Digressions&Impressions

On Baggini’s How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

[This is an excerpt of a commissioned book review that became a victim of the pandemic.--ES]

Julian Baggini’s (2018) How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy is wonderfully written and provides a highly compelling comparative introduction to philosophy, including philosophical traditions rarely discussed. (It does suffer from gendered pattern of exclusion, alas.) Baggini, whose experience in journalism is apparent, has organized the book around his own curiosity, exploring alternative traditions all over the world. Because he has an eye for marvelous quotations, the book is a gem to read and re-read together. For example, in preparing this review I would often stop to read some quote to my (then) ten year old son. And these would always inspire further reflection by him. Throughout the work Baggini manages to appeal to our natural sense of wonder, and  I warmly recommend it.

But I do not recommend it unconditionally. And what follows articulates my growing unease as I reflected on the book. So before I continue, I want to stress that I admire Baggini's achievement. 

The underlying conceit of the book is that philosophies reflect the deeply embedded cultural values, the sediment of a major cultural tradition. (Baggini studiously avoid using ‘civilization.’) Understanding the philosophy of another culture is then a way to see how to see the world differently as shaped by other intellectual assumptions and so a way to understand their culture. Underlying this approach is an idea of culture where philosophy trickles down to the masses and their less reflective practices. Baggini does not stop to investigate this (elitist) idea, which itself has a long history (some version of it can, for example, be found in Mencius, Al-Farabi, Margaret Cavendish, and Bishop Berkeley).

Baggini practices what he preaches and so travels all around the world talking to philosophers and artists alike. Baggini’s most fascinating passages are when he tries to get his head around ideas and cultures where there is a commitment to a relational self (Japan) or a metaphysics of no-self at all (Buddhism). The focus on Japan is itself welcome, and Baggini manages to entice this reader to look up a number of fascinating Japanese art works that Baggini mentions to illustrate some of his claims about Japanese culture. 

However, at times Baggini’s willful neglect of ethnographic methods and anthropology also makes him come across as naïve. At various moments it is quite clear that Baggini’s informants are recruiting him into essentially national even nationalist enterprises romanticizing sometimes lost organic and unified cultures (recall this post by Liam Kofi Bright; and my response). Even Bertrand Russell would not have been surprised that university professors peddle in such dubious ware.

Baggini shows no interest in the developing experimental research program of so-called X-PHI. This program increasingly explores in experimental fashion how people across the world make moral judgments. And while it sometimes finds genuine comparative differences it also finds commonalities among people’s moral evaluations and the process by which they reach them.

Often Baggini’s own eyes tell him such cultures do not exist anymore, but he does not seem to allow that culture may be more hybrid than he allows. At other times Baggini’s interest in other cultures is highly selective. For example, he is clearly and explicitly very taken by the meritocratic defense of social hierarchy to be found in Confucian thought.

But why the Confucian school is more authentically Chinese than the much more egalitarian Mohist school is never explained. That gentleman-scholars and rulers found it more congenial to promote Confucianism in all its demandingness than Mohism never seems to occurs to Baggini. Perhaps I found him to be unconvincing because I happen to read Baggini’s fond quotes of Daniel Bell on the merits of harmony over the value of freedom while the citizens of Hong Kong were daily risking their careers and lives courageously defending their civil rights.  

Baggini does not really alert the reader that his book embraces a Kantian relativized a priori best known in the work of another great philosophical anthropologist, Cassirer (who goes unmentioned). Not unlike Cassirer, Baggini’s interest in other cultures is cosmopolitan in character.

The Kantianism in Baggini is not ad hoc. When confronted with Indian views that suggest that our linguistic understanding of the world are in non-trivially ways misguided and limited, and their practices to overcome such limitations, Baggini marshals a soft-Kantian defense of the idea that our cognitive capacities structure our experience of the world, which “still has to come through the lens of human nature.” This may be true, but it does not follow that an alternative is incoherent (as he argues). Baggini never confronts the possibility that he has reached the limits of argument. 

Be that as it may, it is peculiar and odd that Baggini identifies the Kantian position as intrinsically western, even though the position he ascribes to Buddhism has more than a family resemblance to Spinoza’s philosophy; not unlike the Buddhist thinkers discussed by Baggini, Spinoza also treats the highest form of knowledge as a kind of immediate identification with or union with nature. Spinoza's suspicions of the role of language in our thinking is already familiar in Plato’s Phaedrus and was widespread among early modern philosophers. Leibniz, who shared the suspicion, thought that Spinoza went too far by turning everything but God/Nature into transitory ephemera.

Baggini briefly treats Spinoza as an arch rationalist. It is hard to complain about that. But even so, even Russell noticed that Spinoza offers a philosophy capable of consolation to the cosmic loneliness in an infinite universe felt by an atheist in times of great distress.  The more important point lurking here is that Baggini does not live up to his own promise to use the encounter with other philosophical traditions to explore his own assumptions and the complexity of the tradition he has inherited. To travel with a firm sense of self unchanged through the trip is characteristic of tourism. For all his genuine inquisitiveness and sense of wonder, Baggini does not allow himself the risk of transformation.

Covid's Incomplete Recovery

It's about three weeks ago that I view as a turning point in my not quite completed recovery from covid. (For earlier installments in the series, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here).  Since then I lead a more active and social life. I walk about five miles a day. I try to write three days a week for about five to six hours a day on my quixotic Foucault and the liberal art of government project. At the end of each week, I am pleasantly surprised how much progress I have made. But I don't trust my own judgment yet whether this is professionally interesting or just a weird form of delusional auto-cognitive-therapy.

I am more pro-active in reaching out to family by phone. I am less noise sensitive than I had been most of the year. We do family dinners again, and I find that when other people put on music I don't run away anymore. Last week I went to my son's school play, and enjoyed most of it. While my reading is still light, I did referee two papers this past month.

A propos of nothing. I read Ursula Le Guin's early novels: Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile in reverse order. They are both part of the Hainish universe. Planet of Exile was a bit disappointing, although in a weird way reassuring that her genius and wisdom was not fully formed at once. In re-reading Rocannon's World, I could see when in my first reading I had quit. I am glad that I gave it a second chance: it's a beautiful homage to Tolkien, and simultaneously a powerful meditation on the what it's like to be in the service of empire in the name of science and humanity. Since I had recently read Mill's (1859) "Few Words on Nonintervention," (as part of my liberal art of government project), Le Guin's wisdom really shined for me.

So, at first sight I seem recovered. And I am enjoying the mental space that for the first time in several decades I am free from deadlines and other commitments. I especially enjoy the privilege to ignore emails. My university does not have sabbaticals, so I imagine this is the headspace I have always imagined sabbaticals to be like. Of course, in a sabbatical I would try to write and read much more and more intensely.

Most of the obvious symptoms of Covid have disappeared: I sleep much better. Even so, while I feel much improved and optimistic again, there are some signs that not all is well yet. First, thirty to forty-five minutes is my limit of multi-person zoom. (I can lengthen that a bit if I close my eyes and treat it like a radio-show.) At that point I start to fatigue and irritability creeps into my demeanor. Yesterday, I went to a delightful and small dinner-party (of five adults and two kids). After about an hour I started to fade.  This fatigue can slide into modest temporary headaches (although nothing like what I experienced earlier in the year).

Second, I still have weird memory issues where I seem to have missed parts of conversations. I mangle words, and I can't recall names of people and events. Because my life is so simple at the moment, and I am so visibly improving, it's not especially disconcerting. 

Meanwhile I am still waiting for my appointment at the long haul clinic. Given my ongoing symptoms the perspective if a neurologist might be useful, although the neurologists I know all caution me not to expect much.  Every week I check on cancelations, so far to no avail.

 

 

 

A Garden Tree

In the category comédie humaine:

 

Today, I picked up some butter at my favorite cheese shop. Because I was carrying some books, my phone, and seduced by the chestnut honey from Catalonia, a big bottle of Catalonian chestnut honey, I decided to put the two slabs of butter in the deep side-pockets of my Bermuda-shorts. Mindful that I was likely to forget the butter, I decided to rush home so I could put them securely in the fridge.

As I crossed the High street, darting between moms and their strollers, I was suddenly stopped by a middle aged women who touched me on the arm. My first instinct was a slight panic that I must have forgotten my phone at the shop, followed by relief. My second thought was that it was most un-British to touch me (leave aside during a pandemic).

I belatedly realized that she was offering me an envelope and a bouquet of flowers to be dropped of at Gayton Road. (In the interest of privacy I won't mention the number, which was prime.) Once the request had registered, she asked me where I was going. I was so relieved that this had nothing to do with my phone, that I answered truthfully--all my instincts for self-preservation forgotten.

I looked at the bouquet. By Dutch standards it was unremarkable, even fairly small. But I knew that locally this would be expensive. The handwriting on the envelope was neat in a childish kind of way.

As we walked together, I finally asked the question I should have asked, 'why do you need me to deliver these flowers'; the lady -- who never introduced herself -- told me about a tree in her garden that had to be cut. I thought this sufficient explanation why she did not have time to walk up the road.

But as she kept walking alongside me, I said to her, 'so this is a peace offering?'

Her response was affirmative. Her accent would be described as non-descript (so what I would call middle class).

As I walked up the stairs to ring the door, I decided it would be a good idea to put on a face mask. As I turned around I saw the lady hiding just out of sight. For some reason I had to think of Humbert Humbert hiding behind the bushes, and I almost burst out laughing. Grateful for my mask that my grimace was hidden.

I asked the hiding lady whether I should direct the occupant's attention to her after the door was opened.

''Please, no' was the horrified response. I got a glimpse at the scars of the battle of wills over that much beloved garden tree. I quietly suspected that the bouquet might not meet the demands of atonement.

I rang the doorbell several times. But nobody opened.

I turned around, and much to my surprise the lady had left her hiding and was taking a picture of the scene. I asked if I should leave the envelope and flowers on the doorstep. (They would be safe.) But she asked them back.

After graciously thanking me she left. And I went home to put the slabs of butter in the fridge.

Feeling Covid Optimism

This is, I think, my sixteenth covid update (see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here). It's the first one I am writing with a sense of optimism about the possibility of full recovery. This past week, I have been more mobile, more energetic, more social, and more intellectual than at any time since the middle of December. And while each day I hit a moment in which I simply have to rest, that moment tends to be late in the day and passes. I still find that viplin music I used to enjoy sounds like scratching on blackboard, but I can now tolerate simple beats much better than a few months ago.

I realized that I was improving in the middle of a rather lengthy eye exam last Friday. After noticing that I was reading books without my eye-glasses on, but with one eye closed, my cognitive-scientist, vitreoretinal-surgeon better half had nudged me to the optometrists. The hypothesis that persuaded me to go was that better eye vision might facilitate my convalescence and aid my cognitive renewal, as I like to call it. She might it sound as if the theory has a solid foundation in the literature. Rather than doing my own review, I decided, mindful of my Nietzsche, that hope was better than no hope.

During the exam I reflected on the fact that that week I had spent quite some time on the phone with lawyers, accountants, and immigration specialists trying to sort out how to approach the impending final Brexit deadline (end of June). The experience itself was frustrating because it's clear that if one's territorial and life-style circumstances are even remotely hybrid and one's aspirations is to keep it that way, most of the credentialed folk actually have no idea how the rules should be applied to you (and, admittedly, may come to the conclusion the rules themselves are not yet sorted). But that I could spend so much time politely on the phone over several days without collapsing was good sign. 

At the optometrist I had the deal with a number of (very kind) people for up to three hours. By the end of it I was tired, and considerably poorer, but I realized that my fatigue was not that much worse than it would have been anyway. Then, that holiday week-end our son went away with a classmate's family. My wife and I had our first days of privacy in more than a year. Sleep and sun did their magic job! And while there were still moments of fatigue and irritability on my part, especially because at times the noise and bustle Camden's crowds overwhelmed me, we walked for miles, went to markets, and enjoyed a date in a sit-down restaurant.

One rather unfortunate side effect of my long haul covid, which I have been perhaps too oblique about in these digressions, was a disinterest in physical intimacy. I think this disinterest was partially a loss of libido, but also a fear of my own irritability and hypersensitivity around others. To be attentive to and vulnerable with another requires a minimum of receptivity and self-trust that I simply lacked for most of the time during my long haul.

Meanwhile, I have gotten a bit more serious about using this period to write a somewhat crazy book, The Liberal Art of Government: a Commentary on Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics, which I am developing from my series of digressions. My underlying intuition was (and still is) that I am not quite capable yet of developing philosophical work from scratch. I am, however, improving at editing what I have. (My initial drafts read like a stream of consciousness on prednisone (recall).) Initially I did this in 20 minute intervals, but these are being extended to ninety minutes.

I wouldn't claim I am capable of days-long writing weeks on end; I have to vary my activity throughout the day to avoid headaches. Even so, I am getting increasingly more critical with my existing drafts and that tells me some of my professional instincts are recovering. I am now circulating an introduction and two chapters, although these are still plenty disorganized and not quite at the level one would wish. (Part of the problem is intrinsic to the book I am conceiving because it does not fit any pre-existing disciplinary molds.)

The previous paragraph hints at the fact that recently I have had too much time to reflect on my past and future. Perhaps because my convalescence coincided with my fiftieth birthday I have come to reflect on my limitations and bad choices. Somewhat disappointingly, the only major conclusion I arrived at, whose importance I already realized for quite some time, and have successfully managed to implement thus far, is not to answer work emails at once. It's not a major step in self-improvement, but it pleases me greatly right now.