Question: What is the Purpose of Studying Philosophy?

Some time in October I had passed a note around a philosophy class I was taking at the time. On it, I asked "What is the purpose of studying philosophy?" I knew that a lot of the students in the class weren't majoring in philosophy. Some had in fact not taken philosophy before. So one day before class I was feeling kind of boyish and began passing around notes. Some of the students who received the notes looked up and raised their eyebrows at me. Laughing to themselves, they started to write back. After considerable debate amongst themselves, a handful of students who were in fact majoring or minoring in philosophy decided not to answer the question, saying I was too much of a trouble-maker.

But for the handful of notes which were passed back, their responses were as follows,

"Studying philosophy teaches you how to think: how to challenge assumptions, how to assess meaning, how to interpret situations. Philosophy teaches you how to live a purposeful life by teaching you how to ask 'why?' and how to find reasons."

another, in bright pink colored pen, read

"TO FIND THE TRUTH AND THINK CRITICALLY"

a hurried pen wrote the following,

"To find the ['purpose' is scribbled out] meaning of life and how we should live it."

and finally,

"To be able to mock everything"

House and Trance Tonight

The ornately adorned Trinity night club in Seattle is known for hosting some of the hottest DJs for its Saturday night dance parties. Tonight they are getting a taste of Tacoma since two of the University of Puget Sound’s well-known techno DJs, David Hvidsten (“Chaosthetic”) and Brad Miller (’06 alum) along with Jason LeMaitre (also from Tacoma) are spinning back-to-back in the 50’s-era retro Blue Room.

Brad is touring the Northwest after having spent his post-graduation years working as a producer for Foambox Nightlife Marketing in NYC. Both David and Brad were hosts of the Thursday night KUPS 90.1 radio show “In The Mix”. David continues to host the show now, kicking out non-stop tech-house, breakbeat and funky glitch four-on-the-floor. He’s opening tonight at 10pm for his first show in Seattle. Brad hosted the show for two years and for his last mix he locked himself inside the studio for a 12-hour marathon set.

The Melon used this opportunity ask Brad about his experiences since UPS. Brad has spun with many famous techno DJs since then, including Preach, BT, Hybrid and Seb Fontaine. He’s spun at a list of impressive clubs from the East to the West Coast. Space is one of his favorite clubs; Paul van Dyk is one of his favorite DJs. When the two converge it must be absolutely wicked. “Half the people who go to see [van Dyk] have no idea what he’s doing to the music,” Brad said. “This guy is adding notes on the fly, layering basslines, tweaking harmonics, adding acapellas, all with timing that comes down to fractions of a second.” Needless to say, van Dyk is one of Brad’s biggest influences.

Using a combination of techniques and technologies like Ableton Live and Apple Logic, Brad says that he loves mixing up his music with lots of sidechaining and percussive delays “to give them a bigger feeling.” With a traditional musical background in piano, saxophone and trumpet, Brad now incorporates instruments like Vember Audio’s Surge and Rob Papen’s Predator. So what kind of EDM (electronic dance music) does it end up sounding like? As Brad describes it, it’s a “darker” blend of progressive house and trance. And although it’s typically more “aggressive” sounding, he balances this with “euphoric”, trance-like elements.

In the techno scene, most don’t eschew what some might see as an endless classification and reclassification of its own genre. “You need some way to put the sounds in context,” Brad says. With trance and EDM in general, “It’s not the same when listened to track-by-track the way other music styles are.” When a fun, enthusiastic DJ with an ear for tune and the right sounds is spinning, “the songs can change meaning and create different feelings depending on the context they’re put in.”

Brad naturally tends toward an unregretful attitude toward making music. The question, “What if this is your chance?” was the positive feedback mechanism telling him he had to pursue a career in music. The first big paradigm shift came when, unbeknownst to him, a party thrown by BT would change his life. The next big moment was at Space, with Armin van Buuren spinning a massive set. At the exact moment when they released nitrous jets on the crowd, Brad “knew right there and then that it’s what I was born to do.”

“And,” he adds, “it was only a Tuesday night!”

But when asked about the best party he’d ever been to, Brad admitted it would have to be a 2007 costume party (for pirates only) on a private boat in Manhattan Harbor with Sasha spinning. “Picture me with an eyepatch, a sword, and a pirate flag harassing the tour boats by the Statue of Liberty with Sasha DJing on deck. Unreal.”

Brad, welcome back to the Northwest, and thanks for answering questions for The Melon. See you tonight!

Tonight’s show will open with David Hvidsten at 10pm. Brad Miller and Jason LeMaitre will continue the party until 2pm.

Gentrification, Hip Hop, and the War on Drugs in Hilltop, Tacoma

A friend and I are working on several video installments which look at the affects of gentrification in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood.

The first video is one in which we interviewed Tacoma hip hop artists who live in the Hilltop neighborhood, have been or still are long time gang members, some of whom spent time in prison for drug dealing.

During the 80s and 90s the Hilltop neighborhood was terrorized by the city and the police department, which used invasive tactics to remove low-income black residents from the neighborhoods and push them further away from opportunities that the inner city had to offer. In the late 80s Army Rangers had been involved in an intense shootout with Tacoma gangs, where over 300 rounds were fired, although no one was killed. After this notorious and widely-covered incident, arguably, the city began its indirect oppression of the Hilltop community.

The small group of residents we spoke to gave us an alternative story of the Hilltop neighborhood. The War on Drugs was essentially the US government’s way to keep social problems within a legal framework, they argued. Drug problems are social problems, not legal problems. The legal approach is an attempt to divide and conquer without addressing the underlying causes of addiction or crimes which result from addiction. “America is a drug-ridden society,” one resident told us. He mentioned Prozac, Ritalin, and other ways in which society has legalized its own medication. “We only choose which drugs to legalize and which ones to criminalize.”

We spoke to one long-time resident whose family had built a house on the Hilltop “with their bare hands” sometime before the 1970s. They were evicted in the late 80s and the house came under the possession of the city, which it then sold for over $200,000. The resident said that his family’s home, along with many others, had been labeled a “crack house” in order to justify hundreds of searches and seizures. Many of these raids “had it wrong” about which houses were in fact crack houses, he said.

Our interviewees said the police were known to confiscate drugs in one incident and plant them on other people in order to marginalize everyone in the community. Since a large number of Hilltop residents serving fifteen-year sentences for pushing cocaine and crack in the early 90s are being released about this time, those who we spoke with said it has been extremely difficult for them to find jobs, though some actually have college degrees. One of the Hilltop residents with a Master’s Degree told us that education doesn’t matter to the rest society as much as social capital and status does.

Today hip hop is becoming an alternative form of expression in Tacoma. We spoke with a record label startup whose owners suffered through the 80s and 90s on Hilltop, and feel that making music is one of the only legal ways they can be accepted once again into society. However, with the recent anti gang bill, 2712, they argued that even hip hop is being shunned by the city and the police. The city has urged, and in more recent cases forced, venues and nightclubs to refuse hip hop due to “gang activity”, affecting local producers as well as touring artists.

We asked our interviewees about gangs, especially the Hilltop Crips, which most had been or still are associated with. They said the Crips were a community response to police power since the beginning. "Community Revolution in Progress" is what they called it. They feel that, since the 80s and 90s, black youth and its culture had been so marginalized through city zoning laws and policies which ban activities that might otherwise be acceptable, the gangs were a necessary response to this. Since the low income neighborhoods are heavily policed, it magnifies the likelihood of encountering police and being subject to random stops ("terry stops"). The gangs were originally a way to police their own neighborhoods, they said.

We also spoke with them about the prison society, which they argued everyone is socialized into. It is something that makes black offenders worse off than white offenders through its biased structure and non-rehabilitative aspect. Taking a more “restorative” approach to community and criminal justice, especially when many of these crimes are victimless (that is, when there aren't any breaches of civil liberties involved) they argued that the creation of a prison society has been a very ineffective way of dealing with society’s problems.

Gentrification is the process of supposedly "restoring" neighborhoods like the Hilltop. The city designs zoning ordinances, arranges deals with condo developers, and subsidizes other activities in order to bring economic development to the neighborhood. In so doing, they push long time black residents to Spanaway, East Tacoma and places that are far from growing centers of economic activity where they may have access to greater opportunities. Police misconduct and city planning biases are an integral part of this. Since low income residents often do not have the time to digest city ordinances, they are scrutinized for things that higher income residents are not, even though higher income residents may not be following or understanding these ordinances either.

The low-income residents, on the other hand, incur higher costs by virtue of their location and socio-economic status. This may take the form of car towing bills, police harassment, fines, being arrested for things like spitting in public (which are used very selectively), housing evictions, police raids, sting operations, and incarceration for various blackmarket activities which many have turned to. Post-conviction socio-economic status affects to lower income communities of color in greater ways since the convictions less recuperative socially than they would otherwise.

In the future, I’ll be posting this video the blog, and in the future (time permitting) I will post other videos which looks at the socio-economic affects of gentrification on black-owned businesses in the Hilltop neighborhood.

Staying Vigilant for "Democracy" in Zimbabwe

While many of us recognize that elections and election cycles are not ideas to define democracy by, when nation-states built around the workability of electoral politics have trouble achieving the resemblance of a democratic election by popular vote, there is greater cause for worry.

Robert Mugabe, the incumbent President of Zimbabwe, has been known to actively support political cronyism, violence against the people of Zimbabwe, murderous suppression of public protest, and the enforcement of crippling social policies. This once prosperous South African neighbor is currently experiencing the worst inflation rate in the world, now pegged at over 150,000 percent. Zimbabwe also has the lowest life expectancy in the world. Female life expectancy stands at 34 years, while for males it is 37 years. And Zimbabwe has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, with little or no access to antiretroviral drugs.

The late results from the elections held on Saturday in Zimbabwe were announced yesterday, yet the ZANU-PF government reported that since no clear winner was found, runoff voting will take place on April 19th. This has raised levels of tension and anticipation within the country and internationally. Sokwanele.com is the website for an independent election watching organization in Zimbabwe. They also appear to support the opposition party, the MDC. Based on their data, the candidate from the MDC has already achieved the 50% margin needed to take office. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, another independent group, said the results were 49% MDC and 42% ZANU-PF.

Everyone is confused. All over the blogosphere, bloggers are calling for Zimbabweans to exercise peace and calm till the next results are announced so as not to give Mugabe the justification to unleash violence against the people using the state's armed forces.

After 28 years of "Rule by Mugabe", many expected him to be voted out of office. Yet the time lag for the election results were suspicious. "It's clear that [Mugabe] has lost the vote," said Dumisani Muleya, a political reporter at the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper.

Advocating change, Martin Meenagh said on sokwanele.com that "It might be that in the dark, you reconcile yourself to the idea that your light is the only one in the darkness, and that it must be hidden behind your eyes because the winds would blow it out."

Bright Matonga, the government's Deputy Information Minister, told the BBC that the opposition was being "irresponsible" and "mischievous." Only the electoral commission has the legal privilege to announce results in Zimbabwe. ZANU-PF officials have threatened to punish anyone who makes their own representation about vote results and totals, as the opposition has in fact already done.

Matonga said the opposition thinks it can "provoke ZANU-PF and the police and the army."

Al Jazeera reported that state police were seen "manning a number of roadblocks" for checkpoint security in the capital today, but no other signs of oppressive police planning are known as of yet. The South African indymedia website occasionally mentions the ongoing political crisis and violence in Zimbabwe, and may be a valuable source of information if another crackdown does occur.

No Such Thing as a Simple Substance, Except Kant's

In interpreting Kant we must be careful not to make the mistake that many so-called "charitable" interpreters do, and that is to make Kant into a realist, or a traditional empiricist. There certainly are passages in the Critique and other places which can easily be used to lend themselves to such an interpretation. But the principle of charity must not be abused in this way, and must remain steady in its treatment of Kant as a transcendental idealist.

Kant’s theory of the relation between subjective inner conscious states and the objects of the outer sense is one such topic vulnerable to attacks. It is discussed in the both the A and B editions of the Transcendental Deduction.

The overall project of the Deduction is to establish a proof for the necessary connection (and the rules that govern it) between appearances of the outer sense and the faculties of the mind in the inner sense. There needs to be action (wirkung) through synthesis in the mind before "appearances can belong to knowledge or even to our consciousness, and so to ourselves." This synthesis happens in the 'imagination', a faculty Kant describes as synthesizing the manifolds of the appearances it apprehends. These are all heavily laden terms. Each appearance has a manifold, which must be apprehended before it can be synthesized in the imagination.

This "employment" of empirical work happens in the following ways: recognition, reproduction, association, and apprehension. These fundamental concepts are the only means by which knowledge (erkenntnisse) is possible for us. We would otherwise be passively receptive conduit with no way to synthesize any of the material traveling through our (minds?). Zombies, perchance. The alternative is that we have some sort of apperception, which is a transcendental concept as opposed to an empirical concept.

The apperception is the unchanging and ultimate foundation for synthesizing the unity of experience. I say "foundation" because Kant says apperception "lies under" all our knowledge of experience. Thus we can be sure that there is no alternative to apperception if there is unity of experience. This foundation must be proved in order for there to be any unity.

Now, when Kant says in the A Deduction that these unifying concepts must be "objectively valid" he does not mean that the things in themselves (or even appearances) have to be objectively valid. It is not a judgment about what is really out there, true or false, yes or no, on the grid or off the grid. It is an argument, a proof as he would have it, about what is necessary to have within the mind, in order for any of these appearances to be set in the mind. These subjective processes, unifying concepts, rules of the mind, and the reality of objective faculties, must indeed be "objectively valid" for anything subjective to be possible for us. We can also interpret "objectively valid" more rigidly as "intersubjectively valid", because one way to view an objective truth is to say that it is ultimately intersubjective truth.

The "rules" of the mind are therefore intersubjectively valid, and Kant goes so far as to call these laws. This step-by-step argument is entirely a priori. The concepts are not derived from the objects of perception, not the nature of "self", and especially not from things in themselves. They are derived from the necessary conditions that precede all empirical knowledge of objects. And to put the final nail in the pyrrhonist’s coffin, these concepts must be unified subjectively in "one and the same apperception".

Let’s talk about apperception a bit more. Kant argues the unity of apperception is entirely synthetic in the A Deduction. That all our apprehended appearances must be unified in a "single self-consciousness" must be the "absolutely first synthetic principle of our thinking in general." If it is true that apperception must come first before any other synthetic building block, then this would seem to establish the "self" as a "simple substance". That is, a thing that is not numerically divisible over time.

However, in the Second Paralogism, Kant had attacked Descartes for using the same principle of the self to establish a dogmatic doctrine of the soul. (See this related entry.) You’ll recall that Kant argued this was an attempt to establish simplicity analytically, which if possible would be false, and if not possible than impossible. In the B Deduction Kant is arguing for the objective simplicity analytically.

This means Kant argues qua the B Deduction what will later be established as an impossible proof or a false proof. If Descartes was "equivocating", according to Kant, then Kant himself is not only doing the same but is undermining that which the completeness of the entire Critique of Pure Reason rests on, the most important proof of the Critique: the apperception itself.

Perhaps Kant is confused. But let’s interpret him charitably, as we promised. Kant needs to have apperception be simple and non-divisible in order for the Critique to be "complete" as he mentioned at the outset in the 1st and 2nd prefaces and the Introduction. If the transcendental apperception were not a single foundation that does not change, it would be a contingent happenstance that any knowledge would ever be possible for us. So there needs to be this foundation, and its objective validity needs to be established analytically.

This foundation, furthermore, is different from the subjective "inner sense". So if the “I that thinks” can be distinct from the “I that intuits itself”, and yet can be the same subject, why can’t this same simplicity hold for Descartes? All that would need to be done is add some categories, show how they’re necessary, give space and time with manifolds for every appearance, bundle this together and we have knowledge. It would seem that before we read Kant charitably here we should consider why we are not transitively reading into Descartes charitably as well. Kant claims equivocation where Descartes could have made a similar move, yet he does not tidy up Descartes. He distills his views on the self in chapter the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

The situation we are put in, as charitable readers, is one where our interlocutor has uncharitably interpreted his own interlocutor. And if the principle of charity extends beyond the text at hand, namely to Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, what we have is a philosophical stalemate.

Bluetech

Last Saturday I skipped an excellent gathering (an Oracle Gathering) in order to study Kant's Transcendental Deduction. Some friends of mine had gone to the gathering for the downtempo music, the breakbeats, and of course the dancing. A week earlier we had all gone to a large party like this at the Seattle Science Center, Kinetic III.

Bluetech is a downtempo "psybient" producer from Portland who spun at Oracle this weekend. The kind of music Bluetech produces is often categorized as "intelligent dance music" or IDM, and is usually without a beat. (Though for parties I imagine he spins dubby tech-house, minimal house and music of that nature.) While reading the Deduction I listened to several of his early albums. Starting with Prima Materia, Elementary Particles, and Sines and Singularities, the atmospheric content of each creates what sound like enormous soundscapes that could only be experienced over the period of each album in its entirety. Like the mathematical concepts Bluetech invokes, they take time to understand and appreciate.

Perhaps the best way to describe what Bluetech produces is to make a distinction between moods and acute sensations. Most music today - "pop music" in particular - is interested in created acute sensations such as happiness, anger, surprise, etc. These sensations (pop sensations!) are more specific, triggered usually by specific changes in rhythm, lyrics, tempos, and other audible events. Moods on the other hand are characterized by a relatively long-lasting affective state. They are less specific and less likely to be triggered by separable stimuli.

Mood psychologist Robert Thayer distinguishes two dimensions of mood: energy level and tension level. Generally speaking, one can combine energetic or tired moods with tense or calm moods. The most pleasant mood to be in, Thayer says, is the energetic-calm. And the sorts of moods psybient music is interested in are these energetic calms which have induce lasting affective states.

Having been to a significant number of live DJ performances and parties, I tend to prefer the entire set, or the entire album, for the experience - as opposed to sequestering each three minute piece of music and having it marketed to me as an autonomous, interchangeable part. (At parties, however, socializing to and from rooms is a different experience altogether.) In this sense, great electronic DJs and producers have much in common with the great masters of baroque and classical music styles. Because it is the kind of music that cannot be sampled easily - without significantly diminishing the appreciation of it - their music must be something listeners are prepared to be affected by over a greater period of time.

Some online places you can find Bluetech's music are on his myspace, on imeem, or through pandora.