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Noah -> RE: What I take away from the "Gift" dispute. (12/17/2006 10:11:14 PM)
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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl
While I'm not the sort of person who would suggest anyone simply abandon something they find to be of value, I do think there are some rather conclusive philosophical arguments against referring to submission as a gift. And, since you used the word "ontic" in your OP, I am free to argue from equally obtuse grounds, something I usually avoid on a general audience message board. :)
Well rock on wit your bad self.
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Basically, my position is that to refer to submission as a gift, is to dance with the twin devils of essentialism and reification. In working out this argument, I'll sometimes write in the first person but I do mean it to be an objectively binding argument. To say something IS something is a universalizing argument (logically, it has the form of 'all S is P' or all submission is a gift, and thats the premise I'm taking issue with), and providing the counter-example of my own experience is enough to raise serious issues with that argument. If all submission were a gift, my submission would also be a gift.
I'm afraid you've got a wheel off the rails right at the start. When a woman writes in her profile "My submission is a gift given only to my master" (and gets nasty e-mails for it, say) she is saying something IS something. The first something is her submission. She may go on to say that her submission is the trait she values most in herself. She may go on to say that her submission is a great embarrassment to her mother. In none of these cases does she seem to me to be saying anything whatsoever of the form "all S is P." She is talking, quite explicitly, about particulars, not generalities. She is not implying that your submission is a embarrassment to her mother. She is not implying that your submission is the thing she values most highly in herself. Although the rule you posit would hold that since she is saying "something IS something" she is indeed saying that everyone's submission is an embarrassment to her mother. That just sounds like a rule that aught to be trashcanned, to me.
A pro sub might say "my submission is available for an hourly rate." Once again, your insistence that any claim that a something IS something can be formalized as all S is P just doesn't even begin to get traction for me. Do you really think that the pro sub in question should be meant to be saying that all submission is available at an hourly rate?
Of course you don't. So please abandon your analysis of all "something IS something" sentences as instances of "all S is P".
It just doesn't work.
But more troubling is the way that this part of your argument clashes with what comes later. That is to say that this contention of yours seems to be a instance of that very thing which you describe as reification, which you reject. What gives?
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I'll deal with the problem of reification, first. Grammatically, submission is a noun but this does not mean that submission is an object.
Now you're talking about the grammar, which can be helpful. When you use object here, do you mean object in the grammatical sense? If not, what sense of the word object do you have in mind? The ambiguity leaves the meaning of what follows quite up in the air for me.
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Its a state that accompanies the act of submitting. As such, it is a quality of the one submitting, and cannot be transferred to the one who inspires or calls forth that state. As a state of the person submitting, it is inalienable. Because of this, submission can not be given.
Well just as certain people have hewn very closely to one definition of the word gift, the most restrictive one they could find, maybe, you are taking great pains to ignore all the other senses of the word submission.
If the sense of the word you are specifying as the entire meaning of the word were so, then it might make sense to go on with your analysis. But the word has other meanings as I presume you know.
For instance, when in a scholarly journal, The China Review, an author said: "He promised the chiefs that, if they would submit, they should be made Mandarins and their people not molested in any way. The chiefs put faith in his promises and gladly gave their submission."
Now here the author is plainly employing the word in a way well documented in dictionaries, a way which is clearly and commonly understood not to refer to a state but, roughly, to acts and attitudes.
Dictionary.com unabridged actually lists this sense of submission as primary, with the one you cite as definitive mentioned only as secondary.
The American Heritage dictionary also lists the acts-oriented definition first and the state-oriented definition second. As you know, this kind of priority is given based on the lexicographers understanding of which sense of the word is employed most commonly. The second and third sense are no less "true" than the first, the first is simply more common.
For you to state that "(submission is)a state that accompanies the act of submitting.
... as if that definition tells us all we need to know about the word demonstrably ignores the single most common use of the word, and all other uses of the word, except the one which happens to suit your program.
And so for you to go to posit that: "As such, it is a quality of the one submitting, and cannot be transferred to the one who inspires or calls forth that state. As a state of the person submitting, it is inalienable. Because of this, submission can not be given"
... is just hogwash.
Sure, if that secondary sense of the word submission were in fact the only one, there might be an argument to make there. But not only is it not the only sense of the word. It isn't even the primary one in lexicographical terms.
Maybe I need to be more clear here. When I asked for people to be more intellectually open in considering the various meanings of the word "gift" I didn't mean to state: "But meanwhile, restrict as narrowly as possible the meanings of other key words in this discussion in any old way that suits your argument, irrespective of dictionaries and common usage.
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When people refer to submission as if it were a thing that can be given, they are making an objectification mistake, one encouraged by grammatical conventions. They are treating as a thing something that isn't.
Look. This use of the word may stick in your craw for some reason, but honest to gosh this is how educated people use the word.
In 1751, Mongol Alton Khan gave his submission to the Ming Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty titled the local leaders accordingly.
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/tibet.htm
But times were changing. Many Irish chieftains had submitted to the English throne. In March 1576 The O'Malley (her father had by this time died) was summoned and gave his submission in Galway to Sir Henry Sidney. He kept his promises and in the next year did not join in the rebellion.
http://www.greenwoodstudio.org/amnwtheplay/granuaile.htm
When they openly defied his overlordship, Brian gathered his forces, and routed them in the battle of Glenn Máma in 999. Dublin was plundered, and Sitriuc fled, but he found no asylum in the north. Upon his return he gave his submission, and it may be on this occasion that he married Brian’s daughter Sláine.
http://www.routledge-ny.com/middleages/ireland/boru.pdf.
As later when the Muslims conquered Mecca in 630 CE, Hind gave her submission to the Prophet Muhammad and accepted the religion of Islam and became a Muslim herself, along with her husband Abu Sufyan and their son Muawiya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind_bint_Utbah
Now the historians quoted above might have chosen that other metaphor too.
When they openly defied his overlordship, Brian gathered his forces, and routed them in the battle of Glenn Máma in 999. Dublin was plundered, and Sitriuc fled, but he found no asylum in the north. Upon his return he bent his will, and it may be on this occasion that he married Brian’s daughter Sláine.
Was this historian--and all the others who use the expression--really WRONG to say "...gave his submission..." in a way that would have been ameliorated if they had said "... bent his will ..."? That strikes me as an exceedingly odd claim.
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Thus, in submitting to someone, I am likely to bend to his will if he desires that, but in bending such, I am not giving anything. I am bending.
Well bending is a lovely metaphor. I have no trouble with your using it even if you accede to his will while straight and stiff as a board. And of course to use a word metaphorically is not to employ some second-class technique.
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If I'm feeling very submissive, I may even bend over backwards so he can use me for his pleasure in some wicked way, but I am still not giving anything. I am still bending, albeit over backwards. I do not give the gift of my submission because my submission, as a state, is a quality that inheres in me submitting, is inalienable and thus cannot be given away.
And here we are again with you ignoring the primary sense of the word submission, and all of the other sense of the word, also. You ficus on one lexical definition presumably because it suits your program. But just as scientists should not ignore the preponderance of the data in their research just because it points away from their hypothesis, a person in your position, basing an argument on the meaning of a word, should not ignore the very way in which that word is most commonly (as as we have seen often quite eruditely) used.
You can give your attention. Maybe your teacher is a bore so you don't give it to him as a rule, but on his birthday you give him your attention as a gift. I bet he'd appreciate it.
You can give him a back rub after class. Attitudes and actions are what submission is about more often than states, according to the guys who write the dictionaries.
I think I asked specifically for responses to my OP which did not fly in the face of the dictionary and common experience. I don't understand why you went to such trouble to formulate a response like this, which seems to be all about denying not only perfectly acceptable tertiary uses of a word but actually denying it's primary sense.
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And this is a good thing because if a submissive were able to give his/her submission to the Dominant in the sense of transferring it to him/her, the Dominant would become submissive, and who wants that? Certainly not I! (I think my general claim here is relevant to what people mean when they say submission is simply a part of themselves. I'm not likely to say this, so I'm not sure.)
Oh for heaven's sake. Haven't we been over this ground? If I give Joe Blow my loyalty does that make him suddenly loyal? If I give him my love does that make him into love? I hope you're just trying to be silly here. Because what you are claiming is just silly.
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Then there is the problem of essentialism. Essentialism is the view, that, for any specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically possible to specify a finite list of characteristics —all of which any entity must have to belong to the group defined. This view is contrasted with non-essentialism which states that for any given entity there are no specified traits which that entity must have in order to be defined as that entity. (this definition of essentialism is lifted from wikipedia).
A person may or may not be revealing an essentialist view when she says: "My submission is a gift to my master." We simply do not have enough information to conclude whether she is or isn't, based on her claim. No more than we have the grounds to conclude that you are an essentialist because you characterize your own submission in terms of a "bending". Does your use of the word "bending" entail an ontological orientation of essentialism, with bending as the essence of submission for all people at all times? A OF COURSE NOT.
Just as we shouldn't treat you so ridiculously, so should you not treat others that way.
If you say you find it useful to think of your submitting as a bending, I'm willing to consider that quite generously. That is to say I'm willing to encounter it for a while uncritically, to see what positive value I might find in it. And indeed I find some. I reserve the right to encounter it critically as well, of course, indeed I'll listen to those who say that "anyone who says her submission is a bending is probably a manipulative bitch who is actually topping from the bottom", which so many people posit of subs who speak in terms of the word gift. But I'll probably reject the "saying bending necessarily involves manipulation" theory just as thoroughly as I reject, upon consideration, the "saying gift involves manipulation" theory.
Mere predication of all the kinds that can be performed with "this IS that" sentences by no means entails essentialism. "This salad is tasty" strikes me as something quite opposite to deeming essences. It is an evaluation. You may evaluate your bowl of salad as tasty. I might evaluate mine as not so great. Neither of us is implying that tastyness is the essence of all salads for all time, are we? Sheesh.
"This math class is a challenge."
"This novel is a triumph of style over substance."
"My submission is a bending to his will"
"A German Shepard is a good pet"
I mean I could go on till I drop from hunger. All sorts of different sorts of non-essentialist claims, all of the form "something IS something." NONE of the form "all S is P".
Why in the world would you see essentialism lurking behind every such predication?
But the whole essentialism/non-essentialism debate is a debate within Ontology, and one of your points (I think, and it is in keeping with one of my key points) is that it is unhelpful to conduct this conversation in ontological terms, to reify, if I may use your term. Your personal point of view seems to oscillate pretty wildly in this post, into and out of the reificationist camp. First you say:
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To say something IS something is a universalizing argument (logically, it has the form of 'all S is P' or all submission is a gift, and thats the premise I'm taking issue with)
And then you say: Submission IS a state. Submission IS a quality.
I mean I'll ignore what seems to be a category error there one way or the other because I really truly don't think all this ontic talk moves us toward truth, even though having found my in a nasty thicket of the stuff I'm willing to address it critically for the purpose of getting past it.
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Having made the mistake of treating "submission" as an object, rather than as a state, people then go and try to determine what it is about that 'object' that distinguishes it from other objects, and makes it unique in the attempt to define what it is.
You give the impression of someone taught by Classicists. If I had to guess I say that people of the "Scholastic" stripe (the quotes to indicate that I mean that in the historical sense of scholastic, Aquinas and the Schoolmen) have been influential as you developed your own style of inquiry. Whether any of those guesses are true or false, the thing is that your conclusion that people who use the word "gift" are busy with a genus and difference project just doesn't have a visible leg to stand on, that I can see.
(Setting aside that you are still stacking the deck with your unwarranted restriction on the meaning of the word submission....) The distinguishing/uniqueness thing (commonly referred to asgenus and difference definition, I think, if I understand you tha far) you attribute to every living being who has ever used the word submission is unreasonable.
How do you know they were thinking in terms of genus and difference? How do you know they were not thinking in terms of an ostensive definition, or a late Wittgensteinian view in terms of family resemblances? Or in terms of a stipulative definition or in terms of a pragmatic definition or in terms of one of the several other kinds of definition?
This theme seems to keep coming up in the greater Is Submission A Gift" discussion. Some people seem unable proceed without stating as fact just what some stranger was thinking when he used a certain word in a sentence. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a conversation with a lot of psychics.
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Since it isn't anything ,
Well a few minutes ago you were arguing that it is a state and that it is a quality. Now you suddenly hold that it is not anything.
Just where does this merry-go-round stop?
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endless debates ensue not because there are different opinions and perspectives but because the act of defining the essential characteristics of something that isn't a thing in the first place is bound to be difficult, to the point of being impossible. The debate is endless because it cannot be resolved, being founded on a mistaken premise. The essence of submission is not its giftness because submission has no essence. Its not the sort of thing that can be defined in terms of essential qualities.
To say that "submission has no essence" is a very strictly ontological claim. If I understand your term reification it is indeed an instance of reification.
I really think the conversation would be so much more productive if people (like you) would climb down from these metaphysical parapets and just share their insights as to the positive and negative values they see in using words like "submission" and "gift" in this way or that, rather than all this ultimately ungrounded talk about what submission IS or IS not.
Look, gypsy. It may well be that some people come at this from an explicitly or implicitly essentialist orientation, but I can state as fact that this does not hold as a rule, since I have used (not just mentioned) the word "gift" to describe submission and I did so with no Ontological baggage whatever, and as a matter of fact with that afore-mentioned late-Wittgensteinian notion of definition in mind. QUite antithetical to essentialism on at least two crucial grounds.
I mean really. To attribute a certain ontological bias to everyone (but you) who has ever engaged in this ongoing conversation about submission! Do you gather up blacks and jews in tidy little baskects like that too?
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So, to drive my arguement home, you write,
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For someone to come along and say ".... hogwash. it ain't a gift" seems just as vain and just as in vain as saying the opposite. Do we really imagine that this is the sort of thing where there is a black and white fact of the matter?
Obviously, I do imagine that I can come along and say, "hogwash, it aint a gift" and I do see my claim in factual terms, having to do with my understanding of submission. Its not a gift, because it's not an object (show me a submission and I'll reconsider my view) that can be alienated or defined in terms of its essential qualities. Submission is a state that accompanies the act of submitting, and inheres in the one submitting. It cannot be given.
Okay. I've shown you several submissions. The submissions documented by numerous historians in the snippets above. You're welcome.
Now you have oscillated back from claiming that submission isn't anything to claiming that it is a state. And of course this is part and parcel of your steadfast refusal to consider the primary sense of the word submission as documented in the two dictionaries I cited.
Yes, gypsy. That is one of several sense of the word submission. Just as the "given without conditions" is one of several definitions of gift. The only definition you are willing to acknowledge for submission isn't the only one. It isn't even the primary one. The fact that you have staked your whole argument on this move that flies in teh face of common usage, scholarly usage, and lexical definitions makes your post part of the problem, for me, not part of the solution.
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I haven't considered any of your definitions of "gift" and, while I think some of your claims in this regard are faulty, and I could argue against them, I havent done this because I don't think its necessary to make the point I want to make. This, because, in your original post, you discuss at length the definition of "gift" but, I feel your analytic attention is misdirected. The problem doesn't have so much to do with the meaning of gift, but with the meaning of submission. We can debate the meaning of 'gift' forever, but unless we devote equal attention to the meaning of submission, the energy is wasted.
I'm perfectly willing to explore the various meanings of the word submission. You, on the other hand, have refused to budge an inch out of the narrow track of looking at the word submission in any but one of it's secondary senses.
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All this having been said, I should address the issue of whether or not I think people should stop thinking of their submission in terms of a gift. Not really. I think, the "gift" idea can be fruitful in so far as we remember that when we use it, we use it as a metaphor and keep in mind that we not to be taken literally. We can fruitfully compare submission to a gift because it does share some qualities with the sorts of gifts that are given. But, the fruitfulness of this metaphor is lost as soon as we forget that its a metaphor and begin to take it literally.
So when you used the metaphor of "bending" to describe your own submission, if any reader failed to appreciate in that moment that it was a metaphor and not meant to be taken literally, then their reading of you was necessarily utterly unfruitful for them? I doubt it.
That aside, I thank you for finally, at long last, laying your ontological arms down and encountering the words as they are used in life, and opening your eyes to see what value may be there.
So we can see that irrespective of whether your Thomistic negative appraisal could "prove" that submission is not a gift (which in fact it only attempted to do by ignoring most senses of the word), there can be value in saying that it is. So why in the hell bother with all of that ontological crapola?
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I think this happens sometimes when it is implied that since "submission is a gift" the Dominant should receive it as a gift, be grateful for that gift and act accordingly. In other words, the "submission is a gift" idea carries with it a certain set of moral obligations on the part of the recipient.
Oh Christ. Here you go again. I'm really glad you said sometimes. Maybe for you that terms carries a set of moral obligations--though of course it categorically could not for any of the horde who hold that any gift is utterly unconditional.
And why can't I posit that the "submission is bending" term implies moral obligations? But the fact is that moral obligations and expectations of same don't live in words, or in strings of words. They live in people. This person might mean that. That person might not. This person who says "submission is bending" might imply a moral obligation based on some wacky esssentialistic definition of "bending". So what? This penchant so many people here have of holding that Most People Who Say This (pick one) Word Have These Motivations/Prejudices/Ontic preconceptions/Ethical weaknesses just blows my mind.
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Syllogistically, this general train of thought runs as follows: Since submission is a gift and since gifts are good, it follows that the recipient of that gift should be grateful etc to the giver and treat the giver accordingly.
And let's be clear that this train of thought is yours.
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This, to me, can come accross as something of a manipulative, self protective strategy on the part of submissives who fly the "my submission is a gift" banner. Such people often take this idea one step further, and use it as a justification for treating people like crap (ie: my subission is a gift, and i aint giving it to you so I can be insulting, rude, impolite, ect) It is here that the response "fuck you and your gift" seems appropriate.
Oh come on. And only submissives who use the word gift treat people like crap in the way that you cite? I think LA could give you about a billion links to posts that would show the contrary. Do really think there is a causal link there?
So your view seems to be that there can be value to find in using the word gift to describe one's submission, as long as you remember that it is metaphorical, but that if you do you are probably a schmuck?
My hunch is that those people who are doing the bad thing would be doing the very same thing if they had never heard of this possibility of describing submission as a gift, or if they didn't know the word "gift".
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