SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS

Moderatio

2012-01-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

R. Joseph Hoffman has opined, in the fine old tradition of legitimate hyperbole, that

Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.

Hoffman, who is writing as a non-Christian (albeit a scholar of early Christianity), has the good sense to be on the right side of the "accommodationist" debate ("Can religion and science be compatible, ever, ever, ever?") His point in his admirable post is that the negative answer to this question arises from the excesses of an over-reaching intellectual ambition; and he sees this excess as the equal and opposite cultural reaction to the aforementioned complacency, a complacency which, I might add, was widely diagnosed in the 19th century (read Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, for instance, though I take my lead here from Baudelaire, whose opening poem in the Fleurs du Mal famously names it Ennui). Hoffman's answer to this complacency is simple and has a venerable philosophical lineage:

The opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation.

What's important here is not just that the back-&-forth we are enduring now over this question--the stupid tug-of-war between a superstitious Bibliolatry which was already withering away, and a hubristic scientism that has allowed itself to be distracted from "the business of finding things out" into a tar-pit of unwinnable polemics--that this tension is essentially the spasms of one excess answering another, over the abyss of a fundamental apathy:

American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.

One can quibble, if one likes, with Hoffman's diagnosis, or try to resist the cynicism one detects here, but despite the brief signs of life one glimpses in the #Occupy movement, it is hard for me to dispute the gist of this. As I have said before, there is an oscillation between fear and boredom at work in us. (I don't think this is unique to post-Christian or late-capitalist society; the ancient ascetic spiritual struggle has always been against the Midday Demon-- melancholia and panic).

As regards saving both religion and science from their own excesses: this temper-tantrum-with-two-backs has an answer in the tradition of common sense and ordinary wisdom. As Hoffman points out, it goes by the venerable name "Moderation", the ratio between extremes, the key to virtue in Confucius, the Buddha, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza. (Not to mention Jane Austen, which really ought to be enough.) Does moderation sometimes look like timidity? Certainly; and vice-versa--timidity sometimes styles itself "moderation." After all, moderation, as pursuit of a mean, will partake of the extremes it attempts to balance. And who said keeping one's balance was easy--especially when everyone at either end is pulling you back and forth?

Point is, all that energy that goes into the pulling, is being generated by something. The "Accommodationism" argument is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our culture--I would say a spiritual malaise, if the word wasn't so loaded. But then, that loadedness is the problem, isn't it?

Please enjoy your trip through this door

2012-01-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

Always in search of a more satisfying philosophical experience, and in keeping with our conviction that there is no pure, unmediated experience, we here at SCT are indefatigable in our web-page fine-tuning. After a year of cream-colored poor wannabe approximation of parchment, we are pleased to present our new look: a soothing evening-sky-blue, appropriate for the taking-wing of Minerva's owl. We hope this will aid in putting your mind into a calm and relaxed state, aware but un-agitated, suitable for the contemplative life. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Thank you for choosing SCT.

Myth & object

2012-01-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

Plato frequently shows Socrates inventing myths. Whatever one may think about why this is (shelves have been written about it), I regard the interface between philosophy and myth as of paramount significance; it is neither an accident of genealogy or an idiosyncrasy of certain writers.

A myth is a kind of fiction, but unlike ordinary fiction its denizens seem to have not less but more reality than the inhabitants of our ordinary and familiar world. There is a curious parallel between mythification and what Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie or "defamiliarization," a notion I have had recourse to before. The latter effect renders us "estranged" from the familiar, usually by some striking trope or vivid description, inflecting the ordinary in such a way as to show it shot through either with significance or with an uncanny refusal of significance. Mythification can also effect this, not however by contrasting the ordinary with some conventional setting (making it stand out against it), but rather precisely by placing it into such a conventional system. "The wine-dark sea," "flashing-helmeted Hector", and so on, are only the smallest-scale examples of the workings of such a system, which extended as far as vast interpretive parallels between various events, natural phenomena, and concepts. These equivalences are indeed conventional, i.e., "arbitrary," and philosophy must address itself to understanding them as such, because treating them as "natural" is just superstitious. But philosophy's myths are meant to indicate their own fictitious status in a way that does not undermine the effect of estrangement, but rather produces it in a particularly philosophical mode. A conscious mode, I want to say, though that's only partly accurate.

The long-time reader of SCT will note that this notion has some resonance with earlier posts on fiction, theme, and secondary worlds. Or, to refer back to just yesterday, the whole notion of defamiliarization is a close parallel to the seeing of an object as "withdrawn"--the perplexing or even uncanny vorhanden hammer instead of the friendly, accessible zuhanden one, or (to switch from Heidegger to Sartre) the eerie, nausea-inducing tree-root that refuses any appellation rather than the one to which the word "root" obligingly adheres.

(Part of these reflections was sparked by reading chapter 4 of Thomas Pavel's Fictional Worlds.)

Does the matter withdraw? Does the withdrawal matter?

2012-01-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

Levi Bryant has posted a brief take on one of the two hard (and deceptively simple) questions that I think must be faced by any philosophy which takes its lead from Harman. [Update: in a follow-up post, Bryant distinguishes further between his own conception of withdrawal and Harman's before moving on to elucidate his own position more.] Both these questions have to do with the "withdrawn" object. One of them I asked some while ago--how do such metaphysicians know there are any such objects? This question can easily get disregarded in the enthusiasm for doing ontology rather than epistemology. I happen to think this is a dicey game, but I don't think it renders Harman or Bryant unable to continue doing their work. It just means we should place them more in the line of Descartes (despite Descartes' supposed epistemological bias) than of Locke or Hume--they are after "clear and distinct ideas"--and that's no surprise, as we know that the stakes of the crusade against correlationism are set by Meillassoux as the answer to "Hume's problem." When you recall that one half of Harman's project comes to us courtesy of Husserl, this makes perfect sense. Husserl had already set his face against Kant when he declared in the Logical Investigations that

What is true is absolutely true, is true "in itself." Truth is identically one, whether men or non-men, angels or gods, apprehend it. (I sec.36; p79)

The other question, which Bryant is addressing now, is what difference the thesis of the withdrawn object makes. Bryant rightly compares it to the question of whether everything might be doubling in size; one could add any number of others. ("Could the world have sprung into being half a second ago complete with fossils and records?" is a popular one.) These are the questions that critics of "metaphysics" like to lampoon as pointless. A passage from Wittgenstein always occurs to me in this context:

“a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism. (Philosophical Investigations 271)

Bryant compares the withdrawn object to the infinitely receding transcendental signified beloved of deconstructionists. And here too he's right, though I read this in a slightly different way; Terry Eagleton objected to deconstruction that the problem with deconstruction was that it "left everything as it is." That we can "allude" to the in-itself may not strike us as very significant, if that's really all we can do. Some while ago I blogged on this notion of allusion, and there I remarked that to me this allusion is very much like the Socratic spinning of a "likely story;" the example that comes to mind if the account of anamnesis in the Meno, another instance in which an infinite regression threatens. Latour's account of mediation is another. Latour essentially thinks we trace mediation until we get bored--i.e., his is a pragmatist solution. Harman's way out of this is to give us a circuit between real and sensual objects, but this (as he realizes) still leaves us with a very strange situation, and one could be forgiven for thinking it "just pushes the question back a stage." But it is worth recalling that Eagleton's comparison derives not from Marx (though there is a similarity with the famous line about interpreting the world vs. changing it), but rather from Wittgenstein, who believed that what we could only allude to was precisely ethics:

if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.

It is philosophy itself, Wittgenstein famously held, that "leaves everything as it is" (P.I. 124). Despite the gulf that would seem to separate Wittgenstein (at least in his familiar role as prophet of the linguistic turn) from Speculative Realism in general and OO-thinking in particular, here I think we see a place where object-oriented thought comes close to seeing in any object at all what Wittgenstein sees in ethics--and that seems to me to be extremely significant. (I have earlier juxtaposed before Harman's claim that "aesthetics is first philosophy" with Wittgenstein's that "ethics and aesthetics are one.")

John McDowell (who would seem to be very close to the quietism of Wittgenstein in some ways) is at pains in Mind and World to avoid the consequence that our empirical thinking is a frictionless spinning in a void, a possibility he thinks is raised by what, following Kant, he calls the spontaneity of our judgment--the fact that we decide when we judge, and do not feel caused. Although McDowell is thinking of minds and their decisions, this is in some measure quite analogous to the question of causality in general as it arises for Harman (and I presume for Bryant, though I have not read Democracy of Objects closely yet), because Harman has followed Whitehead in thinking of every interaction as prehension. McDowell thinks he has a way to safeguard against this result. It depends upon granting a distinction between human and animal consciousness (McDowell calls the latter "proto-subjectivity") which may or may not strike one as being the sort of "basic ontological rift" that Harman objects to. For McDowell, the problem arises on the side of subjectivity--it's free, so it seemingly offers no purchase for the natural world to impinge on it; for Harman and Bryant, the problem arises on the side of the (real) object--it withdraws, so how does it interact with anything else?

This question of causality is not quite the same as the question Bryant raises of "so what?", but it is (I think) closer than it may at first appear. The causal question has to do with ontology; the what-difference question has to do with discourse. I have urged before that the difference between epistemology and ontology as philosophical practices is more fluid than rigid; and I expect that Kant still has a thing or two to teach us about this. This may seem like welcoming correlationism in again through the back door, which doesn't concern me as much as it would some. Bryant concludes by saying that

in answering this question it seems that it’s necessary to concede that withdrawn objects make differences that aren’t withdrawn. This isn’t a retreat back to correlationism, but rather the suggestion that perhaps what’s important in object-orientation doesn’t lie in withdrawal as it’s been dominantly conceived.

Or it might mean that correlationism is different from how it has been dominantly conceived. What if the question proved to be a sort of antinomy?

I am very pleased to see Bryant taking this issue on. For myself, I believe that these irruptions of the question of the infinite, and of propositions that have (apparently) no traction, are symptomatic of philosophy not just at its most "pointless" but also, potentially, at its best. One thinker's "pseudo-problem" is another's crux of the matter. Socrates does not stop being friends with people just because their every attempt to say what friendship is is stymied. Though the object "recedes", ones "allusion" to it still occurs--but it occurs in practice. Which means, in participation.

Good luck with that

2012-01-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

The resident teenager pointed out yesterday that the Wikipedia article List of Numbers begins with this stock disclaimer:

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

To quote G.K. Chesterton: that is what one calls a powerful understatement.

You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

Yet one more way to waste time on the internet, or crowdsourcing at its finest?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

(That last bit is from a different Wikipedia article. No need to expand Browning.)

Eleven from '11

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Top four most visited posts of 2011:

Bullshit again
Eucatastrophe vs. Yog-Sothery
Occupy Wall Street: the supply of demands
We have still never been modern

Seven of my own favorites, either because they got some good discussion, or because I got something off my chest, or just because:

Passivity
Theme
The stone (on Holy Saturday)
Homeopathic immortality
Beyond alienation
Weirdness
Flavor/mechanics

No overlap. The public is an ass.

Sir Michael Dummett, RIP

2011-12-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

I learned from Brandon at Siris that Sir Michael Dummett has died.

It is too often the foolish caricature of Analytic philosophy that it contents itself with the question of the meanings and syntax of statements and has stepped back from the grand questions--the questions the "man in the street" thinks of then the word "philosophy" comes up: questions of the nature of space and time, of the relation between truth and appearance, and the meaning of life. Dummett--a student of Quine, a specialist on Frege--was unapologetic about the "linguistic turn" in one way; he maintained that

Other forms of intellectual enquiry seek to determine which propositions are true. Metaphysics seeks to determine what it is for them to be true. (Thought and Reality, p23)

This meant that metaphysics had

to unravel the nature of propositions – of the thoughts we are capable of thinking.(ibid.)

But Dummett did not believe we needed to stop there, and he provided over the years many explorations into the question of time, of ethics, and indeed of the existence of God, for which he resuscitated the usually scoffed-at argument of Berkeley. I'll add parenthetically that I consider this ability to make use of discarded and discredited arguments one of the signs of the catholicity of thought that philosophy requires--a feeling at ease with the whole stream of the millennia-long conversation and an indifference (which is not the same as hostility) to contemporary trends.

Somewhat presciently, he ruminated in his book on The Nature and Future of Philosophy that

It is by no means obvious that universities...should support philosophy but for historical precedent. If universities had been an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied? It seems very doubtful.

Dummett attributed the continuing existence of philosophy departments to the inertia of tradition; but as the last few years have shown, when pressed down against the bottom line with the heel of the call for "results" on their throat, universities will be ready to cut loose from tradition without thinking twice.

He had a wide range of other interests. I remember my astonishment years ago when a friend informed me that Dummett had written two books of the tarot deck. I have read A Wicked Pack of Cards, and while I am not persuaded by him that there is no esoteric tradition behind the deck, Dummett makes a strong case that it was primarily a tool of recreation, not divination; and that it likely had its origin in the 15th century,pace the fanciful speculations of the 18th-century occultists (and their successors). (See his response to Frances Yates' review of The Game of Tarot.)

Maybe more significantly, Dummett did serious work in election theory; and he was for about half a century a champion against racism in the U.K. He and his wife co-founded the Institute of Race Relations in 1958. In 2001 Dummett was still at it, arguing that much European opposition to immigration was at least tacitly racist, this being particularly so in Britain. (When he was knighted, he called for the replacement of the entire staff of the British Home Office.)

I cannot of course demonstrate this, but I suspect that Dummett's work in this regard shared a root with his religious faith as a Roman Catholic, a confession he quietly maintained since the 1940's. Dummett was thoughtfully engaged with his faith in its doctrinal and its ritual dimensions. Staunchly in sympathy with the calls for a vernacular Mass, he was appalled by any number of other innovations that came in its wake. His essay on the matter (here) insists and laments:

Liturgy is an art form; one especially in the service of God, but an art form none the less.... [I am] one who for many years longed for the liturgy to be translated into the vernacular; and I was sustained by the thought that, when it happened, it would be carried out by people who would have such sensitivity to language.... Alas, it has been carried out by people with tin ears both for English and for Latin, who moreover thought themselves entitled to revise the liturgy when it did not please them, not just to translate it.

(This sort of thing will get knowing nods from the choir, and raise a "huh?" of incomprehension for the rest; that's fine.) Dummett did not restrict himself to questions of liturgical style. He defended the doctrine of Real Presence (while criticizing the Thomistic presentation thereof); he argued against the Roman church's position on contraception; he criticized modern philosophers for "worshiping" science and insisted that (as Ombhurbhuva reminded me in a comment on the last post)

the price of denying that God exists is to relinquish the idea that there is such a thing as how reality is in itself.

Dummett's colleague Philippa Foot, a professed atheist, recounted in an interview (included here) that she once asked him,

“What happens when your argument goes one way and your religious belief goes the other?” And he said, “How would it be if you knew that something was true? Other things would have to fit with it.”

But Dummett insisted his faith had experienced long periods of doubt, often brought on by reflection on the problem of evil, which, as he wryly conceded in his Gifford lectures, gave the atheists "a local argumentative advantage." In an autobiographical essay included in the book The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, he gives an account that will sound familiar to anyone who has done any of this wrestling:

I have undergone several periods when I have been overcome by such doubts; during them, I have not ceased to attend Sunday Mass, but have abstained from the sacraments. My doubts have always been global rather than local; my reasons for believing in God are philosophical rather than affective; they can suddenly strike me as unconvincing. ...But most usually my doubts have been engendered by what troubles everyone: can a world in which such suffering occurs be one made by a God who is said to love?...That world looks as if governed by uncaring forces. The pain of animals is a good example ...As for human pain, it is not its mere occurrence that has usually troubled me: after the Cross, no one can say to God, ‘You don’t know what it is like.’ ...What troubles me most is the way some people die. Some deaths are too devoid of dignity or peace to allow any self-surrender; how can they be the means by which anyone’s soul is supposed to pass into eternity?

Dummett did not shy from the matter:

I have no answer to these questions; they trouble me continually. It has been only sporadically, and not for a long time now, that they have overwhelmed me and prevented me for a period from being a whole-hearted believer. When the period has ended and my faith in God has been restored, it has not been because I have found the answers, but because I have become able to live with the agony of not knowing them, confident that they are to be found...I remain a Catholic, and hope to die one.

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Ancilla theologiae ?

2011-12-28T10:25:00.000-08:00

A word of clarification re. my theological posts. The subtitle of this blog is Open Letters on Philosophical Praxis. I take it for granted that philosophy is aimed at the cultivation of experience of a particular kind. There are plenty of snide ways of saying what philosophy is not (yawn yawn "grammatical analysis," "footnote-chasing," etc.), but it is obvious to me that these just name strategies of thought that have on occasion got out of their bottles; I'm not interested in breaking them on the wheel. What I [want to] do here is understood as keeping open the question of philosophy's status as ancilla theologiae. If it were not for the issue of "whose theology?" I would say there is no "question" about it; but theology proves itself to be both the willing and the unconscious handmaid herself of so many ideologies that considerable reticence is called for. In some moods, I would say that philosophy opens onto theology, that theology is the silent culmination of philosophy; but that leaves a great deal of talk which is certainly understood as theology, and this is the stuff I worry about.

In another mood I would suggest that, at least in our postmod situation, the handmaid is like Gorakhnath, and the onetime queen of the sciences is like Matsyendranath. These two sages from Medieval Indian lore are disciple and master respectively, but Matsyendranath once entered into a trance and is eventually found by Gorakhnath as an amnesiac prisoner in the retinue of the enchanting Queen of Ceylon (or is it 1,600 different queens? the stories differ). A brief recounting of this myth is found in a paper by Mircea Eliade here (reprinted as chapter VII in his book Myth and Reality.) The disciple disguises himself as a dancing girl and in a long and symbolic dance he recalls his teacher, by hints and gestures, to his right mind. (There is a whole range of hermeneutic and historical issues that this legend raises--questions about the roles of sex, sexuality, and gender in Indian religion, about the lineages of the Natha Sampradaya [an initiatic tradition, ascetic and in some cases tantric], its relation to Buddhism, and so on. You can see some of that explored in this post by Mike Magee, but I'm not getting into any of it here.) My illustration simply means; theology has forgotten itself. Philosophy is (in this analogy) a disciple; but its role today is in part to raise the issues that theology itself ought to; to convene theology; to call theology to itself.

This sets me apart from plenty of people whose work interests me quite a lot, I know. And there is of course a further tension: of its very nature, philosophy encounters aporiae which can be addressed by the response of faith, but to take this step is in some sense to leave philosophy behind. The philosopher would therefore always in some manner be aspiring to leave his own mode of existence qua philosopher. I do not think this tension can be resolved, at least not on its own level--the level (at least) of discourse. But it can be exploited, and exploited philosophically--that is, for the purposes of cultivating philosophical experience. By this phrase I mean, among other things, the entry into such tension or aporia fully, so that they inform ones whole life. This means, n.b., tha tone continues to "live"--to act politically, socially, and so on--i.e., without the caricature of "paralyzed thought" which supposedly skepticism brings on--though this may be a requisite stage, Socrates' stingray numbness (and let's face it, in one of its modes philosophy just is skepticism). Philosophy in the way I mean it (and this is the way the tradition going back--yes, pretty much continuously--to Plato means it) never lets go of the question quid sit deus?--but for philosophy at least, it remains a question.

From Christmas to Easter, every Sunday

2011-12-25T22:06:00.000-08:00

At Christmas Day Mass I can't help but be struck as was T.S. Eliot's Thomas Beckett in Murder in the Cathedral:

whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on this Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth. So that at the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It was in this same night that has just passed, that a multitude of the heavenly host appeared before the shepherds at Bethlehem, saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men'; at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross.

Eliot has Beckett remark to his flock, "Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion." But indeed, this is what the Church does every Sunday.

The Gloria in excelsis, called "a most ancient and venerable hymn by which the Church, gathered in the Holy Spirit, glorifies and entreats God the Father and the Lamb" in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, occurs in the entrance rites of every Sunday Mass. Its opening clauses,

Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis,

are of course the declaration of the angels before the shepherds, which Eliot has Beckett cite from Luke 2:14 (it can also be "peace to men of good will," depending on your translation). Commencing its worship with this phrase, the Church is already doing what it later declares expressly, "joining with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven," with which words the Mass proceeds to declare

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.

The Sanctus comes as the final words of the preface for the Eucharistic prayer. That is: the Mass identifies the Church with the angelic choir, implicitly at its beginning, and again explicitly at the beginning of the Eucharist proper. There is thus a sense in which the Church is, with every Mass, recapitulating the distance and the conjunction between Christmas and Holy Week; and this sense is in some wise bound up with its angelic vocation.

Václav Havel: "hope is not optimism"

2011-12-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

As Advent, the "season of waiting," winds to its close, Václav Havel has died.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace p 181)

This is a motif that runs through Havel's work from Letters to Olga to his many late addresses, collected in The Art of the Impossible. In the wake of Havel's death I have been turning this distinction over in my mind. I have said before that philosophy is in some sense optimistic, but Havel's "hope" is far closer to what I mean.

I know it's a strange thing to contend: that philosophy is "hopeful." But philosophy arises (in Greece at any rate) out of the question of whether life can be good. The tragedians were by no means sanguine about this, and Solon's famous warning ("Call no man happy...") is meant to resonate with the sad wisdom of Silenus: Best for man is not to be born, and next-best, to die soon. I believe Socrates means to counter this dour tale (and if I were writing a paper, here would be the place for all the stuff about Alcibiades' characterizations of Socrates as Silenus in the Symposium). Socrates says that life can be good, and he tells us what makes it so: "examination." He does acknowledge that life can be not worth living; but he believes he has found an answer to this, the one thing needful, which his fellow Athenians neglect, at risk of moral bankruptcy.

In the same place, Havel says that hope

transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable sign in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can't--unlike Christians, for instance--say anything concrete about the transcendental.

In pointing beyond the horizon of the world to indicate the unspecifiable grounds of hope, I suspect that Havel is following in the steps of his friend Jan Patočka, whose essay "Negative Platonism" (included here) tries to show that the Socratic orientation of philosophy towards a horizon was inherent in thinking itself. Havel's reticence, his confessed inability to "say anything concrete," is the fitting response to a hope whose articulation would seem to take us even beyond the premises of the meaningful; and Havel is right to gently chide Christians who have been far too ready to wax loquacious on the street address of God, though it is difficult to see how one might entirely avoid "saying too much" here. Havel himself seemed to hold out interest in the Gaia hypothesis and the Anthropic principle, proposals which certainly risk at least as much in the way of trespassing beyond the articulable, at least when explicitly connected to "the transcendental."

Asked whether the death and return of Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings, was meant to suggest the passion of Christ, J.R.R. Tolkien demurred:

Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power. But though one may be in this reminded of the Gospels, it is not really the same thing at all. The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. Here I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. (Tolkien, Letters, #181)

Tolkien was of course a Roman Catholic and accepted some measure of our capacity to be explicit about hope, but this explicitness in the end turns out to be always framed by liturgical language and action. Art, he insisted, could not sustain the link between hope and the primary world; it required routing through the imagination.

Even here, of course, one risks a great deal, because the line between art and thinking in general is blurry. All such speech turns out to be a figure of speech.

I hear in the many voices which either expressly avow nihilism--some with a show of regret, others with a kind of unseemly and ill-concealed eagerness--or else impatiently wave it aside as a distraction from their empty triumphalism, a perverse celebration of the mortification of hope. In other quarters, the post-humanists offer bizarre anticipations of a kind of all-too-concrete "hope" of a different kind, not merely seeking refuge in just such a "secondary world" as Tolkien described, but seeking to make it the primary world; indeed to re-make this secondary world over into the primary one. This project will turn out to be the nihilistic one of erasing experience altogether.

One must be willing to (advisedly) risk "saying too much," in facing down the perverse celebrants of the mortification of hope. As Saint Leo the Great said, Inde oritur difficulas fandi, unde adest ratio non tacendi (The difficulty of speaking comes from the same source as the reason for not keeping silent.) I know nihilism from the inside, as does anyone with faith worthy of the name. if I did not, it would be hard to persuade myself that such an attitude is not an abdication of the life of the mind, but one of its essential forms, a necessary part of its life-cycle.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

From imprisoned dissident to president of his country, Havel could have seen the course of his life as a pure vindication. But for millions of human beings who had the misfortune to, say, die in prison (Patočka was one) before the Velvet Revolution, this eventual historical denouement made no difference--at least none we dare name; the very attempt would tip us over into kitsch. The stature of Havel's character is shown by the fact that he knew very well, after his success, that such "turning out well" meant nothing in terms of hope. What counted was the surety--the faith--that it made sense. But the nature of that "sense" cannot be specified. One can at best try to hazard its grammar, not its content.

How to avoid not thinking -- some non-foolproof tips

2011-12-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

Harman, here:
Holism has now evolved from a formerly minority position into a sort of universally accepted cracker barrel wisdom, good for scoring easy points on fossilized and oppressive reactionary patriarchs who are supposedly naive enough to miss the way in which “everything is connected.” The problem is that this is an idea once but no longer liberating. Ideas have lifespans just like humans, and just like humans they can fall into a robotic decadence. My wager, as Badiou would put it, is that interconnectivity is a spent force, and that the intellectual theme of our time will be the recovery of a more robust and weirder model of autonomous individual things.

My first reaction to this was, "liberating" is not the first criterion by which I evaluate assertions. But I always question my first reactions.

There is a real sense in which formerly daring positions become substitutes for thinking. It is much, much harder than one thinks to escape from this. The feeling of "scoring easy points" seems to give validation, for defeating an opponent (or at least, in one's own opinion, taking them down a notch) is a fairly satisfying simulacrum of being right, and all the better if the opponent is one of the establishment.

My own way (certainly not foolproof) of navigating this danger is roughly threefold. Each of these modes carries its own risks.

First, I read widely, from no single school. I know I risk eclecticism in this way; a more grave danger is a kind of scatteredness or shallowness, a dilettantism. I'm not too afraid of this because I consider philosophy a matter of life and death, but it is true that one can't study everything.

Second, I avoid in-crowds where I can. I value friendship above most other goods and even think that the question of friendship is one of the few perennial philosophical matters; but I cultivate an allergy to the subtle allure of relationships in which mutual interest in the truth is eclipsed by a creeping disdain for all those poor benighted other sods who just don't get it. The risk here is a certain loneliness and (again, more dangerous) a chance of being broad-minded-to-a-fault.

Lastly, in those positions that rub me the wrong way, I try to find these in their strongest form. (This is at least half of why I am drawn to Badiou, for instance). This is of course a venerable technique of keeping oneself honest, and I have to admit I think it would do a few contemporary debates a world of good; but it too carries a danger, of remaining in polemical mode too long and failing to articulate a position of one's own.

I'm sure I succumb to all of these in different degrees. What I don't do is look for the cutting edge.

As for Holism, I consider Harman one of the strong points in the case against it. His strength does not lie in his characterization of it as no-longer-liberating. (And of course this is hardly the main thrust of his critique.) He's certainly right that it has become, in some circles, a default position. (On the other hand, there is also a case to be made that reductionism remains the ideological default mode of western culture.) Which position currently holds the attention of the doxa, in whatever circles, is not really the main question. The challenge is to formulate whatever position you hold in a manner that thinks. It is always worth asking oneself if one is scoring easy points. But that is because philosophy is above all a spiritual discipline, not just the construction of arguments.

Transformation, death, "Chinese" thought, and "Western"

2011-12-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

At his blog Intra-Being, Andre Ling raises the question:

At what point does death pass from something inevitable and therefore quite acceptable to something violent and therefore more unacceptable [?]

This question intersected in my mind with a passage I recently encountered in François Jullien's The Silent Transformations. Jullien has seemingly become the Sinologist these days, at least in certain philosophical circles; I do not know what Asian studies departments make of him. His many books translated so far all tend to run the compare-&-contrast ploy: here's what our Western philosophical tradition, inherited from the Greeks, makes of such-&-such a matter; and what does the Chinese tradition say? In The Silent Transformations, the issue is the nature of change, and Jullien argues that Chinese thought tends to regards change as far more gradual and less catastrophic; and this has rendered Chinese philosophy more sensitive not only to small and incremental change, but also to processes that are cumulative and ultimately transformational.

To put it bluntly, there is even an inversion between Greek and Chinese thought in this respect, and the latter opens up an initial breach.... on the one hand Aristotlean nature, the phusis, is conceived as being a subject-agent: it 'wants', 'aims', 'undertakes', is 'ingenious' and sets up 'goals'. The Chinese sage or strategist on the ohter hand displays no ambition other than to 'transform' just as nature does (hua is their master word). (The Silent Transformations, pp 8-9)

I am by disposition suspicious of overarching accounts of "Chinese" or "Japanese" or "Indian thought", just as much as I am of "Greek" or "French" (There is as much difference between Kitaro Nishida and Kukai as there is between Malebranche and Deleuze), so I take all this with a bit of whatever cross-cultural seasoning is appropriate. (I note, e.g., that Jullien refers specifically to Aristotle, but contrasts him with the generic "Chinese sage or strategist.") I hasten to add that I am radically unqualified to question Jullien's scholarship; I merely protest that a culture rich enough to inspire a scholarship of such caliber must have more texture and variation to it that the repetition of what I can't help but consider cliches. After all, the various disputes between rival schools of Confucianism (let alone between Mohists, Buddhists, and so on) were certainly experienced by participants to be substantive disagreements. I raise my eyebrows when I come across a question like this one about the process of human ageing:

Would not this constant and silent passage which constitutes ageing, as undeniable as it is, teach us more about life itself; does it not definitely already let us glimpse what is effective, so widespread and discreet is it that it is ordinarily imperceptible, about all we project and busily construct about the End? But European philosophy has no less placed death as the gleam on the horizon, as a culminating, fascinating and apocalyptic point, towards which everything converges and will be suddenly resolved: the place where, tearing aside the veil, the anticipated Truth is finally to be revealed.... If philosophy had transferred its attention to the transition of ageing, as something which we are nevertheless faced with everywhere and which has always already started, it would undoubtedly have refrained from making death a point of scrutiny which definitively cuts off everything, an invitation, in a great game of double or nothing, to the wager of Faith or rather to the tragic hardening. It would have approached death as the ultimate result--the avatar--of ageing that begins so soon, no longer as a Rupture and a leap into the Indescribable, but in the dependency and continuation of ageing....it would cease to be an enigma and become an epilogue. (pp 58-9)

Suffice it to say that I have my doubts as to whether death is experienced as a non-enigmatic "epilogue" across the whole of Chinese philosophy.

However, these qualms aside, there is something worth examining here. And here, too, is where we intersect again with Andre Ling's question, with which I began. I won't unpack Ling's whole post, which is rather long and worth reading in full. He has recourse to some fruitful work of Tim Morton's which strikes me as interesting, in part, precisely by virtue of grounding a nonviolent ethic in the Harman-inspired trope of 'withdrawal,' i.e., the radical disconnected-ness of all beings (rather than the usual cliche--for which I still have some strong affinity--of pervasive inter-connection). (For a different take on this, look at Amod Lele's early post on Speculative Realism here). Ling takes up this notion and runs with it till he comes to what he sees as the problem:

Morton’s point seems to be that non-violence is the key to existence for any object: an object can only continue to exist if it is able to get along with itself and with others. This means that inconsistencies are not cancelled out but rather multiplied and amplified. It is the proliferation of inconsistencies that permit an expanding co-existence to take place. Violence, it seems to me, becomes a kind of icing on the non-violent cake of being. While non-violence is what makes being possible, that very being itself sustains a variety of violent encounters. In a sense, to the extent that the encounter between two objects is always between a real object and a sensual object – between a subject and a caricature – every encounter contains an inevitable violent dimension. The idea, then, that somehow the ontological necessity of non-violence for being translates into the possibility of perfectly non-violent existence seems to be difficult to uphold. ...How do I avoid merging the recognition that violence is an inevitable feature of the world (it also has an ontological foundation in the caricaturing that goes on in all inter-objective relations) with the idea that, therefore, violence should simply be accepted?

Ling's question is the same one that is made pressing (and left unresolved) by the Bhagavad-Gita.

To conclude, or rather suspend for now, two brief and provisional observations:

First, One might consider the birth of the philosophical mind in the West as the rupture from that participatory consciousness for which (by contrast) there had been a community with the dead, for which "the ancestors" had remained a part of the cultural conversation. Formerly, it had been actually experienced as meaningful to think of death as a transition, and there were even those for whom traffic across this border was considered risky but possible gambit. Is the distinction Ling draws--"beauty is when one object’s ego is dissolved by its encounter with another object. Violence is when an object is reduced to its traces"--pertinent here? Does philosophy begin in the conflation between beauty and violence --i.e., in the characterization of persuasion by beauty as unfree? (I myself want to draw a distinction here between the sublime and the beautiful.)

Second, Jullien contends that China proved somewhat resistant to giving inroads to Christianity in part because of its difference in its conception of time, and of death. But of course, the decisive divergence here is not with "Greek" thought but with "Hebrew"; the Biblical concpetion of time as tending towards an historical telos. And here what seems pertinent is the way the manifest and unmanifest worlds infer or implicate each other. The Chinese "Great Triad" of T'ien, Ti, Jen ("Heaven," "Earth," "Man"), is--despite Rene Guenon's stern words against parallel-mongering in the first chapter of his monograph--closely akin, not indeed to the Christian Trinity, but to the three points Franz Rosenzweig lays out in The Star of Redemption, a philosophical work whose Biblical inspiration I trust needs no belaboring. The difference, however, is that Rosenzweig delineates God, World, and Man insisting upon their confrontation of each other in a kind of ontological bruteness, as it were; he insists upon them as ontologically independent, their relationship unmediated; this is what Rosenzweig means by "smashing the All," in a move as emphatically non-monist as philosophy has seen. For Rosenzweig, God, World and Man are mediated by nothing-- by the Naught. In China, this naught is capable of a sort of paradoxical mediation, for (to quote Guenon, who I recognize is not a standard authority among Sinologists), "the Tao is simultaneously Non-Being and Being, while at the same time not really being anything apart from Non-Being". (The Great Triad, p 19, n.8) I bring in Rosenzweig here not only because he illustrates in a compelling way the philosophical consequences of a sustained encounter with Biblical thinking (and in a way not overdetermined by Christianity), but also precisely because he begins his great book with the subject of Jullien's paragraph above, the question of death.

There is a great deal more to say--on inconsistency, the naught (= the void in Badiou? withrawal in Harman? etc.), decision, and so on.... but enough for now.

Banalization of infinity

2011-12-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

Thinking further re. the Nirenbergs' critique of Badiou which I referred to last post, it strikes me that the oddest part is their casting of his equation mathematics = ontology as politically motivated, as trying to furnish an iron foundation for a 21st-century marxism--their analogy is to Engels' Dialectics of Nature. This seems to me to get Badiou wrong in a subtle but important way. Badiou is up-front with his motives. Whenever he talks about the lamentable philosophical effects of neglecting the matheme, it is always with reference to what he calls Romanticism. Romanticism, in turn, is that school which makes definitive the thematization of finitude. Badiou's re-casting of set theory as ontology is a move intended to laicize and banalize infinity once and for all, to render it incapable of lending comfort to the obscurantism of crypto-theology; and, let's be clear, for Badiou there is no other kind.

Can we really be surprised at so-&so's Rabbinic Judaism, or so-&so's conversion to Islam, or another's thinly veiled Christian devotion, when nothing is said that does not boil down to this: that we are 'consigned to finitude' and 'essentially mortal'?...The truth is that this disentwining [between mathematics and philosophy] renders the Nietzschean proclamation of the death of God ineffectual. Atheists, we lack the wherewithal to be so, so long as the theme of finitude governs our thinking....The only way to situate ourselves within a radical desecration is to return infinity to a neutral banality, to inscribe eternity uniquely in the matheme, and to abandon conjointly historicism and finitude. (Conditions, pp98-99)

One could cite any number of other passages, but let this suffice. Badiou's casting of mathematics as ontology or vice-versa is simply a radical secularizing move, to deprive "Being" of any lingering penumbra of holiness The "Question of Being" is, in this way, to be answered. This is what Badiou means by "Heidegger as commonplace." (It's also, incidentally, one of the essential connections between Badiou and Meillassoux.)

Now obviously I don't see things this way. There is (or can be) a finitism without pathos. (And forcing the banalization of infinity as he does obliges Badiou to read Cantor quite against Cantor's own sense of himself.) Spelling this out would be another and much longer post. But while Badiou's politics are not beside the point, they don't motivate the project in the same way. Yes, Badiou's critique is heir to Marx. But as we know, Marx himself insisted that "the prerequisite of all critique is the critique of religion." In this, at least, I am on Badiou's side, by the way.

Pythagoric snares

2011-11-26T14:35:00.000-08:00

Those interested in Badiou should note the currently (and temporarily) available material online at Critical Inquiry, whose summer 2011 issue featured an article by David and Ricardo Nirenberg: "Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology." In Critical Inquiry's forthcoming winter issue (which, when it comes out, will render the links here dead), the Nirenbergs' critique is responded to by A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens, whose article is prefaced with some brief remarks by Badiou, the gist of which is (I quote) "What a disappointment!"

Bartlett and Clemens' description, which I read first, led me to expect some truly dismal thinking when I turned to the Nirenberg's original essay. The claim is, over and over, that not only have the Nirenbergs (who they, um, "cleverly" re-name Nini, with a nod to Derrida's Limited Inc, in a move that seems just depressingly nyah-nyah by the third instance) misread Badiou, but that they have done so willfully, or stupidly, or both—unless, that is, the Nirenbergs have not read him at all, which Bartlett and Clemens do not hesitate to insinuate may well be.

Suffice it to say that upon turning to the Nirenbergs' essay, this claim does not hold up. But their point that the Nirenbergs have read Badiou against his own express declarations certainly stands. This is not, to my mind, a coup de grace. One may well say, after all, that if the Nirenbergs can argue that Badiou's formulations can be put to serve positions which contradict other of his own explicit statements, so much the worse for Badiou. The real question is not whether the Nirenbergs have read from (or even into) Badiou statements which are contradicted by some of Badiou's own intentions (or, God help us, the secondary literature), but whether or not their readings are defensible philosophically. Certainly they arrive at conclusions about Badiou which I cannot share, but the condescending dismissal of their argument seems to me to be woefully beside the point.

To be sure, I am not of their position, nor of Badiou's, when it comes to the nature of philosophy nor of what they call "pythagoric snares." Their central contention—that, as they put it in their rejoinder to Bartlett and Clemens,

Badiou's thesis deliberately blurs essential distinctions between realms of discourse

—could be put as well to Plato (a point they concede in advance); but this is, I maintain, a constituent practice of philosophy, not a regrettable lapse of good philosophical discrimination but one half of philosophical praxis. The other half, of course, is knowing what one is doing, and continuing to make the "essential distinctions" which are nonetheless blurred. It must be said that Badiou reiterates these distinctions with a rare degree of articulation. If I think he lapses, it not in blurring the distinctions, for which the Nirenbergs fault him, but in doing so with too guilty of a conscience.

This is because I maintain that the Whole, with which Badiou is overtly willing to dispense, is a sine qua non of philosophy. The "blurring" for which the Nirenbergs reproach Badiou is, to my mind, the unavoidable (albeit deniable) practice of the "flip side" of articulation. The closest we come to this in language is poetic trope. Obviously, this thesis is close to unacceptable to Badiou, for whom it could (depending on just what we mean by "language" here) amount to conceding that poetry is a form of silence (as he puts it in his study of Wittgenstein), or—more tendentiously—a form of non-thought. On the other hand it is also unacceptable to the Nirenbergs, since for them it would license the "pythagoric snares" to which they object so strongly, mistakes (as they see it),

in which contingent aspects of mathematical models are used to reach cosmological or ontological conclusions.

They point, e.g., to Glaucon's discussion of the "nuptial number" at Republic 545 &c. I on the other hand hold that the account of political justice, or cosmogenesis, or the relation between word and object, in terms of mathematics or cookery or what have you is an echo of an archaic-&-perennial consciousness whose critique and defense are the twin sides of the proper vocation of philosophy. I therefore do not regard the "snares" in the symptomatic a priori objectionable terms used by the Nirenbergs; indeed I do not see such moves as "reaching conclusions" at all; I see them as being suggestive and pointing beyond the articulable realm. (Their example is a case in point, as would be obvious if they paused to consider—among other things—that it is Glaucon not Socrates who makes this argument)

A final word about the Nirenbergs' own tone. While hardly as persnickety as Bartlett and Clemens', there is something a little troubling about it. The conclusion of their essay states:

insofar as [Badiou's] mathematical ontology disguises the contingent in robes of necessity, it can only diminish our freedom. We can embrace the politics if we so wish. But we should not confuse this choice with mathematics, nor can we call it philosophy.

I have my doubts about this whole formulation, and Bartlett and Clemens do a fair job of explaining why one might be forgiven for thinking the first sentence naïve. I am not concerned with the naïveté, but with the tendentiousness. The implication is that Badiou has either deceived himself or hopes to deceive us into "confusing" politics with mathematics. Confusion is not the same as "blurring," or, to have recourse to an over-used but still pertinent word, problematizing, a discursive boundary. As I have elsewhere argued, it may be permissible to question Badiou's philosophy's claim to the title platonism. But it is pretty staggering to suggest that his platonism does not deserve the title of philosophy.

Follow the argument

2011-11-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

By now anyone who cares has doubtless heard more than they can take about the way #Occupy protesters have disrupted traffic and business and school, and how police have been "forced" to use batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. There have also been occasions at which a kind of ad hoc bonhomie flowered for a few welcome moments, as when in New York police told the drum circle, "we like that beat."

Most of the stories are not so cheerful: protesters doused with pepper spray by police officers attempting to clear a public street--except that the protesters were on the sidewalk; or hit point-blank in the face with pepper spray while they sat peacefully on the lawn, arms linked; or battered and struck by batons, again with arms linked in solidarity (a posture the chancellor of Berkeley insisted was "not nonviolent", whatever the hell that means. Did you need another reason to despair over the state of American higher education?)

You can go on iterating stories like this until you want to cry. As atrocious as some of the anecdotes are, no, they don't involve (so far) any real ammunition (if you don't count aerosols), and yes, yes, the police "are the 99% too." Yet neither the grim details nor the saving caveats are central to the Occupiers' concerns. With every line, such accounts point us to questions of crowd management, on police abuse of power, and to civic questions about "balancing rights." They could all seem, in short, a tremendous diversion of attention.

This diversion has had me thinking hard lately. The activist in me (struggling hard with the cynic) sees every story about police brutality as changing the subject--not as good press or bad press, but just the wrong press, press about the wrong issue. The problem is not police brutality. The problem is corporatism.

But. The philosopher must be concerned with the Whole. Socrates gave the philosopher a twofold rule: follow the argument wherever it leads. This means:

follow the argument wherever it leads,

and also,

follow the argument wherever it leads.

The first formulation, Following the argument wherever it leads, means that we see how issue opens upon issue and question upon question. What does it mean that a protest against corporatism has occasioned police brutality? What is the balance, in our tradition, between the right to protest and other legitimate civic concerns--sanitation, safety, commerce? While some of these debates are legitimate (the police, alas, are not the only ones victimizing people in protest camps, as allegations of rape make all too clear), some smell like opportunistic attempts to get rid of Something In The Way. At what point, or under what conditions, then, do these questions themselves cease being legitimate and become instead subterfuge for maintaining the status quo?

The second formulation, Following the argument wherever it leads, means: it is important that we should see that these matters are all intimately intertwined with each other, but that importance will be lost on us if we forget that they are intertwined specifically with the central matter of the economic system under which we have lived more or less since the Civil War, if not the Jackson administration. Keeping sight of this center is not just a concern for activists. It is (I insist) a matter for anyone who wants to think. The movement (if that's what it is) needs to think broadly, but also at length.

There is, too, the third dimension--depth--which asks after what used to be called the existential meaning of these questions: what is human life that these politics can arise in it, what is politics that it sheds light on, or obscures, our human predicament? If you can ask these while not losing the urgency of the immediate task-at-hand (i.e., while tracking the argument), you are, in my book, a philosopher. Which of course does not make one immune from mistakes. Maybe the opposite. Probably.

All Saints' Day in time and vice-versa

2011-11-06T23:00:00.000-08:00

The Feast of All Saints is not just the last major feast of the Church Year, but, as such, is also the eschatological Feast.

Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

The Book of Common Prayer (ECUSA) contains a rubric specifying that "All Saints' Day may always be observed on the Sunday following November 1, in addition to its observance on the fixed date." This is an unusual feature; All Saints' is the only Feast of which this double observation is permitted. It is the last major feast of the Church Year; the day when the Church celebrates the company of all the Holy (i.e., the Church itself). (As is usually the case, "scholars are divided," but there are reasons to believe that in some parts of the pre-Christian world, this day marked the New Year.) I do not say that the Church intended the meanings which I find in this curious rubric (and I have not been able to ascertain how venerable it is--it may go back only to the preparatory materials for the '79 Prayer Book), but I think one may read an eschatological significance in the fact that, in this way, the Feast can be seen as bracketing the "ordinary time" of the week, falling on November 1 and then recurring on the Eighth Day of the week, the day of eternity. The Feast's temporal bivalence underscores the way the ontology of the Church is fundamentally eschatology: the Church itself, "the company of all blessed people," is the kingdom that is both coming, beyond the horizon of chronology, and is also now here. To use language that is a bit misunderstood these days, the Church Suffering is the Church Triumphant.

Occupy Wall Street: the Supply of Demands

2011-10-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

No one, I trust, is actually in doubt (as opposed to pretending to be in doubt) about what has made Occupy Wall Street protesters--from an unprecedented range of the citizenry--angry. What they want is, supposedly, a different question. The media keeps intoning that there's "no coherent message," no unifying purpose, no laundry list of policy changes. This is not wholly by chance. As Jodi Dean points out, the very question of whether to issue demands continues to be a matter of debate for OWS. (See also Ross Wolfe's post on some of the tension to which this debate gives rise.) There are some good reasons to decline to issue such a list. Many remember how well it worked when millions worldwide marched condemning the invasion of Iraq. They had a clear and unambiguous message. And that worked well, don't you think? Others see issuing demands for the 1% to take concrete steps to give up power as pretty much analogous to putting a slip of paper in a suggestion box that leads straight to the sewer. After a while, you start to get tired of that flushing sound. Still others see it as rushing to the process whereby the corporatists figure out "who we're dealing with here," and start to negotiate us down to an acceptable and meaningless settlement.

To critics overt or covert, this is either a convenient excuse to dismiss the movement, or a genuine sign of either impudence or incoherence. My suspicion is that if the movement seems that vague to you, so vague that you just "can't tell what the Occupiers are saying," you are being a bit vague with the truth as well. But even sympathizers can't help worrying that the movement discredits itself, looking like a mob throwing a tantrum whose only purpose is catharsis.

No doubt there are some loudmouths, some "troublemakers", among the Occupiers, people whose protest is just an angry fighting-for-your-right-to-paaaarty. But anyone who reduces Occupy Wall Street to this is fooling themselves. How deeply some hope that protesters will just get bored and go away.

Uncertainty over whether to make demands, and what the demands will be, is not the Achilles-heel that the scoffers want it to be. But it does signify a lacuna, a shying-away from the brink of something. That something is both complex, and very, very simple, and is of philosophical interest. You might even say it's the whole thing.

This has a complex side and a simple one. On the complex: in their heart of hearts, protesters, or the unacknowledged "~~leadership~~" among protesters, know (and, parenthetically, I would add that the allergy to this concept of leadership, the inability to construe it in any but a statist, authoritarian way, is a liability of the movement), that the way forward is not and cannot be a simple matter of some new (or old) legislation or judicial pronouncement. The system itself (were you waiting for me to sue the S-word?) is deeply flawed, and real solutions are beyond tinkering and adjusting. I am aware that disparaging associations are summoned by the phrase "it's the System, man." Condescending onlookers have been awaiting the moment when Occupy Wall Street is "appropriated by the far left" and they may take this sentence as evidence that the moment is upon us. (The real danger of any co-opting comes from a very different direction.) But to point out that a rigged game is not a "game" at all, but a swindle, is not to say that there cannot be such things as games, let alone to decry the concept of games. It is however to say that a real game will have to look and be something completely different than what we have.

To make this point with more sober and thoughtful analyses than I have patience for, I commend to you the take of Douglas Rushkoff (four related articles, here, here, here, and here) and a critique by Samuel Smith, mainly to the third of those foregoing links, (here). Rushkoff (writing in 2009, well before Occupy was a twinkle in AdBusters' eye) insists that the economy did not malfunction when it created the gargantuan disparity between the 1% and the ninety-nine; it worked exactly as it was supposed to. It is, frankly, dumbfounding to me how anyone could think otherwise.

The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be.... [A]fter America’s post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow.... Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate. …So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn’t understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Where Rushkoff may lose you is when he opines that the best thing that could happen is for the economy to really tank; not to close a couple of firms and send some folks to prison and have the Dow Jones lose a couple of percentage points, but for the market to fall 70-80%. Only then, he thinks, will we be able to rebuild an economy that serves human beings. Here is where Samuel Smith demurs, pointing out that the likely fallout from such a real collapse would be far, far scarier than anything we have witnessed; it would likely mean the unraveling of what people like to call the social fabric. It's not Smith disagrees with Rushkoff's analysis; it's just that he thinks Rushkoff's medicine might be worse than the disease:

Truth be told, “Ponzi scheme” is a mild descriptor for our current hegemony, and there are lots of people who deserve worse punishment than they’re likely to get.... My pragamatic side can’t get past the path from Point A to Point B, though.... If we “let it die,” yes, it will be hard times for “hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers.” It will also be tough on a lot of other people.... people are going to die. Lots of people. Children are going to starve to death in the streets. Maybe your children, but if not, almost certainly the children of someone you know. And since America is so central to the global economy, let’s try not to imagine what happens in areas that are already impoverished. If we’re lucky enough, at some point, to emerge from this holocaust, it’s pure fantasy to assert that a “real economy” is what results.

Now I would mention that some folks, like James Howard Kunstler, ArchdruidJohn Michael Greer, and Derek Jensen, have been saying for while a while now that this scarier something is coming whether we like it or not. (Smith cites Kirkpatrick Sale, another articulate doomsayer, but he sees far more common ground between Sale and Rushkoff than I do.) I have some reservations about these dour expectations--mainly because I think that when it comes to prognostication, the first and last word was said by Yogi Berra: "it's hard to predict, especially the future"--but I'll admit to being very pessimistic about the ecological long-term. It's also true that the dire warnings of chaos and mob rule are a trusty standby for One-Percenters who want to scare the rest of us into not fucking with things. (The specter of social anarchy and mob rule will sooner or later be invoked against OWS.)

Which, n.b., does not make the scary warnings meaningless. But the real question is not what motivates someone to raise this specter, but what motivates us to avoid it--what makes it scary? And there are reasons for this which are closer to home than the fear of turning America into the scene for a Mad Max film.

Replacing a broken system is far more challenging than calling for the punishment of a few CEOs--gratifying (and even right) though that would doubtless be. Most of us have no idea what such work would be like. It could go very, very deep. Perhaps not so deep as market-abolition (which is certainly on some OWS ~~leaders'~~ wishlists, but hardly on that of the 99% en masse), but then, we don't know how deep until we get there. This is why the sneer from critics, "What do you want to put in its place?" while obnoxious and know-nothing, has a significance beyond what the critics intend. I said above that the lacuna indicated by the question of "what we want " indicated something both complex and simple. Here we come to the simple part: not-knowing is real, and frightening.

Some people want nothing more than to go back to their old lives, the lives they thought they were planning before mortgages got foreclosed, before student loans caught up with them when they lost their job, before an accident or illness piled up a stack of bills and credit-card statements. And of course, no lack of strategy is going into trying to figure what it will take to get folks to do just that-- to go back to their old lives. That is just what the demand for demands means: it's a ploy to find the starting-place from which to bargain down to an acceptable arrangement which will get people to agree to go home. Those old lives were of course still lived under the old regime. There was plenty of foul play going on already, but it hadn't yet reached middle America yet. Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground writes, the system has been for a very long time

a socio-economic-political game of calvinball in which those who have the most constantly change and rework the rules to make sure that no matter what happens, all wealth and opportunity is shipped up to the most well-off. As long as the middle-class was given new episodes of Friends and shiny SUVs to distract them, the whole thing could be masked. But now the shifting of wealth has undermined their expectations.

There's a lot in those little words "but now." What follows here is my take, not Gimbel's. What "But now" means is that it's no longer working--not just for the traders and racketeers atop the ladder, but for me and you. Implicit in this is that if we're just now waking up to the atrocious riggedness of the game, we weren't paying attention before. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by shiny SUVs and episodes of Friends. Even now, the would-be clever observation is raised that the activists are working away on iPhones and laptops, broadcasting their protests via the gadgets made by the corporate culture they decry. After you eliminate the smugness from this red-herring, there remains a little whiff of pertinence, and that pertinence inheres in the fact that we are indeed implicated in what we protest. We, too, are responsible. If we are honest, we can see this is the case whether you've been long-time champions of the cause going back to the '60s or before; or whether, like me, you've fought a long and losing fight against apolitical cynicism, or whether you didn't even realize until your city got Occupied that anything was wrong. (O.K., are there any of those?)

N.b., this does not mean that, since "we are all responsible", therefore no one is responsible. As Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem, this was more or less the tenor of Eichmann's defense, and it does not wash. There is more than enough responsibility to go around, but there are also different kinds of responsibility, and those who smiled and yawned and took their bailout-funded bonuses with one hand while signing foreclosures with the other are responsible in a whole different way than those who allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of consumerist security, whether by a suburban dream or a heroin syringe. But these latter, too, are a kind of responsibility, and if this makes anyone uncomfortable, well, it ought to.

Significant American social movements of the 20th century involved at least a twofold energy. There is the aspect by which one sees injustice and calls it by name. This was once fairly easy, e.g. in the days of segregation. But as prejudices and inequities have gone subterranean, there is harder work to be done on that front, both systematic and piecemeal, and it is the sort of thing where people of good will can sometimes disagree (and where those who are not always of good will can spout premature nonsense about the "end of racism," or sexism, or etc.). There is also the aspect by which one asserts than one no longer wishes to be implicated in the injustice one names. This part is harder, is ongoing--even in the times when an injustice seems plain as day. Even after one has consciously condemned and foresworn an injustice, one must catch in oneself the sneaky residue of condescension and inherited prejudice that lingers. Anyone can be surprised at an unguarded moment when they let slip an attitude they would never have expected in themselves. To accept that this occurs, you don't have to buy into notions of inherited guilt or pervasive institutional prejudice; good old-fashioned human fallibility, a failure to live up to our own standards, will do. The courage and commitment is called for on the part of activists as it is called for from those such movements aim to benefit. Internalized racism or sexism was and is real, and is still confronted. Coming out remains (and will for the foreseeable future) a defining and courageous moment in the life of anyone who is gay. Such decisions involve a resolution to no longer be part of the problem--a resolution that has to be repeated over and over.

The analogy between any of these with any other, including OWS, is obviously imperfect. I am not making the sophomoric claim that coming out of the closet, or refusing the stereotypes of one's own ethnicity, is equivalent to deciding to buy local or to opting out of the banking system. No form of resistance is just like any other. My point is that every resistance requires scrutiny of oneself and one's motives and a reiterated decision to take responsibility. Americans from every point on the political spectrum and from every social strata have been, to various degrees, lulled into an unsustainable worldview alien to human values. And we are still in it.

In his book Life, Inc., Rushkoff describes the "landscape of corporatism" as:

a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of theirdepression.
We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it.
While we will find characters to blame for one thing or another, most of corporatism’s architects have long since left the building—and even they were usually acting with only their immediate, short-term profits in mind. Our object instead should be to understand the process by which we were disconnected from the real world and why we remain disconnected with it. This is our best hope of regaining some relationship with terra firma again. Like recovering cult victims, we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatists society. Only then can we begin dismantling it and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.(Life, Inc.p xxv)

Thus the lack of a Mubarak or a Qadaffi for whose head to call is only a small part of what makes "demands" hard to enumerate here. More to the point is that we lack even a language for imagining a different set of values. What could we possibly want, in a country where, after all, we "have the right" to protest?!

When Slavoj Žižek addressed the New York protesters a few Sundays ago, he cited the old joke in which two friends plan, when one is going to visit a country with a repressive government, to circumvent the political censors by writing letters in blue ink if what they write is true and red ink if it is false. Then the first letter arrives and speaks in glowing terms of conditions in the country. Everything is apparently wonderful and readily available--"except red ink."

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, war, terrorism, and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

The invention of a language for our discontent is properly a philosophical matter. It is akin to what Nietzsche called a transvaluation of values.

This revaluation will need to break open the delivery-system whereby Americans have received and swallowed their political positions, all from trusted purveyors of opinion (media or government). In nothing have Americans been consumers more than in their consumption of ready-made political "positions" from an embarrassingly tiny subsection of possible stances. Kicking this habit means breaking apart the two-party system and very, very serious campaign and election reform. I am talking about measures which I don't expect to get a serious hearing, such as range voting and the abandonment of the electoral college. This seems a tall order, but it is probably more likely than Rushkoff's notion (which goes back to Silvio Gesell and beyond) of money bearing negative-interest.

Occupy Wall Street is unlikely to propel the US into democracy, given that the country never has been a democracy and was not intended to be one. But it is possible that it will at least elevate and expand the kind of politics, and even economics, that can happen here. Settling for a "new conversation" while the status quo continues will not be acceptable, but the status quo changes, in America, via just such conversations. Or at least, it could. I remain cautiously pessimistic.

Tomas Tranströmer, "Open and Closed Spaces"

2011-10-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Tomas Tranströmer, a favorite poet of mine for more than twenty years, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this month. This poem by him is one I have wanted to write about for a long time.

Open and Closed Spaces

A man feels the world with his work like a glove.
He rests for a while at midday having laid aside the gloves on the shelf.
There they suddenly grow, spread
and black-out the whole house from inside.

The blacked-out house is away out among the winds of spring.
'Amnesty,' runs the whisper in the grass: 'amnesty.'
A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky
where his wild dream of the future flies like a kite bigger than the suburb.

Further north you can see from a summit the blue endless carpet of pine forest
where the cloud shadows
are standing still.
No, are flying.

(tr. Robin Fulton)

What I love here, among other things, is the way the poem revises itself. The gorgeous and dangerous way in which the terms that are introduced as a figure of speech in one line become substantive in the next. E.g., the way "...like a glove" (a simile) in line one leads on to the gloves (real gloves this time) being "laid aside" in line two, and then in line three they shift again from passively lying on the shelf to "suddenly grow[ing]" to dramatic proportions. A single word--in a mere simile, at that, that most garden-variety of figures of speech--has in three lines taken over and "black[ed] out the whole house"! This pattern continues, with "house" this time: the house is next seen from without, "away out among the winds." These winds will now (without ever being expressly mentioned again by name) shape what comes next: the whisper in the grass, the kite in the air, the clouds and their shadows. But the wind bloweth where it listeth. The poem refuses to be bound by its previous figures; at every step, the law previously laid down is amended. Thus the grass whispers "amnesty," (the law is not binding), but then the motion of the poem veers upwards from being so close to the ground: the boy sprints, a line slants up into the sky; a dream, "like a kite" but huge, introduces the first overtly temporal term ("the future") into a poem that has hitherto been dominated by the spatial; we are transported to a mountaintop; and in the last three lines, one sees the poem overtly correcting itself: what seemed to be steady is in fact in motion. And every closed space can open up. What the poem describes, it enacts.

If you can read Swedish, the original poem (and some others) may be found here. (There are English versions too.)

poem

2011-10-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

"The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces

Terrifies me," Pascal wrote, meaning
those holes draped between stars--
voids that could swallow a trillion times
this ground we're walking. Yet from here
your fingertip covers them, pointing out
a star that's already moved on, leaving
a gap easier crossed, less freezing
than the gulf my fingers found that night
reaching vainly for yours
as we walked
dumbfounding blank
we'd once held hands across

Your after-image still shining.

"The God neither speaks nor conceals..."

2011-10-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

A friend writes me concerning the funeral of a friend:

The day after she died somebody close to her dreamed that she flew off with iridescent dragonfly wings (I got the email about this dream the day after her death). Yesterday at the funeral (under a big tent outdoors), one enormous, singular dragonfly flew around, and perched above the podium for the entire event.

It is hard to know "what to do" with stories like this, and this very incapacity is why they are invaluable. Not because they demonstrate irrefutably the bankruptcy of "the materialist world view;" and not because they show how desperately we narrativize and pattern-seek to gain a shadow of 'meaning' at any cost. Rather, because their experiential force is such that we cannot dismiss them, and yet they just won't slip easily into any preordained category. If we seize on them as "evidence" of something, we slip into superstition. But if we blow them off, we do violence to ourselves. (Many are indeed prepared to bite the bullet and do this, but the cost of this is the chemical gelding of their souls. What they see as tough-mindedness I see as the intellect on steroids--and courting analogous side-effects). The only rational and human (I will even say "faithful") stance is one that sees in them as what Heraclitus said: "The God whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign." This sign is not glossable (if it were, it would be "speaking"). It points us beyond this world, but not at the world's expense.

Wittgenstein, Reality and the Novel

2011-10-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

This is directed at any philosophers or readers of literature in the neighborhood of the U of Hertfordshire. It's a plug for an upcoming (Oct 18) lecture by Bernard Harrison, who will be presenting a view of Wittgenstein he has been quietly and diligently refining and promoting for many decades now. Harrison is set apart from many for the close regard he gives to all ("early" and "late") Wittgenstein, which gives his stance, in my estimation, a thoroughness missing from those philosophies which try to valorize (or dismiss) one or the other. He is also an exceptional close reader of literary texts, and he reads with his heart as well as his mind. I, alas, am on the other side of the globe and cannot hear my old professor. If anyone learns of it being recorded, please let me know.

Michaelmas & St Bartholomew/Nathanael

2011-09-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

September 29, The Feast of St Michael and All Angels:

In the Gospel mandated by the Lectionary for today, John 1:45-51, Philip tells Nathanael that "We have found the Messiah... Jesus of Nazareth;" Nathanael replies with what sounds like a proverb: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" When Jesus sees Nathanael approach, he calls him "an Israelite in whom there is no guile." "Where did you get to know me?" Nathanael asks. "I saw you under the fig tree, before Philip called you." This is apparently enough to get Nathanael to exclaim, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus asks: "You believe because I told you, I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this: you will see the angels of heaven ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

This little exchange attached to today's Feast often strikes one as a bit of a stretch at first; the story of Nathanael's call is the main point, and the bit about the angels seems an afterthought. It's widely taken to be an intentional echo of the passage in Genesis 28:10–19, in which Jacob dreams of a ladder or stairway between earth and heaven, with the angels going to and fro upon it; Jesus implicitly declares himself to be this ladder in some fashion, but just what this identity means is obscure.

Nathanael is often identified with the synoptics' Batholomew, (who, like Nathanael, is always paired with Philip), since John and only John mentions Nathanael and only the synoptics refer to Batholomew; but of course this has not kept many (including St Augustine) from thinking there are two people here. I am, myself, a Nathanael=Bartholomew guy, and I'll try to show why a bit later.

There is a hymn frequently sung on Michaelmas: Allelulia to Jesus, Who died on the tree, / and has raised up a ladder of mercy for me, / and has raised up a ladder of mercy for me. The tree on which Christ died, the cross, is itself a ladder between heaven and earth, and as tree it recapitulated the tree in the center of the garden, which is also the world tree, the tree whose roots are in the underworld and whose branches are in heaven. (Sometimes, mythologically, this is inverted). This tree, axis mundi, comes with fruit (of knowledge, of immortality, or both), a woman, a spring, and serpent. I'm not going to list the occasions of this motif; it is ubiquitous, and one does not need to be a slave to pop Jungianism to accept that this widespread occurrence is significant.

Since we are in the matrix of the Hebrew scriptures, the tree which most concerns us is the one in Eden. In Genesis 3, the serpent is called "the most subtle of all the creatures," "subtle" here being a pun (in Hebrew) on smoothness, a connotation which even then bore on the serpent's smooth-tongued capacity to deceive; but it is also a pun on the nakedness of the man and the woman. These two are "smooth" because their skin is exposed; and the snake's smoothness, too, involves its ability to shed its old, rough skin for a shiny, slick new one.

Jesus' description of Nathanael as "an Israelite in whom there is no guile" refers to this entire complex of notions. What is an Israelite? A descendant of Israel, of course; Israel being Jacob, who saw the ladder and all those angels going up and down. Nathanael's name means "God has given," and what God had given was understood above all to be the particular land upon which they lived, a bequest whose legacy we know to this day. It is in the ladder dream that Jacob hears the voice of God declaring this gift for the first time: "the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants."

But what distinguished Jacob was precisely his smoothness; not only his trickery with Esau--a trickery which is turned back on him by Laban--but also the literal smoothness of his skin, which he and Rebekkah must guilefully disguise in order to deceive blind Isaac, in the story immediately preceding the dream of the ladder. "An Israelite in whom there is no guile" is thus (to put the matter no doubt too strongly) a kind of counter-Jacob. "An Israelite in whom there is no guile" is a kind of colloquial rejoinder to Nathanael's skepticism that there could be "anything good from Nazareth."

How this skepticism is broken through is strange. "Where did you get to know me?" "I saw you under the fig tree." "Rabbi! You are the messiah!" What on earth is going on here? I won't claim to provide the answer to this question, but I hope to explicate what I think are come relevant bits of its context, and perhaps to its pertinence to the Feast of St Michael.

The fig tree is perhaps not the Tree (of Knowledge), but it is the only fruit mentioned by name and genus in the Genesis account: "And they knew that they were naked (="smooth"); and they took fig leaves and wove aprons for themselves." The fig tree thus provides that under which one hides one's smoothness. These aprons (they still figure in the LDS Temple ceremony) are replaced later by "garments of skin" given by God. But Nathanael is not "smooth" in this way; he has no deceit, "no guile."

"Under the fig tree," according to some exegetes, also implies prayer and the study of Torah; according to this line of reading, the subtext is that Nathanael was engaged in some devotional piety when Jesus observed him. This may involve angelic mediation, as later elements of synagogue liturgy imply. Jewish tradition is ambivalent about angels, but Christianity is eloquent on them and sees (I contend) the angels as not just mediators between Heaven and Earth but as, in some sense, the very media of prayer or even of theological vision itself; the liturgy is seen as recapitulating or becoming one with the worship given by angels in the presence of God, who are frequently said (e.g. by Evagrios of Pontos in his 153 texts on Prayer) to be the agents of the "energization" of our prayers (see, e.g., text 76).

To be sure, either Jewish nor Christian tradition is especially interested in angels for their own sake. Evagrios tells an anecdote of a monk who remained steadfast at prayer, even though two angels appeared to him; and the desire to head off any such interest clearly motivates the aforementioned ambivalence of the Rabbis (I believe there is, for instance, not a single mention of angels in the Mishnah). But the image of angels "ascending and descending upon the Son of Man" clearly identifies Jesus himself with the link--tree or ladder--which makes this concourse of energies between earth and heaven possible.

There is a further association, which I mention despite its cultural distance: the Bodhi tree, sacred in Vedic and Buddhist tradition, is also a fig, ficus religiosa; so "under the fig tree" is also where Gautama Buddha attained his enlightenment. This will of course rightly strike many as coming from far afield, but the archetypal emblem of the ascent of awareness from the base of the tree is bound up with the previously-mentioned set of images. It is here that Newagey enthusiasts will rummage about for the kundalini serpent rising from the base of the spine; or (closer to the Judaic matrix of the New Testament) of the ascent from the lower state of the soul called nefesh (frequently interpreted as the serpent in the Kabbalah) up the Sephirotic Tree of Life. These correspondences are indisputably inspired by free-association; whether they ought to be dismissed as "mere" free-association is a different question, but a methodological argument defending them would be a separate blog post.

The last connection that belongs here hinges on the aforementioned identity between Nathanael and Bartholomew. There is a famous depiction of Bartholomew by Michaelangelo in his Sistine Chapel Last Judgment. He is holding his own skin. This is because tradition has it that he was martyred by being flayed. That is, the tradition has preserved a connection between Bartholomew/Nathanael and the shedding skin motif, which thus connects directly to the Genesis story of the Fall. It should be noted that not every version says that Bartholomew was flayed--some stories speak only of his beheading--so there is some reason to think that this detail was intended to resonate with this wider constellation of notions going back to the Hebrew connotations of guile/smoothness.

I might mention, too, that Michaelangelo is painted a recognizable self-portrait on the skin of Bartholomew. Considering the artist's name, this may not just be the painter's exercise of his artistic prerogative. It is possible he knew what he was doing.

The liberal bias of American media

2011-09-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Streetis a very loose movement initially called by AdBusters, publicized by Anonymous, and motivated by everything from an itch for a moment of spectacle to the desire to see CEOs behind bars. It may be the Arab spring belatedly come to Manhattan; it may be the Invisible Committee's shot across the bow of America; it may be a bunch of naïve wannabes, sorry that they missed the Battle of Seattle, and trying to jump-start another manning of the barricades with a page out of Abbie Hoffman. One thing's for sure, you won't get much guidance from those institutions whose job it is to report the news with their mandated, university-intellectual-approved left-leaning bias. Because chances are you haven't even heard of Occupy Wall Street. On September 23, a full week after the protests began, the famously liberal New York Times managed a piece oozing with condescension. It took NPR, that hotbed of wobblies and fellow-travelers and whatever, nine days to deign to so much as mention the movement, and then only in response to listeners' indignation. This is after over ~~a hundred~~ a thousand arrests, and any number of protesters being pretty atrociously mistreated, including some women who were doused with pepper spray by a policeman who had to walk deliberately up to the barrier behind which they were shouting "Oh my God!" as they watched someone be handcuffed and manhandled. Watch the video; if it doesn't ruin the career of one of New York's finest, I hope it at least loses him the respect of his children.

Are the protests big? (Maybe getting bigger, anyway; see here.) Are they likely to really shake things up? Will it look like Tahrir Square? Will activists flood into New York and make the stock market freeze? Not if the "left-leaning" press have anything to do with it.

[UPDATE 10/1/2011 The first link in this post, for the moment, makes my virus-detection software break out in hives. So someone somehow has either poisoned the OWS site, or Norton is providing a service for the Power Elite. Current comments on safeweb.norton.com offer variations on "WTF?" Ain't live conspiracy theory fun? Stay tuned.]

[UPDATE 10/2/2011 Decent coverage from Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, the NT Times again does a two-step on the Brooklyn Bridge (this is really just a shift in emphasis--the same facts are reported lower down in the article.)]

Like I was saying

2011-09-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

If I may be permitted a self-referential moment:

There is a secret link between this fear and the boredom we spoke of earlier: boredom secretes fear as a kind of attempt at self-cure. One can see this quite clearly in contemporary western culture, which has grown more fearful as it has grown more secure, for the periodic upsettings of security become more traumatic and they leave a viral half-life of unsettling phantoms, traumatic enough to drive one back into the arms of a comfortable boredom, in a terrible cycle.

This, a propos last post, where I was voicing my expectation that the blah-banal ironism of the '90s will make its resurgence as the "trauma" of 9/11 fades. This ennui should also serve as a palliative while America dwindles into the twilight of its historical significance.

(Incidentally, some of this feedback-loop has also been described by Lars Svendsen in his The Philosophy of Boredom and The Philosophy of Fear.)

It should always raise one's suspicions when someone claims world-shaking significance for their own field, but I truly believe that philosophy is the cure of this addictive cycle of boredom and fear. It has been fighting the Noonday Demon from the very beginning. It is, to be sure, a homeopathic cure; Socrates' words stun and numb at first.

Irony is Sincerity. ;)

2011-09-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing how September 11th, 2001, made irony go out of the world or something. It's true that before, during the first Bush administration especially and then all through Clinton (ever notice how we tend to date things just like Bronze Age chroniclers, "in the second year of the reign of Sennacherib son of Sargon..."?) there was that crippling "hipness-unto-death"*, as some wit called it, spreading everywhere. It made especially TV commercials give off this evil glow of you-love-being-manipulated-by-this, sure-it's-all-lies-but-you're-kind-of-in-on-the-joke, making everyone complicit in their own cooption. One nadir of this, among many, was Madonna's Truth or Dare, the whole miserable glamorama of Yes-I-yank-your-chain, but I'm-telling-you-I'm-yanking-it; look at me, being all honest and forthcoming! Yeah, yeah, (wink), you're not fooled, you clever one.

This meta-meta-metastasizing of culture was often noted by commentators, of course, either applauding it, or resigning to it, or denouncing it, but it was on a runaway course that seemed unstoppable. (The very best, bar none, send-up of it I know is David Foster Wallace's short story "My Appearance", in Girl with Curious Hair.) Then.... then what? Then "the world changed forever"? Then we came "face to face" with some indigestible something that couldn't be assimilated into the snide, the trite, the in-jokey?

Even as the sirens wailed, and the smoke billowed up above the buildings, before anyone even knew just what had occurred, people in the street catching each others' eye were exchanging a secret, a half-acknowledged, dares-not-speak-it's-name recognition: "Something big is happening right now"--(this no matter where you were, Manhattan or elsewhere)--"and I'm here for it." Almost a jealousy of those who were on the spot. 9/11 was the ultimate in-crowd maker. "We are all New Yorkers," the T-shirts declared, wishfully. If you were conscious ten years ago, you are, whether you will or no, in the club of "Everyone remembers where they were when they heard." Later, by a week or so, we divided into camps: "Why do they hate us?" vs. "They hate our freedoms" vs. "Inside job," mutually-incomprehensible languages, but even this schism did not prevent unheard-of popularity ratings for a President who could not competently read from a teleprompter. It took seven more years of shame to grind that inexorably down to the 20-percent basement where it belonged. (Which more or less tells you how significant popularity polls are.)

Amod has some pertinent thoughts on how "never forget" has slowly started to be...forgotten. The fact that 9/11 has begun to "fade" somewhat from the foreground of national consciousness is no doubt all to the good, given the points he makes; but I fear it has not much to do with the balm of forgetfulness. The racism Amod names is still, to our shame, alive and well; so is the righteous indignation; and so is the pain for those who lost loved ones that day or in the wars that followed. But capitalism has moved on, as it must, not without a tear for the lost. What we've seen in the past ten years is the inevitable commodification of 9/11: the digestion of the event into a few stock images and some memes of patriotism, terrorism, "where-were-you-that-day," and so on. It started the moment someone called it "our finest hour" without cringing.

It may be the war that has slowed the resurgence of so-hip-of-you-to-know-it's-a-lie commercialism which went out of fashion for a brief time. It's telling that it arose and flourished as the long post-Vietnam era went on, as wars became TV events and, importantly, as America's economy continued to prosper. But the acidic corrosion of ironism is already picking up right where it slowed down, and it will be a triumph of capitalism when said ironism can flourish in the midst of a war and in the face of record-high unemployment. Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and being borderline culturally literate enough to recognize (or make) an Orwell reference is a bulwark against tyranny.

* I apologize for the surfeit of hyphenated phrases in this post. Really.

of late

2011-09-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

So during a month of "fasting" from the blog, I discovered to my great relief that I could still think with a pen in my hand. Typing words on a screen and writing on paper are very disparate modes of composition for me, more different than I can even articulate. There's something about the instant revisability of pixels that makes composition slower and more unsure, for me. I've found this translates to how I read online as well: on a screen, I am always scrolling down, before I've finished the paragraph; always looking for the bullet points, the money quote. After months and years of this, I began to get the queasy worry that something impatient and lazy had my mind its slovenly den. Would I be able to write anymore? Well, yes, as it happens, yes it is kind of like riding a bike. But the experiment demonstrated something more to me. I'm just plain happier composing on paper. The words covering the page in their indelible lines gives a shape to my thinking that the discrete increments of typing and the cut-and-paste-able blocks of computer text completely up-end. It's plain that this is an idiosyncracy of my own. Others have their own mental and creative hygiene, other conditions in which they can reach "flow," as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of optimal creativity and production; for me, nothing beats a smooth-flowing, extra-fine-point rollerball, on the unlined white pages of a hardbound notebook. The lines are laid down indelibly; I can cross them out but I can't select-and-cut to make them vanish, or scoop them up and replant them three paragraphs later, and these restraints help me produce: without them, I'm just floundering. But of course transferring this to a blog post involves typing and transcribing, which besides being extra work always invites the revisionary demon, the "inner editor," who yes does valuable service but needs to learn how to be a little less pushy. The point here is that my posts will be fewer, not because I'm writing less but because I'm writing more. What I post will likely be shorter and just an indication of what I am thinking about off-screen. Questions are still welcome, more than welcome, because I think best of all when I'm actually engaging with a live person whose thoughts I can't anticipate because, well, they aren't mine.

Hellenism and Hebraism

2011-08-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

A poem by Cavafy:

The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

I most recently encountered this poem by way of the explanation offered by The Poseidonian for the name of his blog. He's lamenting the likelihood that America has reached its apogee and is now settling into its long decline, an estimate I think pretty likely to be right.

Now compare this to the story, frequently re-told, concerning the early generations of Hasidim:

When the Ba'al Shem Tov had to accomplish a difficult task, he retired to a certain spot in the forest. By mystical means he would light a fire, and he meditated in prayer; and what he set out to perform was done.
After a generation, his disciple the Maggid of Mezeritz too faced a challenge. He went to the same place in the woods, and would say: "We can no longer light the fire, but we can still say the prayers," and what he wanted done became real.
Again, a generation later, Rabbi Moishe of Sassov had to perform a task. And he too went to the forest saying: "We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the prayer's secret meditations; but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs, and that must be sufficient." And so it was.
But when another generation had passed, and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his chair in his room and said: "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place. All we can do is to tell the story of how it was done." And the story that he told had the same effect as the deeds of the other three.

This story is all too often mis-told as a fuzzy vignette intended to make us feel good about recounting myths, a comfort to us in the midst of resignation. I do not think this quite captures the meaning. Between these two parables there is an important and subtle difference in emphasis, and it has everything to do with what is at stake in the one and in the other.

Hitting the ceiling fan. Plus, no posts in August.

2011-07-31T19:06:00.000-07:00

Whether or no the United States Congress manages to send a bill raising the debt ceiling to the President's desk by August 2, one may yet be tempted to speculate that the dumb-show presages the overt decline of the American empire. If it makes a whit of difference at all, that is. (I am about two-thirds with The Last Psychiatrist on this one.) The center of world politics may have shifted definitively to parts of the globe formerly known as the Third World: the movements for democratization in the near and middle east, the resistances to globalization in the developing world, and the shifting fortunes, ambitions, and concerns of Marx's last ~~stand~~ compromise (China), not to mention the complete stagnation not only of economy but of the currents of social mobility within the United States, all suggest that the animating motives of world history (if there is such a Geist), or at least the interests of the Illuminati puppeteers, have relocated to other climes. Yes, futurology is a fool's pastime, especially when based on today's headlines; but it's hard for me to shake the suspicion that the dialectic has either caught up or gotten bored with us. Will the ceiling fan be hit with a bang or a whimper?

In other news, I will probably post nothing in August. If there are any comments, I'll respond, and I'm working on some posts for the future, but I am taking the month to work on my relationship with my preferred mode of thinking/writing: pen on paper.

The order of the day

2011-07-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

In my old hometown, Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in prison. DeChristopher is an environmental activist who, in the twilight of the last Bush administration, grew increasingly alarmed at the government's readiness to sell off public land to the diggers of fossil fuels. One day DeChristopher stepped into a Bureau of Land Management auction, signed himself up as a bidder, and kept on raising his number.

He cost oil and gas corporations hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. DeChristopher's bids raised the average price of land from about $12 and acre to about $125. While he had no money to pay for the bids he made, and initially intended only to embarrass and confound the government and the corporations (who were, he contended, acting in defiance of the law), he and sponsors later raised money for the down payment on his bids and made the offer--which was duly refused by the BLM.

The trial has been cause célèbre for all the right reasons. The auction at which DeChristopher made his fake bids was later declared illegal by a federal judge, partially vindicating DeChristopher's argument that he acted to prevent an illegal transfer of public lands into corporate hands. The informed jury movement got involved (absolutely rightly, by the way) to the great consternation of prosecutors. The courthouse has been the scene of ongoing demonstrations and on the day of DeChristopher's sentencing, over twenty other activists were arrested for civil disobedience.

Two years in prison may seem light or draconian, depending on your expectations. He could have faced up to ten years. On the other hand, it was certainly in the judge's power to assign only community service. To put it in perspective, Will Potter at Green is the New Red puts it like this:

DeChristopher’s two-year sentence is comparable to what members of underground groups have received for property destruction. The court has sent the message that public, aboveground activists, who use non-violent civil disobedience, will be treated on par with underground activists who use economic sabotage.

There is no question that this is what motivated the sentence. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson generously conceded that "I'm not saying there isn't a place for civil disobedience. But it can't be the order of the day." The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Huber, had been adamant: "If a sentence was perceived as too light or inconsequential, it could be seen as a reasonable price to pay to grab the limelight or gain fame." In light of this it is clear that there was concern that civil disobedience not become the order of the day.

You may think DeChristopher misguided, dangerous, devoted to a lost cause, or the great green hope. Of this thing I am sure: he is a brave man and a principled one. As a philosopher, I will add this: I suspect that being backed into a corner, if it doesn't crush you, if you can rise above fight-or-flight, makes you free. It's not a state you can get to on purpose, but this is the secret of all the imponderable and existentially soul-pinning paradoxes from Socrates to Dōgen to Kierkegaard to Gurdieff, and sometimes it wakes you up in a way that makes all the difference in the world, even if it seems to leave things much as they were. I don't know whether Tim DeChristopher considers himself a philosopher or not, but clearly he has thought through where he stands and why. Nor is he cowed by the judicial system's ability to pass sentence. That's not the corner he's in. He believes we are all in a corner already, and most of us are too scared or too alienated to see it. He is right that his example can be enough to snap some people out of their own fear--"if he can do that, I can do something too"--and by the same token the government is right, by its lights, to want raise the cost of such freedom.

DeChristopher's courtroom statement to Judge Benson before sentencing was the only time he was able to make a declaration of his motivations and political positions during the trial (the prosecution had argued that he ought not be allowed to distract the court with these irrelevancies, though it was eager to use his public statements later to argue for a harsh sentence). While not quite the Letter from Birmingham Jail, it is still a noble contribution to the documents in great tradition of resistance to authority; moving, articulate, unapologetic, and damning:

[The prosecution] would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything.... they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between....
[The prosecution] also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law.... The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law....
I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me....I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them....You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away.

Go read it all.

Flavorful mechanics

2011-07-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.

--Robert Louis Stevenson, "On some technical elements of style in literature".

Some would contend that Stevenson's observations pertain not just to art, but to any object of wonder or delight or even diversion. I have a friend who, like me, has a tendency towards animism. He remembers being fascinated by a little plastic Yoda toy when he was young. One day it forcibly struck home to him that the thing was not alive, was not a little green Jedi master, but was a lump of plastic with paint. "I would swear," he told me, "that after I realized this, its eyes looked dead."

Compare the starker rhetoric of Thomas Ligotti:

Life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would have us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. (Conspiracy Against the Human Race, p. 29)

Or again, Ligotti glossing the work of Carlo Michelstaedter:

To Michelstaedter, nothing in this world can be anything but a puppet. And a puppet is only a plaything, a thing of parts brought together as a simulacrum of real presence. It is nothing in itself. It is not whole and individual but exists only relative to other playthings, some of them human playthings that support one another’s illusion of being real. However, by suppressing thoughts of suffering and death they give themselves away as beings of paradox – prevaricators who must hide from themselves the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives if they are to go on living. (ibid., p. 32-33)

The "silent, staring void," a process without mind, behind mind, an emptiness not rich with potentia like the radiant spaciousness of the Buddhist sunyata but blank, accidental, and joyless, an endless spinning of gears and pulleys--this is, we are assured, what the willing dupes called average human beings must conceal from themselves, in order to enjoy this confidence trick called life. But one may espouse a nihilism far less patently abject than this, and still insist, or indeed assume, that life reduces to a play of interacting mechanical processes. I want to investigate (and, implicitly, challenge) this assumption here with reference to games, and I'm going to start with a couple of examples.

Mille Bornes is a game in which players pretend to be driving a 1,000-mile (hence the name) race. It's played with cards marked either with numbers of miles (25, 50, 75, 100, 200), with certain hazards or frustrations one might encounter in a road race (stop signs and speed limits, flat tires, accidents, running out of gas), or with remedies to said obstacles (green lights, spare tires, filling up, repairs). There are special cards which grant immunity to a given obstacle: Right-of-way, Puncture-Proof, Driving Ace, and Spare Tank. One plays miles-cards (or remedies) on oneself, trying to attain (but not exceed) 1,000; one plays obstacle cards on one's opponent.

The cards are adorned with signs that are suggestive of their function: various animals with different cliche speeds (from snail to swallow), traffic signs, and so forth. In playing Mille Bornes, at least with 10-to-12-year-olds (my own significant sample), one does sometimes feel a certain frustration or excitement, similar to being stuck in traffic or zooming ahead with a "so-long-suckahs!" laugh, and one does sometimes provide oneself a little narrative: "Damn! Another flat tire!?" All of this suggested merely by the pictures and the theme of the game, of course; for strictly speaking, there is nothing at all about the structure of the game that has anything to do with a road-race.

Mechanically, Mille Bornes is a play of variables. Numbers and functions and rules interact and are operated by players. Any connotation of miles, roads, speed or slowness, is provided by the players themselves spurred on by the theme of the game. Similarly, a game of Clue unfolds by way of an algorithm of process-of-elimination and a degree of random-number generation (two dice being rolled most turns); but these could operate without any props like rope and revolver or settings like ballrooms and libraries, all of which are, strictly speaking, extraneous.

The murder-theme of Clue, or the race-theme of Mille Bornes, are what one calls the flavor of the game. The rules, mathematics, and so on constitute the game's mechanics. The mechanics of a well-structured game are balanced and give no obvious advantage to any one player. They keep a game both challenging and rewarding. A game's flavor lends a kind of thematic or narrative coherence to it.

My thoughts about the relation between mechanics and flavor were originally occasioned by watching many, many rounds of Magic: the Gathering (MTG, or just Magic, for short), a game which showcases both of these aspects in a small package. A round of Magic is an imaginary duel between mages who cast spells, summon creatures, and employ fantastic objects to defeat their opponents; players (the "mages" in question) make these moves by playing various cards in their deck (the spells, creatures, and so on). Every such move requires tapping a source of magical power called, in the game, "mana." In extremely oversimplified terms, one may say that the more potent the move, the greater the mana cost. Mana comes in one of five colors, and each color has tendencies to align with or oppose other colors. Every Magic card shows, in abbreviated form, the costs and benefits associated with it; the rules show what sorts of targets it can be directed against, what circumstances prevent it being deployed, and so on. Additionally, each card displays artwork that shows the object, creature, or spell it stands for. Many feature in addition a short passage of "flavor text": a sentence or two meant to summon up an atmosphere suggestive of the role of the card's subject in an imaginary narrative.

"Wrath is no vice when inflicted upon the deserving."

"Its diet consists of fruits, plants, small woodland animals, large woodland animals, woodlands, fruit groves, fruit farmers, and small cities."

"He ensures not only whether but also when and where the lightning strikes twice."

"The land promises nothing and keeps its promise."

And so on.

This little snippets of flavor text are both completely superfluous, and absolutely essential to the game in some way. My informal research among enthusiasts of MTG indicates that few if any give themselves a narrative of events as they play, along the lines of "Now I'll cast this spell... Oh no! She's summoned an army of undead soldiers! They destroyed my giant spider!" They are thinking, rather, in terms of scores and rules: "Shoot, I'm down to 7 life." But of course the very term life in this context is a bit of flavor text. Indeed, it's admitted, the game would be no fun at all without the flavor. And, of course; no fun, no game. I even know players who acknowledge that their best decks--the ones that give them the best odds of winning--are not the decks they prefer to play with; they'd rather play with a deck that has a coherent flavorful theme--say, all one color of mana, or lots of flying creatures, or an special types of spells. The flavor is not just why to play, it is in some measure constitutive of the game itself. One could certainly run a fairly simple algorithm with functions and quantities that would be completely isomorphic with a round of MTG, but it would not be playing a game.

Now I am aware that some games are far more "mechanical," in the sense I am using the word, than others. One could argue that a game like Go, or MasterMind, is almost purely a matter of mechanics. But even this would not be completely true, because there is an element of flavor in the tension of a contest between two players, in the challenge of trying to beat one's own record, in the very experience of playing. And indeed, I suspect that in experience itself we find the best analogue to flavor. It is very telling that the word "flavor" itself refers to a subjective experience while the word "mechanics" pertains to the objective aspects of a game. (I would suggest that the mechanical is the meta-level, but in fact this does not get it quite right, for it is of the essence of the meta- that it is about its object, whereas the mechanical in a certain sense has no object at all--it could all happen automatically, without any intentionality whatsoever. It is the flavorful that has an object and in that sense is closer to the meta-level. This is a significant detail but I won't explore it here.)

One may note that my argument here bears a certain resemblance to Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment: imagine yourself in a room with detailed instructions in English for deciding what Chinese script to put in an out-box depending upon what Chinese comes into the in-box. Searle's argument is that one could become so good at following the instructions that from the outsider's perspective, nothing could distinguish you from a native Chinese speaker, even though one may understand not a word. Searle takes this to be a refutation to the claims of adherents of Strong AI; in essence, passing the Turing Test is not a criteria for understanding, for despite my having outputs and inputs that are exactly those of a speaker of Chinese, the characters do not mean anything to me.

What I am calling, in game-terms, "flavor," is here analogous to Searle's "understanding." One of Searle's points is that understanding can be separated from the rules that generate apparent competence: or, more succinctly, semantics does not reduce to syntax. The Chinese room argument does not directly address the question of the origin of semantics, which is a separate issue; it simply underscores the distinction.

One might also compare certain arguments of David Deutsch regarding virtual reality. Deutsch contends that Turing's arguments about universal machines can be extended to the question of simulated realities. The details of Deutsch's argument are beyond the scope of this post, but one theme of his account is that while a virtual simulation can generate any number of physically impossible scenarios, these impossibilities are by definition not actually, physically existing; what exists are physically possible states of affairs, which we then interpret as different (and sometimes impossible) states of affairs.

This, in turn, is just what stage magic (not, of course, to be confused with MTG) is: a set of procedures that results in an simulation of an impossible situation. The object of the magic, however, is not the impossible situation; and it is certainly not the rendering of the impossible event into the possible explanation. Or so argues one of the great theorists of modern stage magic, Eugene Burger, when he writes:

The magical experience is not the experience of a puzzle.... [it] is...in part, the experience of mystery. Mystery operates in magic in two ways. There is, first, experiencing the mystery that [for example,] a human body is here, alive and before my eyes, floating in space. The mere "thatness" of the magical effect--that it is happening at all--is the first level at which mystery operates or is present in magic.
There is however another way...This appears when we confront mystery as something to solve or figure out--as for example in a mystery novel or film where we attempt to outguess the detective and solve the mystery for ourselves. To do this we must transform the mystery into a puzzle to be solved. And to do that is to destroy the mystery! For once the mystery is solved, the mystery is no more.
The magical experience prompts us to ask whether all mysteries are really puzzles waiting to be solved. Is there, in other words, an irreducible presence of mystery in the world that can't be turned into puzzles and, therefore, remains Mystery forever and ever? The magical worldview suggests that there is....
Conjuring, at its best, functions to awaken us to another realm of experience: the magical dimension that points us towards the mystery that lies behind and beyond all experience. (Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning, pp 13, 22-24)

This is coming from a respected and acclaimed conjurer, remember, who knows very well that any number of astounding effects can be produced by strings and pulleys. What is at stake here is not the impossibility per se, but the wonder at the impossibility. It is precisely the flavor of "the magical experience," which Burger insists cannot be boiled down to the mechanics of the trick, even though these mechanics are indispensable for occasioning it.

The difference between the experience of flavor (or vice-versa) and the infrastructure of such mechanics can lend plausibility to two different conclusions: either that everything is reducible to mechanics, and there is, really, no flavor at all ("flavor" is just a [mechanical] label used by one part of the mechanics for another part); or that there is some aspect of things that is irreducible to mechanics, precisely that aspect which is the recognition of the difference between mechanics and flavor--not the difference between explanans and explanandum, but between both of these on the one hand, and understanding of the relationship, on the other.

When my friend realized Yoda was just plastic and paint--where did the "Yoda"-ness go? Where, indeed, had it come from? To say it came from my friend is to beg the question. Where did he get it?

One last, Platonist, speculation: my suspicion is that this issue of mechanics and flavor is isomorphic with the question of the relation between Being and the Good.

incommunicado

2011-07-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Off to the wilderness for a bit, so no posts (not that I am all that regular in this regard anyway); and my responses to comments will have to wait a few days. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just away from electricity and drinking up some cool, green, slow sanity.

McLuhan centennial

2011-07-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

Marshall McLuhan would have been 100 today. I am a little baffled over Google's failure to mark the occasion with a special graphic. I call it a case of the anxiety of influence.

But there are plenty of notices online. The official McLuhan site has a huge list on its main page of events happening (both online and out on the surface of the Earth) during the whole year. Graham Harman has a short post here, and Douglas Coupland, whose brief study of McLuhan You know nothing of my work (titled for a line from McLuhan's cameo in Annie Hall), has an article in the Guardian. (A couple of reviews of Coupland's book here and here.)

I won't try to sum up McLuhan or go on about how he saw what was coming. Anyone who reads him can tell he knew which way the wind was blowing. His reputation suffered--like Derrida's later--from people adopting his style and nomenclature, without really bothering to read him. To some degree it's still the case.

One thing that is striking about McLuhan is how much a child of Gutenberg he was. His experiments in form were very much grounded in what was possible on the printed page. He was a Joyce critic, and in some ways his conversion to Roman Catholicism mirrored Joyce's exodus away from it. Eric McLuhan has edited a collection of his father's writings on religion and they are indispensable for understanding his work.

What people often still (and, in my opinion, scandalously) don't seem to get about McLuhan that for all his attention to the way innovations in media were re-shaping human experience he wasn't such a fan of the trends he described. He is frequently writing not straight-ahead description but satire, and he was less than sanguine about what he was satirizing. It may be that people's incomprehension of this point is a function of the very thing McLuhan was addressing. Media does not just impact what we perceive, but what we can perceive.

For all that, McLuhan is not a "technological determinist," as some stupid reductions would have it, but rather, as my friend Alf Seegert once put it, a technological co-evolutionist. We are able to make choices about media, but media will also shape the very manner of our choosing.

McLuhan remarked in a 1966 interview:

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it, The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. (McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and interviews p 102)

McLuhan believed it was important to be clear-sighted about how those effects happened. Others came along afterward and tried to celebrate what he limited himself to depicting (albeit sometimes with a wicked gleam in his eye). Some of their excesses may have magnified some of McLuhan's own defects, not leat that wicked gleam. I am sure I am not the first to point out the irony that McLuhan's message was swamped by his medium. We are only barely beginning to catch on to what he was saying. And why.

Ismpressionistic self-portrait

2011-07-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

There is a strong meta-philosophical flavor in many of my posts. This has its reasons--I am constantly asking myself what it is I am doing here (what is this thing called philosophy?)--but I decided to sketch an outline of those first-order positions I find most congenial, partly because people sometimes ask, so, dude, what is it you believe? and partly because it's good to touch base with one's commitments. I won't be arguing for any of these positions here, let alone spelling out the details; I won't even argue that they are all mutually consistent. It's more or less a list of -isms, and perhaps not all that enlightening, though I try to provide some glosses-- mostly these are the from-the-hip variety, so it's possible that in refining them I will have to seriously revise.

Philosophically:
in method, I am
eclectic (My working assumption is that the intuitions at the root of any position are valid even if the articulation is problematic);
traditionalist (I am always interested in what the precedents of a position are, and this interest goes deeper than the historical);
skeptical (I always think a good question is "how do you know?")
and
irenic (I am less interested in making anyone agree with me, than in how we can both get along).

In doctrine, I am an
ontological realist (the world exists whether or not I am there to look at it). This does not mean that mind is not part of this world, or that mind does not exist necessarily! Ontological realism in the sense I espouse it is consistent with certain kinds of idealism. It simply means that there are constraints upon what we can truly say.
Also as regards ontology, I am a
personalist (to be is to experience, and the conatus of experience is towards personhood);
and tend to be
relationalist (entities, and certainly persons, are, at least in time--in terms of their coming-to-be and passing-away--constituted by their relations).

I am also a moral realist (judgments about whether something is right or wrong have sense outside of who is making the claim). When one says that X is good, one is making a stronger claim than that one approves of X or that X is "good for me."

On the question of science and religion, I am an accomodationist (there is no necessary conflict between scientific and religious stances). I take this so for granted that I do not really consider it a deep philosophical issue--it's almost a more matter of current affairs--but it's worth mentioning.

In political economy:
In my aims I am anarchist (the more distant the relationship, the more intolerable coercion--because the less resistible--is within it);
in my loyalties, conservative (existing goods tend to trump hypothetical alternative goods);
in my reactions, cynical (the question cui bono? always comes to mind);
in practice, localist (the closer the relationship, the less reason within it for coercion).
(This last especially is very from-the-hip.)

I am more swayed by Marx than almost any other thinker politically: the relevant sociological category is always class.

In art: I am both a dada classicist and a romantic modernist. (Huh?) I believe with Warhol that art is what you can get away with; I maintain, with Tarkovsky, Goethe, Bach, Leonardo, and Confucius, that some things are waaay more worth getting away with than others.

In theology: I am a rational fideist (the structure of our experience is aporetic and does require a (Jacobian, Kierkegaardian) leap; but the disposition for this leap can be rationally cultivated and its consequences rationally discussed);
and at the end of the day an apophaticist (God is wholly beyond the pertinence of any created concept).

The more I reflect the more convinced I am that the best preparation for philosophy is listening to and playing music--as many kinds of music as possible.

a short poem

2011-07-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Arc Minora

As certain as things get, say who are wise.
Note: both sides of the mouth are talking here,
And mumbling—can you make it out at all?
Greek—none. Less Hebrew. Latin pretty small.
Recall the temptress, though, soft at your ear,
Assuring that what counts is scale, not size.
My sun unwinds, etching the western sea
Smaragdine almost. Sort of. Not at all.
Mnemonic thread my mistress gave to me,
A snaky toy to tantalize a cat
Receding just beyond where her paw’s at.
Go, serpent. O, we absolve boas for free,
And trace the tangle back into a ball.
No doubt the lamb prefers the lion tamed;
A rhyme that scans—a Tao that can be named—

Eagle and seagull

2011-07-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

I can't help that this really did happen on the fourth of July. It was six years ago, and every day I encountered headlines about the Iraq War, but during it this encounter, I thought nothing at all about national symbolism until after the fact. Since then I have thought many things--Garuda and the snakes, the founding of Tenochtitlan, the Albanian Eagle--but at the time I only watched and felt.

I was waiting for my bus, but well before I got to the stop I heard the crying of a seagull. We had crows in my neighborhood but seagulls were not so frequent this far from the water; and it was a very insistent and repetitive cry. I looked up into the almost-cloudless sky and saw two birds: one small white seagull, and one enormous and unmistakable eagle. The wings were huge and black and straight, as if it were cut from paper. There were two small spots of of white: head and tail, I guessed, though it was very far away--yet despite the height, it was clearly not just huge, but in fact much bigger than me. I saw it flap its wings maybe twice or three times the whole time I watched. It was circling and rising in the updraft, and the seagull was diving at it, over and over. I have seen such a thing once before--I watched it from the window of the bus, and something seemed almost unbearably sad about it; but when I tried to put my finger on what, all I came up with were obviously loaded mistakes. It wasn't the fact that everyone else on the bus seemed oblivious to this amazing spectacle; it wasn't the apparent "nobility" of the great bird and the annoying gadfly-quality of the smaller; I couldn't quite tell what it was. Now, here it was again, but something was new: this time I could hear the seagull crying. I stood there for between five and ten minutes craning my neck into the sky watching. Every once in a while I had to check to see if my bus was coming; or the bright sun would blind me, and I'd lose the birds in the blue; but the sound of the seagull would draw my eye; remarkable that it could be that precise from such a distance. Rather early on, a plane flew by underneath the two birds; even then, the sound of the jet did not drown out the seagull's cry; and after that, they kept going, higher and higher. It was astonishing how high they climbed; how the eagle just rose and rose, swerving each time the seagull came in; how the seagull did not give up. So I watched and watched, bewitched; if I looked away for a moment to rest my eyes or ease my craning neck, I had to search to re-find the birds, smaller and smaller in all that swimming blue, but whenever I did, guided by the gull's voice, I was struck once again by how I could see, even from that distance, the sharp outline of pinions on the eagle's wings. A man walked by seeming not to notice; someone rode past on a bicycle. Something of my old annoyance with the apparent obliviousness of bystanders twitched inside me, but I dismissed it--too easy, probably wrong, and anyway not at all what I was interested in just then. Then a woman walked by who either had heard the bird or had seen me staring thunderstruck into the air and followed my gaze. As she passed I looked at her. "It's sad beyond words," she said. "Yes," I said, somehow both thrilled and unsurprised that someone else should perceive the same obvious emotional quality. "That eagle isn't going to let go," she said. And walked on. It dawned on me for the first time what that other little patch of white must have been. The whole significance of the scene inverted, a figure-ground reversal. I looked back up into the sky. My words with the woman had taken maybe 10 seconds. The air was silent. The eagle was gone, the seagull was gone. Nothing. They'd disappeared. Whatever final moment there'd been to see, I'd missed while getting my realization--if that was what it was. I scanned the empty air over and over.

Beyond alienation: in search of a theory

2011-06-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Have been giving some considerable thought to politics of late and wanted to post a few links to some recent discussion that, from various angles, have been informing my reflections. I have done this briefly before, but this is going to be a much longer post, with a good deal of quotation and comment.

To begin with a confession: The majority of my intellectual life was apolitical, a stance whose insufficiency I began to consciously register half a decade ago. Since then I have struggled to articulate a workable ground for engagement while still doing honor to the intuitions which occasioned my disaffection. This is not easy. This is in part because, in a sense which I shall attempt to indicate at the end of this post, apoliticism or political quietism is of a piece with philosophy in a perfectly legitimate sense. However, insofar as one is a citizen and not merely a philosopher, apoliticism is not apatheia but alienation. This is, following Marx, where I start.

This post from John Emerson on Trollblog does a good job of explaining my own cynicism on the bad days:

while the exotic conspiracy theories are usually crap, in a democratic society anyone who takes what their political leaders say at face value is a chump and a likely victim. Everyone in the biz knows this. Especially, above all, more than anyone else, the people who ridicule conspiracy theorists know this, because they’re almost always insiders and almost always have a stake in the insider game.
The anti-conspiracy theory message is “Sit down and shut up. You don’t understand, you’ll never understand, trust us!”

This sums up the paralyzing frustration one feels as an "outsider" to political process; but the hazard of conspiracy theory is that it seems to posit that there is no inside; that no matter how far in you've got, there's always another level, the above-33°-Freemasons, the Über-Bilderbergers, the fifth-dimensional fnords or lloigor-lizards on the throne of England, of whom one hears frightened whispers. Like Kafka's land-surveyor, we never get inside the Castle.

This is ultimately a self-defeating position, of course, and not because it leads to woo-woo spooky entities, but because it renders one completely disempowered and as such is not politics at all, but abdication. It is also, as I remark in my review of Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, finally self-contradictory, in a way I'll come back to below. This does not address any particular conspiracy-claims, which I believe are often dismissed in just such a tone as Emerson imitates; but it points to something else, namely the widespread alienation of which conspiracy theory is an index, albeit not its only (or most important) manifestation.

This alienation leads some to throw their hands up and say, "what's the use?" This kind of apoliticism is easy to mock, but such mockery is more cruel than anything else: since when is mockery the right response to despair? However, what's-the-use abdication is only the most obvious form of this alienation, which has more subtle and self-deceiving forms. Others adopt a curious sort of split personality in which they think they are "doing their bit" when they vote, but nonetheless regard this vote as empowering professionals or technocrats to do the real work. Sometimes this takes the form of almost no further engagement with politics; sometimes it takes the form of consulting the "voters' guide" in their publication of choice. In either case it can still be an abdication which cloaks itself in the Citizen's New Clothes, usually a button or a sticker that reads "I voted!" with a smiley face. What this means is that you are now certified to be able to complain when things don't go your way.

The Poseidonian has a well-wrought post up promulgating a very different kind of engagement, a real engagement which I respect highly:

Kazantzakis...conveyed this notion to me: the noble man takes responsibility for everything, not just what he can actually control. Which led me to think that the outsider stance was somehow too easy, not strenuous enough. ...I must, as a part of my conception of my own character, regard myself as responsible for my government. ...I strive within the limits of my ability to pretend that what the nation will do is entirely up to me, and that I will have to take the blame if I make a bad decision. I try to figure out what the best decision from the perspective of governance would be. And then once I think I have that, I tell people what I think. Because this regulative fiction governs my sense of civic virtue, people often find me overly accommodating of the status quo. But I in turn view many people as not really serious. When someone says something over the top or utterly defeated or cynical, however appropriate that may really be to their actual conditions of powerlessness, I ask myself, what would I think if, say, the president thought and acted exactly that way while in office? I’d think they were a lousy president, worse than lousy. Hugely irresponsible.

This is accompanied by a realistic depiction of the motives of most politicians:

I see no reason to think that the people in the positions of greatest power aren’t basically the same as the [local politicians] I knew first hand. They were fundamentally decent people with a tinge of ambition, and while the narcissistic side came out the most during campaigns, the rest of the time was just problem solving in the context of an inherited situation. True horrific evil, I thus suspect, is more often than not Arendt-banal, not seeing the forest for the trees. (There are exceptions.)

This feels very realpolitik, if I may use the word in a non-pejorative sense: a refusal to set politics apart as a special realm of extraordinary vice; an recognition that we operate in concrete situations fraught with a complexity that rules out in advance any ideal solution; and an insistence that this does not absolve us of nevertheless having to act.

This strikes me as a very commonsense view, and I want to give some account of why I drifted rather far from it before (partially) returning to it by hard effort. To do this I need to sketch the origins of my own disaffection insofar as I can reconstruct them.

My earliest political memory is sitting in the back seat of the car while the Watergate hearings were reported on the radio, and registering how shocked my parents were. I had no idea at the time what a Republican or a Democrat was, but I knew my parents were appalled at some great misdeed. later, as I came to poitical consciousness (under Iran-Contra), I was retroactively shocked, in turn, that my parents never seemed to connect the obvious corruption they were commenting upon every night around the dinner table with their own political commitments.

Thus my first independent political positions were, alas, predictably characterized by the generation gap. Certainly I felt my convictions keenly, but in my heart I knew that I was also reacting to the kneejerk republicanism of my family. This was not what eventually soured me on it, though. Committed and eloquent as many of my co-activists were (this was in the anti-apartheid divestment movement on US university campuses and, closer to my heart, the anti-nuclear arms movement), the indignation that seemed to fuel them always seemed (to me) tinged with a kind of surprise--as if they just could not believe that apartheid, or nuclear weapons testing, or etc, continued unabated despite the (to them) obvious moral case. The more I tried to engage with this, the more silly I felt. Yes, of course there was a moral case to be made, but if the disconnect was so entrenched, then outrageous it might be, but it was, alas, too common to be scandalizing.

My disillusionment was not primarily about the ineffectuality of activism, but about the unrealistic premises upon which it was based. However, as soon as I turned to available discussions seeking (apparently) to formulate more reliable or coherent accounts, I noticed something that almost always strikes observers of political discussion on the left: how entrenched it was in theoretical disputes. At the time, this was almost impossible to view as anything but an un-ironic version of what Monty Python spoofed so effectively in The Life of Brian. Endless arguments about fine points of exegesis of Marx (how Hegelian was he, really? Were you, perhaps, relying too much upon his early work?); on contrasts between versions of socialism, communism, and anarchism, when none of these was within light-years of being practically implemented; on whether race, or sex, or class, constituted the basic faultline (on this question, I did reach a conclusion--it's about class, stupid--on which I have never seen a reason to change my mind); on whether to take positions about various issues of the day or remain single-focus; all this tugged the left in a hundred directions and seemed to completely drain its energy.

So there was a dilemma: on the one hand, inadequate and almost anti-intellectual rage without articulation; on the other, infighting and distinctions that were, if not quite pointless, endlessly distracting.

Meanwhile, the best the Democratic party could offer was Clinton, a man whose much-despised "slickness" was merely the replay of Reagan's "Teflon-coating." Unable to stomach the right, unable to respect the left, unable to synthesize theory and praxis, I slipped into what Adorno predicted: the privilege of praxis (I had also been reading Wittgenstein, and there is a quietist streak in Wittgenstein which had its effect here too.) I served meals with Food Not Bombs, and stopped voting for major parties.

Pete Wolfendale's extremely articulate and rich reflections on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism begin with an account of disillusionment or frustration similar to my own anecdote of failed activism; but honesty compels me to add that Wolfendale seems to have got reflective about it a lot quicker than I did:

I remember attending the big anti-war march just before the beginning of the Iraq war in London, the biggest peace protest in history at the time (I think), and seeing how easily it was assimilated and dissipated by the media-democratic complex. It struck me that a smaller number of people (with a smaller amount of public support behind them) brought down the Vietnam war, and yet this did precisely nothing. I was 17 at the time, and hoping to go into politics. That event disrupted my perspective and made me want to understand why it did nothing, and how it would be possible to do something.

Whereas, however, Wolfendale asked this second question, I myself retreated into a kind of disaffectedness. In retrospect I suspect it was a defensive position to shield myself from feeling foolish; a kind of psychic distancing that served to let me feel smarter than the dupes. I'm not proud of this, but it took me a long while to see that my jaded cynicism was a cover for (and a way of not acknowledging) my utter alienation and helplessness. This brings me back to my response to (which is not really a rejoinder, but a riff on) Emerson's post, for despite his legitimate point about the grain-of-truth in conspiracy theory, such theory itself is self-defeating. Pushed to its conclusion, such theorizing either dictates that there is no way to trust the evidence at all, including the evidence that leads to positing the conspiracy; or else it backs you into a corner where you can only cower. Both of these conclusions are unacceptable, the former theoretically and the latter practically. Fortunately, neither of them really bears scrutiny (a point which is independent of the plausibility of any given conspiracy theory, note); what it ultimately means is, as I wrote in the aforementioned review of Shea and Wilson, that "that fear can contain the seeds of its own dissolution." This review is from 2006, the same year I saw Who Killed the Electric Car?, a film that I had thought would provide some cynical laughs and instead left me dumbfounded at my own impotent rage. I finally faced my alienation and steeled myself to transmute merely being Mad as Hell into being Not Going to Take It Anymore. But this is easier said than done, for just acknowledging disaffection does not by itself alter the fact of disaffection, and it is not obvious what to do next in an effort to live responsibly.

What recourse? To just admit that my abstaining from voting was a symptom of alienation does nothing to address the alienation itself, which is grounded in very real causes. One wants to take responsibility, not lie to oneself in a whole different way. Pretending we are not facing some version of Long Emergency is not an option. The old roll-up-your-sleeves-and-do-something approach seems pitiable in the face of the cliff we are careening towards; it invites the response, "and what army?". Moreover, as Ross Wolfe points out with a little help from Adorno,

Those who participate in events such as the recent G-20 protests often leave with the sense of smug self-satisfaction that comes from knowing that they have “done their part” in order to somehow “make a difference” in the world.

The question then is how to realistically apply myself without merely denying how disempowered I feel. I have no appetite for pretending I am doing something important or worthwhile when it is just whistling past the graveyard.

My first step was to divest myself of the stupid caricature I had wrought of politicians. This effort bears resemblance to the thought-experiment I quoted above from the Poseidonian's post. I had to ask myself-- look, suppose I was possessed by some strong vision of how I believed things ought to be, and by a vision of a possible way to get there, and by enough charisma to give me a chance. Yes, I would try to get ahead, and yes I would likely face inevitable compromises along the way, but I would not have started out just fueled by power-lust. Perhaps, in the end, I would succumb to Arendtian banality, but--must I? The question is, is the current system such that this always happens, so that the closer you get to the top, there is no one who has not had to step over so many bodies that they are effectively ruined?

Some days my cynicism still wins and I sigh, "Stupid question." More often nowadays I can believe there are still good guys left--a development which I freely confess was catalyzed by watching The West Wing, and flowered in conjunction with reading the Jefferson-Adams correspondence.

This also rekindled my faith in constitutional process; I think there is a genius in the idea of harnessing disagreement to propel things forward rather than stall them. Moreover, because I grew up among conservatives, I also retained an awareness of their basic good instincts, and I remain myself a small-c conservative if by this we mean that I always ask what the cost of something is, in terms of giving up some good-- usually a cultural good. Most of my political economic instincts are localist (though I am not convinced that this is a workable model for global development); this stems from my reading of a great deal of Wendell Berry, as well as the transformative experience my encounter with Buber's I and Thou, which has made forever unignorable the significance of the irreducibly particular. Buber may also have contributed to my now-instinctive faith in the ability of people to work things out if they can stay honest and in-the-moment. This leads to some touchy-feely sounding methods but in practice it is capable of getting work done, albeit slowly. In my heart of hearts I am an anarchist, watching alertly for the American Spring; but practically speaking I am a classical liberal.

All of this may, however, sound more hopeful than it really is. While I can (sometimes) believe that there are human beings in high places who have not surrendered their moral compass as the price of admission, and while I can stipulate that a decision-maker must after all decide and not give in to mere cynicism, I am not at all persuaded that the class war in which such decision-makers are (wittingly or not) enrolled gives them the leeway they need to gain anything but Pyrrhic victories; and I do not see that the official lines of this struggle have much to do with its substantive issues (what Mao called its primary contradictions).

As if in response, a post by Stan Goff of Feral Scholar argues for abstaining from the vote in the coming US presidential election. What I appreciate about this post is the way it manages to articulate a case for a kind of politically activist disaffection. The stance urged by Goff seems to be (if I paraphrase him aright) that disaffection can find its voice by refusing to participate in a bankrupt system-- that one can be actively, not merely passively, nonparticipatory. There's something paradoxical about this suggestion but I like the spirit of it. One thing I like is that Goff does not pretend there are no differences between the two ruling parties:

Given the powerful fears generated around these issues [Goff's examples are abortion, race questions, and social security], it is more difficult to make the case for simply not voting, when there are clear differences between the parties at least on some issues. It is dishonest to make the claim that there are no differences between the parties; and if this is the sole reason for discouraging voting, it can easily be invalidated.
That is not my argument for not voting. I don’t believe, however, that fear ought to be a reason for voting either.
One of my arguments for not voting is that participation itself in the process legitimates something that is not legitimate.
There is also an argument against the legitimacy argument that goes like this:
If voting makes any difference at all, then voting the lesser of two evils – while not a solution – does at least apply the brakes when the polity is headed in the wrong direction. Refusing to vote simply because it might legitimate the process is refusing to get one’s hands dirty and allowing the greater evil just so you can claim some moral high ground, while real people will be affected if the greater evil prevails in the election.
Again, this strikes me as a powerful argument, assuming one accepts a utilitarian moral standpoint – that is, that the ends justify the means.

This is refreshing, because the standard Naderite argument has lost a good deal of credibility after eight years of the junior Bush administration. Anyone who now insists that the Democratic and Republican party are indistinguishable on certain essentials must also be ready to countenance the response that if one is indifferent to the outcome of a contest between them on these grounds, one may have to put up with many, many real differences. Goff sees the logic at play, and bites the bullet:

The problem with the argument is that appeals to specific, short-term interests to continue to legitimize the process with our participation is never a one-time tactic. It is renewed indefinitely, as long as there is something that needs protection through rearguard voting. There will always be something that qualifies as an end that will continue to demand the same means. Meanwhile, many of those practices and policies that both parties agree on (Wall Street hegemony, foreign wars, subsidies for the rich, etc.) are perpetuated and legitimized along with those more narrow interests. ....There is simply no end to defensive voting; and what it has resulted in over time is a steady increase in power for the most powerful who control both parties. ...There is little doubt what Republicans will do in office when they control the executive and legislative branches. We have seen them in action. But what never gets mentioned in this equation is that we have seen exactly the same things happen, on exactly the same trajectories, when Democrats were in control, giving the lie to the idea that Democrats will defend anyone except Wall Street and the military-industrial complex....The only efficacious political group is the ruling class, no matter which party is in power. To believe otherwise is to ignore the empirical evidence of history. And voting for third-party candidates that don’t have a chance in hell of getting elected is just as silly an exercise of faith in the same system.
The problem is not electoral outcomes; it is elections. The things we call elections in the United States are not in the least democratic. They are a consumer choice between Coke or Pepsi. Why do we try to convince ourselves otherwise? Choose neither.

One difficulty is of course that not-voting is still (in a way) a vote, by which I don't mean the facile objection that "not to choose is to choose not to," as some would-be wit put it, but rather that for not-voting to have a strong effect, it must be many, many citizens not voting; generating this result effectively means a campaign, and this means (though I am now extrapolating from Goff's argument) money. A question that arises then is, if you're going to generate enough money to stage a campaign, why not have it be a campaign for someone? Well, perhaps because the amount of money (and red tape) is couple of orders of magnitude less for a don't-get-out-the-vote campaign than for a candidate who will after all wind up being slotted into a pre-assigned role in a rotten system. Or perhaps because of a suspicion that the amount of money in question cannot but ruin a human soul under capitalism. I'm not sure. But when I read Goff's proposal as of a piece with the obvious fictional parallel, Saramago's Seeing, I almost don't care. I am heartened just by the realization that one can perform active non-engagement (in the electoral system--at least on the national level (there are differences on the local level)) as a mode of political intervention. For too long my own disinclination to participate has only reinforced my self-perception as alienated and powerless. It is different to see abstaining as a political action.

The problem with being disaffected, aside from how it hurts the soul (and the mind too, as it provides an excuse for not educating oneself), is that it also winds up looking like support for the status quo. This is also the case for me even in my renewed efforts to divest myself of cynicism, for I don't fit very well on the political map. (Even as "disaffected"--the actual category in which I fall according to this poll by Pew research--I do not quite correspond to the stats outline that Pew provides, aside from not following NASCAR racing, which apparently 77% of these "official" dissaffecteds, like me, wisely don't.) In fact I don't see myself as a centrist, but as an a radical who's getting back into shape. My radicalism, however, is localist and particularist. I maintain (1) that currently existing goods should not always be sacrificed for envisioned goods, (2) that there are always practical considerations that force us to choose between priorities, and (3) that these practical considerations are not always what they seem, because they frequently serve entrenched interests and ought to be questioned. This does not make them unreal however, or mean we can have everything we want for free.

In this connection I find a lot to admire and agree with in a paper of G.A. Cohen's (pdf here) on "small-c" conservativism. Cohen argues that (and exemplifies how) it is perfectly possible to be conservative with regards to all sorts of concrete instantiations of value, and to harbor grave reservations concerning any number of proposed changes, while remaining a committed egalitarian and a radical as regards justice:

I have for decades harboured strongly conservative, that is, strongly small-c conservative, opinions, on many matters that are not matters of justice.... (I do not have conservative views about matters of justice because what conservatives like me want to conserve is that which has intrinsic value, and injustice lacks intrinsic value (and has, indeed, intrinsic disvalue)....I join the ranks of the complainers down the ages who say: “Things ain’t what they used to be.”
Do not suppose that, because that lamentation is perennial, it’s misplaced. Anti-conservatives say, “Oh, well, people have always said that things are getting worse”, and anti-conservatives mean thereby to convey that the conservative lamentation expresses an illusion. But it is entirely possible that at any rate certain kinds of things have always been worse than they were before.
....
The conservative impulse is to conserve what is valuable, that is, the particular things that are valuable. A salient, though not the only, alternative to conserving what is valuable is to maximize value, but clear-thinking conservatives are resolved to conserve the valuable at the expense of maximizing value: what we distinctively value are the particular bearers of value. A commitment to the conservation of what has value is at the centre of the specific conservative attitude that I am seeking to describe....
“Conservation of what has value” is the canonical phrase here, not “conservation of
value.”

Cohen's paper shares a certain esprit with a pair of posts by Amod Lele:

I’ve sometimes found it perplexing that in the contemporary right wing, social and cultural conservatism is often joined with economic libertarianism, extreme liberalism in the classical sense (and the inverse is true on the left). The justification for this connection is...[that] government social intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, the centrepiece of a left-wing political problem, makes people worse. It discourages people from working hard and being thrifty, makes them lazy, less virtuous. Under a left-wing social-democratic government, the good people who work hard and save to get rich are punished, while the lazy are rewarded. And where I depart most from such a viewpoint is not in the idea that the government should avoid the promotion of virtue, nor in the belief that social programs may discourage work or thrift. Rather, it is in the idea that hard work and thrift are themselves virtues.
...Hard work and thrift are often associated with real virtues, such as temperance and patient endurance. To put in long hours earning money, one must have the ability to put aside the desires of the moment and endure present hardship for future benefit; this ability is an excellent character trait. But it is not a virtue in itself; indeed, especially in the US, it often becomes a characteristic vice.
...
The literal meaning of the word “conservative” should be fairly obvious: it is about conserving, preserving, existing states of affairs. That’s what it would have meant in the time of Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism. The problem with the word is that in the ensuing two centuries, the world has changed drastically in ways that Burke would have wished it hadn’t. And that means that if one wants the kind of society that Burke tended to advocate – especially if one wishes “small government” – one will need to change society in quite drastic ways from what it has become. Which, in turn, means not being conservative – not in the literal sense of the world.
....So to be literally conservative today means something very different from what it meant in Burke’s time; it may well mean supporting the things that Burke opposed, because they are now part of our social fabric. But...what are the reasons behind a literal conservatism?
To my mind, the biggest and most important reason is a pragmatism based on historical experience: revolutions screw things up. ... Drastic attempts at social change cause great misery in the short term, and don’t necessarily make things much better in the long term.
...This isn’t to say literal conservatism is the answer to all our political problems. There are cases where it seems to work poorly indeed. Perhaps the strongest case against literal conservatism was made by Martin Luther King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.”...when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
Sometimes, it would seem, radical change does need to come quickly. But it seems to me that the situtations calling for such changes are relatively rare – and a conservative worthy of the name will not engage in them over a matter as relatively trifling as lower taxes.

The overlap between Cohen and Lele is certainly not complete. This last citation may suggest that there is a difference between them on what counts as a matter of concern for a conservative. What I relate to in both of them, though, is the rejection of pre-determined loyalties. I was pointed to Cohen by Simon Hewitt of Latte Labour, whose Christian Marxism sometimes reminds me (e.g. here) of the fundamental contention of Andrew Schmookler at None So Blind, that no account of politics can be adequate that does not honor certain intuitions of both the right--that the distinction between good and evil is as pertinent as ever--and the left--that this distinction means defending the powerless against the powerful. That is, that politics cannot do without normative (i.e., moral) categories.

This is one place where Wolfendale is pertinent. Despite the length of my post, I want to stay with Wolfendale's essay for just a bit, though I cannot do it justice, because (as is typical of Pete), he has spelled out in detail a huge array of premises and applications that, while I don't share all of them, do help me to situate some of my own convictions and aspirations. What Pete does is offer one way of theorizing how normative thought can inform political theory, in a way which I must say is refreshingly unlike the various marking-off of theoretical positions that so turned me off before. This is the sort of theorizing that I believe needs to happen, precisely in order to provide a workable platform that avoids the relativism towards which the left so often slips. Of the very many rich threads in Pete's post I am going to highlight just one, his insistent and surprising rehabilitation of Foucault, whose ethics he describes as "the most advanced form of virtue ethics yet developed." This is a counter-reading of Foucault against the many claims that he allows no room for freedom, a view which Wolfendale thinks misreads Foucault egregiously; it is a stark challenge to those condescending dismissals of him from, e.g., Camille Paglia (whose multi-fisted barrage cast aspersions on Foucault's scholarship) or Stanley Rosen (who reads Foucault, in the last chapter of Hermeneutics as Politics, as one more postmodern relativist against the sober wisdom of the Foucault's [and Rosen'] teacher Kojève). Both Paglia and Rosen think to contrast the decadent Foucault against the noble ancients, and Wolfendale's characterization of Foucault as presenting a formulation of virtue ethics--albeit one which is routed through an idiosyncratic Kantianism--is a gauntlet thrown down, not primarily of course for the sake of Foucauldian exegesis but for the sake of the project of self-construction in a context in which social and political power and the technologies of control are constantly at work. This is a project to which Foucault devoted much energy. But to read this project as a kind of virtue ethics--as a legitimate descendant of Aristotelian moral thinking--puts it in a context which goes counter both to those who want to celebrate Foucault as preaching a kind of emancipatory counter-gospel to the repressive discourse of Christianity, and to those like Rosen or Paglia who regard Foucault as starkly on the side of the (post)moderns. It re-casts Foucault's thinking of self-invention (not his term) in a context that goes back to ancient preoccupations with, as he would have put it, "the care of the self," a concern that is certainly authentically philosophical, not to say Platonist. I am halfway persuaded that Wolfendale is right about Foucault, and certainly that Foucault can be profitably read this way; but I am less sure that Foucault gives us a helpful way of thinking of constructive political deliberation--a deliberation necessarily dialogic--as opposed to resistive political discourse which is (in what he may have considered an outmoded term) individualist; a discourse not necessarily abdicatory, but at least abstentious.

In this post I have, in my disjointed way, tried to indicate my sympathies with positions left and right. I haven't detailed these here, but some examples are: I am a Greenpeace- and Sierra Club-supporting environmentalist. I a support gay civil marriage; but I think churches should decide the question on theological grounds and in any case ought not take their cue from the state. I recommend the decriminalization of most drugs; I am not sure about prostitution. I lean towards opposing hate crimes legislation. I am pro-life, and pro-family planning. I oppose the death penalty and am a member of Amnesty International. I support third world debt cancellation; I am strongly inclined to oppose Wall Street bailouts (and wish, but don't expect, to see vigorous prosecution of every last dishonest CEO, corporate board member, banker, and broker). I have mentioned my occasional work with Food Not Bombs (though I admit, it's been a while). I support nuclear disarmament. As a Christian I oppose the war in Afghanistan and--with qualifications--in Libya (and you bet it's a war); as an Westerner I admit that I am frightened --disproportionately, the way I'm frightened of shark attacks-- by militant Islamism. I am on record as having no objections to building the Cordoba House and finding scurrilous all such objections. And (though this is not a "political position"), I am confessedly agnostic about 9/11 "truth". Above all, I am dubious of anyone's claim to predict my views on anything else based upon any of these positions--or indeed even my rationale for these positions here listed. My counter-prediction is that you are likely to be surprised. Me too, for that matter.

At the same time I've indicated that (and, to a lesser extent, why) I find both right and left (as represented by Republican and Democratic parties in the US) to be utterly inadequate and unacceptable, and as time goes on more and more alarmingly alike economically and politically, despite different social constituencies and the provisional (albeit sometimes genuine) commitments they make to them. Both embrace economic neoliberalism; both are interventionist at their convenience (or that of the ruling class); both welcome the expanse of Federal power despite rhetoric; and, ditto the rhetoric, both defer to corporate interests and selectively to larger unions which more and more resemble large businesses. Both, make no mistake, are perfectly ready to play fast and loose with civil liberties and, when it comes right down to it, human rights (at least if they can outsource the abuses). Above all, both are willing to tell you whatever it takes, and to spend whatever (and whoever's) money it takes, to get elected; and are utterly unwilling to face the reality of impossible debt, vanishing resources, and the indifference of nature to industry lobbying or government decree. (Publicly unwilling, that is; I shudder to think what private contingency plans they have made around the bonfires of Bohemian Grove.) These similarities are doubtless in part functions of what I was calling realpolitik above; but there comes a time (and economic and environmental realities may fast be visiting it upon us) when practicing business-as-usual is no longer commitment, but cowardice.

My sympathies lands me in a kind of apparent centrism that is really anything but. My dissatisfaction (not to say disgust), on the other hand, pan out in a kind of alienation that has in the past led me to a nigh-absolute apolitical stance; but this apoliticalness is no cure for the alienation. The different positions I have drawn on here do not all add up to a single compatible stance, but they are all informing an effort at a discourse that can be theoretically rich enough to do justice to the intuitions that ground both my commitments right & left, and my sense of alienation--without just leaving me with it.

That said, I want to add one final sense in which the apolitical stance is philosophically justified, because I maintain that one cannot coherently defend any political position philosophically without acknowledging this. This sense has to do with the Foucauldian project of self-construction, whether or not we agree that Foucault's vocabulary will finally be sufficient to describe it. It is clear to me that the appetite for power over people is incompatible with the love of wisdom. (In this regard as in many, Christian theology --ecclesiology in particular is relevant here-- must regard philosophy as praeparatio evangelica, for the church-as-community is in one sense a community that is a crucible for just such asceticism as the philosopher undertakes alone.) This is not to say that actual power is incompatible in this way; Socrates clearly had power, as Alcibiades testifies, but he had no interest in using it or increasing it. This does not contradict the analysis I offered above--that a person possessed of what they believe is a workable vision for political society can in authenticity and good faith pursue it without being a slave to ambition--but it means that, insofar as they are also a philosopher, such a politician would engage in politics in a sense without caring.

J.D. Salinger, in "Seymour: an introduction," gives the eponymous character a reflection upon the inter-relations of poetry and apatheia:

indiscrimination...leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. ...no easy thing to do.

Something like this is true of politics as well (and indeed of science and even love, to throw in the rest of Badiou's occasions). Insofar as one is a philosopher one must in politics cultivate a letting-go of what some strains of Buddhism like to call "attachment to results."

One might debate this; the discussion would turn upon how one interprets Socrates' death: was it an act of political submission, or of a kind of amor fati, or simply a case of Socrates' final becoming-Socrates? I believe all these interpretations are possible. On the first, Socrates is a kind of Creon passing judgment on himself; on the second, he is Antigone. Only on the third reading is he Socrates. But in this instance, he is neither an apologist for the state (neither the "ideal state" nor the "second best" which are the object, respectively, of the Republic and the Laws), nor an activist who opposes the state, even for the sake of the most worthy of causes. He is the philosopher, whose disaffection has attained a kind of silent articulation which marks it as precisely not alienated.

Weird tales

2011-06-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

Trent Dougherty has a good post at the Prosblogion where he cries foul on the attacks on the case for mental causation, or the existence of God, or etc., when such attacks base themselves on the grounds that the objects of their attack are "weird" or "spooky." Dougherty finds this dismissal unacceptable. "If anyone should be able to get past the weird, it is philosophers," he says. This cannot but remind me of Harman's reiterated point that "The real is much weirder than common sense can imagine."

This calls to mind some recent posts by Fabio Gironi at Hypertiling and by Ben Woodward at NaughtThought, regarding the pertinence of the category "weird." Gironi wants to urge caution when it comes to weirdness, e.g. a frequent recurrence to Lovecraft in certain quarters of the philosophical blogosphere (on which fad I have weighed in here). Certainly, Gironi concedes, the world is very strange, and exceeds our capacity to theorize it; but this does not mean that there is no knowledge. Both philosophy and weird fiction share a focus upon the meaningless of the in-itself, Gironi thinks, but this overlap is a potential liability for the philosopher who is tempted too strongly in the direction of a kind of overwrought style in which connotation swamps precision.

[A] balance must be reached. An excessive emphasis on the weirdness, inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of reality in itself (re)produces a secular form of a vacuous mysticism of darkness (which is more self-congratulatory than philosophically fertile) and undermines naturalism by re-imbuing nature of ‘supernatural’ traits. On the other hand, we should be cautious with hyper-rationalisms, relying on the sheer power of pure thought to comprehend everything, for that is just the flipside of the old theological coin: on the one hand negative theology (which is always about meaninglessness for-us), on the other confidence in the lumen naturalis of reason (which ultimately banishes meaninglessness in-itself). The limits of our epistemic grasp cannot be overcome via either poetic talk nor via a mysteriously efficacious intellectual intuition. They can only be probed and pushed by rational inquiry.

This fine paragraph, which in some ways is the center of Gironi's contention, not only lays out his via media between effusive weirdness and triumphalist apodicticism, but also suggests that the weird is a contemporary modulation of ancient apophaticism ("negative theology"). This is certainly right in one sense, and several thinkers are starting to re-appropriate certain moves of medieval negative theology. (I am thinking, for instance of Eugene Thacker's engagement with pseudo-Dionysus and Nicholas of Cusa in After Life.) I can only agree with Gironi that the moves of negative theology will not accomplish anything by themselves-- but I obviously disagree with him if he means that apophaticism per se is a cop-out or a symptom of a discredited rationalism. I would sooner say that the discreditation of rationalism is a symptom of the abandonment of a real apophaticism-- negative theology that was aimed not at formulating an ingenious system for the intellect to recite, but at leading the whole person, including the intellect, into the cloud of unknowing. This is not the conclusion of an argument but an experience.

To some degree this would seem to put me more on Woodward's side, when against Gironi he invokes Pierre Hadot in his account of why Lovecraftian weirdness is useful in his own philosophical project. Hadot, too, believed in the cultivation of philosophy for experiential ends, though he came to hold a somewhat chastened estimation of the availability of mystical experience. But of course this alliance is not perfect, as Woodward's account of his motives indicates:

I do not see myself as making nature supernatural – Lovecraft and the weird are extremely useful for me in cracking the dense aesthetic/affective shell around nature, nature as caught between what Pierre Hadot has set up as the Orphic and the Promethean. That is: to weird nature, to set it as something which gives rise to and eventually undoes thought, is not to make it supernatural, it's to de-supernaturalize thought, to break a certain degree of the (ungrounded) transcendental quarantine on thought.

Woodward here is referring to Hadot's distinction, in The Veil of Isis, of two attitudes towards nature, the technological "Promethean," and the poetic "Orphic." It's an oversimplification but one may gloss this by saying that the former tries to wrest nature's secrets by force (the famous Baconian move of putting her to the rack) while the latter is an attitude of attentive listening.

As I read Woodward, he sees the weird is an unsettling effect, which enables him to reject a legacy of (perhaps unexamined) supernaturalism in the self-thinking of thought. I on the other hand am willing to bite the supernaturalist bullet--at least as an admissible description of the weird reality we inhabit. To say "admissible description" does not mean that I am agnostic about this--nature is grounded (I hold) upon something deeper, and something which is neither Nietzschean nor Meillassouxian hyperchaos--but I am open to various vocabularies for discussing this ground, since for me the relevant category is not causality but meaning.

This brings me back to Dougherty's post. What follows is the gist of a comment I posted there, ~~which has yet to appear (and may not, I suppose)~~. The out-of-hand dismissal of "weirdness," as if this ad hominem sufficed by itself to refute an argument, is not a logical move but a rhetorical one--it appeals to a shared culture, and is the equivalent of a knowing look or a raised eyebrow. This does not make it illegitimate (appeals to shared mores of discursive communities are certainly in-bounds), but it is a move based in opinion and as such it is more or less the opposite of philosophy strictly speaking. I don't say that philosophers cannot avail themselves of such moves (philosophy is always having to re-invent the distinction between itself and sophistry), but they ought to be clear on what they are about. What I like about Gironi's and Woodward's discussion, though I ultimately disagree with both of them (with Gironi because I reject his account of theology and Woodward because I don't share his motivation for recourse to weirdness, which is more or less the opposite of mine), is that it's a discussion of the overlap between philosophical style and content, a discussion which acknowledges that the boundary between these is itself a point of negotiation.
Heisenberg's account of physical explanation seems pertinent here:

It is impossible to explain...qualities of matter except by tracing these back to the behavior of entities which themselves no longer possess these qualities. If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell.

This really is just to say that one cannot explain how opium works by postulating a dormative property.

Analogy is dangerous, but I want to suggest, in the spirit of Aquinas' cosmological arguments, that all ordinariness will be satisfactorily accounted for only in terms of the not-ordinary; which is to say, some version of the weird. Dougherty puts the reason for this very succinctly:

we face a choice among mysteries, not a choice between mystery and something else.

However this choice may be delineated, the most relevant terms I see are those between a weird that is meaningless, or a mystery that is meaningful. The present age is dominated by the drive to explain the latter in terms of the former. I am concerned to understand the former in terms of the latter.

A little bit from Žižek, a little bit from....

2011-06-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

In conversation with Glyn Daly, Žižek remarks:

I do consider myself an extreme Stalinist philosopher. That is to say, it's clear where I stand. I don't believe in combining things. I hate the approach of taking a little bit from Lacan, a little bit from Foucault, a little bit from Derrida. No, I don't believe in this; I believe in clear-cut positions. I think the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of 'what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis,' and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think the only way to be honest and to expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position. (Conversations with Žižek p45)

Two different ills are attacked here. Žižek is opposed to eclecticism ("combining things... a little bit from [X], a little bit from [Y]"); he is also opposed to what he here calls "apparent, multidisciplinary modesty" which merely offers hypotheses. The latter, he thinks, is, beneath its veneer of humility, "the most arrogant position."

A bit ago, I commended, with reservations, a breezy little book called The World is Made of Stories by David Loy. I referenced there a mostly-positive review which nonetheless had problems with the way in which Loy presented his case:

what a curious tale it is: a kind of mystical hotch-potch in which Sartre rubs shoulders with gnosticism, psychotherapy with Advaita Vedanta...

I suppose this is sort of thing Žižek has in mind; and while I think it's an approach that risks shallowness on the one hand and pedantry on the other, and while I share some doubts about the default relativism which I think Žižek is targeting, I think (to take a dogmatic position) that Žižek is simply wrong in his brusque dismissal of "combining things." (I confess I do not understand why Žižek thinks this must go hand-in-hand with the "arrogant" relativism he denounces, but here I want to address just the point about eclecticism.)

One indefatigable and loyal commenter to SCT, (Ombhurbhuva), recently urged meto "try venturing out without the bodyguard of authorities," which I take to be a suggestion to forgo engagement with a preexisting literature and simply start, as it were, from scratch. (He'll correct me if I've got him wrong, I trust.) One reason why I believe my approach does not collapse into mere commentary despite being a quite continual engagement with what I have read (and continue to read), is that I am unapologetically eclectic in precisely the way Žižek abhors-- in fact, far more so. I don't even find Žižek's example especially eclectic. "A little bit of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida...": could anything be more predictable, or more dated? Fast forward a decade or two, and we have: a little bit of Deleuze, a little bit of Badiou, a little bit of Žižek. There is hardly anything "multidisciplinary" about this. But take "a little Badiou, a little Strauss, a little Levinas," and we're further out--despite the fact that all three of these are admitted platonists of one sort or another. And taking a bit of Longinus, a bit of Wittgenstein, and a bit of St. Maximus--this, I should think, is in danger of being billed as merely syncretic. So be it. I have no truck with reducing philosophies or religions or etc. etc. to any one perennial message, but there is in my mind no question that there are perennial perplexities; and if I read Aurobindo back-to-back with Thomas Reid, it is not because I expect them to agree with each other (or with me!) but precisely because in navigating their differences, I may be more likely to triangulate towards the experience of insight.

So I have more than a passing interest in thinkers like Victor Cousin or Hermann Lotze, who were both called eclectics by contemporaries (Cousin, to be sure, also by himself). Both were philosophers of extraordinary influence in their day, whose stock has now fallen till their thought is only the concern of specialists. Perhaps this has more than a coincidental connection to their eclecticism; maybe Lotze's realism-idealism was so influential for a while for the same reasons that it eventually fell from favor--that it was so clearly a synthesis of doctrines of its time. Maybe.

On the other hand, one man's eclecticism may simply be another man's anomaly. I'm frequently bemused by the dismissals or critiques of this or that--say, a strain of ecological or economic thinking--on the grounds that it's somehow tainted with something suspect or impure, that it tumbles you in with strange bedfellows.

The most recent example I encountered is the one I mentioned last post, when I recounted being lumped in with a right-wing attack on public education. But further examples abound. Can one espouse a Heideggerian-inspired ecology without getting tripped up on the slippery slope into fascism? Can one preach localism or particularism in my political economy without aiding and abetting the white-collar scions of the Republican Party? Can one draw upon Marx and Sartre and Žižek without wanting to line those same scions up against the wall?

Žižek himself, incidentally, knows better than to practice the anti-eclecticism he preaches. If you put Lacan back-to-back with Damasio and Turing and St. Paul, you are an eclectic in my book.

I spend a great deal of time reading figures with whom I deeply disagree, but whose positions I do not feel I can in good conscience leave unconfronted. This isn't just "good form." I respect the uncompromising nihilism of Brassier, or the cheerful scientism of Dennett, or the fierce fury of Nietzsche, but I not only respect it-- I learn from it, I want to do it justice, I try to put myself through its fire.

Beyond this, though, I read many, many figures who apparently disagree with each other. This is not for the sake of eclecticism; philosophy is not a hodge-podge of Bartlett's quotations (and it has to be said that Loy's book does risk reading like such a mix-tape, with commentary). But it is one thing to illustrate one's claims or argument with what seems supporting testimony from someone else; it's another to spend the time in the crucible of another's thinking, not only "seeing the world through their eyes," but seeing why anyone would want to see the world thus, and then trying to articulate a worldview that keeps integrity while acknowledging the force of this vision. It may be too much to ask of a philosophy that it account for and accommodate (which does not mean satisfy), say, both Marx and Oakeshott, or Barth and Suhrawardi, or the Buddha and St. Paul; but if you don't understand why one would want to do this, you aren't really trying.

My own utterly disorganized and meandering thinking-out-loud is, in short, a messy dialectic. There is contradiction in it, and there's no getting it out.

Guilt by association

2011-06-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

The sentiments I recently expressed regarding the question of whether higher education is worth its skyrocketing costs might sound like arguments for scrapping public education funding ("after all, what's the point?"), arguments put forward by a side on the class war with whom I have no sympathy. I do sometimes wonder if, as Peter Thiel opines, higher education is a "bubble," but this can mean more than one thing: say (to put it in almost stupidly simply terms), that the costs of higher education are too high, or that the benefits are too low. In fact, even these low benefits are far from negligible. A college degree still correlates with higher income, for instance; and in particular for children of the working class, the university is still a way to ascend a social ladder. Whether that's the best way to do it, or indeed the best goal; whether this has much, or anything at all, to do with education; these are further questions, and I don't think I am asking them in the same way that those who'd like to gut education funding.

I don't know whether Thiel thinks we should fund public education, though I suppose his libertarianism rejects it in principle. I too have a certain interest in libertarianism, and a fierce critique of public education as well, but I suspect our motives are different. If Thiel awarded two million dollars to some non-Ivy League students, or even to neophyte literary critics or philosophers instead of to aspiring venture capitalists and inventors, I'd be more interested in what he was up to. (Till then, we have the Ammonius Foundation.) Then again, I do share Thiel's esteem for René Girard. (N.b., Thiel's awardees are all remarkable and no doubt deserving, and it seems quite plausible that Thiel's investment in them will bear fruit. Let's just not pretend that, had they not won, their lot would have been lives of abject struggle in a philistine world indifferent to genius and unrewarding of hard work. I don't begrudge them their awards; I'd just like to see someone with Thiel's rhetoric and means reach out to people who might be far more hard-pressed to make it in the absence of his largesse.)

The more proximate, occasional, point here is that I should not wish to be thought an ally of the right-wing assault upon public higher education (and not just higher), even though I sometimes voice, if it were possible, even more strident criticisms of academe and of public education in general.

The more fundamental point, of which this is only an illustration, is that surface agreements in terms of policy or in terms of inspiration are not indices of some deeper alliance. One would think this were obvious, but it's amazing to me how often one sees an argument with the shape somewhat like: "you draw on Heidegger for your ecological thinking; but Heidegger's thought is inherently fascistic; therefore your own position is either that of a willful reactionary or a useful idiot." (Another example: "You say X. You know who else said X? The goddam Inquisition! And no oh-but-that-wasn't-real-Christianity cheating, either!") I am not saying that these objections are inadmissible from the get-go; I just refuse to grant them the status of knock-down arguments. It's amazing to me how often they are presented in that spirit. Guilt by association (an idea with which I probably have more sympathy than most--remember, on most days I believe in original sin) is alive and well.

(Reflections occasioned by some recent conversations--not all with the same people--mainly off-blog. I apologize if my exposition leaves some of the context unclear.)

"Wonder does not subside."

2011-06-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

I regularly check over at Daan Verhoeven's blog for translations of his father's work, often illustrated with Daan's own gorgeous photography. Cornelis Verhoeven was a Dutch philosopher whose one book which has been Englished, The Philosophy of Wonder, was very important to me when I first began doing philosophy in earnest; I keep coming back to it.

There is something about the figure of Verhoeven that gives me hope. His quiet dignity, his wryly amused humility, his sense of scale. He is not cowed, either by the "towering figures" of the philosophical tradition, nor by the intractability of the tradition's questions. So far as I can tell, he never bought into dour prophecies about the death of philosophy, though there is a quiet tone of resignation that runs through his work I have read--a modulation of his meditations upon Seneca, perhaps--a gentle demurral from take things too seriously, combined with the acknowledgment of real pain and a deep gratitude for every, always-passing, beauty. He knew that these realities were too quick, too vivid, too overwhelming, to be articulated, but he did not think this absolved him from the need to speak:

Our phrases are always more clear than our living thoughts, and our incurable wonder does not subside through calculations of probability and sharp logic.

This is a kind of phenomenology of philosophy itself, keenly aware of the limitations of its own project in the face of infinity, yet unapologetically taking "one more step," as Badiou was to famously urge; and then another, and another.

Cornelis Verhoeven died ten years ago today. His son Daan has put up a new blog where he intends to put his translations. May they continue.

In which the question is raised: in what sense are we doing philosophy?

2011-06-05T12:31:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 30:

The difference between exoteric and esoteric [was] formerly known to philosophers.

I subscribe to this interpretation of the history of philosophy, associated most (in)famously with the name of Leo Strauss, though I did not come to it through him. One danger of it, however, is that one starts to think that if one is a philosopher one must practice esotericism; and if one doesn't, one isn't doing philosophy. Another danger is that one starts to think that one can only understand the philosophers if one is oneself a philosopher in this sense. But this is to misconstrue the Nietzschean taxonomy.

In my very first post I cited Strauss and said that, like him, I claim to be "only a scholar;" after all, what is more insufferably pretentious than insinuating that one has a secret doctrine? But of course this is not quite right; are we or are we not doing philosophy here? (I am not asking this because of some recent voices--who should know better--seeming to claim that philosophy doesn't happen online, that what do here is journalism and not philosophy--an argument which has force but not measure on its side. Online media have some debilitating restrictions when it comes to philosophy, but no more than other forms.) The issue for me is that I do acknowledge the force of Strauss' analysis, however much I may quibble with the details--I see a "between the lines" strategy occurring in philosphical texts going back to Plato, and indeed far beyond the confines of what is usually considered philosophy; I struggle with this and indeed feel a keen inadequacy; and I certainly have no gnosis to impart. But at the same time, I do not want to surrender the claim to be an aspiring lover of wisdom. I've been trying to put my inchoate objections to the Straussian formulae into words.

In the wake of Nietzsche, many, many of his "disciples" took over the rhetoric he used, speaking of "we hyperboreans," we philosophers of the future. Most of these have by now been mercifully buried with the past. Those we still read either grew up and found their own voices or started out with other intuitions as well. But the seed had been sown for the elevation of philosopher into a seer.

The tremendous impression Heidegger made among his contemporaries owes something to this legacy of Nietzsche's (as he recognized very well). One gets a sense of this impression from Arendt's well-known memoir, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty", in which she recalls his growing reputation:

There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king....word spread that thinking is alive again....there is a teacher; one could perhaps learn to think.

I read Strauss' scholarly humility as a defensive move against the undeniable force of Heidegger's oracular debut. (Like any number of others, Strauss was bowled over by Heidegger's debate with Cassirer at Davos; he later said that Heidegger was "the only great thinker of our time"-- which was, he added, just the trouble.) Strauss was a very deep and perceptive thinker, but he was certainly not that kind of thinker, and to contend with Heidegger on that ground would have been to repeat the defeat of Cassirer, or the Pyrrhic victory of Jaspers (in which he kept his honor but lost the war), or the long war of attrition of Adorno. So he adopted a different strategy, proposing an alternate series of readings of the history of philosophy to the series proposed by Heidegger, readings which did not explicitly engage with Heidegger at all but which always implicitly called into question, in their understated and modest dignity, the Heideggerian animus against Plato.

There remain to this day scholars--Laurence Lampert, Seth Benardete, and so on--who make this distinction between scholarship and philosophy in such a way that leaves one with a slightly uneasy feeling. When Lampert suggests (e.g. here, p 1) that

we have to read philosophers differently, abandoning the notion that--like us--they tried to make everything as clear as possible to everyone, and we have to entertain the unpalatable and unwelcome possibility that they hid their real meaning and that they had good reasons for doing so[,]

he is postulating a very specific difference between "philosophers" and "[the rest of] us," a much starker division than I admit. I am one who holds that philosophy lurks to one's right and one's left at every moment; that to decline it one must actively decline it.

A friend of mine recently made a mix-tape of what he called "any-mood songs," songs he could confidently expect to always want to hear, no matter what. My friend is a guitarist and composer and has thought more about music than most people have listened to it; he has emphatic likes and dislikes and is astonishingly articulate about them. His compilation exercise, he told me, required a tremendous honesty. Honesty? Indeed: one can be attached to a song for all sorts of reasons, and yet not consider it an "any-mood" song. The nature of these attachments, the severe and open-eyed awareness needed to think about them--who would have thought that questions of self-deception and aesthetics would be so deeply entwined as to come into relief when making a mix-tape for oneself? And yet, he found, there was opportunity and even a strange incentive to deceive himself about his own aesthetics, a matter on which I might have thought him able to operate even without thinking. But this is just it. Every circumstance of our life is fraught with occasion for reflection, for thought--fraught with philosophical import merely by virtue of our own sentience. If we do not find ourselves, each and all, spontaneously voicing the wisdom of Socrates (which is to say, articulate ignorance), this is not because our lives are not philosophical but because we are not; we are divorced from our lives, leading in them in, precisely, a manner of un-examination.

But then, does this not mean that Lampert and Strauss are right--that those who endeavor to live the examined life are different? And if so, then, how different? Was Hume still a philosopher when he turned from skepticism to billiards?

To be sure, this ambiguous adulation of philosophers that wants to decode their secrets is preferable (if one must choose) to the ressentiment towards the dead white males which presumes that feet of clay must go "all the way up." Such is, for instance, the pitiable contention that Fregean logic was tainted by anti-semitism, and abetted National Socialism:

Hitler...guided by sentiments not unlike the ones expressed in Frege's diary, worked out the master-logic of National Socialism...National Socialism thought like Frege's, did not concern itself with empirical content....No personal experience could negate [its] body of truth. The applications of logic to action that Frege had promised came readily to hand. If Jews are a mongrel race, they must be exterminated. 'A thought like a hammer' [in Frege's words] demanded instant obedience to the dictates of logic." (Andrea Nye, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic p 169)

Well! Yes, this sort of broadside (and there's more where that came from) is simultaneously hard to answer and an easy target. (Those of you who missed the late '80s and early '90s may require a strong White Queen effort to believe it, but this sort of thing was ubiquitous on university campuses then.) But the question, what about Heidegger's Being and Time?, is not so clear-cut; simultaneously harder to brush off and harder to make stick. Oh feet of clay!

And yet, isn't there something similar between unriddling the hidden teaching of Vico or Bacon or Avicenna, and finding the skeleton's in Frege's or Heidegger's closet? Let me be clear: the question of anti-semitism in Heidegger or in Frege can indeed be asked philosophically. If I think Nye fails in Frege's case, this is not because she asks a poor question, but because she doesn't ask it as a philosopher. She knows very well what conclusions she wants to come to, and Frege's anti-semitic writings (mainly his diary) offer her an occasion to get there. And yet even these motives can serve philosophy, for the strong desire to question logic, and to recruit any occasion to its aid, is itself a mode of philosophical eros.

This post is not primarily about the prejudices of philosophers (or of their sophistic critics); it's about the alleged differences between philosophers and "the rest of us." Nye's critique is a way of abolishing this difference, a way I think fails, but this doesn't mean the difference is purely phantasmal.

Wittgenstein said that what he sought was a way to stop doing philosophy when he wanted to. If there is something that sets off philosophers from "the rest of us," it's this--that the vast majority need no prodding to stop doing philosophy, to decline to follow the logos "wherever it leads". For a few, it is not so easy. We get distracted by things, but it's precisely a distraction into thought. Every concrete occasion offers us, not a way to a specific end, but a lure towards God-knows-what-end. To take an aesthetic example: for me, the question of why a beautiful vista is beautiful is part of its beauty. I cannot even begin to respond to the quietist objection "why can't you just 'let it be' without asking these questions?" The response the vista calls forth from me includes the question every bit as much as it includes my admiration--the question is the shape of my admiration. The incentive to ask is woven into the very texture of the experience. This, I maintain, is what makes a philosopher, a lover of wisdom--not that we feel this itch but that we can't leave it alone.

This doesn't mean we can elaborate doctrines of teachings. Most of continue to grope and struggle, to pick up one bad reason after another for what we believe on instinct, to question our instincts without knowing what else to fall back upon. There is indeed an esotericism involved here, which may be elaborated into some sort of agrapha dogmata, but if so, who cares? Plato's unwritten doctrines were not "secret" because they might fall into the wrong hands but because they "could not be put into words." And as Wittgenstein knew, "if a question can be asked, it can also be answered."

Strauss maintains that Nietzsche followed a long tradition in distinguishing between the 'herd,' the exceptions, and the philosophers. This goes back at least to Machiavelli, who probably got it from Averroes. Among non-philosophers, the herd declines to ask the question; the exception asks, but with an end in mind--it wants an answer, very frequently a particular answer. The philosopher knows that every question will be answered by another; the search is endless, though there can be a realization of this inexhaustibility that goes beyond questions and answers (and in a sense leaves them just where they were). (There is a philosophical truth to quietism too.) "To be able to stop doing philosophy when I want to" presupposes that one has been doing philosophy; it is to come out the other side of it--an experience of deliverance, not of denial.

Geworfenheit at age 12

2011-05-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Because I was adopted as a baby, I am sometimes asked (e.g. by prospective adopting parents) about how I viewed my family situation when I was growing up. I always reply that I believed my situation was no different from anyone else's: we are all, I reflected, thrown into the world from we-know-not-where; my own circumstance is thus just like anyone's, except perhaps, as it were, writ large. I of course had not read Heidegger when I was twelve, but I am quite sure that while I didn't say "writ large," I did indeed use the words "thrown into" (at least to myself), and probably from about that age if not earlier. This was my conclusion, despite the fact that I was also raised in a faith (to which I certainly consciously subscribed) which held that we did indeed know "where we came from," since Mormonism has a well-articulated doctrine of pre-existence of souls. Ever since my break from that religion, it's been interesting to me that I was able to hold these two positions--the existential sense of geworfenheit and the LDS doctrine of pre-mortality--simultaneously without so much as blinking. This stance seems to me to be the flip-side of the indifference with which Wittgenstein regarded the question of an afterlife:

The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed; but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is not problems of natural science that have to be solved.)
(Tractatus 6.4312, tr. Ogden)

I find myself thinking on this because today is my birthday, as well as the U.S. observation of Memorial Day. (When I was born, this date was always Memorial Day; I was born on the day when we commemorate the fallen).

This coexistence of two ostensibly contradictory thoughts might be put down to the lack of self-reflection of a child, or the pernicious influence of religion in compartmentalizing one's thoughts, or any number of other explanations; but I think it was just the budding realization that an ontological mystery obtains no matter what one's cosmology. It was also, I think, an incipient ease with inconsistency at a certain discursive level. While I went through a period of intense discomfort with apparent logical incompatibility, I've come to experience such inconsistency as more like the growing edge of articulation than as inevitably some symptom of a deep-seated problem (though the growth at the edge always includes reiterations of checking for such such problems). Probably some intense semi-mystical experiences, even earlier than age 12, also had something to do with it. It is salutary (especially for one with a precocious vocabulary and argumentative style) to realize that no matter how you try to express certain things, words will fail. Philosophy is the path to this realization of failure, paved with words of the most exacting precision you can muster.

They cough in ink

2011-05-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, James Ladyman published an article on the appropriateness of specialization, jargon, and professionalization in philosophy.

Here I am concerned not with Ladyman's contentions about accessibility (whether or not philosophy is "for the masses"), nor with which sorts of specialization are good and which are bad. I am interested in the spirit in which one specializes.

I once worked in a magazine shop, which sold, aside from quite a lot of pornography, publications devoted to a quite bewildering array of specialties. (Now that I think of it, the porn dealt with a bit of a bewildering array too.) I spent many hours perusing magazines on lapidary arts, fingerings for classical guitar, geopolitics in Asia, Civil War re-enactments, hydraulic systems for lowrider cars, Tibetan Buddhism, and stereophonics, among other matters. Of course I did not become a master jeweler, a grandmaster in chess, or a Zen master, but I acquired the ability to ask intelligent questions across an array of disciplines and to think about the answers, and what's more, a keen interest in asking them.

All of this did me much good, but the best good was in knowing that all these worlds were there; it was possible to get lost in any of them, and possible to traverse from one to another.

Many of Ladyman's observations are on-target.

It is all too easy to mock and dismiss the recondite work of academics and question its value. When people claim that professional philosophers are producing work of little or no value because it is jargon-ridden and otherwise inaccessible, this may be telling people what they want to hear.

This is a very fair point, and anyone who wants to deride the fashions of academia had better pay heed, for such derision is itself a fashion. Nor is Ladyman far off-target when he says,

There would be something badly wrong if work in the philosophy of physics were as accessible to a linguist as to a physicist, or if work in the philosophy of language were as accessible to a physicist as to a linguist....Most academic work in all subjects is dry and dull to the outsider and contributes only a minute increment to the sum of knowledge. I expect there are people out there whose appetites for the details of snail morphology or monastic life in seventeenth century France is immeasurably greater than mine. I don’t expect them to be interested in the status of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles in the light of contemporary physics.

But the false note has crept in at the word "expect." Ladyman is quite right to point out that not everyone is a natural popularizer and that "civilisation needs people whose curiosity about obscure matters is abnormal;" and my own pedagogical commitments forbid me from prescribing an obligation to be interested in anything at all. But I believe that philosophy is (among other things) the art of inciting interest, and that this art is practiced by example and love. No one can compel me to be interested in baseball statistics or Korean confucianism or mitochondrial chemiosmosis; but anyone I love may entice me, by their interest, into a new world, and in so doing show me how that world was always open upon my own.

This does not mean adopting the same enthusiasm they have--one must find one's own way in; some very pertinent thoughts on this are offered in Amod's post here, e.g.:

To stay entirely in one’s comfort zone and never let one’s choice of pleasures be guided by those whose judgement one respects – this is a vice. It’s a sure way to remain mired in the situation...in which virtue does not become pleasurable and pleasure does not become virtuous. At the same time, to ignore one’s own preferences and passions in the hopes of reaching an unrealistic ideal of what one should like – this too is a vice, one that sacrifices one’s happiness and likely one’s virtue as well. How does one negotiate the middle ground?

If I am right, this Aristotelian question of moderation is bound up with the good old Platonic questions of love and of vision. This is a matter of some paradox, but really it just means that one's love is always for something concrete, and yet one love always has in it a feeling of reaching beyond what (who) one loves. Žižek likes to spin a Lacanian take on this point: the lover is always implicitly saying, "I love you, but inexplicably I love something in you more than you." For Plato this "something" is the Beautiful, but even this, as soon as it has been reified, becomes just one more thing. The Lacanian slogan does not stop where I have put the period. It goes on, "...and therefore I destroy you." This conclusion is the overstated but right enough summary of failing to find the via media Amod speaks of (and which Žižek so disdains). One's loves are themselves a dialectic; one goes beyond and returns to one's occasions, because what one loves in ones beloved (and it is obvious here I am speaking of not just the people one loves but every icon in one's life) is their inexhaustibility; the way they open up the whole world; the light they cast on it, that shines through them; and above all, who one is when one loves, when that light shines on and through us.

Philosophy doubtless must needs specialize, but if it any specialty loses its orientation towards the whole (a question not of what one says but of why), then it has become just another hobby, another distraction, a place to hide-- a bit of antiquarianism, a passion for beekeeping, or an obsession with hi-fi audio. To philosophize is to aspire to be more than an ear, even if one were the greatest ear in Europe. Indeed it is to be more than a "lover" even if one were Don Juan--precisely because what happens with Don Juan is that "lover" becomes what "Beauty" becomes in our Platonic example above--reified, and so impoverished. As technocrats move into every last department and philosophers are either shown the door or pressured to provide results, the specialists who Ladyman welcomes are no doubt the penultimate wave of the Kali Yuga. But what would they say, did their Socrates walk that way?

On Mormon theologoumena

2011-05-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

Over at Gnosis and Noesis, a post on the Latter-day Saint (Mormon) concept of God caught my eye. It points out what used to be common knowledge, that "God" is a couple. Mormon cosmology says that the world was created by God (I leave suspended the question as to whether this means this planet, or some section of the universe, or the entire "observable universe", or the whole universe that originated in the Big Bang--assuming there was such a Bang). But this creation was not ex nihilo-- rather, it was out of pre-existent matter. God is a couple, a divine male/female pair, who "organized" (this is the term the LDS tend to use) the matter into a world, for their spiritual offspring to inhabit. The notion is that these offspring (that's you and me) would go through certain necessary experiences only available in embodied mortal existence--the primary one being embodiment itself--before returning to the presence of God (male & female). These experiences are tests of faith and perseverance, of character-building and ethical spiritual purification; they also include certain ritual experiences that must be had in mortal form, though one can experience them either oneself or by having them performed by proxy (this is the basis for the much-debated performance of Mormon Temple services on behalf of the dead). The virtue of these experiences is somehow tied both to physical embodiment, to free agency (a term upon which LDS thought places much stress), and to the mortal condition of not-knowing (or not remembering) our ultimate origin (a condition Mormon theology speaks of by invoking a "veil" said to exist between our world and the former/next world, a veil which also is held to be symbolized by the veil in the Hebrew (and Mormon) Temple). Those of us who pass muster--who fulfill the ritual ordinances and keep moral purity (an impossible task without the atoning sacrifice of Christ, Mormons will remind us), will be exalted and become, in turn, gods themselves. Marriage is one of the ordinances in question, and this is why god is held to be male and female--because it requires a pair, male and female, to attain the fullness of human potential (which is divinity).

Where did our divine parents come from? Why, from a world like our own, of course, in which they ascended by passing the same sorts of tests to which we are now subject. Presumably there was also a Christ-analogue in the history of that world, but I know of no official pronouncement to that effect, nor even any speculation from the days when Mormon theology got good and speculative, back in the days when Brigham Young would refute Orson Pratt from the pulpit. Things have settled down since then, alas. But the doctrine that the couple who fashioned of this world were once mortals on a similar world made by a similar couple, and so on and so on, is generally accepted. The chain extends infinitely into the past and will extend infinitely into the future.

Do these worlds exist in our own space-time or is our entire universe the handiwork of our heavenly parents? Mormons debate this, though generally not publicly. But there is no speculation, let alone any answer, to the question of why this cosmic mortal/divine, caterpillar/butterfly cycle should obtain. (Not even a pseudo-Thomist sounding formula such as "it is its own cause".) This prompted one of my friends to observe that Mormonism is a form of agnosticism.

More interesting to me is the nature of Godhood itself as conceptualized in Mormon cosmology. Mormonism is often (and accurately) viewed as an intensely hierarchical religion, with its ascending ranks of priesthood (Aaronic and Melchizedek), its levels of quasi-Masonic initiation, and so on. "The priesthood" itself is not just a sociological category nor yet a vocation; it is conceived by Mormons to be a spiritual power in itself. One may hold "office" in the priesthood according to one's rank, by virtue of having been ordained, in a manner which bears some comparison to a dharma transmission, though probably the better analogy would be the Biblical anecdote in which Elisha petitions Elijah for "a double portion" of his spirit upon the latter's ascent in the fiery chariot. The point is that priesthood for Mormons is a kind of authority or power as well as a ranking of offices (deacon, teacher, priest, elder, etc.), but above all it is the constituting power of the universe itself. Though I can't chase down chapter and verse at this moment, God is not infrequently said in LDS parlance to have created the world "by" the priesthood. In this respect, though I emphasize that this is not by any stretch an explicit or even "esoteric" official Mormon doctrine (I have never heard anyone speculate along these lines), it has often struck me that "god" (as divine married couple organizing matter into worlds and populating them) is simply the highest office in the Mormon priesthood; while the priesthood itself is the closest analogue in Mormonism to what is traditionally meant by "God" (though some would say it's closer still to "the Force" in the Star Wars saga). The Mormon scripture Doctrine and Convenants declares of "intelligence:"

Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. (D&C 93:29)

This doubtless stands behind certain speculation of the early Mormon apostle Orson Pratt, probably the most monistic-tending of the early Latter-day Saints, who waxed eloquent on the plurality (indeed the infinity) of gods, but also described Truth itself as God, in the singular. (See, e.g., The Seer I 2, p 24) Since LDS scripture also uses the terms "Intelligence" and "intelligences," one is tempted to think that there is an incipient cosmology here which Pratt was trying to spell out. The late, great Sterling McMurrin, still the godfather of serious Mormon theological studies, has some thoughts along these lines in this paper.

The way up is the way down

2011-05-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Alexander Schmemann says in a number of places that in the Eucharist, bread and wine become "what they are meant to be;" I might press this further and say "what they really are." One could even perhaps press one's luck and venture that as all theology is doxastic and sacramental ("or not at all"), and that theology thus must be the showing of the eschatological face of things, so too all philosophy is precisely the effort of asking of things what they are. This is why science as perpetually open ("revisable") is still philosophy.

Daniel Dennett likes to characterize philosophy as what one does when one doesn't know what the right question is. This is a witty way of attaching a degree of dignity to groping in the dark, but really what Dennett means is that all philosophy is prolegomena to science. I would rather say that science is philosophy which has (artificially) curtailed its questioning, fencing it within certain limits; it is philosophy under the supposition that one can delimit the question (what is known as "laboratory conditions"). Philosophy always aims toward the question of the Whole. Science forecloses this question, and asks, not "what is X?" but under what circumstances X occurs. It does not and cannot investigate the occurrence of "circumstances" per se.

What this means is that science is in a sense a "going further" than philosophy, but always by way of a more narrow focus, a quantitative reduction which is also a qualitative changing the subject. Any moment of science, however, still remains philosophy, in that it has ontological and methodological axioms, and these can be asked after without the concomitant narrowing.

If philosophy generates science as its own "finitely realizable" case, so too poetry arises out of religion, but in, so to speak, the opposite direction--as a move towards the impossible articulation of its alternatives, its presuppositions. Li-Young Lee comments, in a conversation included in Breaking the Alabaster Jar, that

religion is fossilized poetry.... Did you ever see the mouth where lava is being born? There's a place in Hawaii where it comes right out into the ocean. It's this hot, red thing coming out as the ocean is cooling. I'm looking at that and thinking, Well, that lava thing, that's art. When the lava hardens into these patterns, that's religion. They're worshiping patterns that were once living. When you look at it, it's a record of something that was once living. Art for me is the practice of that living--the mouth itself, what's really coming out. (pp 80-81)

Again, I would revise the disparaging analogy (though I don't know that Lee intended disparagement): poetry is rather the invention of the infinitely variable (and as it were, innocent) heresies and theolegoumena which are the indices of living faith; which surround, virtually, the actuality of lived religious experience. I would add that poetry is certainly, as it were, prior to theology, just as science does come after philosophy. (In this sense, science is paired with politics, poetry with love.) See, e.g., this post by John Gallaher on the way poetry is "spirituality," which is today's word for this move of the individual to be religious without "all that."

Science aims at a stricter denotation than philosophy; poetry at broader connotation than religion. Science is an attempt to go further than philosophy; poetry, to back up from religion. Is Theology--which from the outside (or from post-modernity) looks like a manticore (half botched poem, half abortive science)--where they meet?

Louis Lavelle

2011-05-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

A while ago I touched upon the question of philosophers I wish would be translated. This post finally got some comments; I hope to see more. Here's one: Erich Przywara, whose controversy with Karl Barth on the analogia entis is one of the great chapters of 20th century theology, but whose works are almost non-existent in English. Or another:Eric Weil, a translation of whose Logic of Philosophy is still nowhere to be seen. (You can get Hegel and the State easily and a collection of essays edited by Kluback if you keep checking the online used book sources religiously.)

Another would be Louis Lavelle. Lavelle's philosophy may seem like a transition between Bergson's and Sartre's, not only in terms of chronology (he held the chair formerly occupied by Bergson at the College of France, and he died in 1951 as existentialism was coming into ascendancy), but in terms of doctrine: we associate the phrase "existence precedes essence" with Sartre, but in Of the Act (1937), Lavelle had already declared that "we need to posit our existence [before] discover[ing] our essence." But unlike either Sartre of Bergson, Lavelle's name did not catch on outside of France. A 1947 article by James Collins of St Louis University called "Louis Lavelle on Human Participation" (ah yes, that explains my interest) is almost the only secondary piece I know, aside from some book reviews (there is also supposed to be a study on The Experience of Being in the philosophy of Louis Lavelle by Joanne Opalek, but I have never seen it). For a very long time almost nothing has been available by Lavelle himself for the anglophone. I have owned a little blue volume called The Dilemma of Narcissus for about 10 years (this one you can get fairly cheap), and recently tracked down Introduction to Ontology, which, I don't mind telling you, was not an easy task. Nothing else has been Englished except a book on four saints (St. Francis, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis de Sales) called The Meaning of Holiness, which I've not seen. But all these books are from Lavelle's "minor," "moralist" writings (though I commend Dilemma to you; there's a brief post touching on it here by Bill Vallicella). What I've longed to sink my teeth into was Lavelle's tetralogy Dialectic of the Eternal Present.

Now it can finally happen. The website of the French Association Louis Lavelle has made available selections from Lavelle's major works, translated by Robert Jones, along with very helpful introductory essay and notes by Jones. Serious students of philosophy and scholars of French thought are indebted to him.

Education wants to be free

2011-05-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Zero Tuition College strikes me as an idea whose time may have come. It is an envisioned online community of self-directed college-age students, designed to be not just a supplement to but potentially a replacement for university education.

I am a strong advocate of "alternatives" to accepted educational channels, though I would like to see them become less alternative. My intuition (and that's all it is, not a well-thought-out position) is that the devil's-bargain by which higher-ed has sold itself to what passes for "capitalism" these days is one of the main symptoms and causes (both) of the malaise that stymies social revolution (or even reform) in the west. Without implicating anyone else in my half-baked radicalism, I commend, as a partial liberation from the gatekeepers of education, Salman Khan's Khan Academy. The ZT College, brainchild of Blake Boles, may be the next step.

As an anarcho-autodidact who makes his living slumming in the margins of public education (and volunteering at a very different school), I spend a lot of time thinking about how to apply the principles of free- or un-schooling (which work astoundingly well for pre-college age students), to students in an ordinary public-school setting; and also wondering how this approach applies to college and post-college education. This is more or less the haphazard road I pursued. I educated myself, if that is the word, by following my nose; by always chasing down the interesting-sounding references, always tracing the trail back to primary texts, and by giving myself permission to ask irresponsible-sounding questions. I did audit a number of classes (and even paid for some), because the truth about philosophy is that you can't do it all by yourself all the time (Socrates spent his time in the city). But I had the good fortune to be advised early on (by a professor who gave me straight A's) to steer clear of the academy. "It's a world in which dull dogs tend to rule," he sighed. He may have just been being nice with the A's, I suppose, but I think he guessed that it would have ruined my soul. I probably would have turned into one of those self-congratulatory PC professors or one of those self-congratulatory anti-PC professors.

Not that my soul is especially beautiful. I feel twinges of jealousy of friends whose careers are beginning to rise; I feel insinuations of smugness over reports of people with doctorates who can't find jobs. And I am of course hampered to some degree by a dearth of letters after my name, and sometimes blame myself. All (perhaps) pretty venial, but unbecoming nonetheless.

On the other hand I have no college debt, no craving for tenure, and no departmental politics to deal with. I have work that is as rewarding as it gets and no illusions that I am trapped in it when the inevitable frustrations arise.

All of this not-very-interesting autobiographical material is just by way of accounting for my own interest in Boles' proposal. After all, given the widespread dismay over rising tuition (in my state of Washington some tuition costs have risen as much as 28% in two years), and the terrifying lack of job security, or even job prospects, for people with (advanced!) degrees, what exactly is the attraction of a university education?

I am assuming here that one really is aiming to acquire skills, breadth, learning, proficiency, exposure to ideas, experience, accomplishment. Since the university will not guarantee one a future income, and increasingly seems not even to make one more likely to be hired, all practical or mercenary motives seem moot.

Since I am not an aberrantly intelligent observer, I can't be the only person to ask these questions. In fact, the projects of Boles and Khan and others make it all the more likely that in the future (assuming we have a livable planet), the lack of letters after one's name may become more and more irrelevant to one's career(s). Note, though, that the whole point of ZT College is to have a community of fellow-learners with whom to share ideas and support. Self-directed learning (and I truly believe there is no other kind) is still, irreducibly, a conversation. One learns for oneself, but one learns with others. Perhaps philosophy most of all.

ZT College is currently having a (very modest) fundraising campaign in order to get off the ground. For $25 you can be a co-founder.

Niggle and Morel

2011-05-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

On the heels of writing my last post on literary and/or homeopathic "immortality," I finally got around to reading Eileen Joy's "You Are Here: A Manifesto"

literature [i]s a kind of poetic DNA, an inter-subjective, living, and dynamic process and also an open "signaling system," ...literary narratives, especially the ones crafted with a high degree of artistry and whose authors generously and playfully leave the most important questions unsettled ...these narratives are never really done, never really "over"[;].... [C]hange...accomplishes a special purchase within the realm of the imaginative, narrative arts, which I want to argue includes literary criticism, includes scholarship, includes thinking.

This is just what I mean. Moreover, this is (I assert) what the great literary/philosophical tradition has always meant. One retells the great myths not in order to hear them again but to enter them.

Walter Benjamin:

...the listener's naive relationship to the storyteller is controlled by his interest in retaining what he is told. The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story. Memory is the epic facultypar excellence. Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can epic writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, make its peace with the power of death on the other. ("The Storyteller.")

Compare this to a remark of James Carse in his Finite and Infinite Games. Carse writes:

To tell a story for its own sake is to tell it for no other reason than that it is a story. Great stories have this feature: to listen to them and learn them is to become their narrator.

It goes back to Plato, at least. Writing, he says, always "says the same thing;" this is why speech is higher, because it can change, because in saying what it means it will alter according to need. Far from undoing any "determinate meaning," this ability to change is precisely what makes speech capable of communicating a meaning. This very same point is made by Latour, in his work on iconoclash: no image means anything by itself; meaning only transpires by moving from one image, one story, one interpretation, to another, to another. This is the case in science as well as in religion, though the modalities of the meanings at stake in such images differs. Of lovers of images, Latour writes that their

iconophilia does not mean the exclusive and obsessive attention to image.... Iconophilia means moving from one image to the next. They know "truth is image but there is no image of truth." For them, the only way to access truth, objectivity, and sanctity is to move fast from one image to another, not to dream the impossible dream of jumping to a non-existing original.

Towards the end of her essay, Joy expressly invokes artistic immortality, urging us to get busy

making new objects. Giving birth to things. Radical acts of coupling and natality and hetero-queer reproduction. Until you can’t anymore. That’s when you drop dead. But don’t worry... you’ll always be with us, by which I mean: with me. I’ll never forget you and I trust you’ll do the same for me. I’m talking to you but also to my dog, the hawthorn outside my study window, the window itself, my favorite plate, and the imaginary pen I write my imaginary books with that never get published. We’ll designate mourners and record their grieving, then play it on an endless feedback loop machine that has a one-thousand-year battery. Some call this medieval studies. Or the humanities, which need to get more, and not less human.

This thousand-year capacity and this playback machine mark the bathetic limit of human aspirations. Long as art may be, it is finite. The feedback loop machine that Joy describes is, essentially, the invention of Morel. This is the title of a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, upon which Robbe-Grillet's famous and maddening film Last Year at Marienbad was supposedly based, in part. There is no online text of the story available as far as I can tell, but there are several critical essays, for instance this fine one by David Auerbach. In this novel (spoiler alert), a refugee on an uncharted island discovers a group of people who turn out to be only 3-D holographic images, endlessly repeating a week-long recording made decades earlier. The narrator, slowly unriddling the nature of the people, who of course do not see him, becomes infatuated with one of the women, named Faustine. Eventually he discovers the secret of the recording mechanism, and despite realizing that the process will likely kill him (there are hints that all the original party later died horribly from the effects of the recording process), he records himself "interacting" with various members of the original recording, especially Faustine, in order to give the impression that he was there originally and that he and Faustine are a romantic couple. In effect, he has spliced himself into a story in which he had no part. The story ends with a plea that some future inventor will merge his soul with Faustine's. The Invention of Morel was praised by Jorge Luis Borges as a perfectly contrived fiction. What Borges seems especially to have admired was the way the mysterious atmosphere of the story was resolved (in a perfectly this-worldly manner once the technological premise is accepted) even as it occasioned metaphysical questions that were beyond it.

Bioy Casares' story was published in 1940. It is almost perfectly contemporary with Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle", written in 1938-39 (albeit first published in '45). (Thanks to SCT reader and commenter Alf for the email which inspired this comparison.) In this work, the painter Niggle works endlessly and sometimes aimlessly on an enormous painting of a tree, when he should be getting ready for a "journey" he must take. He is troubled when he remembers the necessity of the journey and occasionally makes some token preparations; and he resents the intrusions of other business, especially the needs of his neighbor, Parish, who has a bad leg and often needs assistance; but mostly he works and works on his unfinished and perhaps unfinishable painting. One day, however, he is suddenly called upon to leave on his "journey." (Despite Tolkien's avowed dislike of allegory, it is indisputable that this journey is death). Because he arrives with "no luggage," Niggle must stay in a kind of purgatorial "Workhouse," where his labors, at first very arduous, become satisfying little by little, not because they change but because Niggle does. He develops a kind of Zen-like discipline and detachment. Then, after a spate of particularly back-breaking work, he is told to take complete rest. Lying in the dark, he overhears two Voices discussing his "case." Eventually they conclude it is time for some "gentle treatment;" Niggle awakes the next day to be sent on a train to a little station where he finds a bicycle and a path.

The bicycle was rolling along over a marvellous turf. It was green and close; and yet he could see every blade distinctly. He seemed to remember having seen or dreamed of that sweep of grass somewhere or other. The curves of the land were familiar somehow. Yes: the ground was becoming level, as it should, and now, of course, it was beginning to rise again. A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle.

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.

"It's a gift!" he said.

Niggle has found himself in his own art, his art perfected, as it were, by grace. He has been placed there, not by his own design, like the narrator of Morel, nor in a closed universe that repeats endlessly, but in a real world that opens endlessly upon more and more. Even in his original painting, Niggle had included far in the distance mountains; these now become the sign of a threshold to a world beyond his own subcreation, but with which that subcreation is continuous.

There were the Mountains in the background. They did get nearer, very slowly. They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.

Like the thousand-year battery Eileen Joy imagines running the feedback-machine of mourning, all the fame of even the best art has its limit. A tiny corner of Niggle's original canvas painting is preserved for a while,

left...to the Town Museum, and for a long while "Leaf: by Niggle" hung there in a recess, and was noticed by a few eyes. But eventually the Museum was burnt down, and the leaf, and Niggle, were entirely forgotten in his old country.

The possibility of really standing under the Tree the artist imagines (and we are all artists in this sense), and of hiking beyond the forest into the land beyond, cannot be given by art, although art can imagine it. Eventually Niggle does go off towards the mountains, leaving Parish to look after the Tree and the garden.

Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.

My brief reading of Tolkien's allegory is not meant to be definitive, much less demonstrative. I am only highlighting what I take to be the difference between the highest aspirations of which human art is capable (a hope for a Nabokovian immortality, an immortality "in song" as it were, long-lived perhaps, like the Indian or Tibetan gods, but ultimately destined to find their limit), and the eschatological assurance of the Christian gospel in which Tolkien believed. I am far from asserting that Tolkien's thematics of subcreation, enchantment, and so on, can only be accessed or even understood by those who share these commitments. My own position, however, is that "enchantment" in the sense in which Tolkien conceived it, is distinguished from delusion in precisely the way Morel's narrator is distinguished from Niggle. The former remains hermetically sealed off from the world. The latter moves, like Latour's iconophile, from story to story to story; it knows, as Joy's commends us to know, that "these narratives are never really done, never really 'over'." But of course, for these narratives to really never be done, they must transpire in a world larger than the one bounded by extinction, in which the clever animals must die and the Museum inevitably burns down. Human subcreation may intuit or hope for such a world, but it is not our prerogative to make it. Either we must find that it is the world in which we are already, or we must live in disappointment, delusion, or resignation.

The homeopathic theory of immortality

2011-05-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen famously remarked that "I don't want to achieve immortality through my works; I want to achieve it by not dying." But most of us in the postmodern liberal West, I would wager, hover somewhere around a fond and somewhat guilty hope for postmortem consciousness, supported when pushed to the wall by some platitudes about our work or our legacy, or at least the intensity of our short lives. It is an ancient compromise. From Homer (Helen: "Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us so that in the future we may be sung of by the bards") through Shakespeare ("Absent thee from felicity awhile and draw thy breath in pain to tell my story") to Nabokov ("the only immortality we may share, my Lolita"), the maxim vita brevis, ars longa is expanded into an aesthetic soteriology.

We try to keep up our end of the bargain. Whether to lessen our own pain of grief or to reassure ourselves that later generations will do the same for us, we promise not to forget the dead, to keep a legacy alive, to honor lessons taught or accomplishments striven for. The modern and postmodern mythology is full of references to this sort of immortality, a closely-held belief that "as long as someone remembers," the dead are "still with us," or even continue to exist for themselves (as in Kevin Brockmeyer's recent novel The Brief History of the Dead), but the roots go very deep and the manifestations are widespread. The promise to recite Kaddish. The Día de los Muertos. Our memorials public and private.

And when the last one who remembers us is dead? Here is where things become dilute. Someone will remember them, perhaps? And so on, and so on, our "influence," our "legacy" getting more and more diffuse but perhaps (goes the implicit rationale), perhaps still efficacious.

Even aside from every other possible connection across six degrees, I am certainly effected by my father's high school English teacher; maybe even by her mother's childhood best friend. There's a kind of homeopathic subtext here, a notion that though the ripples get ever fainter, a keen spiritual eye could discern the karmic traces, that given the right conditions one could extract a full profile of a slave on Washington's plantation or a monk in 10th-century Silesia or one of our hominid cousins from the savanna a few hundred thousand years ago. The implication is that experience is a kind of medium with a "memory" like water is supposed (in homeopathy) to have. This is, I suppose, what are called the "akashic records" in modern theosophy.

Of course, in practice (aside from some alleged ability to read the akasha) this is a poor substitute for immortality. It's not very satisfying to say that the "legacy" of my father's English teacher's mother's best friend somehow "lives on" (say, in this blog); or that my own will "live on" in the work of someone equally removed down-the-line from me. But then, the question is, satisfying to who? To our ego, that's who, the ego that doesn't want to die, and is going to. The dissolution of such a legacy is just as real as that of the physical elements of the body recirculating through the natural world. To realize this fully is to "die before you die," a practice that has been elaborated in multiple spiritual contexts precisely as a combat against the tyranny of the ego.

The Tibetan Buddhist practice of meditating (with sharply detailed visualization) upon one's eventual death is meant to bring into clear focus the ramifications of our bodily mortality. There are some vivid examples in The Words of My Perfect Teacher, e.g.:

This same body that was wrapped up during life in silk and brocades, that was kept well filled up with tea and beer, that once looked as handsome and distinguished as a god, is now called a corpse, and is left lying there horribly livid, heavy, and distorted.... No matter how precious and well-loved you were, now you arouse horror and nausea.... once you are dead, you just lie there with your cheek against a stone or tuft of grass, your hair bespattered with earth. (p47.)

At the same time, however, there is always the inexorability of karma, by which the ripples of any cause, be they ever so faint, find their equal-and-opposite effect. This introduces a certain tension between ultimate impermanence and the laws of samsara, in which what comes around goes around. The alchemical aqua permanens or Mercurial water is perhaps closer to the kind of "water" the homeopathic theory assumes, a water in which these karmic reverberations could obtain, according to the "law of infinitesimals" (which says that dilution increases potency). Jung remarks that "The philosophical water is the stone or the prima materia itself; but at the same time it is also its solvent...", and the dissolution he refers to is closely akin to the dissolution of body and ego envisioned in the above-mentioned Buddhist meditations. (I am not claiming either continuity of tradition or identity of intention here, only an analogy.) Medieval and Renaissance alchemy speak of "water" and other fluids with more than one adjective--aqua vitae (water of life), acetum fontis (vinegar of the spring), lac virginis (virgin's milk)--which may or may not be various aspects of this fluid. The "father of alchemy," Zosimos of Panopolis (4th c. A.D.), recounts a dream of a figure named Ion, who responds to Zosimos' querries:

I am Ion, Priest of the Adytum, and I have borne an intolerable force. For someone came at me headlong in the morning and dismembered me with a sword and tore me apart, according to the rigor of harmony. And, having cut my head off with the sword, he mashed my flesh with my bones and burned them in the fire of the treatment, until, my body transformed, I should learn to become a spirit. And I sustained the same intolerable force.

(Note that it is Ion who speaks here of his own dismemberment; the Wikipedia article on Zosimos linked to above incorrectly asserts that Ion performs this operation on Zosimos in the dream.) Upon awakening, Zosimos muses upon Ion as an allegory for the the philosophical water. He dreams again of a cauldron full of boiling men, and hears the explanation,

"The spectacle which you see is at once the entrance and the exit and the process."

I questioned him further, "What is the nature of the process?"

And he answered saying, "It is the place of the practice called the embalming. Men wishing to obtain virtue enter here and, fleeing the body, become spirits."

Without identifying Tibetan Buddhism with western alchemy, one may say that in each case, to "die before you die" is not just a salutary reminder of impermanence but a practice intended to lead to a kind of reality beyond death. (I know I may be reprimanded by Buddhists here, so let me clarify again that I am not claiming this means the Buddhism of any stripe believes in a self.) Eliade argues in his book The Forge and the Crucible that the alchemists were "projecting onto matter the initiatory function of suffering." One need not be a full-fledged Jungian to read such passages as pertaining to the process of individuation or indeed something greater. From the Brahmanas' injunction to understand the equivalences of the Vedic sacrifice to the Nietzschean underscoring of mnemotechnical cruelty, the tradition is that the undoing of the ego is linked to the promise of immortality. To read the inevitable dissolution of individual existence at the moment of biological death as a kind dispersal that makes possible a continued existence is a perennial tendency. "Unless a grain of wheat die..."

As the plausibility of individual postmortem existence has receded until its main popular defense is the sassy "scientists don't know everything, man!" (with perhaps an NDE anecdote or bit of past-life recall thrown in), the immortality at issue here has shifted from the metaphysical to the artistic, and the medium in which most hope to "live" is not a disembodied spirit-hood as ghost-sans-machine, but the material and cultural matrix of memory. Such a chastened aspiration is not, however, a purely modern innovation. The Bible knows well this sort of fingers-crossed hope. "Let us now praise famous men," Ecclesiasticus says, recounting artists or composers, lawgivers or other benefactors of humanity; these are those whose names remain upon the lips of the living, but a little later it remembers:

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

Yet it is as if just this nod of the text toward them is enough--enough, at least, for this sort of literary immortality:

But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant. Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.

I don't claim that this is the only Biblical vision of afterlife (or lack thereof), but I believe I could make a case that it is the most pervasive one. That is, that the dead have no (conscious) existence of their own--"will the dead praise you, O Lord?" (Psalm 88:10). What postmortem existence they have is restricted to, as it were, suspended solution in the praise of the living. Surprisingly, then, this limited immortality, which is the most that cynical reason can permit itself to believe in, turns out to have a respectable Biblical heritage.

The Bible--both Testaments--proves to be remarkably reticent when it comes to life after death. No one reports anything of it. T.S. Eliot's Prufrock imagines a Lazarus saying

"I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"

But in fact, Lazarus says not a word in the Gospels regarding this or any other question. One is left with the impression, almost, that the desperate inquiry "what happens to us when we die?" is not a question that preoccupied the Evangelists. N.T. Wright has earned a reputation in part by persistent (and, in my opinion, accurate) reiteration that the New Testament's promise is concerning "new creation" and not immortality--not life-after-death but "life after 'life-after-death'", as he memorably puts it. Life-after-death, in this sense, is precisely continually diluting homeopathic and alchemical immortality in which we enter the conversation and song that precedes us and will come after.

But we know well that this aspiration is not enough to give us what we hope for. We may aspire like Yeats to "dine with Landor and with Donne" at journey's end, or even to be someone with whom some yet-unborn Yeats may hope to dine. In this hope one still finds the ancient belief in poetry and music as magically potent, which is to say, one is right back at the very pulse of the equivalences. Such "salvation through works," through the memory of the living, is what we can aspire to ourselves. I am sometimes moved to wonder whether there is not something to it; for the old alchemists, with (and despite) their weird imagery, were preserving techniques that generated real enough effects, psychic and existential and perhaps ontological as well. But even if we stipulate that the alchemical dissolution of the self and its sublimation into spirit (which amply recalls the Bardos of Buddhism as well as the Dantean purgatory of the west) has a metaphysical and not just a metaphorical reality, this is not what the New Testament is concerned with; indeed, as St. Paul makes clear, the concern of Christianity begins precisely--and only--where our human aspirations face their abject failure.

Wright underscores that the New Testament, promising a new heaven and a new earth, an unimaginable but bodily resurrection, knows nothing of "going to Heaven"--nor indeed to Hell-"when you die." The Biblical eschatological promise is neither the fond superstition of ectoplasm and table-rapping or of disembodied harpists. Neither, however, is it the diffuse karmic immortality of long-memory'd art or homeopathic legacy (even after our name has been forgotten).

And yet, for all that, "literary" immortality is as it were image of what is ultimately envisioned in the same Biblical hope. The language of these human aspirations is not discarded out of hand, for the Church herself is the wounded and risen Body of Christ.. The liturgical refrain of "memory eternal" is a way of making even the faltering and pitiful hope of vita brevis, ars longa (which is, on our own, all we are capable of) an image of eschatological promise. For this faltering, human hope is precisely what has been (so says the Gospel) assumed and redeemed by the God in Whose image we are made.

This assertion remains, however, an act of faith. No image by itself shows the truth; the truth is glimpsed precisely and only where the image fails.

"Walt Whitman"

The master-songs are ended, and the man
That sang them is a name. And so is God
A name; and so is love, and life, and death,
And everything. But we, who are too blind
To read what we have written, or what faith
Has written for us, do not understand:
We only blink, and wonder.

Last night it was the song that was the man,
But now it is the man that is the song.
We do not hear him very much to-day:
His piercing and eternal cadence rings
Too pure for us --- too powerfully pure,
Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;
But there are some that hear him, and they know
That he shall sing to-morrow for all men,
And that all time shall listen.

The master-songs are ended? Rather say
No songs are ended that are ever sung,
And that no names are dead names. When we write
Men's letters on proud marble or on sand,
We write them there forever.

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

An effort at housecleaning

2011-04-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

I've cleaned up my enormous blogroll somewhat. While I know that I get a good deal of traffic here just from folk who use the blogroll as a kind of digest to see what's new in the theo-philo-blogosphere, and that's a good thing, I also know that quite a number of the links by now are either dead or cold. Doing this clean-up has required some judgment-calls on my part. On one hand, a blog that hasn't posted for a few months is not by that token a-goner. The old posts, sometimes years' worth, are still there, after all, and it does happen that all of a sudden there's a flurry of activity on what you thought was a dead line. I've been pleased in the past to find sites get new life breathed into them. On the other hand, the list really has got outrageously long and cluttered. I've listed below any still-working links that I have eliminated from the main list. My intention is to periodically weed out any dead links and to re-plant links that sprout again. There will be a permanent link to this post atop the list, in "About the Blogroll."

I am aware of a degree of arbitrariness in this but, well, it's my blogroll and it's housecleaning time. On the surreal assumption that anyone cares whether I list them, I urge you not to be shy if you think I've cut you unfairly. I'm a reasonable guy.

First off: there are a few sites for which feeds have never worked, but which are frequently updated and which deserve your attention.

Scrivener's Error
Bloodaxe Books
Edge.org (The online successor to John Brockman's Reality Club)
Thom Hartmann
Foreign Policy Blogs
The Procrustean
Rate Your Music reviews
Bookslut
Paleojudaica

Now for the cuts. I've arranged these by somewhat arbitrary groups.

Philosophy:
Daily Humiliation
Critical Animal
Trauma & Philosophy
Grundlegung
The Relative Absolute
The Accursed Share
Fractal Ontology
New Empiricism
We Have Never Been Blogging
NY Times: The Stone
Logic Matters
Philosophical Pontifications
Philosophia Perennis
Trancissions
Frames/Sing
InNegative
Mitochondrial Vertigo
Way of Ordinary Wisdom
Contaminations

Buddhism:
The Buddha is my DJ
Buddhas & Sages
ThinkBuddha
Ordinary Extraordinary

Christian theology &/or Biblical exegetics
Rain & the Rhinoceros
Douglas Knight
Well at the World's End
Non Sermoni Res
Sub Specie Aeterni
Turnabout

Science / Mathematics:
Edge of Physics
Neverending Books
Biology-blog

Myth / Magic:
Reflections from the Black Stone
Zalmoxis

Politics:
Counter-Terrorism Blog
No Useless Leniency
Zero Anthropology

Literature / Arts:
Seven Corners
Digital Emunction
Frederick Turner's blog
Any King
Fugitive Ink
Blographia Literaria
A Shearsman of Sorts

A few sites have been replaced in the blogroll by their new incarnations:

New Directions Publishing
New: New Directions Publishing

Dilettante Exegete
New: The Dilettante Exegete

The Reading Experience
New: The Reading Experience 2

Hirhurim
New: Torah Musings

American Stranger
New: Disaster Notes

The Talmud Blog (blogspot)
New: Talmud Blog (wordpress)

"I am the King's man"
New: Ethnarchy

As I say, I will amend this post from time to time to keep it (more or less) up-to-date.

Why the dark age looks dark?

2011-04-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I grumble about the division of philosophy into "eras." I am one who errs on the side of regarding philosophers as contemporaries. I don't disregard history, "influence," "development," and so on, but I tend to believe Heidegger and Ockham and Plotinus and Sankhara would be able to understand each other (enough to have real arguments). Of course, this "understanding" must overcome all sorts of obstacles and can only occur now (unless there really is a Limbo somewhere, like Dante and Santayana envisioned, in which all these wise folk are forever discoursing) in the work of their descendants, i.e., you and me. This is one reason why scholarship remains pertinent to philosophy.

One of the worst symptoms of this chronological apartheid is the invention of the Dark Ages and other tremendous gaps in the standard histories. For the sake of the argument I'll just stay with the usual narrative that starts things up in Greece, because at least here we can say confidently that there is cultural continuity, whereas the influence of Chinese or Indian thinking on the west is more difficult to demonstrate. These standard accounts usually begin with Thales or someone, move fairly quickly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, then gloss over everyone till we get to St Paul with some hurried words about "schools" of Stoics and Epicureans and Skeptics. After Paul we again make haste to our quick date with St Augustine, after which, nodding to Boethius, we step into our time-machine and, mating our mixaphors, pole-vault over more than a millennium to Bacon and then Descartes. We may glance downward while in flight and see someone, usually St Thomas Aquinas, doing something-or-other and maybe William of Ockham shaking his head. Once on the ground again we go down the line, Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza), Empiricism (Locke, Hume), Idealism (Berekley), the Transcendental move (Kant), and so on to Hegel and his various inversions (Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) and Frege before we split again into Continental (Husserl, Heidegger and so on via deconstruction) and Analytic (Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine and so on via modal logic).

I realize that my account of this travesty is itself a travesty. I know that a good teacher of history can convey a sense of how complex and tangled these chains are. I recognize that not all centuries are equally interesting to any other, and thus that there is some justification for compression. Moreover, to complain about gaps, especially in "survey" courses and the like, is to be a pedantic bore. You may thus skip if you wish the upcoming list, which is a partial enumeration of significant names of those left out of just one of the gaps. This is the one from about the 6th century to the 11th. I was inspired to make this list one day while reading John Deely's Four Ages of Understanding, where he writes that

The closest thing to a truly dark period in the so-called dark ages runs from the execution of Boethius in 524 down to the eleventh century work of Anselm, Abelard, and Peter Lombard. During this time what was left of ancient Roman educational structures in the western Empire crumbled to dust, and the nascent monastery and clerical schools took time to gestate a new educational blooming.

Deely is one of the most scrupulous of scholars when it comes to attending to continuity of tradition, and I think he is right that beginning with Anselm we really can trace a more or less continuous conversation down to the present day. Continuity is only one of my interests, though. Looking at the stream of European philosophy/theology and its immediate tributaries, it's painfully clear that a great deal is omitted even from a history that attends to scholasticism, if it breaks off with Boethius and picks up with Anselm. (In the passage immediately following, Deely acknowledges three of these names (Ps.-Dionysus, Alcuin, and Erigena), and elsewhere makes use of Priscian.)

Boethius
Pseudo-Dionysus (5th-6th c.)
Leontius of Byzantium (5th-6th c.)
Cassiodorus Senator (6th c.)
Gregory I ("the Great") (6th c)
Isidore of Seville (6th c.)
Priscian Caesariensis (6th c.)
Ildefonsus of Toledo (7th c.)
John Climacus (7th c.)
Isaac the Syrian (7th c.)
Stephen of Alexandria (7th c.)
Maximus Confessor (7th c.)
John Damascene (7th c.)
The Venerable Bede (7th-8th c.)
Alcuin of York (8th c.)
Simeon Kayyara (8th c.)
Photios of Constantinople (9th c.)
John Scotus Erigena (9th c.)
Ishaq al-Kindi (9th c.)
David al-Mukkamas (9th-10th c.)
Zakariya al-Razi (10th c.)
Abu Nasr al-Farabi (10th c.)
Saadia Gaon (10th c.)
Muhammad ibn Hazm (10th c.)
Symeon the New Theologian (10th c.)
Anselm of Canterbury

Most of these figures are at least nominal Christians (quite a few are saints). A few are Islamic of Jewish thinkers (I have actually omitted a great number of figures, especially of the Jewish Savoraim and Geonim), but I take it as uncontroversial that their traditions fed into the main stream of the western philosophical tradition whose history is at issue here. I am leaving aside the other question of the legitimacy of the narrative that centers around "the [Christian] west". (This post was originally inspired by one by Tim Morton on al-Razi.) These names are of varying degrees of obscurity, but I take it that at least Maximus, Erigena, and al-Farabi ought to be common knowledge.

One of the issues that arises in considering a list like this is that many of the thinkers included are more typically considered jurists, scholars, grammarians, educators, and above all exegetes and theologians. The question arises then: to what extent is the invention of "the dark ages," at least in histories of western philosophy, a function of the (anachronistic?) separation of philosophy and religion? For even the tensions and polemics between these are are not, in the Middle Ages, framed in the same way as the modern distinction which puts them in separate university departments where they can safely ignore each other. To fight like al-Ghazali and ibn Rushd, you have to be up close and personal.

Standing down

2011-04-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

I really appreciate the immediate messages from readers who let me know (seemingly within minutes) that this blog was setting off alarms via Google Chrome and RSS feeds. Seems that a blog I had in the (admittedly very extensive) blogroll was (inadvertently, I am sure) hosting suspicious spyware, and my own blog was getting blocked as a result. I've removed the blog listing for the present time. (I won't put it back until Google stops tagging it with "this site may harm your computer," and my own antivirus software tells me it's cool.) I hope it's blessed with faithful readers who know how to contact the author (I don't). Thanks, guys.

[Update: the site in question, Accelerating Future, has posted an all-clear and been reinstated to the blogroll.]

The stone

2011-04-23T07:23:00.001-07:00

We know Good Friday all too well. We know Easter Sunday too well too. The one is trauma swathed in rites that are themselves always in danger of degenerating into sentimentality. The other is an unrepresentable event, proclaimed with an imperative ("Rejoice!") but likewise spinning off layers of sentimentality. Neither of them are really understandable. The death of God, what can that mean? The resurrection -- even more unimaginable. The icon of the resurrection is precisely an acknowledgment that the event is undepictable, and every fundamentalist attempt to imagine "what the camera would have captured" degenerates into kitsch.

But Holy Saturday is unimaginable in a different way, and its resistance to representation has been dealt with not by enwrapping it in layers of custom (whether legitimate or not), but by more or less ignoring it. I am not the first to point this out, of course; and since von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale, meditations on Holy Saturday have become more frequent. When I discovered this book it was like finding a treasure, for Holy Saturday has always seemed to me to be the essence of Christianity in this world.

Both rival interpretations thereof (the "Harrowing of Hell" vs. von Balthasar's suffering Christ, of which perhaps there is a foretaste in the cross-cry "My God, my God--") seem to me pertinent. What conception of the Good is more coherent, more intuitively obvious-- a Good which is defeated by either brute indifference or outright evil but never, ever makes use of power against the forces arrayed against it; or a Good which "triumphs in the end"?

There is no Eucharist in the liturgy of Holy Saturday (indeed, there is hardly any liturgy). In this respect it is, as Rahner saw, a sort of temporal analogy for the normal, everyday secular world. This is a tremendous paradox, since the absence of the Eucharist obviously marks Holy Saturday as the exception, not the norm. An inversion of the sabbath. In a sense, Holy Saturday is the moment in the year when the year turns inside- (or rightside-?) out; the norm of the world becomes the norm of the church, and is recast as a hallowed mode of waiting in hope, (albeit a strange hope, a hope without hope, "for hope would be hope for the wrong thing" as Eliot writes).

Easter is proclaimed in a world in which the bullets fly and the machetes hack, children are still locked in closets, women are still unsafe on the street, and the animals and plants and ecosystems at are dubbed with the euphemistic term "natural resources" while the seas choke with plastic and oil and the snowlines of mountains creep inch by inch toward the vanishing point. In a thousand ways small and great our hearts break. I affirm with all my soul that "all manner of thing shall be well;" but I cannot imagine it. For myself, I am 364 days of the year on Holy Saturday, wondering, "Who will roll away the stone from the tomb for us?"

The tomb turns inside-out. But it will not look like what we imagine.

Tolkien and subcreation

2011-04-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

My last post was not meant to show that there is anything symptomatic, let alone "wrong," with the main trends of Speculative Realism in their enthusiasm for Lovecraft. But the contrast between HPL and JRRT helps me to lay out some of my own divergences. A few people have asked me, mostly off-blog, to what extent I consider myself a Speculative Realist. My post on not being a correlationist was intended as a partial answer to this. My disposition has always been realist--I still remember recoiling with horror from the anything-goesism I first encountered in what passed under the banner deconstruction during my short-lived university 'career'. I loved reading Derrida by myself, for instance, but I hated the hip excuses made out of his work. I loved (and was strongly effected by) reading Sartre and Camus, let alone Kierkegaard, but something in me strongly reacted against the 'we are free to choose anything' line, which always felt to me like the Army's slogan Be-All-That-You-Can-Be, smoking Galois cigarettes. So for me, maybe just because I have a prejudice against contemporary trends, realism has a strong attraction, mainly ethical in motivation. As to speculation--well yeah, I mean look at the name of the blog. BUT: I still found myself ill at ease with something about every version of SR I come across (Adrian Ivakhiv at Immanence is perhaps closest to my own line of thinking), and when I tried to think this through I kept hitting just my own reactions--"yeah, but I don't like that"--until it occurred to me that the common denominator in SR was Lovecraft. Not as an influence (maybe) but as an index. And it struck me that the writer who occupies an analogous place for me is Tolkien.

In saying this, I want to clarify myself as regards certain aspects of his legacy, not because I don't respect them but because my emphasis and intention is different. The philosophical echoes of Tolkien have tended, by and large (which means I'm about to make some over-generalizations) to be twofold. Either readers have picked up on his broadly ecological vision (sometimes with a hefty dose of anti-industrialism as well); or they have embraced some extrapolation of romantic conservativism. The former camp tends to be a mixture of Christians and (sometimes only vaguely) neo-pagan, Wiccan or "animist" groups, and takes inspiration from Tolkien's vision of nature--his trees, his gardens, his mountains and wastelands, as places that exist in themselves and not merely for human domination. (The best instance of this I know is chapter three of Patrick Curry's excellent Defending Middle-earth.) The latter is almost entirely Christian, and takes its inspiration from Tolkien's vision of political and economic life as local, but also from his depiction of military might used in self-defense against an enemy one may need to understand, but not to empathize with. (John Milbank's essay here is a somewhat stark example.)

Both these positions have their critics. There are some legitimate critiques to be made of Tolkien's ecological vision, which seems rather hard on desert landscapes for instance, not to mention wolves (and spiders!); but in general I think critics often overstate their point and I often suspect that they are motivated by something other than ecology.

As to Tolkien's politics, there is no question but that Tolkien was a small-government kind of guy. "The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men," he once wrote to his son. "Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." His political stance, he said in the same letter, tended toward Anarchism, "or to or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy." This curious juxtaposition of opposites led Tolkien to endorse, or at least to pine for, a kind of Cincinnatism, in which rulers could be recruited, and rulers never made ruling their chief occupation:

The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop....But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—-after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—-is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. (Letters, pp63-64)

"The same good old inefficient human way"--that is, the way before Ford, before mass-production and industry. Those who see Tolkien as a "reactionary" are not far wrong, aside from the sneer with which they usually say it.

What both camps--the ecological and the political--have in common is a fear of an enemy. One is is focused upon an impending ecological ruination--Saruman's contraptions, his "mind of metal and wheels"--the other upon a (perceived) impending military or political or terrorist threat to its conception of Christian civiliation, either from within or without--the hordes of Mordor at the gates of Minas Tirith, and Denethor's collapse of nerve within. What neither camp does, however, or at any rate does only secondarily, is to seriously consider Tolkien's oeuvre as a work of art, or Tolkien's aesthetics and their philosophical and theological underpinnings (and ramifications). This is an astoundingly rich field, and what makes for the strongest contrast with Lovecraft, who was essentially a Positivist who wished to savor a kind of thrill of something he knew to be impossible, and so had to construct his tales as a kind of wistful guilty pleasure. Tolkien's aesthetics on the other hand comes out of a rich intersection of Thomism and almost unparalleled mythopoetic and philological acumen. Tolkien was able to write as he did because he believed there was a point to writing--even if it were unfinishable, an anxiety which plagued him often. One can see Tolkien exorcising this anxiety in "Leaf by Niggle", the short story he published alongside the essay "On Fairy Stories" and which he clearly saw as a sort of companion piece to it. This story is important, partly as the closest thing to allegory Tolkien ever wrote, and partly because it is very tempting to read it for clues of how he thought of subcreation in terms of soteriology and eschatology. Tolkien pretty clearly hopes that there will come a fulfillment on the 'last day' when God will make real what we've dreamed or what we have loved. We are not passive, nor meant to be so; I would argue (going beyond Tolkien) that our every moment is a kind of subcreation, since we actively make the Umwelt we live in, and we continually improvise its theme.

In Tolkien's account, subcreation means the making of a "Secondary World" capable of sustaining "Secondary Belief:"

literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. ("On Fairy-Stories")

Tolkien gives an example:

A real enthusiast for cricket is in the enchanted state: Secondary Belief. I, when I watch a match, am on the lower level. I can achieve (more or less) willing suspension of disbelief, when I am held there and supported by some other motive that will keep away boredom: for instance, a wild, heraldic, preference for dark blue rather than light. (OFS)

It's important to note, incidentally, that the example is not literary. This is because a "secondary world" is not a literary or even an artistic endeavor in the usual sense, though this is what Tolkien primarily illustrated by the term. I have found that Tolkien's thinking here can be usefully elucidated by a careful application of the apparatus of a very different book, one of the neglected (and flawed) small gems of American philosophy in the 20th century-- James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games. This is not to say that Carse and Tolkien see eye to eye (they emphatically do not); only that Carse's thinking provides a different language in which draw out some of Tolkien's insights, and vice-versa. (A critique of Carse is still in the works here, one of the many posts I may eventually get to.) Carse's main distinction is in the title of his book. A finite game, he says, "occurs within a world." A "secondary world" in Tolkien's sense is (I would say) such a world. It is not the game, but it makes the game possible. It is, as it were, the border between the finite game and the infinite one. Carse talks of "infinite games" in the plural, their defining characteristic being that one plays not to win but to keep playing; but he does not give any examples of such games, and in the final sentence of the book he declares, "There is but one infinite game." This One, inherently unclosable, game, is what the Christian tradition has called The Kingdom of God. But a "secondary world" qua "enchantment" (In Tolkien's sense) is a finite game enacted as a move in an infinite game. It has reference to the primary world, and is not a turning away from it:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory. (OFS)

This is to say, such things are "enchanted."

Every deep tradition knows that it must make the world to point as it were beyond the world. In the Roman Catholic tradition from which Tolkien came, one is surrounded by visible icons, even as one is told constantly of the invisible God; the liturgical calendar begins precisely with a reminder that "the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour," and dogmas and creeds are articulated in the name of the ineffable. These are not just "fingers pointing at the moon," but fingers pointing out their own non-moon-ness; an ambiguous accomplishment, requiring a living tradition to keep it possible, a tradition that knows all its occasions and apparatus are both more and less than it makes of them at any moment. For any of them--a censer, a candle, a sunrise--is a prop, but also a window onto mystery. Everything is an icon; which is to say, in a certain sense, everything has an interiority (what I have tried to express in shorthand by saying that "objects have souls"), and can tend towards their own coronation in the kingdom of ends. Thomism distinguishes between the subject as subjecta mentis and as supposita entis, subjects of consciousness and subjects of being, and while I do not imagine that Tolkien has an elaborate scholastic apparatus behind his aesthetics, he clearly held that all beings, even rocks, had a kind of moral standing and intentionality, as it were.

The phrase "in the enchanted state" uses a technical term in Tolkien's vocabulary. He is at pains to distinguish what he calls Enchantment from both Art and Magic:

Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief. Art of the same sort, if more skilled and effortless, the elves can also use, or so the reports seem to show; but the more potent and specially elvish craft I will, for lack of a less debatable word, call Enchantment. Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills. ("On Fairy Stories")

Take a moment and you'll see that this characterization of magic is very close to the way Tolkien describes government in the letter cited above, and the way he thought of industrialism as well, a kind of perversion of craftsmanship as it were. Again, the best critic of Tolkien I know of in this respect is Patrick Curry, whose essay "Magic vs Enchantment" spells out this opposition and draws a number of consequences from it.

A "secondary world," then, is only incidentally (I want to argue) a setting for a novel, let alone a fantasy novel. It can also be the rules of a board game or a field of combat or an auditorium stage or a bedroom. What happens in a secondary world is that one is enchanted: the borders between it and the primary world blur. But they do not disappear. Enchantment ought to return us to wonder at the world outside it. A "glimpse of joy," as Tolkien says regarding Eucatastrophe, hints at something in the structure not just in the secondary world but in the World.

A secondary world is a finite game directed beyond itself: played as a move in the infinite game. You see what I'm driving at: this is a participatory vision of reality.

A question arises: what keeps a secondary world from becoming merely a delusion? After all, "the story I tell myself" can also be a gigantic distraction, an ideological rationalization, an aestheticizing prop for avoidance--what Tolkien called "desertion" instead of escape. This intersects with previous posts about stories, which is what set me off on thinking about Tolkien in the first place. More on that soon.

Eucatastrophe vs. Yog-Sothery

2011-04-10T11:18:00.000-07:00

The literary influences and enthusiasms of a philosopher can say a lot, albeit sometimes in an impressionistic, hindsight sort of way. There's something perfectly obvious, once you know it, about Wittgenstein's enthusiasm for American noir crime fiction, and his remark about Kafka--"This man gives himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble"--is the sort of thing only a secret sharer could come up with. Deleuze is very hard going (or often is for me, anyway), but something may snap into focus when you read him with Fitzgerald and Dickens in mind. The cross-pollenization between Goethe and German Idealism is well known. To try to understand Existentialism from its philosophical entries alone is to see only half the picture.

Like most people, I did not start out reading philosophy; I started out reading fiction. I've remained a fiction reader; and some of my earliest reading has remained for me some of the most formative. What follows are some more or less haphazard comparisons of two such writers, and their philosophical fallout.

The vogue for H.P. Lovecraft among speculative realists is often remarked. It is sometimes even noted that this is one of the only things, aside from an entrenched resistance to correlationism, that unites them. I am dubious as to whether, by now, this is any longer the case--the trend has become too broad--but it is worth noting as a shared characteristic of the first four "founders" (so called)--Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Meillassoux--and it bears a little scrutiny. Yes, Lovecraft produced a body of "weird" fiction, and this apparently chimes well with some counter-intuitive results of the philosophy; some of Lovecraft's literary heirs (I am thinking of Ligotti, for instance, or Mieville) are occasionally seen as fellow-travellers, and other names prominent among the S.R. movement (see especially Reza Negarastani, but also, e.g., Nicola Masciandaro) produce work that sidles right up to the edge of horror fiction and sometimes looks like commentary in the margins of one of Lovecraft's lost grimoires. But what is it about Lovecraft and "weird" horror that specifically attracts thinkers of this ilk?

Lovecraft is one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century in terms of genealogy. He did not invent horror or "weird fiction," but he played a key role in its mutation into a genre had mass appeal while being capable of sustaining critical attention. To be sure, Lovecraft's own craft often leaves something to be desired. I count myself a fan--The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is one of my favorites--but even Lovecraft's strongest defenders do not deny that his prose slips towards the purple, and that some of his effects are contrived or absurd. (Consider, e.g., the doomed narrator/writer of "Dagon," scrawling "The window! The window!") But what Lovecraft accomplished--what he more or less invented, and certainly developed far beyond the point where he found it at--was an art of depicting the human mind confronted with incommensurable realities.

In 20th-century astrophysics, a tremendously dense object, the black hole, is theorized as surrounded at a certain radial distance by an "event horizon." This is the limit, outside of which an approaching object can still recede again without being irrevocably captured by the black hole's gravity. Once it crosses the event horizon, its requisite escape velocity approaches infinity; it therefore must inevitably fall into the black hole. This is why black holes are typically said to "have no hair;" there is no way to investigate what they are like, since this would involve receiving a signal from the black hole.However, due to the stretching of spacetime, General Relativity predicts that an object falling toward a black hole will, from an outsider's perspective, never cross the event horizon. It will continue to send ever slower messages back to its listeners. These messages will be endless, they will be slower and slower, and they will all pertain to what lies outside the event horizon. From the spacecraft's own perspective, things are very different; it is torn apart by the gravity of the black hole (presumably-- so the theory predicts).

Lovecraft's narrators or protagonists have very frequently had their psyches drawn into the circuit of the equivalent of a black hole. From our "outside" perspective, they seem to be speaking words we can understand; but from their own, they have crossed a threshold from which there is no coming back.

Lovecraft's only kinsman among his contemporaries in this respect is Kafka. This comparison will no doubt seem like a category mistake, but both men were concerned with the mind in its encounter with something that not only vastly exceeded the mind, but strictly speaking did not care for the mind as such. The difference is that in Kafka, there is only approach, or better, only the idea of an approach. We remain entirely outside the event horizon. In Lovecraft we are, per impossible, given a report of the encounter with the unthinkable. Kafka's protagonists, like ourselves, never cross the event horizon. We receive their dispatches as they read them themselves. But Lovecraft's poor souls are torn apart.

The contrast I want to consider, though, is not between Lovecraft and Kafka but between Lovecraft and the one writer to whom he can really be compared as an innovator and inventor in genre. Lovecraft stands at a crucial turning point for the genre of horror. Likewise, in fantasy, there is no question but that the figure who occupies a similar place is J.R.R. Tolkien. They are a curious pair. Like Lovecraft's, Tolkien's art has been savagely ridiculed at times. Like Lovecraft, he completely reinvented his genre. Like Lovecraft, his imitators have been many, and mostly inferior. Both writers have been attacked for an implicit or explicit racism; both have been noted for the lack of attention they give to sex; both were apparently political conservatives for at least part of their career.

Their legacies have been at odds. A few enthusiasts have been able to reconcile their love for both (I think for instance of Lin Carter). But for every one of these there is an exemplar of the opposite tendency, for which Tolkien, or at least his influence, is seen as crippling and baneful. In this respect, at least, Tolkien stands out: I do not know of any attacks of remotely similar savagery decrying the success or influence of Lovecraft; and doubtless this is in part because while their legacies are comparable artistically, Tolkien's is of a different order of magnitude in terms of sheer popularity--and hence, in commercial terms as well. China Miéville spoke for many, I suspect, when he called Tolkien "the wen on the arse of fantasy." As an unabashed enthusiast I have wondered for a long while at the critical hostility toward Tolkien, probably best exampled in Wilson's famous essay "Ooh, those awful orcs!" (Wilson also wrote a fairly damning piece on Lovecraft, "Tales of the Marvelous and the Ridiculous.") So it was with some pleasure that I read Miéville's brief essay outlining five reasons why fantasy and its readers are indebted to Tolkien. He's right on every point, particularly on the centrality of loss in Tolkien's art, which gives the lie to every stupid reduction of fantasy to "consolation", and also underscores why Peter Jackson just didn't get it. However, I want to look at reason five, "subcreation," a bit more deeply, partly because, as Miéville notes, it is under-examined, partly because I think it makes for the most compelling comparison with Lovecraft, and partly because it is (albeit perhaps by a hair) the most philosophically promising one, the one that underscores why Tolkien appeals to one sort of philosophizing and Lovecraft appeals to another.

Subcreation is Tolkien's word for the detailed evocation of an entire milieu in which one's story is set. One might in fact see it as the fleshing-out of what Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis called theme, a word I have used recently in the sense Lewis gave it (or at least, I hope, a sense connected with Lewis'). One thing that appeals to fans of Tolkien, and has inspired no shortage of nerds in their own imaginings, is the fully-envisioned world of Middle-earth. It may have (no pun intended) precious little to do with the plot at all. This is one reason why, despite my grave misgivings about Jackson's films, I've seen them over and over; it was such a thrill to see Middle-earth (at least, in those spots where Jackson got it right). This was a shameless drinking-up of theme with hardly a thought for plot. A real Tolkien-dork will spend hours reading the damn appendices to Lord of the Rings; bets will be made about which dwarf-lord came first in the genealogies. To be sure, this is insufferable from the outside, but the principle it illustrates in literature, Miéville rightly underscores, "represents a revolution:"

Previously, in works such as Eddison's, Leiber's, Ashton Smith's and many others', the worlds of magic, vibrant, brilliant, hilarious and much-loved as they may be, were secondary to the plot. This is not a criticism: that's a perfectly legitimate way to proceed. But the paradigm shift of which there may be other examples, but of which Tolkien was by a vast margin the outstanding herald, represents an extraordinary inversion, which brings its own unique tools and capabilities to narrative. The order is reverse: the world comes first, and then, and only then, things happen--stories occur--within it.

As is well-known, Tolkien was a philologist, and for his own entertainment invented the languages his various denizens of Middle-earth spoke. In fact, Middle-earth was in a sense invented in order for there to be a place for the languages to be heard: Tolkien was perhaps not completely exaggerating when he said that he wrote his trilogy in order to make a context in which “A star shines on the hour of our meeting” (Elen síla lumenn’ omentielvo in Quenya, if you're interested) was a common greeting. (I've long thought that Tolkien's only peer in linguistic invention, his through-the-looking-glass twin as it were, is Joyce; when I read Tom Shippey's Author of the century I was pleased to see him making this point too.) In other words, Tolkien's thrill for the very fact of linguistic communication generated in him an entire cosmos and cosmology; his plot was at the service of theme and not vice-versa.

But there is another side to all of this. For Tolkien, subcreation is not merely a literary endeavor. It is perhaps not even a merely artistic endeavor. Miéville points us to Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-stories" in which he lays out a good deal of his account of subcreation, observing that Tolkien remains (almost) the sole theorist of this notion. Tolkien's idea, however, is situated in a broader and deeper philosophy of engagement with literature. It is far more widely applicable than just to "fantasy;" for subcreation has a meaning only in connection with creation, and this for the Roman Catholic Tolkien is an expressly theological category. If you doubt the pertinence of theology here, I refer you to the original essay, which explicitly adverts to the Christian story, in particular the resurrection, and by implication the eschatological destiny of the world, in what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe. This felicitous coinage deserves to be far more widely known, I think. Tolkien means by it a reversal of fortune that brings about an unlooked-for and overwhelming good, but to him it was rooted not in any implausible intervention (deus ex machina) nor coincidence, but in the structure of the world. This was why he placed such an emphasis upon rendering Middle-earth so present, so detailed: the "happy ending" needed to be, as he put it, "true in that world," and he clearly believed this to be the application of a principle that pertained to our world, the "primary world," as well:

The peculiar quality of "joy" (Eucatastrophe) in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality of truth - The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. (On Fairy-Stories)

Now if you compare this to Lovecraft, there is a fairly glaring contrast, but a very interesting symmetry as well. Tolkien's eucatastrophe is nearly isomorphic with the event horizon I mentioned in connection with Lovecraft. Tolkien's word denotes an incommensurable good, whereas Lovecraft's characters have encountered an incommensurable malevolence (or an indifference so intense as to be indistinguishable from it); in both cases, it discloses (each claims) something deep about the nature of reality. But here is the interesting thing. As is well know, Lovecraft did not believe in his cosmic beings; he believed, with Nietzsche, that the clever animals will have to die, that

Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear.

One can see why this appeals, if that is the right word, to a modern efforts at thinking "the end of thought." But the salient point (for my purposes) is that this is all Lovecraft believed; he expressly did not believe in the eldritch nightmares such as he described, and he did not think them possible:

The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen. If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. (Selected Letters III 434)

Now in making this contrast between Tolkien and Lovecraft I do not mean to imply that Tolkien believed in magic rings and Ents, whereas Lovecraft did not believe in grimoires of accused lore (at least, that actually "worked"). But it is impossible to imagine Lovecraft himself (as opposed to one of his narrators) speaking of the Deep Ones in the way Tolkien speaks of Elves in "On Fairy-Stories," and there is a reason for this.

In his essay "On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl," (in Collapse IV) Harman notes Lovecraft's monsters and "others" are indeed beyond our ken, possibly inherently; but they are emphatically of our world, not in the sense of belonging to our spacetime--sometimes they do not--but in the sense of being phenomenal. They exceed our expectations and our concepts, and partly by this token are horrible, but they can still be described, as for instance in the painstaking scientific analysis of the dissection in "At the Mountains of Madness." This is to say that the "incommensurable" in Lovecraft is natural. Nonetheless, this incommensurability is not mitigated by being natural, any more than the destruction wrought the black hole would be. Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath are tremendously more powerful than anything human, but they are of the same ontological order as Randolph Carter or the town of Providence, Rhode Island. And this is because there is, for Lovecraft, only one ontological order.

Tolkien certainly held that Elves and Ents were of the same ontological order as Humanity; the trees in Mirkwood or the Old Forest may be in some sense sentient or capable of acting, but Tolkien does not think of them as not different in kind from
ourselves. Nonetheless, Tolkien does believe the supernatural has a pertinence to fantasy; but that is because he believes in the supernatural. Its pertinence however is not straightforward:

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil's tithe. (OFS)

Both Tolkien and Lovecraft approved of "escape" as a function of their preferred genres. Lovecraft felt keenly

The general revolt of the sensitive mind against the tyranny of corporeal enclosure, restricted sense-equipment, & the laws of force, space, & causation....The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality-when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt--as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (Selected Letters III 295-96)

In answer to critics who denigrated fantasy as "escapist," Tolkien wrote:

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. (OFS)

This passage needs to be considered carefully by those who think Lovecraft is the more realist of the two authors. Neither man, as I said, denigrated the idea of escape. But only Tolkien believed there really could be an escape. For Lovecraft, the sense of revolt could only be "pacified." We are always already within the event horizon.

Follow-up post on Tolkien's vision here.

One good Turn deserves another

2011-04-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Before The Speculative Turn (2010)-- around two years before-- there was The Participatory Turn (2008), a book which argues (according to its page in SUNY press' website) that we can "take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism, without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact." As the word "participation" might tip you off, this is more or less my project too (all my philosophical forays--and that is all they are, border-skirmishes--have their roots in either cultural or spiritual motives). The two books make an interesting pair, and as the earlier one has not made a big splash, as far as I have seen (despite some good reviews, including one in Tikkun), I thought I would examine it a little by way of comparing the Participatory and the Speculative Turns. If the later book wears its revolutionary claims on its sleeve, or at least on its jacket ("This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come"), the earlier book is a trifle on the modest side. ("Do we really need another 'turn'?" the introduction opens.) Editors Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman write:

...we do not think of the participatory turn as a radical break with either the past nor the present, but rather as an attempt to name, articulate and strengthen an emerging academic ethos....this articulation is neither a return to previous epistemological structures not a drastic rupture from them, but rather reflects the ongoing project of a creative fusion of past, present and perhaps future horizons that integrates certain traditional religious claims with modern standards of critical inquiry.

This smacks of not wanting to put on airs, but the essays included (you can read a modified version of Ferrer's here), while no more unified by a single program than are those of the more recent "speculative" anthology, are every bit as implicitly far-reaching. What they share is precisely a commitment to "take seriously religious experience:" they neither reduce it to something else (something that would be best investigated by, say, anthropology or sociology) nor do they unify it all under a single heading, some ur-religious mysterium tremendum et fascinans. For Ferrer and Sherman, religion is irreducibly plural. Like the editors and authors of The Speculative Turn, Ferrer and Sherman reject both linguistic reductionism and the Kantian premises which made it possible, and so re-open the question of the status of truth. They trace the equation, by which every metaphysical claim reduces to (nothing but) discourse, back to a neo-Kantian framework that regards the issue of any supernatural source of religion to require either suspension (since what is in question is a noumenon, hence inaccessible) or denial. This dismissal of all contemplative traditions' claims that unconditioned facts of reality are experiencable, amounts de facto (argue Ferrer and Sherman) to metaphysical perspective as ethnocentric as it is materialistic.

The Kantian impasse is at work, they argue, in the tug-of-war between perennialists and constructivists with regards to mystical experience. The former argue that mystical experience is one, that it involves some kernel that is common to all religious encounters, and that this experience is then translated, as it were, according to the cultural accouterments of the mystic's particular context. The latter respond that all experience is linguistically or culturally mediated; talk of a "common core" outside of culture is simply meaningless. Not merely the interpretation of experience, but the very experience itself, must be filtered via the mystic's cultural and personal lenses. Both these parties are found by Ferrer and Sherman to be ensnared by Kantian premises: to wit, the assumption that a dualism must obtain between an unconditioned reality and a human framework of interpretation. To the contrary, they argue, no religious event is purely objective or subjective, neither a discovery nor an invention; it is ontologically co-arising, hence "participatory."

Is this, then, a response to that by-now baneful word "correlationism," which is also traced to Kant's door? Not entirely. Though there is no reference to Meillassoux in the book, it would be possible to read The Participatory Turn as a pre-emptive blow on behalf of a kind of correlationism, the kind that claims a metaphysical or ontological status for the correlation itself. (I have some sympathies with this move, though, so I may be projecting.) Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the keynote address at today's symposium "Here Comes Everything: an introduction to Speculative Realism" at the California Institute of Integral Studies is given by Jacob Sherman, and called "Participatory Realism: Two Cheers for Meillassoux." I wish I could be there. It seems the two Turns have been toward each other. Their confluence should be interesting.

New kids on the blogs

2011-03-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

Two new philosophy blogs have appeared just this month I want to point people to:

Muss Es Sein?

and

fragilekeys

As I write, they have ~~three and~~ four posts up ~~respectively~~ each, so they are very new. Early yet to say what will happen at either one, but the quality of the writing and thinking is high at each. Welcome new voices raising the caliber of the conversation. Give them a read.

Why I am, mostly, not a correlationist

2011-03-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

"If you think the realism vs. anti-realism debate is a “pseudo-problem,” then you’re a correlationist."

By this account (Harman's), I am certainly not. I think the debate in question is not a pseudo-problem but a mystery. One can think this in at least two possible ways. Possibly we are too stupid to understand the issue; our brains did not evolve to confront such metaphysical conundrums. This would be something akin to Colin McGinn's philosophy of consciousness. On the other hand, possibly the issue is irreducibly mysterious; it resists resolution by the very nature of its terms. My money is on option 2.

Incidentally, even Wittgenstein, while he may have used the term "pseudo-problem" a bit at a certain stage in his career (or at least contributed to the atmosphere that made this term welcome), regarded the "mistakes" that language could lead us into as far deeper than what is usually meant by this disparagement. For him, the purgation and self-examination involved in clearing up such "mistakes" was a struggle--one could justly say a spiritual struggle, if one did not fear (or care) about misappropriation of the adjective; and if at a certain moment the question seemed to "disappear," this did not make it a stupid mistake.

I do however think that "correlationism" is a persistent resolution to the debate that cannot be forsworn once and for all, anymore than can "metaphysics". In my ontology/epistemology (and I am suspicious of any too-rigid separation of these), any entity that could "think" the issue will wind up being correlationist; correlationism is, like geocentrism, how the world looks for a certain kind of situated consciousness.
If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.
This remark by Xenophanes, preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies 5.110), did not mean that Xenophanes believed there were no gods; we know from other quotations (fragmentary though they are), in Clement and elsewhere, that Xenophanes held that "God is one, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or thought," (Miscellanies 5.109); "All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears," Sextus Empiricus quotes (Against the Mathematicians 9.144). In like manner, neither should we conclude that, the "human-world interface" being demystified, the question of the interface per se is now moot. The day we bridge the human-dolphin divide (or perhaps when a computer convinces us to ignore the machine-human divide) we will learn again that philosophy is not anthropology, but has only been so by accident, as it were.

Explanation or understanding

2011-03-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

In his Explanation and Understanding, Georg H. von Wright gives the genealogy of his titular pair as follows:

The German historian-philosopher [Johann Gustav] Droysen appears to have been the first to introduce a methodological dichotomy which has had great influence. He coined for it the names explanation and understanding, in German Erklären and Verstehen. The aim of the natural sciences, he said, is to explain; the aim of history is to understand the phenomena which fall within its domain. These methodological ideas were then worked out to systematic fulness by Wilhelm Dilthey. (p. 5)

The first passage (as far as I know) in Droysen where the distinction is made is this one:

According to the object and nature of human thought, there are three possible methods: the speculative (formulated in philosophy and theology), the mathematical or physical, and the historical. Their respective essences are: to know, to explain, and to understand. Hence the old canon of the sciences: Logic, Physics, Ethics, which are not three ways to one goal, but the three sides of a prism, through which the human eye, if it will, may in colored reflection catch foregleams of the eternal light whose direct splendor it would not be able to bear. (Outline of the Principles of History p 15.)

It will be noted (von Wright acknowledges it in a footnote) that the distinction Droysen lays out is not a dichotomy but a trichotomy. It seems to have been Wilhelm Dilthey who made the reduction from three to two, beginning with his essay "Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology." Explanatory science, he says, is a concept that

describes an ideal science which has been shaped particularly by the development of atomic physics.... the distinguishing mark of explanatory psychology is that it is convinced that it can produce a complete and transparent knowledge of mental phenomena from a limited number of unambiguously defined elements.(Dilthey, Selected Writings p 92)

To this, Dilthey opposes an "interpretive" or "descriptive and analytical" psychology, which would show individual uniqueness, based for instance upon the presentation of case-histories, and which would be the object of a different mode of thinking. "We explain nature, but we understand mental life," Dilthey says, distinguishing the respective objects of explanation and understanding; or, again, distinguishing their modes:

We explain through purely intellectual processes, but we understand through the cooperation of all the powers of the mind activated by apprehension.

It is not too much, I think, to see here a crucial mutation in post-critical philosophy. Kant, as is well known, distinguished in the first Critique between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand) as faculties of the mind. The latter is empirically conditioned; all data come to the understanding via the senses, and is organized by it according to the categorial structure of the mind. Reason takes for its material, however, not the testimony of the senses but the very concepts which guide the understanding itself. This paved the way for the Kantian critique of metaphysics, since Kant argued that Reason makes use of the Understanding's principles outside their proper sphere, generating three speculative entities: the self, the world as a whole, and God, and thus begetting three speculative discourses (psychology, cosmology, and theology). Rightly grasped, Kant thinks, these three fields give the reason no objects at all, but only regulative principles.

I hope I may be forgiven this incredibly brief sketch of the Vernunft/Verstand distinction (and I invite any Kant scholars to jump on me here). Before going on I want only to note that Kant claims that speculation arises by the misuse by Reason of the categories that guide the Understanding. Keep this in mind as we go forward.

Dilthey's expansion of Droysen's setup leaves speculation aside; form here on it will be only explanation and understanding that are at issue. The discourse of explanation is appropriate for many things, including many human phenomena, but it will not work for a certain vital class of things we may call meanings. If I hear that the price of silk has risen because a blight has killed most of the mulberry plants in a region, this claim can be investigated by various empirical means; but the claim itself must be understood first. the difference is that the utterance about the silk plants is a product of a speaker, and to understand it is to admit a certain kinship between myself and the speaker. Dilthey:

for the natural sciences an ordering of nature is achieved only through a succession of conclusions by means of linking of hypotheses. For the human sciences, on the contrary, it follows that the connectedness of psychic life is given as an original and general foundation. Nature we explain; the life of the soul we understand.

Last post but one, I cited an interview with Ray Brassier, in which he lays out an interpretation of the intellectual history of humankind (an interpretation not unlike my own, though our evaluations are very different), asserting that humanity has gradually dispensed with a "narrative" view of the world. Of course, where Brassier seems to see this as an unmixed good, I am far more ambivalent; few cultural developments, it seems to me, can be unequivocally reckoned a gain. Brassier distinguishes his own nihilism from that of forerunners like Nietzsche, by insisting that his is a nihilism occasioned precisely by his belief in truth, rather than in its impossibility:

where pre-modern nihilism was a consequence of a failure of understanding – “We cannot understand God, therefore there is no meaning available to creatures of limited understanding such as we” – modern nihilism follows from its unprecedented success – “We understand nature better than we did, but this understanding no longer requires the postulate of an underlying meaning”....Like Nietzsche, I think nihilism is a consequence of the ‘will to truth’. But unlike Nietzsche, I do not think nihilism culminates in the claim that there is no truth....I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition. (Emphasis in original.)

As von Wright notes, "Ordinary usage does not make a sharp distinction between the words 'explain' and 'understand,'" and I do not claim that Brassier must have had in mind the Dilthey-inflected connotations of the word each time he says "understand" in this passage. But in fact, if you substitute the appropriate form of "explain" for each "understand" or "understood," the exchange reads differently. To hold that meaninglessness can be explained, is not the same as to hold that it can be understood.

Now we could leave this aside as a semantic preference, or a finicky preciousness, except for the historical trajectory which Brassier traces, and which he believes is a salutary shucking-off of the religious narratives humankind has been telling itself about the universe since we learned to talk. I want to argue, on the other hand, that there is a way of relating understanding to explanation that can avoid both the recoil from science and the establishment of science as the sole dispositive discourse. Brassier holds that we can acknowledge the human need for narrative but that we can also understand that nothing in the structure of the universe (and there is nowhere else) answers to this need. Indeed, Brassier has entirely subsumed understanding in explanation; his claim in in effect to have (or at least that science has) "explained understanding;" and the question is whether this is the same as understanding it.

Brassier's claim is that the universe's non-narrative structure is (1) understandable, and (2) shows that the universe lacks meaning. This is the sense of Brassier's claim that his nihilism is occasioned by a belief in truth rather than, like Nietzsche's, a disbelief. My first rejoinder here is that one can usefully distinguish between theme and plot, and argue that if the universe has no plot (I have said as much before, though I may partially retract this), this is still not to say one can discern no theme. (The terms "plot" and "theme" derive from C.S. Lewis and are explicated here and here.)

It will be recalled that in this same earlier post I underscored Benjamin's assertion that story was passing out of currency in the face of the rise of news:

Every morning brings us news of the globe, but we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation [Erklärungen]. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; everything benefits information. Actually it is half the art of storytelling to keep the story free from explanation as one retells it.... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced upon the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands [versteht] them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

(I apologize for the pedantic reiteration of what are, after all, pretty pedestrian German words, but I am aiming to show that I am not relying upon translators' accidents, which would be all too easy for someone like myself.) When Benjamin claims for the narrative of story an "amplitude" that the information in the daily newspaper does not share, this amplitude is its contact with what Benjamin in "The Storyteller" calls "counsel" or even "counsel woven into the fabric of real life[:] wisdom." This is worth quoting:

...the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.

(Compare this to the famous Wittgensteinian "practical" account of understanding--"Now I can go on!"--which might seem otherwise starkly different from the Continental-hermeneutic contrast to Explanation.)

To seek counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that man is only receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a "symptom of decay," let alone a "modern" symptom. It is rather only a concomitant symptom of the productive forces of history, a concomitant that has gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech.(Illuminations, pp86-7)

No more than Benjamin do I want to wax nostalgic about times past or indignant about today's decadence, about which I am more or less in agreement with Nietzsche--denunciations of decadence are symptoms of what they denounce. I do believe that pointing out the decadence of an age and the spiritual perils it brings with it is one function of philosophy, and indeed one of its indispensable tools-- because recoil from decadence can cultivate the experience of insight, the "spark" Plato talks about. And even in Plato's day, there was concern that Wisdom--"the epic side of truth," "counsel woven into the fabric of real life"--was dying out. In Plato's analysis, as in Benjamin's, this is attributed in part to the technological media of thought. In Plato's case it was writing; in Benjamin's it is print, but in both cases there is a feedback between thinking and the material medium, and the impact upon thinking itself is always an abstraction from lived experience.

I concluded that post with the assertion that "'Explanation' is simply the mode of engagement that separates meaning from truth." For explanation, meaning is simply not an issue. But this is simply the effect of what Benjamin's account calls modern humanity's no longer "allow[ing] his situation to speak." Explanation in the sense of modern science is the wresting of information from the world, but it is not listening to the world--a phrase that science can understand only as meaningless or at best a misleading façon de parler (I have discussed this listening somewhat here, and what we might hear in this listening, here).

Such listening does not disclose a meta-cosmological plot; but it does (I claim) open the possibility of discerning a theme. This, too, however, is too much for the nihilist, of either Nietzsche's or Brassier's stripe. To them I rejoin: one can stipulate or perhaps even accept the lack of theme in the universe, but I deny that one can understand it. If the bottom line is chaos, or Meillassouxian "facticity," this can perhaps be thought; it cannot be understood; and it cannot be celebrated, except inconsistently and by perversity.

Indeed it cannot even stricto sensu be explained. This is why Meillassoux must turn once again to the neglected third side of Droysen's prism: speculation. In order to follow this further, we will need to think more about Dilthey's abandonment of this trichotomy. This will have to be left for a follow-up post.

But will beauty save the world?

2011-03-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

Reading this poem put me, for obvious reasons, in mind of Gary, at The Ontological Boy.

A Boy

Out of the noise of tired people working,
Harried with thoughts of war and lists of dead,
His beauty met me like a fresh wind blowing,
Clean boyish beauty and high-held head.

Eyes that told secrets, lips that would not tell them,
Fearless and shy the young unwearied eyes—
Men die by millions now, because God blunders,
Yet to have made this boy he must be wise.

--Sara Teasdale

The poem slips the context past the reader so quickly one almost misses it. Subordinate descriptive phrases obscure and postpone the main clause until the third line. When it arrives, it is a simple declarative at the center of the first stanza: His beauty met me. This directness orients us, and "like a fresh wind blowing," it disperses what we had read impatiently, unsure of where the sentence was going until it arrived at the grammatical subject. On the first reading, we do not even go back to retrace our steps. Now we are swept up in the admiration of that Apollonian epiphany of Western art, the beautiful boy, which the first two lines of the second stanza frame with a reference to the eyes. These eyes are articulate, they "told secrets," though these secrets are unheard because the lips will "not tell them;" this curious oxymoron is echoed in the next line by "fearless and shy, the young unwearied eyes." Nature loves to hide, said Heraclitus.

But this portrait, which exactly corresponds, structurally, to the description in the first half of the first stanza, breaks off. Only now do we remember where we were. We were tired, we were distracted. What were the first lines? Out of the noise of tired people working, / Harried with thoughts of war and lists of dead. This was where we had been when we were interrupted, when we had been startled by this bolt from the blue. Men die is the center of this stanza, as His beauty met me was of the first; and like that earlier clause, it is too the grammatical center of the sentence, its first simple declarative. There is a war somewhere; there are, somewhere, people dying, dying by millions. What can possibly be commensurate between these upheavals, these ruinous events that visit calamity on those we love and those we do not know alike, and this unanswerable beauty here in front of us in this face? Men die by millions now, because God blunders, / Yet to have made this boy he must be wise.

The near(?)-blasphemy of the penultimate line is only retroactively noticed, highlighted by the doxology of the final one. It is as though the enormity of one's despair can only be articulated in praise, and vice-versa. But the poem does not say this outright; no more than the boy himself will it unequiviocally tell its secret. Only, shy and fearless, it declares the fact of beauty. It stops short of declaring beauty an unanswerable theodicy.

The poem was published in Flame and Shadow in 1920 and was probably written against the background of the First World War. Boys like this one were being mangled across Europe, in barb-wire and mustard gas. (They still are, your tax dollars and stock options at work.) The contrast between the millions dead and the luminous single one alive is almost too much to bear. Is one mocking the millions to love the one? The poem does not resolve anything. It gives us frankly the blunder of God and God's wisdom in the closing two lines, the "blunder" balanced by the apparent proof--"he must be wise"--the evidence for which is simply the boy himself. There is no other evidence possible or needed. The poem itself gives and withholds, like the "secrets" told silently by the boy's eyes and kept by his lips. The boy is the poem and the poem is the boy.

Theme through thick and thin

2011-03-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

I posted recently on stories, happiness and interest:

the mythological mode of thinking is a compressed way of preserving the significant historical, political, or natural wisdom of a people in preliterate conditions....under a cosmology that is itself also narrative. Science replaces this memory. The language of science is designed for utmost communicability, but it is not narrative. It is, in a sense, an anti-story.... the purgation of narrative from memory.

In a recent interview, Ray Brassier makes what I cannot but read as the same point:

[I]ntelligibility has become detached from meaning: with modern science, conceptual rationality weans itself from the narrative structures that continue to prevail in theology and theologically inflected metaphysics. This marks a decisive step forward in the slow process through which human rationality has gradually abandoned mythology, which is basically the interpretation of reality in narrative terms. The world has no author and there is no story enciphered in the structure of reality. No narrative is unfolding in nature, certainly not the traditional monotheistic narrative in which the human drama of sin and redemption occupied centre stage, and humanity was a mirror for God.
....a project is now underway to understand and explain human consciousness in terms that are compatible with the natural sciences, such that the meanings generated by consciousness can themselves be understood and explained as the products of purposeless but perfectly intelligible processes, which are at once neurobiological and sociohistorical....it is the very category of narrative that has been rendered cognitively redundant by modern science. Science does not need to deny the significance of our evident psychological need for narrative; it just demotes it from its previously foundational metaphysical status to that of an epistemically derivative ‘useful fiction’.

As I was writing that post, I kept re-reading Walter Benjamin's great essay on "The Storyteller," ostensibly about Nikolai Leskov but really ranging far and wide, as all his great work does. Benjamin contrasts two tendencies of memory which, he says, came slowly unpaired from the balance and tension in which the ancient apic tradition had held them: reminiscence, which always moves from one incident, one anecdote, one story to the next, and remembrance, which "is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle..." This latter tendency Benjamin finds at work in the novel, the former in the story.

Benjamin believed that the credibility of figure of the storyteller was fading, in the face of the onslaught of "information" provided by news sources. Superficially, that seems to have resolved in a different way that Benjamin anticipated, for the novel itself has become polyvocal, and, partly enabled by new technology, genres of interactive fiction and metafiction have been invented by writers inspired by the same spirit informing the aphorism I quoted from John Berger: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.". But Benjamin's critique of the mass media remains pertinent. Why is it, Benjamin asks, that despite receiving every day news from the whole world, we remain poor in stories? Because the events from around the globe reach us steeped in explanation, whereas it is the greater part of the storyteller's art to exclude explanation. Benjamin's example is a story from Herodutus in which a captured king impassively witnesses his own son and daughter pass by in their newly humbled situation, but breaks down and weeps when he sees an old man who had formerly been one of his servants. Benjamin argues that this story, told baldly by Herodotus without any psychological analysis, has inspired centuries of comment and re-telling precisely on this account. It is (Benjamin seems to argue) the polyvalence of the story which keeps it alive, and this polyvalence is an effect of its willingness to leave so much implicit--and so, as well, to occasion the participation (there's that word again) of the reader.

So far, we are on a ground very similar to that covered by C.S. Lewis, who I also quoted in the earlier post, to the effect that what is most moving in a story is not the plot but what he calls the theme. Lewis' examples include the vastness and emptiness of outer-space, which hangs over certain scenes in H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, and the "Giant-ness" of the story "Jack the Giant-killer." Regarding the latter, he very sensibly points out that one could not substitute a different opponent for Jack up the beanstalk and hope to preserve the same "theme" at all, even if all the narrative excitement were as identical as may be; the theme of the giant, and one in the sky, is essential to the experience of the story and makes the story essentially different than a story about a subterranean troll-king or a sea-dragon, even if we imagine either of these keeping a singing harp and a source of golden eggs.

As I mentioned, Lewis felt that theme and plot were fundamentally in tension, because the events of plot almost inevitably distracted from theme. It is as if the necessity of having particular events of Jack's exploration and hair's-breadth escapes unfold got in the way of the enjoyment of mere ominous sense of gigantic menace in a world in the clouds. This is why, as I said to Elisa in the comments, music comes closest to giving us, as it were, "pure theme." Jankelevitch remarks (Music and the Ineffable, p.57) that

Music signifies something in general without ever wanting to say anything in particular

The suggestion that music is the queen of the arts is not new; Schopenhauer famously suggested that all art aspired to the state of music, and the late-19th century attempts at "pure poetry" and the beginnings of abstract painting owe much to their attempted "musicalization." But the reticence of music is of a particular kind. Jankelevitch again:

[M]usic is not just discourse fallen silent. The "silence of music" is itself a constituent part of audible music....Concision harbors the wish to disturb silence as little as possible. Thus reticence must be considered a privileged form of silence: for the silence that is no longer "tacit" or "tactirun," but "reticent," is a very special form of silence, one that arises quite suddenly, on the brink of mystery, at the threshold of the ineffable.... What do they tell us, these moments where implications are left hanging? They are saying, Finish this yourselves because I have said too much.

Music is the appropriate instance for nearly all of Plato's mathematics. Plato does indeed hold up mathematics as the instance of knowledge par excellence, but when it comes to applying this standard of knowledge to politics or ethics or even metaphysics, he always routes mathematics through music, which remained the locus classicus for mathematics well into the middle ages. Music opens mathematics upon something beyond bare quantity. This experience is the image of the dialectical periagoge. It is a hinge between a "thin" and a "thick" account of Being, to use Peter van Inwagen's vocabulary. Van Inwagen attributes the "thin" conception to Analytic philosophy in general and thinks its highest articulation so far comes from Quine, with antecedents in Kant's critique of Descartes and in Frege.

The thin conception of being [van Inwagen writes] is this: the concept of being is closely allied with the concept of number: to say that there are Xs is to say that the number of Xs is 1 or more -- and to say nothing more profound, nothing more interesting, nothing more. Continental philosophers have not seen matters this way. (The continental philosophy of being is, I believe, rooted in Thomism.) For these philosophers, being is a "thick" concept, and they see the thin conception of being...as a travesty, an evisceration of the richness of being....[I]n my view, it is possible to distinguish between the being and the nature of a thing --any thing; anything-- and that the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what belongs properly to the nature of a chair--or of a human being or of a universal or of God--to the being of the chair. To endorse the thick conception of being is, in fact, to make (perhaps for other reasons, perhaps in a more sophisticated way) the very mistake of which Kant accused Descartes: the mistake of treating being as a "real predicate." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 4-5)

Bill Vallicella notes recently that this definition is "pure Frege:"

...existence is analogous to number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought. (Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, 65e)

Now if one knows anything at all about Badiou, one knows that Badiou proclaims the identity between mathematics and ontology. Not just the resonance but the identity-- I might say the mere identity. Badiou argues that the mathematics as the sole point of rupture with opinion. To be sure, Plato says that there is the dialectical periagoge, but, says Badiou,

no one can say whether dialectical conversion, which is the essence of the philosophical disposition, exists. It is held up as a proposal or project, rather than as something actually existing. Dialectics is a programme, or initiation, while mathematics is an existing, available procedure. (Theoretical Writings, tr. Brassier & Toscano, p 29.)

I've written elsewhere that this constitutes precisely the difference between Badiou and Plato: Badiou offers us a platonism sans initiation, without experience.

Except, of course, that Badiou knows he must make a place for experience. Hence, the event. But on his account, experience can owe precisely nothing to Being, since what is are simply differences per se. This is also the point of contact & divergence between Frege and Badiou. What is, for Frege, "the denial of the number nought," is for Badiou the count-as-one: a pragmatic step, an als ob, but in any case is "to say nothing more profound, nothing more interesting, nothing more." In this sense, Badiou is like the "deflationary realist" described by Pete Wolfendale in his "Essay on Transcendental Realism" (which Brassier admiringly cites in the interview above). For Wolfendale's deflationist, the word "real" does no work-- there is no difference, for them, between saying "the chair (the number 5, the Eiffel Tower, the Horsehead Nebula, the love affair, the revolution) exists" and saying that it "really exists." In both cases all one does is posit a set and declare that its membership is not null. Note that Wolfendale uses the same vocabulary as van Inwagen:

[M]ost forms of realism don’t know what they mean by ‘real’. The only form that I think has a good idea of what it means is what I call deflationary realism. Deflationists point out that classical realism wants to deploy a thick sense of ‘real’, but that it doesn’t know what it means by it, and so in response they propose a thin sense of real. This thin sense of real is usually indexed to truth. So for example, whereas the platonist (a local realist) says numbers really exist, and the nominalist (a local anti-realist) says numbers don’t really exist, Quine (the deflationist) comes along and says that the ‘really’ doesn’t make any sense here. Quine says that if we take there to be true statements in which we quantify over numbers, then we’re committed to their existence. If it is true that ‘there are infinitely many primes’ then numbers, and more specifically prime numbers, exist. This makes the question of whether numbers exist a completely trivial matter. So, yes, deflationists have a fairly feeble notion of ‘real’, but they’re pretty explicit about it. ...classical realists [have] an account of what the real is. I just don’t think [they've] got any better an idea of what ‘real’ means. This is the difference between having an account of what the real is, and having an account of what it is to have an account of what the real is.

Now Pete does think that he can offer such a meta-account, and moreover that this sets his Transcendental Realism apart from the Brandomian deflationary realism in that he can offer a warrant for our intuitions of the "thick" sense of reality which his deflationists must dismiss. Pete does a fine job of explicating this, but I think he still reduces "thick" accounts to local effects or turbulence in the laminal flow of the "thin":

there are at least two kinds of truth: objective and non-objective truth. There thus is a thin concept of truth which functions as a genus and a variety of thick notions of truth which function as its species. The withdrawal of authority and the attitude independence it establishes is the common form of truth, and the various ways this withdrawal is modified, producing a variety of forms of relative and absolute attitude independence, constitute the variety of types of truth.(Essay on Transcendental Realism p. 14)

In essence, Wolfendale's transcendental realist is what I might call a "generous analytical philosopher," one who wants to meet the Continental philosopher with her "thick" conception of being as close to halfway as possible. In fact, the continental philosopher, as Badiou sees, is always in danger of slipping from philosophy into poetry. This is because any attempt to make explicit what "real" means courts the danger Lewis named, of plot displacing theme; and when one tries to make a plot of theme, the poem is what one ends with. Badiou's impatience with this "suturing" of philosophy to poetry is well known; for him, it is one of the last refuges of theology. One way of describing Badiou's project is as a rigorous thinking-through of the consequences of the "thin" conception of being, with precisely the aim of combating this intersection of poem and religion. Van Inwagen's perception that the "thick" conception of being owes much to Thomism is pertinent here, but I'll leave that thread unpulled for now. The point is that for Badiou, and for Brassier following him, the mathematicization of being is precisely what Brassier names when he says that "intelligibility has become detached from meaning." The mathematical is the intelligible par excellence, free of the last shreds of doxa; it is perfectly communicable (if you know the code) but, qua mathematics, is purged entirely of connotation (and thus, precisely, of the potential "noise" which hampers communication). Indeed, it is free almost of denotation as well. Now Badiou calls this rupture between meaning and intelligibility, meaning and truth, by an old name: the death of God:

the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing....Today we may call ‘obscurantism’ the intention of keeping them harnessed together – meaning and truth. ("A Conversation with Alain Badiou," lacanian ink 23)

Someday I will write a Borgesian critique of myself as obscurantist. For now I am just going to shrug and smile.

The book by David Loy that originally inspired these two posts, The World is Made of Stories, does lend some credibility to this take on religion. As I quoted there:

God is a unique narrative device: he creates his own stories, not being inside any bigger one....God is thus the guarantee that life has meaning, that our stories are meaningful....Essential to the God story is the denial that it is a story.

Brassier's account of

the slow process through which human rationality has gradually abandoned mythology, which is basically the interpretation of reality in narrative terms[,]

is one answer to the Loy's question as to what happens when one concedes that one's "biggest stories" are stories.

What I have tried to suggest (following Lewis) that there is a difference between plot and theme; that it is folly to project a plot upon the universe, but that plot is a function of human psychology (one of many) that opens us to theme. There is no simplistic equation (theme good, plot bad) here. Music (and not mathematics) is the center of gravity for Plato's mathematical metaphors not because there is something magical about music but because it puts constraints upon the purely mathematical, constraints which the philosopher who is alive to the ineffable and to metalepsis must be at pains to respect.

I am aware of course that to gesture thus to the "ineffable" and to praise the implicit over the explicit is not only to court the charge of obscurantism, but to practically beg for a Lacanian diagnosis, with "theme" being the obscure object of desire, the McGuffin that is never the thing we want but always pointing us to the next thing. In fact, I think there's a potentially valuable form of such diagnosis. Žižek points us this way in this essay, which riffs on Badiou's "simplest definition" of religion (above). To think on this closely would inevitably push us towards an engagement with Žižek on Christianity and on Buddhism, but also point us back to Benjamin's essay and his account of the decline of the story. This post is long enough (to say the least), so I'll save this for later. But I want to underscore for now that Benjamin's observations about the rise of explanation is not restricted to news media. "Explanation" is simply the mode of engagement that separates meaning from truth.

"Aiding the enemy"

2011-03-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

I very rarely post here to urge a particular course of immediate action. But as a card-carrying member of Amnesty International, I occasionally write letters calling for the release of or better treatment of political prisoners. All the more reason when the prisoner is one's fellow-citizen, held by one's own government.

PFC Bradley Manning (of Wikileaks fame) has since last July been confined 23 hours a day to a 72-square-foot cell with a toilet and a bed. Now the man is a military prisoner and we do not expect the accommodations to be those of an upscale minimum-security prison with a golf course. Even the fact that he has only just been (finally) charged with any crime ("Aiding the enemy") is not really too shocking. But Manning is reported to be allowed no private belongings whatsoever, to be allowed to receive or compose correspondence under extremely restricted circumstances, he's woken up if he tries to nap. He's not allowed to work outside his cell. He's considered a maximum-security prisoner under Prevention-of-Injury status, but so far no clarification has been given to inquiries about why this status has been assigned. His POI status means Manning is checked by guards every five minutes, and is prevented from sleeping during the day. Of late he is subject to daily nude inspections and must sleep naked. All while being checked every five minutes.

It is well known that forced nudity (to say nothing of solitary confinement itself) has the (designed) effect of increasing the sense of helplessness and desperation in a human being. The suggestion that this is a measure to prevent or lessen Manning's alleged suicidal tendency warrants derision; it is either a gross misunderstanding of human psychology, or a transparent lie attempting to justify the vindictive treatment by the military of one of their own who stepped significantly out of line. I have a guess as to which.

There have been plenty of speculations about what motivated Manning to provide the leaks to Wikileaks, including (inevitably) aspersions on his character, and snide insinuations about his mental health. While I have no doubt that it takes, at least, a good deal of alienation to prompt one to make a decision like Manning's, to turn against a culture he had wanted to be a part of, this is not my concern. I am concerned with the apparent casualness with which the United States military recreates in the state of Virgina the (allegedly aberrant) maltreatment of prisoners that characterized Abu Ghraib. (I know that this comparison will be called overblown. I'm interested in that defensiveness.) I am cynical enough to be unsurprised (though I was for a while ready to believe that the President had really meant to close Guantanamo, as soon as something feasible could be worked out, I am not so sure anymore); but I still have some hope in the ability of enough public outcry to shame its leaders into doing the right thing, at least when there is no money at stake. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Obama need to hear, from as many people as possible, that this is unacceptable. You can write via Amnesty International.

Online support network for PFC Manning here.