Theme through thick and thin

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"

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.

Check that meteorite for arsenic traces

Last December, when NASA scientists Ronald Oremland and Felisa Wolfe-Simon announced that a certain strain of bacteria had apparently swapped out phosphorus for arsenic in their makeup. This was weird--albeit plausible, since arsenic sits directly under phosphorus in the Periodic Table. (An analogous relationship between silicon and carbon is what makes some Sci-Fi writers, and some anticipators of the Age of Intelligent Machines (if there is a difference), think that there could be silicon-based life in the universe, at least in the future.) The announcement, coming as it did from NASA, had a good deal of credibility at first, and sparked a lot of speculation about the possibility that life elsewhere could look very different from life on Earth. But it turned out that the journalistic hype surrounding and preceding the announcement was overblown; critics swarmed in to denounce both the science and the publicity. It got very contentious, and very public.

This time people are being more careful. NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover has published his conclusions--that the fossilized record of bacteria can be clearly read in ancient meteroites--in the respected Journal of Cosmology, and the Journal accompanied the publication with the announcement,in what does seem a teensy-bit defensive-sounding tone:

Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis. Our intention is to publish the commentaries, both pro and con, alongside Dr. Hoover's paper. In this way, the paper will have received a thorough vetting, and all points of view can be presented. No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough analysis, and no other scientific journal in the history of science has made such a profoundly important paper available to the scientific community, for comment, before it is published. We believe the best way to advance science, is to promote debate and discussion.

(The commentaries, to be published over the next few days, can be accessed at this link.)

So let's not have anyone saying that we didn't understand the big implications, OK?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary preemptiveness.

Well, this doubtless says something about the way science works in this "new era" of hyper-connectedness. Science remains (so far) an all-too-human enterprise. Be that as it may, it's interesting to contrast Hoover's findings with Oremland and Wolfe-Simon's. The latter were suggesting that there was reason to think life might look very different elsewhere in the universe where conditions could be otherwise. The former is saying that perhaps life got here from (possibly very) far away and yet could have looked more or less like what we have on our own planet. Leaving aside the question of the solidity of the science, however, I'm don't see why both might not be the case.

Is happiness boring?

A book by philosopher David Loy, is reviewed at this post on thinkBuddha (and you've got to love a Buddhist-flavored review that opens with a citation of Blanchot's Madness of the Day). The book asserts in its title that The world is made of stories. The assertion derives from a slight mis-citation of Muriel Rukeyser's passage in "The Speed of Darkness":

Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

Amod Lele has made a welcome return to blogging, and his first post riffed on Penelope Trunk's question as to whether happiness is "all there is" to life. Trunk answers No; one also wants an interesting life. (Actually, Trunk hyperbolically asserts that one cannot have both, but must choose.) And this makes me wonder: what is it that makes something interesting at all? And is it inherently opposed enough to happiness to warrant being thought a completely different pole?

In what is surely one of the most over-quoted literary openings, Tolstoy declares famously that "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is what makes Anna Karenina's life worth telling, what makes it, in fact, a story; this is why stories that reach "happily ever after" do so at the end. In this world, we experience conflict as the matter of narrative. There is no requirement for a story to end happily, but permanent happiness is nonetheless the end of a story. Without dissatisfaction, without conflict, without tension to be resolved, there is no story to be told. No wonder, then, that Trunk sees remaining interested and being happy as divergent ends. And it strikes me that this is really one of the great symptoms of our time, or perhaps of the human condition: that we are torn between an idea of what is worth attending to, and one of the fulfillment of our being.

What is a matter for story is a matter for memory. Nietzsche claimed that cruelty was the mode of all human mnemotechnics. Christianity, on the other hand, asserts: Memory Eternal, in a mode almost diametrically opposite Nietzsche's. Here is the early 20th-century Orthodox theologian and martyr Pavel Florensky, in his great work The Pillar and Ground of Truth, p.144:

What did the wise thief ask for on the cross: "Lord, remember me (mnestheti mou) when Thou comest into Thy kingdom." He asks to be remembered, that is all. And in answer, in satisfaction of his wish, the Lord Jesus answers: "Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:42) In other words, "to be remembered" by the Lord is the same thing as "to be in Paradise." "To be in Paradise" is to be in eternal memory and, consequently, to have eternal existence and therefore an eternal memory of God. Without remembrance of God we die, but our remembrance of God is possible only through God's remembrance of us. ...

For most of human history, our mode of memory was precisely the religious. In their book When they Severed Earth from Sky, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber update the argument that the mythological mode of thinking is a compressed way of preserving the significant historical, political, or natural wisdom of a people in preliterate conditions. One need not concur with the Barbers' leveling Euhemerism to see the pertinence of this thesis. The knowledge preserved, according to this model, is preserved 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; its principles may be elegance, or symmetry, or explanatory power, but in any case they are not those of story, which belongs to a different order of discourse, at whose limits science sets up shop. A narrative says, this happened. Science says, if X happens, Y will happen, unless Z intervenes.

Science thus understood was the purgation of narrative from memory. Its limits are two. On the far side, there is an irreducible brute-ness to the facts it must account for. Chaitin's absolute randomness is one face of this; Meillassoux's hyperchaos is another. Nobel Prize-wining physicist Robert Laughlin suggests that we may have to entirely relinquish dreams of understanding the fundamental substratum of matter. But on the near side, Latour, Bloor, Pickering, and others have also shown that science does not extricate itself entirely from its roots in narrative; science is also always its own story.

Narrative is irreducibly plural; there is always the possibility of a different story, and in fact some stories are, as I have argued before, incommensurable with each other. Science aspires to a single account, and when we call this aimed-at account "theory," not story, we are pointing out this difference; this is why science would, if it could, purge itself of its own history (for of what interest is it to know that the theory of General Relativity is Einstein's?). But the cosmological contexts of a religion point to an aspiration after a single story, a sort of meta-story perhaps, in which all our stories would resolve. John Berger in G. writes (p. 133), Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one. (The line may be his most-quoted sentence: it serves as an epigraph for both Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion.) What the declaration of "Eternal Memory" pines for is a preservation of these stories in all their specificity, but without dissipating in a mere open pluralism; its longing for a single story, a True Story, is an eschatological promise and hope, not a premise.

A single story, a "True Story;" I suggest this pace David Loy, who says:

Big stories are the overarching ones that explain everything, including our role within it. God is the best example, although scientism is a secular equivalent when 'science can explain everything that can be explained.' Scientists generally agree on how to confirm or disprove their stories, for that is what distinguishes science from speculation. But how does one evaluate the Biggest Stories? God is a unique narrative device: he creates his own stories, not being inside any bigger one. God is the story that trumps all others because the whole cosmos is within it. His story puts limitations on our own but there is the security of knowing that he controls all stories. God is thus the guarantee that life has meaning, that our stories are meaningful. We want to believe that there is a transcendent plot, an all-encompassing storyline that makes sense of everything, that will (or can) have a happy ending. Essential to the God story is the denial that it is a story.

Loy wants to ask us, and wants us to ask: What happens when we realize our stories are (just) stories? ThinkBuddha's Will Buckingham, in the review I link to at the beginning, suggests that Loy, too, has given us a "big story" of his own in this narrative about how we tell stories and ultimately need to let go of them when they cease to serve. (For some of Buckingham's own approach to how story serves us, especially as regards ethics--a question close to my own concerns--see this review of his book Finding our sea legs.) I think Buckingham is right, that the longing for such a Story that will make sense of our stories is indeed what religion responds to or grows from, and that insofar as Loy is right, it's in pointing to the possibility of a story that "undoes itself," so to speak--not, however, in the too-clever-by-half postmodern mode which plays at renouncing the longing, but in gesturing to a world that is more than, not less than, a story.

In his essay On Stories, C.S. Lewis lays out a distinction between theme and plot:

The art of story as I see it is a very difficult one. ...its central difficulty is...[that] the idea that really matters becomes lost or blunted as the story gets under way.... there is a perpetual danger of this happening in all stories. To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series--the plot, as we call it--is really only a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.

Every reader knows what Lewis means here. It's why we sometimes leave books alone for a long time before we read them-- because we are savoring the theme and want to breathe it is a long while, before the plot gets in the way. But Lewis very shrewdly goes on to suggest that

this internal tension in the heart of every story constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life.... In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside....All that happens may be delightful; but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?... In life and art both, it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.

Loy is of course right that no story, plot-wise, can be true in the way our heart longs for when it longs for a True Story. But the question is not of plot at all, but of theme. And this brings us, like Odysseus, back to Penelope Trunk's question about being happy, or being interested.

At one point I might have made an easy equation: interested = plot; happy = theme. Would that it were so simple. Trunk notes (citing Barry Schwartz) that prioritizing being interested means prioritizing having options--i.e., things to do, things that may or may not happen--whereas prioritizing happiness does not. Schwartz is a social psychologist who (like several others, e.g. David Myers and Robert Lane) argues that the plethora of "choices" facing consumers in late-capitalist cultures contributes to rising anxiety. So far, this seems to support the notion that "being interested," at least in its consummerist mode (which descends, I think, from the old vice--at least it used to be called a vice--of curiositas) is aligned with "plot" in Lewis' sense (and along these lines it's instructive to compare Augustine's views at the link just given, where H.J. Hodges reads Augustine writing not about scientific inquiry but about, of all things, stage-plays. Hodges actually has several excellent posts up in the same vicinity about ancient and medieval views of curiosity.) But there's more to it.

The desire to "be interested" in one's life is closely entwined with the construal of oneself as being in a kind of story. Deep down the expanding interest in the "stories" of others is partly a hunger for something else to distract us from our own. There's a legitimacy to this as well as a hidden sin. Are we aiming to be snapped out of our narcissism? or merely to get new fodder for it? Are we trying to be interested in the world, or just looking for another way of seeming interesting? (This, by the way, is a distinction that Trunk is careful to make, in a from-the-hip way, which may be the only way one can.)

In a poetry review I once wrote, I had occasion to cite Alan Finkielkraut in The Defeat of the Mind:

The followers of postmodernism do not dream of an authentic society, where people live comfortably in their cultural identities, but a polymorphous one, a multicolored, heterogeneous world in which individuals have many lifestyles to choose from. They have less interest in promoting the right to be different than the right to have access to the differences of others. For the multicultural means a storehouse of options.

I compared this, at the time, to Kierkegaard's conception of the Aesthetic stage, in which the pressing question for anyone is "does this decision make a good story?" (This is my gloss, not Kierkegaard's, and it oversimplifies things, but I'll stand by it). But one can live like Kierkegaard's Aesthetic man with reference almost purely to what Lewis means by "theme" rather than "plot;" in fact, I would guess this is more often the case. One isn't so often concerned about whether one is really living a series of events analogous to the life of Holden Caulfield or the vampire Lestat or Anne of Green Gables or Anna Wulf, as one is about seeing oneself through the aura of the theme of the world and character of such a figure. What this means is that theme no less than plot can be about the consummerist sort of "interested"; such worlds become just more options in the late-capitalist multicultural storehouse.

I think what Lewis means by "theme" in his essay is very close to what I have called "a world". E.g. in the poem by Auden I analyzed before: the abjection of the line "nothing now can come to any good" is irrefutable inside the [world of the] poem; this is the theme. One can live, or try to live, one's whole life within such a world. But one can also live in such a way that every such world opens up onto another, and another, and another; and ultimately returns one each time to The World, what I have called the indelimitability of experience.

I want to steer clear of valorizing either the desire for happiness or for being interested. Although I want to distinguish carefully the latter from the astonishment or wonder which is the root of philosophy, I think such wonder can be provoked by the experience of interest, and in any case the desire for and experience of freedom is bound up with philosophy every bit as closely as is happiness; and happiness, in any case, is also more than one thing, as Amod's blog post makes some headway in clarifying. Happiness? Pleasure? Contentment? Joy? Blessedness?

But I have gone on for such length about the question not just because (I admit it) I'm a bookish fellow myself and am endlessly diverted by the question of the relation between books-and-life, but because I think the question (and it is of wider application than books) has ramifications for our understanding of ethics:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore 'imaginative literature' is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art--and only genius can do that. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 120)

The question, then, cannot be just that of theme versus plot (and Lewis would not have thought so); but of which theme. Nietzsche's remark about the mnemonic value of suffering is one index here, and so too is the liturgical prayer, memory eternal. For there are themes of misery, despair, Promethean rebellion, as well as of happiness or contentment or blessedness. The tension, not between art and life, but in both art and life, is the tension of time and eternity.

[Update 4/13 Follow-up post here.
And see Amod's post reflecting on the Finkielkraut quotation above here.]

Libertariana

Several blogs that have a far wider readership than SCT have already linked to the new kid on the block Bleeding Heart Libertarian, which if it bucks the trend of dying young will likely become an established go-to site for political and economic insight that has stopped riding the right-left seesaw. I'm going to plug it even though I doubt anyone will hear it hear first, because it's more or less down my alley. The two fellow-bloggers with whom I most often concur on political questions are The Poseidonian, and Amod Lele, and like them, I keep, as it were, a foot in both camps (or maybe I just mutter "a plague on both your houses"). I am more troubled than the Poseidonian seems to be by the fact that liberalism founders upon the question of justification of values (I am troubled because I believe there are reasons to think that this makes liberalism potentially immunodeficient), and I am probably more paranoid than Amod (I am entertained by--and I sometimes entertain--conspiracy theory to what I assume is a far greater degree), which is why what would be quietism in him is often alienation in myself; but in general I find myself with few demurrals. My social conservatism comes from the same place as my ecological conservationism, for the boundary between noosphere and biosphere is permeable and both realms need equilibrium. My suspicion of business is of a piece with my suspicion of government--the bigger, the worse, is the way my kneecap thinks, and while I often argue my kneecap down (I have not mastered the art some seem to have, of writing with it), I always listen. In my Uptopian moods I'm probably something of an anarcho-monarchist, like Salvador Dali or J.R.R. Tolkien, but realistically I'd settle for a constitution and some responsible, Cincinnatus-style parliamentarians (I think the weak point of Badiou's politics is his weird animus against parliamentarianism and electoral politics per se as opposed to in practice). That said, I'm sure there'll be plenty to argue with on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, but (from my point of view) it'll be arguing-with, and that's saying something.

Minor metamorphoses

I am trying some new looks to improve readability on the blog. If anyone has any feedback about this, please let me know. I love the deep-dark background, but I'm told it's hard on the eyes, so I'm thinking of something a little more... parchment-like? (It's hard, because you can think you've got it perfect, and then discover--say, when you sit up straighter--that perfection includes the precise angle of your laptop screen.) Without, however, re-designing the whole look of the place.

There are a few glitches in the sidebar, so please be patient for a bit while I get the colors sorted out. Not all of the gadgets respond to the one-size-fits-all html, apparently.

I hope to finish this molting during the next week or so.

Music of the Arab revolutions

I've argued many times that music is the intersection par excellence for metalepsis. Plato knew well that music and politics were weird twins. It remains true to this day.

One discovery I made recently is the mixtape compiled by the Libyan political group Khalas. "Khalas" is a word meaning "Enough," and in this context means "Enough Qaddafi." Khalas has been active since 2009, struggling to raise the profile of the anti-Qaddafi movement in Libya; its moment seems to have come. The compilation it has made, however, is of music from around the Arab world--Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt-- fraught with lyrics about the movements against dictatorial regimes. The music is entirely rap and hiphop, all in Arabic, and all protest music concerning the upheavals that are sweeping the Arab world. It is worth listening to even if you can't understand a word; but for some good commentary and translation, you can read a transcript of an interview with Abdulla Darrat, one of the founders of Khalas, here.

To my alarm, the website for Khalas, http://enoughgaddafi.com , seems to be shut down. I hope this is only temporary. The mixtape can I think be accessed here. It's not clear why the site is down-- it's an American site, run by exiles-- but one has to wonder about the timing.

More on the Mixtape here or here, including links to the various artists who appear on it, and ways to stream or download.

Addendum: To clarify: whatever one's politics, I think it is arguable that on a certain scale, the Arab revolutions are potentially a geopolitical change more significant than the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. (Alternatively, it could turn out to be a case of plus ça change....) Be that as it may, I have not always had a lot of time for protest music of any sort, the lyrics of which are frequently cringe-making with resentment wear their populism on their sleeve. Since I do not speak Arabic I can't critique these lyrics at all; but I love the way the diction of Arabic works with the delivery of hip-hop, and the way this once-American mutation of drum-machine, urban discontent, and musical scavenging has spread to a part of the world Americans frequently misconstrue and fear. (It is possibly not coincidental that its origins are in a part of America that Americans also often misconstrue and fear.) Cultures are much more long-lived than political regimes. I have forgotten now where I read that the Ayatollah Khomeini was once asked what he feared in America. Not its military might, he replied; but he did fear its blue denim jeans and its rock music. In a lot of ways I am probably on his side in that--I too loathe the spectre of McWorld. Capitalism will certainly make its move on Libya (and make no mistake, these moves are being considered even now); but there is something in musical innovation that exceeds capitalist co-option.

Beauty will yet save the world; but it won't be pretty.

Two late obituaries: Julius T. Fraser (1923-2010); Matthew Lipman (1922-2010)

I am sorry to say that I am very late in learning of the deaths of two philosophers, almost exact contemporaries, who ought to be more well-known. J.T. Fraser died last November; Matthew Lipman last December.

A moving memoir of Fraser can be read here on Frederick Turner's blog (Fraser's work on time informs Turner's aesthetics from the ground up, especially in Beauty: the value of values.)

Fraser's books on time were some of the first books of philosophy I stumbled upon in my local library growing up. Fraser argued that time is not a single thing; it is a whole series or hierarchy of different temporalities which all serve to mediate or resolve tensions of the previous level. Energy flies from itself at lightspeed and is (as per Einstein) literally timeless; in its coalescence, matter enabled things to happen; but of course, at the cost of any particular form being destructible. Life emerges in part as a navigation of just this difficulty, with its drive to reproduce, whereby the template of life, so to speak, survives its material base. Consciousness itself arises as yet another wrinkle in this same dialectic.

From all this, it would be hard to avoid the impression that Fraser's work presents a kind of evolutionary Hegelianism. There's a certain truth to such a summary, but like any summary it leaves out the essential. In fact, Fraser's philosophy seems (to me) far more inspired by a close study of 20th-century physics than German idealism. Fraser founded the International Society for the Study of Time, which has continued this grounding in interdisciplinary studies and empirical research.

It is worth noting that another starting-place for Fraser was von Uexküll, from whose concept of umwelt Fraser derived his emphasis upon the experiential aspect of whatever temporal level was in question. It's worth pointing out, given that a number of SCT readers are currently reading Graham Harman, that Fraser speaks explicitly of the umwelts of nonliving objects. At the same time, Fraser remains a Kantian when he says,

it is obvious that a world of distinct and only partially overlapping umwelts--of young children, birds, viruses, molecules--are still features of ourumwelt. ...they may be taken as real only to the extent that we can know and comprehend them. There is nothing inconsistent about the situation. It is the conscious human mind that searches for order among inorganic and organic phenomena, then writes natural philosophies about them; it is not the other way around. It is we who are capable of thinking ourselves into the position of radiation, particles, or field mice, and of outlining the boundaries of their universes to the limits of our capacities. (The Genesis and Evolution of Time, p. 23.)

This avowal of the uniqueness of thinking is also the conclusion of Matthew Lipman:

To me, the most interesting thing in the whole world is thinking. I know that lots of other things are also very important and wonderful, like electricity, and magnetism and gravitation. But although we understand them, they can't understand us. So thinking must be something very special.

This citation is from Lipman's first novel, Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery. Harry is a fifth grader, and he writes the foregoing sentences in a report on "The Most Interesting Thing in the World." Matthew Lipman was a pioneer in philosophy. He did not (as far as I know) write any revolutionary interpretation of Kant or Aurobindo; his innovation was not so much in what he taught as in who he taught it to. Frustrated by the apparent incapacity of college students to engage in critical thinking (this was in the late 1960's), Lipman left Columbia University to found the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, hoping that teaching philosophy to grade school students would cultivate the capacity for critical thinking he found lacking in his undergrads.

To this end, Lipman wrote several novels aimed at pre-teens, as well lobbying strenuously for the teaching of philosophy to children. He insisted that kids as young as 6 or 7 years old could learn to reflect critically. This is sometimes held to be argued contra Piaget and others, who maintained that this intellectual capacity did not usually come into play until later; but in fact, much of Lipman's practical work is addressed to children at about age 10 or 12, when (according to Piaget) children start to acquire this facility. His work has since had worldwide success. (I initially learned of Lipman via the blog of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, which coincidentally is located in my own city of Seattle.) One can see a number of videos on philosophy for children online (E.g. here; the link is to the first of seven parts of a film featuring Lipman; the other parts can be found following it. The sound quality is bad; but there are other videos linked as well.) Lipman's hope to cultivate critical thinking seems to have some empirical validation; his obituary in the NY Times mentions that some 3,000 New Jersey middle-school students in New Jersey who took his philosophy course showed nearly almost twice the academic progress in a year as their "non-philosophical" peers. I am not especially eager to validate philosophy as an adjunct to "academic achievement" in general, but as a teacher of school-children I can confirm what probably ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it: children are born to philosophize, and what's more, ask far more ambitious questions than most grad students.

You can read a couple of interviews with Lipman as well.

Insomnia: passivity terminable and interminable

A while ago I posted a meditation on sleep, waking, sunyata and the in-itself. It has long seemed to me very telling that Levinas, one of the thinkers under whose tutelage I remain lo these decades after first reading him, begins his ontological investigations with an exploration of the theme of insomnia.

It is as a modality or modification of insomnia that consciousness is consciousness-of-..., a gathering into being or into presence, which, at a certain depth of vigilance where vigilance has to clothe itself with justice, is essential essential to insomnia. Insomnia, wakefulness or vigilance, far from being definable as the simple negation of the natural phenomenon of sleep, belongs to the categorial, antecendent to all anthropological attention and stupor. Ever on the verge of awakening, sleep communicates with vigilance; while trying to escape, sleep stays tuned in, in an obedience to the wakefulness which threatens it and calls to it, which demands. ("God & Philosophy," in The Levinas Reader, p 169).

It is a thematic of the inescapable, of being which cannot be declined because it does not belong to intentionality but rather vice-versa (Levinas calls it "formalism without intentionality"). This motif of irrefusable experience, a kind of irruption of strangeness unavoidably close to the self (so close that it is the self-before-identification, I might say), is shared by Levinas with another thinker from eastern Europe, another claimant of Nietzsche's mantle, E.M. Cioran. Cioran defines man as the animal that wants to sleep but cannot. A fine essay on this aspect of Cioran's thought showed up late last year on the blog Heterodoxia; I just noticed it. There is also an excellent post on Cioran at Dark Chemistry.

A common response to Cioran is recoil from his unremitting pessimism. His philosophy is indeed a litany of refusals of consolation. He does not so much parry as laugh (bitterly) at every proffered reason to prefer existence to nothingness. Cioran's philosophy is a modern restatement of the wisdom of Silenus: the best thing for man is not to be born, and the next-best is to die soon; or it would be, if only, if only. "We have lost, being born, as much as we will lose dying," he muses. And again: "It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

At first glance one might think Cioran's a spirit very close to the antipodes of my own, I who praise Rousseau and Leibniz precisely for their optimism (the optimism Voltaire found it so easy to lampoon). And yet, not just the articulation of his anti-vision, not just the "passion" with which he held it, incites my admiration. Nor is it just the mockery he directs at the pretensions of human prometheanism that make me want to make occasional common cause with him. It is rather the absolute commitment with which he follows the insight of, the wisdom of, suffering. Cioran's mother once told him that, had she known how unhappy he owuld be, she would have aborted him. And yet Cioran followed his despair not to depths, but to (as the title of his first book puts it) heights.

Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism was in part that it offered a soteriology of sleep. He believed that the turn of Europe toward the longing for nirvana was a losing of nerve in the face of existence, a symptom of nihilism. One can certainly critique this view of Buddhism, the very name of which derives from the Sanskrit word for awake. But however well or poorly Nietzsche mis-read the Buddha, his take on the First Noble Truth seems pretty solid. "Life is dukkha," suffering, thirst, craving, discomfiture. To the will to end suffering, (the Third Noble Truth), Nietzsche rejoined instead with a paean to suffering:

Man, as the animal that is most courageous, most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering as such: he wants it, even seeks it out, provided one shows him some meaning in it, some wherefore of suffering.(Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, 28)

You want, if possible - and there is no more insane "if possible" - to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible - that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? ...whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it--has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (Beyond Good & Evil,"Our Virtues")

Nietzsche was, however, a better Buddhist than he knew; for the Dharma would direct one not away from one's suffering but back to it, with eyes wide open and mind attentive. As for his stipulation that human beings can will suffering "provided one shows him some meaning in it," we will come back to this.

The word suffer means, strictly speaking, to experience or to undergo (the su- is derived from the Latin sub-; compare the end of the prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Thus began Zarathustra's going-under," untergehen.) Strictly speaking, to suffer can be absolutely neutral in meaning. To be sure, dukkha has some strong negative connotations; but what this ought to suggest to us is that there is a fundamentally traumatic dimension to all experience whatsoever. This is why the Christian tradition refers to Christ's passion, the rendering of Christ as utterly subject; this is why this Passion is held to redeem created nature (and not, incidentally, only human nature) which, as a craving for experience which tends asymptotically towards non-being, is an inability to shut itself off.

I am thinking this to some degree alongside Michael Austin's thoughts on structuralism, which he defines as (among other things),

a system which says that reality is inherently antagonistic, and that the human being must shield itself from the trauma of the Real. This is done through the construction of meaning.

This should be thought in dialogue with a renewed reflection on aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime. As will be recalled, Burke considered the sublime to be precisely a kind of trauma--he calls the delight it occasions a "negative pain"--and Kant also remarks on the way in which the sublime is an incitement to a sort of fear. I would say, following a line I've tried to sketch before, that this involves a "summons" (to use Levinas' term) to rise to the occasion of one's own being; but also an anxiety that one will fail (will "miss the mark," in the Christian sense of sin).

Now obviously there can be more than one defense against trauma, even if one concedes (as Austin does not) that the Real just is traumatic. (I don't concede this either, but I come closer.) For instance, one might try, not to construct meaning, but to withdraw from the whole shebang. In this respect, Cioran takes insomnia to be the very mark of the human; man is the animal that wants to sleep and cannot. This incapacity to withdraw from passivity, this ultra-passivity, is very close to what Levinas also saw; and it is what Harman makes the sine qua non of relation: for an object to have a psyche is for it to be in relation, and this means for the object to be in the interior of a larger one. An entity which is furthest "outside" is (for that moment, and contingently) what Harman calls dormant, with advised reference to the connotations of sleep which we get in this loan-word from French. But note that this furthest-outside mirrors, in a strange way, the "withdrawing" of the object-in-itself in Harman's ontology (the notorious "molten interior" of objects).

I'll go on record here as recoiling from Harman's notion of the dormant object, an object that has no relations whatsoever. We can think of this, Harman says, as

an infinite regress downward in the world, with no tiniest layer of microparticle bringing an end to the chain of beings. But the same does not hold in reverse.... Imagine an ocean without a bottom, but with a turbulent surface where certain drops of water have neighbors below but none above. This is the model of the world that has resulted from our previous discussion.

This concept strikes me as almost brutal, a conceptual guillotining of a chain of relations that would otherwise be seen to obtain. To be sure, Harman has his reasons; he wants to decline the notion of a complete inter-relatedness of the world:

The idea of a universe as a whole actually seems like a fruitless abstraction, and there is some autonomy for the various different parts of the cosmos, all of which require work to be interwoven together, which proves that they are not already interwoven.

This refusal of the Whole, characteristic of a strain of postmodern philosophy, is a theme that links Harman to thinkers with whom he has, otherwise, considerable distance, including Badiou, Deleuze, and Derrida. On the other hand, the notion of work to be done to accomplish the interweaving, does I think capture something right, a pragmatist streak in Harman quite congenial to the process-theology inspired by his hero Whitehead. I cannot concede to Harman that the notion of the Whole is a barren one, a "fruitless abstraction," but I can acknowledge it as an orientation instead of a point of departure.

To wrap up this, as usual, widely-cast net of a post, I want to consider two sub-themes here. First is that there is a strange echo here of a thematic from Bergson. (Incidentally, we need to think Bergson in a way other than merely via Deleuze, not because Deleuze's influence is baneful but because any single reading of a philosopher is always reductive. Yet another reason to hope to see Jankelevitch's book on Bergson translated-- or even Benda's.) I want to tentatively suggest that the way Harman's withdrawing interior, refusing all relation, bends around Klein-bottle like to meet his dormant object, exterior to all others, is a curious example of what Bergson critiqued when he remarked that time had been "spatialized" in philosophy, that it had been thought on the model of space and not in its own terms (which he attempted to do especially in Time and Free Will). Harman goes some way toward this in his thinking of time, space, eidos, and essence as Heidegger's Fourfold. The recovery of an "exteriority" other than spatial is one of the grounding intuitions of Levinas (Totality and Infinity is subtitled "an essay on exteriority"); see especially his remarks on Bergson in Ethics and Infinity. Also, in denying (in the same essay) that dormancy is at all like death (the horizon of the future), Harman is both very close to and veering away from Levinas. Like almost everything in this post, this needs to be spelled out more fully.

The second point is that Austin wants to argue against what he's calling structuralism, a label he uses to describe a philosophy that sees meaning as essentially the provenance of the human. Austin lists Nietzsche among his thinkers "who insist that meaning is deeper than humanity and extends to all life," but I see Nietzsche (at least in the citations above) as standing in the middle of the stream that claims human beings weave meaning in direct response to the suffering that is inevitably theirs; he simply asserts that we ought to keep suffering, as it were precisely for this reason.

While I've asserted above that there is a traumatic aspect to experience per se (though the mention of Longinus, Burke, or Kant, on the sublime ought to alert us that this trauma is not mere suffering), I do not claim that humans are the inventors of meaning, whether we think of this meaning as more or less sufficient (like Cassirer) or falling pitifully short (like Cioran); and I concur with Austin that this notion is to be resisted. But I see structuralism, not as a philosophy that construes the real as trauma, but rather as the philosophy that articulates the experience of trauma thus universalized. There is a sense in which structuralism (a la Austin) is simply philosophy as such: that is, if we acknowledge the force of the Socratic claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," as an answer to the Silenic claim that "not to be born is the best for man, and next best is to die soon." It is not necessary to consider human ingenuity the only source of meaning to admit either that meaning is a stay against trauma (pace Austin, the nonhuman world experiences dukkha galore), or to see the possibility that "examination" may be the way human beings make meaning.

Of course, there remains the question of whether it succeeds in answering the question, or merely of posing it. The Buddha (whose title, I have underscored before, means simply "awake") would suggest that insomnia, whether thought a la Levinas or Cioran, may be only the hither side of another sort of awakening altogether.

We have still never been modern, and now it's too late

Tim Morton pulls on his big-ideas boots with a post that is going to make certain naysayers roll their eyes.

He lines up colonialism, correlationism, and capitalism, with its ecological mayhem as fallout. These "three C's," I'm tempted to call them, he construes as symptoms of a single meta-phenomenon (though he doesn't put it quite like this). Then to each of these, he opposes some very recent occurrence:

1) Revolutions in the name of universal human values from which the orientalist West excluded the other for two centuries, thus making those places such as Egypt suddenly emerge in front of the West
2) The rise of anti-correlationist forms of speculative realism
3) Global warming and the emerging reaction to it as a genuine nonhuman entity

He argues, too, that these three fly in the face of what we might have expected. Arab countries weren't supposed to have any democratic tradition on which to draw. It was deconstruction and post-colonial theory that should have spelled the end of correlationism. And ecological inter-connectedness (relationalism) should have unified the world into a single system of feedback. To Morton, these three phenomena spell the end of modernity, understood as the era in which his three C's were ascendant.

I would rather put it in Latourian, by saying that the last excuses we had for thinking we ever had been modern are falling away. This is actually my single biggest objection to Morton's post, and though I make some more minor quibbles below, it's the one I really care about. In the same way as 9/11 did not "change the world" more than it showed us what world we really lived in, these events Morton lists reveal that modernity is characterized almost solely by the insistence that "we are modern." It's a tautological era. There is a before-and-after in history, but that's not it. (Hint: see remarks on dialectic in the last paragraph below.)

To the minor quibbles, then. Of course, it's as dangerous to hang your philosophy on today's headlines as on today's science. Can this be viewed as opportunist? Yes. Can it be seen as over-confidently assuming that philosophy (and not just any philosophy but this new philosophy) somehow has the privileged lens through which to see current affairs-- or even assuming that current affairs give a kind of empirical proof of said philosophy? Yes.

Well, I say, go for it. Make me believe it. Get ready (of course) for the doubters (to say nothing of the mockers), but do it-- marshal your arguments, deploy your analogies, and ready your rhetoric to persuade. What philosophy worth reading was not audacious? I actually think Morton makes a good prima facie case; I just would love to see it spelled out and made a place one can live, so to speak, instead of just a store-front.

I do want to push back a little. First, on what Morton is calling "congruence". I'm not saying one needs to prove that imperialism and idealism are "the same," but their rough chronological coincidence, or even their having been made to support each other, is not quite enough. One can be an idealist or a correlationist without being a colonialist; one can even be a capitalist without being a nationalist. Or-- can one? (I mean, without paying the price of incoherence?) Do ontology and politics implicate each other (or not), and if so how? (Some preliminary work on this is done in this post by Morton, and in some very good comments especially from Slatted Light, as well as another post on Dark Chemistry.

Second: Morton's three reasons for seeing his counter-phenomena as "paradoxical" are uneven. His political counterfactual is negative ("suposedly Arab states have no position X from which to do this job, but it turns out what they have is fine") whereas his philosophical and economic/ecological counterfactuals are positive ("supposedly positions Y & Z were going to do these job, but it turns out it was insufficient"). This somewhat hobbles his presentation, and I am not sure whether or how it affects his case.

The other push-back is: no, deconstruction didn't propel us out of "modernity," and ecological relationalism did not solve the eco crisis. But they are (one could argue) essential moments in the dialectic. And make no mistake, if you are going to argue that these three C's and their transformations are all of a piece, you are standing on the shoulders of Hegel. And this means (among other things) taking a very long view. Which, I hasten to add, is what Morton's critics will need to do, rather than focusing--as will certainly be tempting--on the immediate (e.g., "we don't know what sort of regime will emerge in Egypt yet,", or even "God! what a topical, fly-by-night desperate play for of object-oriented relevance.") That is, if we are doing philosophy here.

What Egypt tells us about America

Commenter after sage commenter, reminding us that things in Egypt could go wrong, urge caution: how do we know, really, what the "will of the people" here is? What if the demonstrations are staged? Could we be missing part of the picture? Suppose Mubarak resigned and--well, something worse took his place? And so we have the sages warning us to balance ideals with realism; he may be a bad guy, but he's been our bad guy. At least he's not the Muslim Brotherhood. And we certainly wouldn't call him a dictator.

This is politics within the limits of prudence alone. We are reminded, in case we'd forgotten, that there have been some revolutions that sort of turned out badly. Better to wait, in the name of supporting "stability in the region," to see which way the wind is blowing. And then, when the headlines announce the winner, we will declare (with due reference to a carefully-crafted selection of our previous comments) that this is who we were for all along, and offer congratulations to The Egyptian People.

Such a policy is being consciously pursued at this very moment, doubtless spun this way and that by a thousand scrambled cables (which in due time we will read on Wikileaks) pressing for restraint, for respect for human rights, for maneuvering the right (Israel-friendly and "moderate") parties into position. The public face of it is equivocation and what Joe at The Disorder of Things calls

the dark art of evasive support, leaving no doubt that he’s all for Egyptian democracy that doesn’t change too much, too fast, and, most importantly, doesn’t compromise the key strategic interests of the US.

This art is shrugged off as realpolitik, a regrettable necessity, and those who object to it are mocked for being Utopians or at the very least naïve.

The studied ambiguity of the Obama administration on Egypt reminds me of nothing so much as the cautious, step-by-step articulation of a position of maximum maneuverability by Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Ramadan has been roundly, scurrilously criticized by opponents for sly, weaselly, shifty taking-back-with-one-hand-what-he-gives-with-the-other. His call for a moratorium on stoning (rather than simply declaring the practice an abomination), his "saying different things to different audiences," has been and remains the occasion for the most defamatory spite I have encountered in the intellectual press. (I've written about this before.) Most problematic for Westerners is Ramadan's not-distant-enough relation with his family's legacy, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been outlawed in Egypt during most of Mubarak's rule and which is the object of a lot of worried speculation about what might "come next." (In fact, Ramadan recently declared that the scale of Egyptian uprising took the Muslim Brotherhood by surprise.)

I went last Saturday to listen to Ramadan speak at an event hosted by Seattle University. A thronged auditorium filled mainly, but not entirely, by academics. I sat next to a woman who had listened to Ramadan the night before in his address to a local mosque, and I asked her closely about that talk. "If anything," she said, "he was a bit hard on Muslims. He urged us to be at our best in American society. He said, 'I am not so interested in how you can integrate into American society. I am interested in how you can contribute.'"

Since Ramadan is often accused of saying different things to different audiences, I was especially attentive to any difference between this report and what I heard him say. Would he just "play the crowd"?

It would be very easy to say yes, though my neighbor thought his talk was fairly consonant with what she had heard the previous night. Little I heard Ramadan say would have raised an eyebrow in any liberal, educated academic. I was, in fact, somewhat disappointed. He got some applause and some appreciative "Mmmm"s from the audience, but always for saying more or less what the crowd already thought, or would have thought on its own. "Sometimes it is important to question the way in which we ask the questions," he said, meaning that there is not a monolithic entity called "Islam" confronting a monolithic "West." Mmmmm. "Yes, Muslims need to think through their conceptions of women and of gender. But don't we think that the West needs to do this too?" Mmmmm. For a "controversial intellectual," Ramadan gave about the most uncontroversial lecture (in that context) he could have. (About the only exception: he did eventually mention Egypt and said "we must not support dictatorship, anywhere." It was still pretty safe, but it was at least an explicit position. He's said so again, here.)

Ramadan's call for a modernization of Islam is (I believe) sincere and potentially powerful; he is learned and has a wide appreciation of the tradition of the Western philosophical and artistic tradition as well as that of Islam, and bringing these into dialogue is desperately needed. Insofar as this is the case Ramadan may indeed be an "important intellectual;" but this breadth is not depth. Breadth is, among other things, a degree of comfort with ambiguity. Depth is a not being satisfied with comfort. He may in fact not be satisfied, but nothing he said that day led me to feel he was challenging us not to be.

However, this relative lack of depth is not Ramadan's alone; it is ours (mine, that of the Western liberal intellectual). In listening to him, I realized he was articulating the common moral intuitions of modern, conflicted, liberal individualism-- pressing some of those intuitions far enough to be stated in a way that pleased his audience with a kind of clarity, but never really challenging them, never revolutionizing them, nor pressing the contradictions inherent in them to a point at which insight might spark. (I hasten to add: this is an impression based on listening to one lecture, as well as reading a number of Ramadan's writings. Maybe things are different studying with him in person. He was certainly affable enough face to face, and I can well imagine his charisma working well in a seminar.)

It is very striking that most of the snide attacks on Ramadan come from the political quarters which find the Obama administration's waffling over Egypt perfectly understandable. Egypt is a situation in which we have to be careful. The President may be an equivocator, but he's our equivocator. And this is because, in our hearts, we are equivocators. Ramadan's strength, like Obama's, is the strength of contemporary liberalism, and his weaknesses are likewise the weaknesses of liberalism.

I am thinking, as I write this, of one of the most insightful articles I have read about Obama, this one by Esquire's Tom Junod, from a little over a year ago. Junod sees Obama in terms of "positive discipline," a philosophy of child-rearing for Heaven's sake, but exactly the right place to look.

the principles of positive discipline are virtually identical to the principles of community organization, which is what started him in politics — positive discipline is community organization writ small. Indeed, I have heard the principles of positive discipline espoused from the pulpits of leftish churches and also at a support group I attended to learn how to deal with a relative who is mentally ill. They have currency everywhere, especially among the class of educated people who hand out dried fruit for Halloween instead of candy, as the Obamas did. We are in the middle of a profound social experiment in which our assumptions about power are being challenged in the most fundamental way — that is, in our own families. Barack Obama, then, is not the agent of change; he's the fulfillment of a change that is already occurring culture-wide, in every place but politics. That's why the Republicans fear him so much; why, while waiting for him to fail, they just come off as the political party for people who want to hit their kids.

This tolerant-to-a-fault culture, to which I belong and which I will champion as the right way to do things, has nonetheless more than a touch of ambiguity to it. We run smack into this troubled conscience when we try to think about "tolerance of intolerance," when someone raises the spectre of those who "cannot be modernized," when we worry about clashes of civilizations or the suicide of reason. But we also meet it in unexpected places, as when we see an essay like Amy Chua's in the WSJ, or Jennifer Senior's in New York magazine, go viral. The web firestorm which made Chua briefly (in)famous over strict parenting (and, if there is justice in the world, will get her publicist many, many more clients), the weird argument/sigh-of-relief over Senior's essay illustrating Daniel Gilbert's passing observation (in Stumbling on Happiness that a number of studies show that parents are less happy than nonparents, and, significantly, less happy than they think they are themselves-- these are little blips on a cultural barometer that ought to tell us that our relationship to the most fundamental aspect of culture--having children--is very conflicted. And if you're wondering what on Earth this has to do with whether or how to support a revolution in Egypt, I want to say it has everything to do with it. Our liberalism and individualism, our espousal of self-realization, of the "ethics of authenticity" in Charles Taylor's phrase, has--we know in our hearts-- its blind spots, and when these are pointed out, we stammer. Sometimes for 5,000 comments at a time. Maybe there's a point to hitting your kids after all? Or am I just mad at them for getting in my way?

I find that something about the Mubarak regime and the U.S.' foot-dragging over it, comes into focus when one asks the question of whether there is a point to hitting your kids. Or at least forcing them to practice the piano for seven hours, or making damn sure they do not watch one. more. second. of T.V. before they finish their homework. How willing are we to sacrifice democracy in the name of Israeli stability, or keeping oil flowing, or getting the Egyptian trains to run on time? Maybe there's a point to Mubarak hitting his people?

Barack Obama is well described by Tom Junod:

He is the first truly modern president, because he is the first president to govern as if there is no evil, only lost opportunities for good. He is the first post-evil president.

He's a symptom of our cultural moment, of one trend that has been growing and will continue to grow if larger considerations don't crush it. But the tolerant liberalism he represents has a troubled conscience, and a lack of concepts for this conscience, precisely because the language of conscience involves words like "evil." This is precisely where the breadth of contemporary thinking founders on its own lack of depth.

This is where a thinker like Tariq Ramadan equivocates--he cannot quite come out and say of anything (say, the stoning of women) that it is evil, but simultaneously, his thinking needs this dimension. Moreover--and here Ramadan is superior to many of his critics, and many of his friends as well--he has access to a tradition which gives him this vocabulary; but making a close fit of that vocabulary with the liberal vocabulary is almost completely neglected. It is, in fact, an incredibly difficult challenge; I do not fault Ramadan for having made little headway in it. But I think he understates the challenge, and insofar as he does this consciously, this is an intellectual (and a moral) lapse.

At the risk of getting some Mmmm's of my own, though: this is a fault I share; this is where liberalism in general equivocates. The reason Obama looks so awkward when he tries to do prudence instead of vision is because he lacks--or has rejected--a vocabulary for the limits of liberalism. We don't want to seem unliberal, but we are--if we can admit it--scared. (How we envy, so much we try to emulate it, the sentiment heard repeatedly from interviewed Egyptian demonstrators: "All of a sudden, nobody is afraid anymore." And yet, we're a little afraid of that, too.)

Andrew Bard Schmookler contends that the loss of a viable notion of moral evaluation--of good and evil--is what has crippled the left, while the misuse of this notion has twisted the right. Thus the left is perfectly comfortable with Tariq Ramadan's equivocation (it hardly sees it as such), but is ever-more impatient with Obama's hedging his bets with regards to Mubarak; meanwhile (and, need I add, on a very different scale) it is critics on the right (relatively speaking) who lambaste Ramadan for "doublespeak," but who shake their heads over the naïveté of the left in its calls for an explicit declaration of support for the protesters in Tahrir Square. (Please note, I am talking about general positions here, and don't have particular commentators in mind. In fact, I would love to have counter-examples pointed out.)

The people of Egypt are not America's children. America does not get to tell them to finish their homework before they watch T.V., and it doesn't get to tell them that they cannot have elections unless they promise not to vote in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The head-shaking over Utopian naïveté (no matter how condescending) has a point. Political upheaval is scary and downright dangerous. There is no question that things could "go wrong" in a dozen or more ways. But what is naïve is to think that one could be safely on the right side of history. Breadth, here, is prudence. Depth is courage.

Etienne Souriau

From the time I learned the title of Etienne Souriau's book Les Differents Modes d'Existence, I have wanted to read it. I am often impressed by modality as an opening upon metaphysical problems. I consider Michael Oakeshott's Experience and its Modes one of the great (and under-appreciated) works of 20th-century philosophy. Paul Weiss' Modes of Being is one of the books that first drew me into metaphysics; I still remember reading it in the city library (I think I was one of the only people to check it out). And although Santayana's Realms of Being (a classic which still awaits its renaissance) does not expressly invoke the terminology of modality, I think of it as in the same camp. All these works have in common a willingness to have done with a single ontological category, and my impression is that they share at least this much with Souriau. I am gratified to find this borne out by Latour's rich essay in The Speculative Turn.

Three books with which I am familiar have excurses, of varying length, on Souriau. They are the very different from each other. The first is Mikel Dufrenne's Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. As his title implies, Dufrenne draws upon Souriau's work for the ample resources it offers aesthetics, but his work is one of general phenomonology. In particular, Dufrenne draws out ramifications of a distinction between an aesthetic object and a work of art which, he acknowledges, owes much to Souriau's differentiation between the phenomenal and physical existence, though Dufrenne notes that Souriau does not stop at these two modes. Dufrenne also reproduces a table from L'Avenir de l'esthetique in which Souriau delineates twenty-four aesthetic values on a sort of compass rose the twenty-four values are arranged in a circle (as it were on the hour and half-hour marks). These terms, starting at 12 o'clock and moving clockwise, are:

Beautiful
Noble
Grandiloquent
Grandiose
Sublime
Lyric
Pathetic
Heroic
Tragic
Pyrrhic
Dramatic
Melodramatic
Grotesque
Caricatural
Ironic
Satiric
Comic
Witty
Fantastic
Picturesque
Pretty
Graceful
Poetic
Elegaic

Now this enumeration may bring to mind Polonius' description of the Players' proficiency:

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light.

But Souriau is not just delivering a litany, he is arranging a scale or a spectrum, which is why his values turn back around, so that different values are at 180° to each other (for instance, Beautiful/Grotesque, Pathetic/Fantastic), or at other significant "angles," which nuances our usual conceptions of aesthetic opposites; thus, e.g., Tragic and Comic are at four and eight o'clock, respectively.

However, this is a fragment of Souriau's work, out of context in Dufrenne, who, while he claims a great deal of influence from Souriau and expressly traces some of his own terms and applications back to him, is not engaged in exegesis, and does not present Souriau's thought in any systematic way.

Robert Scholes' Structuralism in Literature refers primarily to Souriau's narratological work, especially Les Deux Cent Milles Situations Dramatiques. Scholes does give a lengthy exposition of this work, with its curious combinatorics, its idiosyncratic astrological notation system, and its somewhat tongue-in-cheek structuralism. This ought to give fair warning that the chart I refer to above, for instance, is intended as a prop and not a skeleton key. (The Deux Cent Milles Situations in the title is a gentle chiding of the notion that one could reduce dramatic narratives to some small compass of "basic plots.") Additionally, Scholes has some material on Souriau's influence on Greimas, which Latour also mentions.

One other place I (unexpectedly, I admit) encountered Souriau, was Henry Corbin's book Alone With the Alone: creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi. In a four-page-long footnote (pp290-293), Corbin draws heavily on three of Souriau's books, including Les Differents Modes d'Existence, comparing Qur'anic ta'wil (esoteric interpretation) to Souriau's account of transition from virtual existence to supraexistence, and waxing enthusiastic over Souriau's reinterpretation of angelology, especially in L'Ombre de Dieu (also referenced by Latour). This angelology (like Michel Serres') has some direct echoes, I suspect, in Latour's recent work on iconology and sociology of religion (e.g. here and here). Whether one gets a very clear idea of Souriau's own thought from the parallels Corbin draws between it and his own exegesis of Islamic mysticism, it is worth pointing to this long appreciative notice for the sake of a different frame for reading Souriau, lest Latour's welcome presentation become the default setting.

Until Latour's essay, the longest treatment of Souriau's philosophy I have come across is this essay, by Luce de Vitry-Maubrey, called "Etienne Souriau's cosmic vision and the coming-into-its-own of the Platonic Other". (Open (Scribd) version here.) It was published in 1985 and has not been followed (in English) by anything else I know of. I am extremely pleased to have found this article available online (it initially cost me some legwork in a couple of academic libraries), and I urge anyone interested in Souriau, or in Latour's recent work, to read it and compare it with Latour's Speculative Turn essay. It gives the most extensive overview of Souriau, in English, of which I am aware. This is so even in comparison with Latour's (much longer) article, if only because Latour is presenting primarily a single book, whereas de Vitry-Maubrey is concerned with an entire philosophical oeuvre. There are some apparent tensions between the two presentations. Latour writes:

Souriau fully and truly undoes the Kantian amalgam. We no longer have a knowing mind on the one side and on the other side things-in-themselves., with a point of encounter in the middle where phenomena are generated.... We have phenomena...that finally circulate with their own 'patuity' without having to be accountable to a support behind them or an intentional subject in front of them.(The Speculative Turn, pp320-321)

On the other hand, de Vitry-Maubrey writes that Souriau gives us not an undoing but a radicalization of "the Kantian reversal.":

Souriau accepts as irreversible the methodological progress brought about by the Critique: thought is a strictly earthly happening....But...according to Souriau, the full reversal Kant should have accomplished would consist in positing thought as a phenomenon sui generis (of which man is only the occasional cause) which draws both its form and its content from the existential complex from which it emanates.

For de Vitry-Maubrey, Souriau's thinking is an accomplishment of both the Kantian and the Platonic projects (the title of her article suggests the Platonic dimension), but she quotes Souriau (in L'Avernir d'Esthetique): "Plato can only be listened to by way of Kant."

Of course, this is a difference in emphasis, not a complete divergence of orientation. The apparent anti-Kantian animus currently informing Speculative Realism is more rhetorical than substantive; it's a matter of which elements in Kant one wants to emphasize. I have myself pointed out (this is my story and I'm sticking to it) that Harman's ontology, for instance, is a universalizing of Kantianism--it distributes the phenomenon/noumenon split equally and democratically amongst all entities everywhere. This is not surprising when one reflects that Harman has internalized so much of Latour; his ontology radicalizes what Meillassoux calls "weak" correlationism, that correlationism which admits (in theory) an inaccessible in-itself. One might call it a "Kantianism without reserve."

And just as Kant intended, this move empowers thought rather than stymies it. Latour's apparently un-Kantian Souriau, and de Vitry-Maubrey's ultra-Kantian Souriau are unanimous in their arguing for a Thought that is on its own, its own "mode," which gives rise to the ego rather than vice-versa (this is Souriau's reversal of Descartes and radicalization of Husserl). Although for Souriau thought is an earthly thing, it is its own thing, not to be explained away by reference to firing neurons, Oedipal drives, or Boolean operators. It is--at least, it seems at second-hand--closer to Santayana's Realm of Spirit, than to Descartes's Res Cogitans.

Now there are still questions. No matter how strong the anti-monist spirit animating an enumeration of modes, one still wants to ask: "Modes of what?" Despite my sympathy with a pluralist slant (I am an American, after all), I still think philosophy aspires to a vision of the whole. A real engagement of this sort of inquiry vis-a-vis Souriau's project can't be undertaken on the basis of secondary texts. It is devoutly to be hoped that the work of translation is commencing somewhere. Or, I guess, I could brush up my French, but that's a very tall order.

For those interested in more on Souriau:
A few biographical details, and some account of Souriau's work on film, can be found here.

And there is an essay comparing aspects of Souriau's aesthetics to the 10th-c. Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta here.

If you have access to JSTOR, you can read three articles by Souriau himself:
Time in the Plastic Arts
A General Methodology...
The Cube and the Sphere