“Another way of putting this point is to say, with Davidson, that “the irrational” is essential to intellectual progress. In a paper on Freud, Davidson notes that “mental causes which are not reasons” –that is, beliefs and desires which play a role in our behavior but which do not fit into the scheme of beliefs and desires which we would claim as ours- are needed not only to explain “deviant” behavior (as Freudian psychoanalytic theory employs them) but also to “explain our salutary efforts, and occasional successes, at self criticism and self improvement.” –Rorty
“That said, we can see here a bridge or overlap (or maybe even a premonition of (with modern discoveries in neuroscience and, contrary to the bah-humbug attitude of more scientific approaches such as that of Dennett or Searle, the import of the metaphoric/ poetic (that which Heidegger failed to follow through with (that, despite their seemingly irrational nature, can add to our evolution in terms of brain plasticity. (And it allows for a connection that can eventually be made with Deleuze.)
My window is almost out, so I have to do this quick and elaborate later. But as J. Allan Hobson points out in Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction, dreaming (that which we would normally think of as an irrational experience (actually may play a vital role in the process of brain plasticity….”
To elaborate: the body sleeps; meanwhile, the brain, restless with the movements of mind and consciousness, prods itself in a kind of inventory (perhaps out of a resistance to its own non-existence (in which it ransacks its contents, picks randomly through all the mental artifacts it can in a given window, and juxtaposes them in a kind of bricolage or collage until it finds patterns that happen to work (the pragmatic word for resonate or seduce (that it stores as artifacts that it can further use as artifacts in further dream related inventories.
But not only are dream motifs being created. It may well be that the very structures by which the brain (via brain plasticity (interacts with its real-world environment. We get, in this materialist sense, how even the more irrational actions of the mind can participate in its “intellectual” evolution. We see now how our evolution as individual intellects or a culture does not exclusively require the strict methodology that our more neo- classicist peers would have us believe. Rorty, later, in the same essay, goes on to say:
“Davidson’s insistence in that paper on the importance of “mental causality that transcends reason” is focused on self-criticism and self-improvement in individual human beings, but I think his point is is even more striking and plausible for the self-criticism of cultures. The “irrational” intrusion of beliefs which “make no sense” (i.e., cannot be justified by exhibiting their coherence with the rest of what we believe) are just those events which intellectual historians look back upon as ‘conceptual revolutions’. Or, more precisely, they are the events [note the Deleuzian possibility here -me [which spark conceptual revolutions –seemingly crazy suggestions by people who were without honor in their own countries, suggestions which strike us as luminous truths, truths which must have always been latent in ‘human reason’. “
Here, I would stand on Rorty’s, Davidson’s, as well as Deleuze’s shoulders and note the folly of the tyranny of the functional: the guilt and inferiority complex the neo-classist disposition seems to feel in the face of science and not being able to create an i-pad. If we really look at our cultural and technological evolution, there is no way of distinguishing the value of the functional (the technological (and the non-functional (the creative (approaches to our intellectual evolution. Case in point: the 90’s, under Clinton, are considered a period of major economic expansion. And from a more conservative (neo-classicist (perspective this might be attributed to a major technological boom. However, this was accompanied by a major creative boom: Seattle grunge, electronic, industrial, etc… Now how could the conservative disposition argue that this creative boom followed the technological boom when there is every reason to believe that technology was working to meet the demands of the evolving sensibility of the creative boom? There was no privileged participant in what was basically a chicken and the egg dynamic.
The truth, as I see it, is that there is no way of knowing what product of intellectual or creative inquiry will be useful. Take, for instance, the engineer’s of WW2 planes who based how they painted them on Picasso. And even if that product is not useful, we’ll never know since all it will do is slip into obscurity. This is my main argument with the neo-classicist sensibility: given that we can never know what we might or might not use, does it make any sense to smugly dismiss any method until it has clearly proven itself to cause real harm? Wouldn’t it, rather than establish an arbitrary and power backed criteria by which an assertion may be deemed worthy of participating, be better to play things by ear and let the discourse weed out the wrong?
And I would pull this into the political by pointing out how wrong the Republicans in America are in their dismissal of the arts, their hard-on against such cultural institutions such as the NEA or public TV and Radio. They fail to see the very real connection between unblocked creative energy and economic prowess. And leaving that to the forces of Capitalism can only stifle that resource… Think: reality TV.