Digressions&Impressions

Covid Midterms

I interrupted the flow of my covid diaries (see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; and here) because there was very little to add, and I wanted to use my 'writing time' for other intellectual activities. Three weeks later, progress is frustratingly slow, but there are some changes: my permanent muscle fatigue is gone. (Perhaps this is due to taking vitamins B1/B2 which was adviced by a fellow philosophical, long hauler. I can't prove causation, but I will happily continue with the pills.) I am less irritable around music and other people. We have had a few family meals now. I even went to the movies with my son the other day--Godzilla vs Kong is surprisingly moving and well done movie. After I was floored, but it was a joy to spend half a day with my son having fun; the first time in over five months!

I can spend about an half hour on zoom/phones before nausea and headaches set in. Sometimes I can stretch it a bit. For example, I didn't participate in the PhD defense of my brilliant student Lea Klarenbeek. But I very much enjoyed the proceedings on the webinar. To simplify: she used ameliorative analysis a la Haslanger and applied Anderson's ideas on relationality equality to the concept of integration. Crucially integration should not be viewed as a property of individuals, but of structures, societies, and groups with each other. (Her target is a kind of civic nationalist/communitarian discourse that rounds integration in Europe.) I could follow the discussion, but after I logged off I was floored. Yesterday we had parent teacher discussions on zoom with my son's teachers. After it was done I crawled into bed.

I still have periods of partial insomnia in clusters for a few days, but I also have days of fine sleep in a row. More important, I can read about four pages of philosophy in half hour increments a few times a day. If I go on too long I get nausea and headaches. So, I can read about 80-100 pages per week. (Kind of what I expect from our bachelor students.) Not satisfying, but at least stimulating.

I am unable to do creative intellectual work (unless one puts twitter in that category). But I can edit pre-existing material in thirty minute increments. Currently I am entertaining myself with the idea that I am writing a book on the Liberal Art of Government drawn from my digressions. The book will be a kind of commentary on Foucault Birth of Biopolitics. I have a draft of an introduction and a first chapter that I am circulating.

A new cognitive problem that I am aware of is that I suffer from strange memory loss. I don't recall conversations and I have trouble recalling names/places and other stuff that I ordinarily have at hand. I noticed it because my son was very surprised i had forgotten the details of a school trip (that's the kind of thing I get excited about). And he pointed out it was not the first time during the last few months. When I checked with my wife, she admitted that she had been wondering about my memory. But because I am otherwise so aware and present, she found it difficult to be sure. My occupational physician thinks some things don't imprint unless I am able to give it my full intention.

The NHS has shortened the amount of time for my second jab. So I will be fully vaccinated in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I have had a round of medical screening, and I have been triaged for one of the long haul special clinics. Unfortunately, they are experiencing "extremely high volumes" so it is unclear when I will be seen by a specialist.

Yesterday, my occupational physician took me through the roadmap ahead. Early in July she will make an official determination whether I can return to work in September. September is not just the start of new academic year, buy also, coincidentally, the moment my benefits will be (modestly, albeit structurally) lowered. We have also booked a date the end of July to make sure no correction is needed. She greatly tempered my expectations about what I can expect to be doing. She thought that lecturing might be possible, but when I said that I teach a (rather large) seminar style course in the Fall, she sighed kindly. 

September feels ages away, but after her sigh I was quite shaken. It didn't help that I spoke to a disciplinary colleague about his long haul recovery. He has benefitted greatly from rehab, but his underlying message was that while there is improvement he is learning to live with and accept his limitations. On some level I know that shows wisdom. 

In fact, while with due gratitude to my family (for their support), past unions and the welfare state (for my present financial support), and my colleagues (for their extra work), I view my long haul as an un-mitigated disaster. Even so, I have come to embrace one of my new routines: I have gotten used to not responding to emails at once. I especially have come to see the mental health benefits from not responding to work related emails at once. And while I find it frustrating that I cannot digress on the issues of the day, it's not an unmitigated disaster to focus on listening to others only.

I am not especially impatient day to day about my recovery. Since I suffer very little now, it's not at all unbearable. Because I have withdrawn from most commitments I do not feel much pressure. Part of me does not mind to give up my supervisory and managerial duties. While it is clear some of my colleagues have really had to do a lot of extra work because of my incapacitation (and some have let me know this in rather forthright manner--I love the Dutch!), I also feel things are organized enough that I am dispensable at work. But the conversation with my disciplinary colleague in light of my sweet sighing, occupational physician did rekindle the fear that I may never fully recover my intellectual or social skills. This fear sneaks up on me and occasionally sours my humor.

 

 

4 April 1979: Foucault on Civil Society (Ferguson vs Smith) (ep XL)

To simplify matters, I will take the most fundamental, almost statutory text regarding the characterization of civil society. This is Ferguson’s famous text, translated into French in 1783 with the title Essais sur l’histoire de la société civile, and which is very close to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the word “nation” in Smith, moreover, having more or less the same meaning as civil society in Ferguson. We have here the political correlate, the correlate in terms of civil society, of what Adam Smith studied in purely economic terms. Ferguson’s civil society is actually the concrete, encompassing element within which the economic men Smith tried to study operate. I would like to pick out three or four essential characteristics of this civil society in Ferguson: first, civil society understood as an historical-natural constant; second, civil society as principle of spontaneous synthesis; third, civil society as permanent matrix of political power; and fourth, civil society as the motor element of history.--Michel Foucault, 4 April, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 12, The Birth of Biopolitics, 298

Foucault had coupled Ferguson and Smith before in lecture 11. There they jointly illustrate the claim that according to eighteenth century doctrine, "not only must government not obstruct the interests of each, but it is impossible for the sovereign to have a point of view on the economic mechanism which totalizes every element and enables them to be combined artificially or voluntarily." (280)* Foucault then uses Ferguson's analysis of the relative success of the English colonies over the French in North America, to support the claim that independent citizens entrusted with their own interests (the English) can outcompete colonies that come with big designs (the French).

In lecture 12, Foucault reminds his audience that eighteenth century social theory (to simplify: prior to, say, Bentham) can't really combine homo oeconomicus with the age's moral-theological-juridical views of criminal (and political) subjects. These are incommensurable paradigms -- Foucault puts it like this: "that homo oeconomicus and the subject of right were therefore not superposable" (292) --, until Benthamite reformers (anticipated by Beccaria and Grouchy) thin out the criminal subject so he conforms to the utilitarian image of man.

Faced with the incommensurability (and some other assumptions about the limits of government knowledge), and prior to that radical move, there are three options: first, "the sovereign will be able to intervene everywhere except in the market." (293). Foucault does not associate any theorist or group with this position. Second, which looks like it, the sovereign remains in control of the market, in particular the preconditions necessary to its functioning, but rather than supervise it actively, it controls it theoretically or passively. It is said to be 'theoretical' because it needs data and evidence on the market's functioning and process in order to get its preconditions (taxes, tariffs, laws, etc.) right. This second position is associated with physiocrats, who are treated as kind of quasi-Ordo-liberals avant la lettre. 

As Foucault notes neither of these first two options is very attractive to the sovereign and so do not really ever get tried out. (It's notable Foucault skips Turgot's moment near power in 1774-1776). That's because neither option solves the problem of incommensurability. To the best of my knowledge Foucault's thesis is original. Instead, a different, third option is used, one that does allow the sovereign the exercise, as I noted before, a governmental technology (296), even if, or perhaps because, that technology (civil society) also helps constitute a new kind of sovereignty.

The way civil society solves this incommensurability is by being a the site of an enlarged interest or what came to be known as (enlightened) self-interest properly understood. Here self-interest is not egoism. (The underlying idea being that egoism is always selfish, but that there are forms of self-interest, like prudence, which may be moral.) Foucault, in summarizing Ferguson puts it like this: "there is a distinct set of non-egoist interests, a distinct interplay of non-egoist, disinterested interests which is much wider than egoism itself." (301) I'd have to check Ferguson, but this seems right.

For Smith, this disinterested interest is an effect of our nature. As he puts in the famous first sentence of TMS, "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” That is, for Smith civil society is itself a site of  important, aesthetic experiences (assuming that 'the pleasure of seeing it' falls under aesthetics). The principle in our nature is sympathy, which makes the sight and mutual recognition of other people's passions pleasurable to us. Importantly, for Smith, as Levy and Peart have argued, sympathy is also a means toward seeing each other as equals. 

Crucially then, on Foucault's interpretation of Ferguson and Smith, civil society can accommodate, even be the grounds of existence of, economic agents without reducing their interests to a profit motive only. (301) The other crucial feature of civil society is that it grounds what we may call tribalism, faction, or community. It does so because in it there is free play of both sympathy and antipathy, which makes us form distinct groups sometimes based on shared interests or repugnancies other times based on shared language, values, religion, heritage, etc. As Foucault writes:

Civil society, Ferguson says, leads the individual to enlist “on the side of one tribe or community.” Civil society is not humanitarian but communitarian. And in fact we see civil society appear in the family, village, and corporation, and, of course, at higher levels, reaching that of the nation in Adam Smith’s sense, [in the sense given to it] at more or less the same time in France. The nation is precisely one of the major forms, [but] only one of the possible forms, of civil society. (302)

What's attractive about Foucault's interpretive framework is that community and political differentiation are a natural by-product of what we may call, 'Scottish social theory.'+ This is so, even though within Scottish social theory, humanity becomes (as Hanley, Debes, Taylor, and Abramson have argued) a key moral ideal.

But I think Foucault's framework is too attractive. For, I suspect Foucault is projecting backward a recently popular idea that the nations of nationalism are themselves a fruit of modernity. Let me explain my unease.

To the best of my knowledge Foucault is the first to suggest that a Smithian 'nation' just is what Ferguson calls 'civil society.' But for Smith 'nations' and 'society' are two distinct analytical categories. And within a nation there can be multiple societies, including different kinds of societies (this is especially so in Scotland with its contrast between Highlands and Lowlands.) And, as I have argued elsewhere, throughout WN when Smith focuses primarily on economic analysis, he writes about “society;” when he focuses on mores or political matters, he will speak of “civilized society” (e.g., WN 1.8.39, 97) or “political society” (1.8.36, 96). And 'civilized' is contrasted with 'savage' or 'barbarous.' (To be sure: for Smith progress to being civilized is good, but unlike many others in the age, he does not treat the civilized as morally superior to the barbarous.) 

Now, despite having 'nations' in the title of WN, Smith is not very interested in characterizing a nation. But it is pretty clear that for Smith nations can both transcend different ages (including the birth of civil society), and come to an end. With previous paragraphs in mind, I now treat the first two characteristics of civil society mentioned above, in turn. (The next two characteristics shall be treated in a follow up post.)

That civil society is a historical constant means (and now Foucault is paraphrasing Ferguson) that "the social bond has no pre-history...it is permanent and indispensable." (299) Following the critics of Hobbes, mankind is by nature a social animal embedded, we would say, in culture. By contrast, while it is true that, in general, Smith treats humans as social animals, it should be clear that on my reading of Smith on society, Smith does not think that civil society is a historical constant.

And, in fact, it is worth noting that right at the start of Wealth of Nations, Smith hints, when commenting on the propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" that may not be an "original" principle "in human nature of which no further account can be given;" but, rather, and more "probable" is it the historical "consequence of the faculties of reason and speech." And in another work, on the origin of language, Smith offers an account of the development of the cognitive and linguistic building blocks of culture. So, this is an important difference between Ferguson and Smith.

This, and other details recounted in this post, make me suspect that Foucault did not read Smith as carefully as he read Ferguson (at least when preparing lectures 11-12). See also my note * below. (That Foucault treats Smith's analysis of the equivalent of civil society as being offered 'in purely economic terms' suggests that Foucault is drawing on a caricature.) Ironically, Smith's position anticipates Foucault's own: civil society is itself a product of development. And whereas Smith kind of anticipates Marx with a focus on material conditions, Foucault kind of echoes Hayek with his focus (as we have seen last times) on transactions (although relative to Hayek, Foucault wishes to denaturalize the spontaneous order).++

Second, "spontaneous synthesis means there is no explicit contract, no voluntary union, no renunciation of rights, and no delegation of natural rights to someone else; in short, there is no constitution of sovereignty by a sort of pact of subjection." (300) This characteristic is the shared debt of Ferguson and Smith to Hume. In addition, 'spontaneous synthesis' means that the happiness of the whole is constituted by the happiness of its parts understood as individuals and vice versa. This is indeed Ferguson's view. And it is important that even for a republican like Ferguson this is achieved by focusing on the "happiness of individuals" which "is the great end of civil society." (302, Foucault quoting Ferguson). It is also a plausible reading of Smith's position for whom the happiness of common labourers will ensure the flourishing of society. However, in some ways, Ferguson's version of this position is closer to Smith's teacher, Hutcheson (who is the common source), than Smith here. Because Smith sometimes implies that if one is in good health and knows that one is beloved, we will be happy regardless of the circumstances of larger society.**

 

 

 

 

4 April 1979: Foucault on The Original Neoliberalism (ep XXXVIII)

What is civil society? Well, all in all, I think the notion and analysis of civil society, the set of objects or elements that are brought to light in the framework of this notion of civil society, amount to an attempt to answer the question I have just mentioned: how to govern, according to the rules of right, a space of sovereignty which for good or ill is inhabited by economic subjects? How can a reason, a rational principle be found for limiting, other than by right or by the domination of economic science, a governmental practice which must take responsibility for the heterogeneity of the economic and the juridical? Civil society is not a philosophical idea therefore. Civil society is, I believe, a concept of governmental technology, or rather, it is the correlate of a technology of government the rational measure of which must be juridically pegged to an economy understood as process of production and exchange. The problem of civil society is the juridical structure (économie juridique) of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure (économie économique). And I think that civil society—which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation—makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology; it makes possible a self-limitation which infringes neither economic laws nor the principles of right, and which infringes neither the requirement of governmental generality nor the need for an omnipresence of government. An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social.--Michel Foucault, 4 April, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 12, The Birth of Biopolitics, 295-296

In the final lecture, Foucault returns to the eighteenth century, and his main theme, the specificity of a liberal art of government. And he reminds his audience that this does not involve what they might antecedently to his lectures imagine: the liberal art of government neither involves the creation of a zone (the market) free of government interference ("sort of free port or free space in the general space of sovereignty" (293)); nor does it involve, as the Physiocrats propose, "a position of both passivity with regard to the intrinsic necessity of the economic process and, at the same time, of supervision and, as it were, checking, or rather of total and constant [scientific] verification of this process." (293) Rather, the liberal art of government will involve the management of a sphere, even an entity, that in some sense is in between government and rights bearing individuals and corporations (i.e., society); and, in other sense, is the general, but delimited common ground among government,  rights bearing individuals, corporations, and other associations (i.e., the nation).

While it is tempting to rush ahead to the end of the lecture to explore the relationship between civil society and nationalism, in order to understand the relationship between liberalism and naturalism, and to see how Foucault treats the theorists of civil society (Ferguson and Adam Smith), Foucault halts the flow of his argument, to make both a larger metaphysical point first as well as to remind his audience, as I noted, that the lecture-series itself is part of a much larger enterprise. And he, thereby invites his audience then (and later) to explore how his musings on the specifically liberal art of government related to much larger study of governmental technologies:

Civil society is not a primary and immediate reality; it is something which forms part of modern governmental technology. To say that it belongs to governmental technology does not mean that it is purely and simply its product or that it has no reality. Civil society is like madness and sexuality, what I call transactional realities (réalités de transaction). That is to say, those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness, and so on, which, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed. Civil society, therefore, is an element of transactional reality in the history of governmental technologies, a transactional reality which seems to me to be absolutely correlative to the form of governmental technology we call liberalism, that is to say, a technology of government whose objective is its own self-limitation insofar as it is pegged to the specificity of economic processes. (297)

l want to make three main points about Foucault's position here. First, it is in some sense a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to treat Foucault as a straightforward social constructivist about transactional realities. That would be to say that civil society is merely a "product"--and Foucault explicitly denies that. For while civil society is in a certain sense a new effect of certain historically specific conditions, it is not constructed on a plan or by anybody in particular; nor is it merely (a la Searle) a set of self-affirming beliefs (even if it presupposes norms and commitment). Rather, civil society is both the byproduct of particular patterns of behavior (and omission) from the bottom up (as it advocates would claim) as well as co-constituted by (as it advocates may miss noticing) the existence of governmental practice that simultaneously, and historically conditioned, aims to shape, and is shaped by, market exchange(s) and a practice which is also a form of self-limitation.

From the perspective of metaphysical clarity, the previous paragraph is frustratingly vague. To the best of my knowledge Foucault never uses 'transactional realities' again. I think it is best to understand civil society as a kind of emergent property from different levels and orders of social reality. But it is also a robust property because once it emerges it gives rise to all set of other properties that reinforce it. 

Second, it is surprising that the ontological category Foucault uses 'transactional reality' itself linguistically echoes the particular social phenomenon (market exchange) to which civil society is pegged. Perhaps this awkwardness explains the reason why Foucault does not seem to use the term again, which, after all, is also used to describe social features (madness, sexuality, etc.) that are not themselves intrinsically connected to markets or exchange.

But it is also pretty clear why Foucault uses the term. For Foucault is trying to describe what Hayek called 'spontaneous order' while denying its 'naturalness'. In addition, Foucault is clear transactional realities exist, in part, to be subjects of (governmental) technique and this is something Hayek would generally deny (although ORDOs would accept). 

The previous two points are meant as elucidation (even if you, my dear reader, might feel  have clarified nothing). The final, third point is to note how narrow liberalism is for Foucault. It is constituted by a certain governmental technology that respects rights (or governs by 'rules of right,'), that is the rule of law, and is oriented toward market processes or the economy.* What's lacking entirely are the features associated with political liberalism (representative government, consent of the governed, free press/speech, freedom of religion, separation of powers, open borders, etc. This is especially surprising because as, I have noted (see also my post on the first lecture of birth of biopolitics) the liberal art of government (even the term) is rooted in the seventeenth century philosophy of John Locke, especially chapter 5 of Locke's Second Treatise. Of course, I don't deny this also involves a commitment to economic and population growth, cheap goods, trade etc. (as discerned by Toland).

The point is not just historical (what about Locke), but also philosophical. Is liberalism constituted narrowly -- as its Marxist critics often suggest, and certain libertarian advocates imply -- to a narrow defense of property and the gospel of growth -- or does it constitute a whole range of practices that are political, social, and even cultural? In fact, Foucault recognizes that a reader may well be wondering what happened to Locke  because he continues with the following, striking claim:

In Locke, for example, civil society is precisely a society characterized by a juridical-political structure. It is society, the set of individuals who are linked to each other through a juridical and political bond. In this sense, the notion of civil society is absolutely indistinguishable from political society. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, chapter 7 is entitled: “Of Political or Civil Society.” So, until then, civil society is always a society characterized by the existence of a juridical and political bond. It is from the second half of the eighteenth century, precisely at the time when the questions of political economy and of the governmentality of economic processes and subjects are being addressed, that the notion of civil society will change, if not totally, then at least in a significant way, and it will be thoroughly reorganized. (297-298)

To put this as a joke: in Foucault's historiography, the original neo-liberalism is the eighteenth century's move to depoliticize its conception of civil society. Foucault's reading of Locke is a bit curious, because the leitmotif of chapter 7 of the Second Treatise, which gives a stylized natural history from marriage/family, procreation, economic contracts, to the institution of the rule of laws and punishment as well as collective self-government is that all these institutions revolve around mutual consent and shared utility, that is, "mutual peace and security" and to be "guarded from harm, or injury." (etc.)** Rather than seeing mutual, voluntary consent as the ground of a shared liberal conception of civil society, and seeing the eighteenth century conceptions as a natural development of Locke's rather terse and stylized account, Foucault implies that from the vantage point of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century conception of civil society represents, despite some continuity, a break. And this is all the more surprising because throughout his treatment of homo economicus in the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault had insisted (recall lecture 11) that the eighteenth century conception was the man of (voluntary) exchange. So, with that in mind we're ready for the discussion of Ferguson and Smith, which Foucault implies, re-founded liberalism by making it self-aware about how (a re-conceptualized) civil society could be governed. 

 

Covid Spring

On Sunday, April 18, I received my first AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab. (For my covid diaries, see here; here;  here; here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) After a day or so, I started to feel very crummy with terrible headaches, fatigue, and irritability. Thankfully no insomnia. This lasted about twelve days. This past week I have been much better, especially daytime. Starting around 5pm, I often feel tired and hungry. The fatigue is no surprise because unfortunately, the partial insomnia has returned. In addition, I find phone and zoom conversations beyond twenty minutes still very exhausting. So, I spent my days on twitter and reading science fiction (I really admired the mixture of satire and sensitivity in A Canticle for Leibowitz). 

On Wednesday, I decided to try to do some real work: to read and comment on a chapter by one of the advanced PhD students I co-supervise. Her topic is fresh, but the author she is working on very familiar to me. She is an excellent writer, so this seemed like a good test-case. Since I had read earlier versions of the material, I figured it would be a bit like returning to a familiar face. When I tried reading it in the morning I got nausea, and my brain was not processing what I was reading. I felt panic, doubting I could ever do salient academic work again. I was mystified anew about the fact that I can read fiction and social media, but not academic work. After fresh air and lunch, I tried again. And then I read the (four section) paper one section at a time in twenty to thirty minutes stints with rests (that is, time on Twitter) among them. For an impatient person like me this way of reading is not an enjoyable experience despite my pleasure at the PhD's obvious improvement. 

Even so, that evening, fortified with a cheese and honey platter, I wrote up comments on the paper. I offered some distinctions, and referred to existing literature. I also made comments about organization and presentation. Because I could sense onset of fatigue, I offered fewer nitpicky comments than I normally would. I was too tired to re-read. But since I had spent a whole day on a task that ordinarily would take me about 90 minutes, I sent the email with comments apologizing for not responding to the rest (and important part) of the PhD's letter.

During the last four months, I had done some work related activity, but most of these involved logistical stuff (organizing exams for my class; organizing a team of indexers for my monograph; sending out emails to keep an edited volume going, letters of recommendation, etc.); and while often it felt like work, I didn't think of any of these as substantive intellectual labor. I had once or twice tried to start a new paper (based on ideas I had worked out in past lectures and digressions), but each time I realized I was not up to it. So, my comments on her chapter did feel like a small victory. But I was too exhausted to savior it.

The next morning, before the PhD had confirmed receipt of my email, I decided to re-read my letter. I I noticed a few typos, and uncompleted thoughts, but on the whole it looked like comments adequate enough for the purpose of giving direction and encouragement. Heartened, I opened a new word file, and typed in a title of a paper I had long intended to write. I started my introduction which would be the outline of the main argument. After ninety minutes I stopped because of great hunger and a strange fatigue. (I ended up having lunch very early.) After lunch I realized I could not return to work; I finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion, wondering if I should read Keats next.

While I have pulled out of other events planned this Spring, earlier in the week I canceled a talk at LSE later this month. It was no surprise to anybody involved, but a little bit died inside me. This invite had originally been planned for Spring 2020, but then we postponed due to the pandemic. At the moment I am unsure if I can attend (even by Zoom) the defense of one of my students later in May. My last planned event for the year is in Durham in June; that seems ambitious, too. So I just alerted them to the possibility of me canceling on them, too.

It's easy to give in to despair; I am still unsure about cognitive recovery, but I end the week with the glass half full. Did comment on that chapter, after all. I lead a pain-free existence surrounded by the comforts of life. When the sun is out, I read outside in the park or on quiet street benches. (I can't tell you how annoyed I am that Spring has been so cold here.) While I am still walled off from many of Mill's higher pleasures (music, arts, conversation), I am not suffering most of the time. Dogs say hi to me at my street bench, sniffing my books, and enjoying my petting. 

My GP is fairly confident I should feel more or less recovered by the end of June (six months after my onset). Because this week is so much better than last, I believe her sufficiently such that I did start discussing my Fall teaching assignments with the teaching directors. 

My life's field of vision is still quite narrow. The other day my wife noticed that I was reading my sci fi book with one eye closed. (For years now I would read without glasses reinforcing my sense of nearsightedness.) Covid has been so all-consuming, that my first response was is this another side-effect of my viral encephalitis? My wife laughed and said, 'no it's ageing.' Then followed a by now familiar explanation about decaying eye muscles and focusing. I realized she had explained the mechanism to me before, a few years ago, on a country lane during a Summer hike leaving Alfriston behind; but rather than feeling melancholy, I was strangely relieved to be reminded of normal, age-related attrition.