Digressions&Impressions

On Jemisin, On the Curated Stories we Tell the Young, and Omelas (part I)

But some knowledge is dangerous.
Um-Helat has been a worse place, after all, in its past. Not all of its peoples, so disparate in origin and custom and language, came together entirely by choice. The city had a different civilization once-one which might not have upset you so! (Poor thing. There, there.) Remnants of that time dot the land all around the city, ruined and enormous and half-broken. Here a bridge. There a great truck, on its back a rusting, curve-sided thing that ancient peoples referred to by the exotic term missile. In the distance: the skeletal remains of another city, once just as vast as Um-Helat, but never so lovely. Works such as these encumber all the land, no more and no less venerabe to the Um-Helatians than the rest of the landscape. Indeed, every young citizen must be reminded of these things upon coming of age, and told carefully curated stories of their nature and purpose. When the young citizens learn this, it is a shock almost incomprehensible, in that they literally lack the words to comprehend such things. The languages spoken in Um-Helat were once our languages, yes--for this world was once our world; it was not so much parallel as the same, back then.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 7-8. [HT  David Duffy] 

A few years ago, several readers recommended Jemisin to me after I had posted (yet again) on Le Guin. I am late to the party because her Broken Earth series (a trilogy) was, rightfully, a sensation when the individual volumes appeared wining every prize possible despite opposition from sexist, white supremacists.* The Ones Who Stay and Fight is a short story and a response, in complex ways, to Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. (It's possible that "Um-Helat" just is "Omelas" with a vowel shift and a few centuries drift.) There are many echoes of Le Guin's short story in in Jemisin's short shory.

There is, in fact, one kind of direct reference to Le Guin in Jemisin's story: among the population of Um-Helat, we are told, there are/is a "gethen" (7). Gethen is a planet in one of Le Guin's most famous novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (set in her Hainish universe). Gethen is populated by ambisexual people with no fixed sex. The implied narrator of "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" leaves it ambiguous whether this gethen is meant to be a descendant of the people of Gethen. If so, Jemisin's story is also part of the Hainish iniverse. I say 'also' because Le Guin had retrospecively inserted "The Ones who Walk Away" into the Hainish cycle with a dedication attached to another story (which I recently discussed), "The Day Before the Revolution." Or, the narrator is using 'gethen' as a means to refer to any kind of ambisexual (in the way that 'fridgerator' and 'xerox' function), and the implication is that Le Guin's writings are at least familiar to the narrator.

The previous paragraph is a kind of aside, but that there ambisexual people in Um-Helat is meant to be another illustration that in this city -- which (see also the quoted passage atop this post) is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-religious -- practically all human possibility is welcomed. As the narrator tells us on p. 1, "This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled." In reading about Um-Helat, I am often reminded of Plato's and, especially Al-Farabi's description of the democratic city. Recall Al-Farabi's take, "The democratic city is the city in which every one of its inhabitants is unrestrained and left to himself to do what he likes. Its inhabitants are equal to one another, and their traditional law is that no human being is superior to another in anything at all." Al-Farabi describes democracies as naturally, welcoming, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies ("the nations repair to it and dwell in it, so it becomes great beyond measure. People of every tribe are procreated in it by every sort of pairing off and sexual intercourse.") Democracy is presented in dazzling colors: it is "the marvelous and happy [polity]. On the surface, it is like an embroidered garment replete with colored figures and dyes. Everyone loves it and loves to dwell in it...." This dazzling feature is very present in Um-Helat, too, from the first page.

The first inkling we get of this in the story, is that in Um-Helat "anyone can earn auntiehood." (1) This suggest that it has an inclusive notion of family-hood. To be an 'auntie' in Um-helat, just means to care for a youngster. In fact, we later learn (and this is non-trivial point to the story, even a SPOILER--don't keep reading if you are not into that) that exclusive love to off-spring and parents at the expense of serving the common interest is highly problematic in Um-Helat. So, being a true 'auntie' in Um-Helat involves not favoring your own nephews and nieces.  

However, unlike the democratic city, Um-Helat has social mechanisms and customs that are clearly designed to prevent any instability and the degeneration of democracy into tyranny. In particular, these mechanism are designed to prevent ideologies that promote human inequality from taking root. The 'gethen' mentioned above (again SPOILER alert), is one of the so-called 'social workers' whose job it is to root out those who secretly consume and circulate our inequality promoting (social) media. These social workers -- with a nod to 'paradox of freedom' [in the story something analogous is called the 'paradox of tolerance' (p.5)] -- literally police the spread of dangerous memes and their (human) carriers. (The viral/contagious metaphors run through the story.) Some other time, I'll return to the nature of these social workers, but in the remainder I focus on peculiar such mechanism designed to create resistance to dangerous ideas (that promote unequal respect/dignity). 

For, not unlike Omelas (recall), Um-Helat has a peculiar and structurally not dissimilar coming of age ritual quoted above this post. What I am interested in here, is the content of the 'carefully curated stories.' For, not unlike the children in Omelas, they learn something about their city/polity that both is carefully kept from them (which implies an important social taboo), and simultaneously crucial to the political identity of the city and its citizens. In the case of Um-Helat it is connected to historical memory of a post-apocalyptic re-founding, and in which the archeological remnants of a bombed out civilization figures greatly.

In fact, there are plenty of hints throughout the story that Um-Helat understands itself as progressing, a work in progress, from a terrible nadir. Since the remains of the war are omnipresent and left highly visible, I was reflecting on what might be the content of the curated stories that so shock the kids.** I believe they are told that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. Let's call this the bedrock principle of Um-Helat. And the reason they are shocked by the bedrock principle is that the very idea and the conceptualizations of treating others as unequal is banished from Um-Helat (remember the 'social workers' police this violently--they are like Platonic guardian-auxiliaries who guard city from internal and external enemies). It may well be very difficult to phrase in their language. (We are told they have plenty of vocabulary to mark difference, but not to express superiority in difference.) 

We are told, that what "shocks the young citizens of Um-Helat is the realization that, once, those differences of opinion involved differences in respect. That once, value was ascribed to some people,
and not others. That once, humanity was acknowledged for some, and not others." (p. 9) It is pretty clearly part of the logic of the story that the carefully curated coming of age ritual is designed as a kind of social inoculation against of the spreading of inequality in respect.

Now, the passage just quoted (from p. 9) does not support my claim that what they are taught in the coming of age ritual is that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. It's possible they are merely that treating others as unequal did lead to war/civil war.

But I think bedrock can explain another oddity. The social workers don't just police the spread of ideas of unequal treatment/respect, but they are especially on the lookout for people who consume our (social) media. Um-Helat is a branch that split of from us at some point in (a possible) past. (The metaphysics and epistemology of the branching worlds is worth its own post.) And the oddity of the coming of age ritual of Um-Helat is that they explicitly teach in (carefully curated fashion) the very knowledge that is considered dangerous even explicitly forbidden in Um-Helat!

Now, one might that what's central (and again there are shades of Plato) is that the reason our (social) media is forbidden in Um-Helat is that it packages especially dangerous ideas in ways that makes its spread more likely that facilitate uptake for evil. This is certainly part of the story. But as the narrator recognizes (and the folk of Um-Helat, too), by making it "forbidden" fruit, it becomes "so seductive." (p. 9) And since in order to become adult in Um-Helat is to be explicitly exposed to these dangerous ideas anyway, why make it more attractive -- to inquisitive and rebellious natures -- by forbidding becoming acquainted with the versions circulating on our (social) media? 

I suspect that, in fact, the really dangerous idea -- and this is also what's so unsettling about the nature of Omelas -- is that it is not true that societies that are built on mutual disrespect, or on harming some and not others, fundamentally must lead to civil war.+ In fact, Omelas is explicitly a polity "without soldiers." To put this in the language of game theory, a fundamentally inegalitarian polity may be a suboptimal equilibrium, but an equilibrium nevertheless. And it is idea, which is key to bedrock, that is kind of the noble lie of Um-Helat. And if you don't believe that Um-Helat, which is lovely in many ways, can have any noble lies, you are in for a shock when you read the story for the first time and learn of the manner in which the social workers prevent the virus of inequality spreading. But I return to that before long....stay tuned.

Cosmic Balance and Civic Flourishing in Omelas.

    They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
    This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

    The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.--- Ursula Le Guin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Omelas has an unusual coming of age ritual: the would be adults are initiated into a horrible truth that is simultaneously the foundation of civic happiness. And they may not alter this state of affairs on pain of losing their prosperity (and other good things). In addition, their subsequent free speech is limited in a crucial way, they may not comfort or express compassion to the child that is sacrificed for their flourishing. This would violate "the terms" of a kind of (social) contract (recall here; and here) that is either the actual root of this commercial republic, or a kind of civic religion that structures its social reality. 

A skeptical reader may well deny that such "terms" could ever express a truth since it is so manifestly unjust. But as I have noted before, if the terms actually constitute (political) justice in the city, then this move is external to the civic consciousness of Omelas. (Of course, a defender of natural right might take that as evidence that forms of legal positivism are pathways to evil.) And moreover sometimes the truth indicates the abominable misery of the status quo.

But my present interest is to note that the ritual expresses the significance of social and political knowledge in Omelas. Because this ritual is initiated in order to convey a key knowledge about social life of Omelas when the would-be-adults are capable of "understanding" the "explanations" of it. The reactions of those exposed to it, suggests that those not yet ready for understanding are carefully guarded from the truth. So, the miserable child is a social taboo from which the young are guarded carefully. That is to say, the not young maintain a culture of silence among those who are not yet initiated.  This suggests that in so far as it is a civic religion it is carefully expressed. It is by no means obvious that the many visitors to Omelas that the proud city receives would know about it since these might well tell the children of Omelas or be tempted to protest the state of affairs. (This suggests that freedom of speech is curtailed even more widely in Omelas.)

I have noted before that despite the fact that the actual religion of Omelas lacks clergy, the miserable and innocent child is a kind of piacular scapegoat. To me this suggests that the state and its civic religion has claimed for itself that which properly belongs to revealed or clerical religion.

One of my students, Robin Kan, pointed out to me that the sacrifice of the innocent child functions like a cosmic balance principle in their civic religion. For, at any given time of the polity's existence, the child's immense suffering balances out the flourishing of the polity ("that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.") Structurally, such a cosmic balance principle is very similar to Christ's redemptive suffering for the sins of humanity (which is sometimes discussed in terms of such a cosmic balance), except that Christ voluntarily takes on this task and the child is forced into it without ever being allowed any understanding of its role. It is not even offered an ideological explanation for its suffering, and thanks to Omelas' social taboo on it, it has literally no chance of anticipating it. Of course, Omelas' balance principle is not cosmic, but local, bounded by the the territory of Omelas; the child does not redeem all of humanity.

It is natural to teach Omelas as a means to discuss the limitations of utilitarianism in an introductory context. This year my own students saw in it a parable of colonial/imperial conquest or capitalist exploitation, and the way the media makes that available to viewers at the center and simultaneously makes us it feel impossible to change. In a future post I want to discuss one such interpretation because it centers on the purported absence of war in Omelas.

But it is worth noting that if one reads the story on its own terms, it depicts the horrors of state power devoted to the "happiness" of its people. And in the story this is a power that rests on the well informed understanding and tacit consent of its adult citizens, and it is presented as the best kind of polity that accepts the legitimacy of state power. That is to say, the implied point of view of the narration is the question whether it is worth paying the price of the benefits of state power.  

Of course, my present interpretation is informed by my recent (recall) reading of Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." This story invites us to see in one of those who walk away from Omelas the revolutionary founders of a form of anarchism (which rejects state power).* That is, if we take Omelas as a best case scenario for statism, then it invites us both to reflect on the price we're willing to pay to accept our complicity in its horrors, and to what degree we're willing to contemplate (and to pursue) serious alternatives.

One final thought: the line of interpretation that I have offered here is not an alternative to, or a refutation of, treating Omelas as a means toward discussing the limitations of utilitarianism. For, as Foucault emphasizes, utilitarianism is not merely an ethical system, it is also a technology of governance. And so it does ask us what price we're willing to pay in pursuing such technologies and if we're willing to contemplate doing without them.

Covid Limbo

Nearly 70,000 cases of covid infection were reported yesterday, 8th January. Of course that’s officially confirmed cases and the real number of infections will be much higher. A small but significant proportion of those people will go on to be hospitalised and a small but significant proportion of them will die in the next few days. As we are often reminded, as if to reassure us, most of these victims will be over 60 and/or have various ‘underlying medical conditions’, but there are at least a couple of important ways in which this narrative of reassurance is both troubling and misleading. First, this narrative, intentionally or not (and I think it often is intentional when seized upon by various covid deniers and ‘lockdown sceptics’) effectively relegates people over 60 and those with ‘underlying conditions’ (and the list of these conditions is much more extensive than people normally realise) to more or less sub-human status: those whose deaths and lives are apparently relatively unimportant. Secondly, the fact is that you just don’t know if you are ‘vulnerable’ or not to this virus – no one can be sure that they are ‘safe’ from it. Indeed it’s currently thought that one in 20 people who develop symptoms on infection might suffer symptoms lasting more than eight weeks and, further, a significant number of those people remain unwell for several months (at least) after infection. This isn’t ‘just’ elderly people or those with ‘pre-existing health conditions’, but includes relatively young, relatively fit and active people like me – I’m 45 and before I became very ill with long covid last summer I used to weight-train in a serious and focused way at least 3 to 4 times a week. There are many, many people in more or less the same position as me currently and, given the rates of infection at the moment, many more will find themselves in a similar place over the next few weeks and months. Those who think – selfishly and incorrectly – that the pandemic is of little concern to them personally really ought to think again.--Ed Rooksby, January 9, 2021 "Nine months in the long limbo of long covid." [HT Chris Brooke]

Last week, I was too depressed to pen a digression. This despite the fact that my very kind and supportive, university's occupational physician suggested that a diary in which I record my progress might be helpful. And there is progress to report: Saturday, nine days ago, was the last truly horrid day of intense headaches. Since, I have barely had any dizziness (the most recurring symptom), much more manageable bouts of insomnia, and much reduced spells of headaches. In addition, on several days I lacked the general sense of fatigue I have tried to describe before (recall here; here; here). In the post quoted at the top of my own, Rooksby, whose symptoms were considerably worse than my own, writes, "it felt like my brain was encased in cotton wool and that I was somehow removed from reality, like I was watching everything – including my own activity – from behind thick glass."  

Even so, even minor walks or an hour responding to emails can still induce a strange fatigue and irritability toward any kind of noise or disturbance (which helps me recognize the fatigue). And the depression was caused not just by my ongoing inability to read books, but also a sense that every sign of progress is quickly followed by a rude reminder that I am nowhere near recovered. Part of me wonders if the sense of despair isn't itself a by-product of covid given how many other weird (and mostly minor) intermittent neurological/cognitive symptoms I experience.

The university's occupational physician convinced me that I need to take my sick leave seriously. And so I have let go of most of my work related activities. As I decline requests to do tenure files, referee, blurb; postpone research activities related to a number of edited volumes and grants; postpone or cancel public lectures and interviews; withdraw from dissertation defenses; I accept intra-departmental political defeats, and I also register how much stuff I pack into my ordinary self days. 

Perhaps the depression was induced by the following uncanny experience. I watched myself lecture on video last week. The recording of the lecture series is used to substitute for my presence this semester. It's a huge lecture course (400-500 students). And while I am no Sandel, I enjoy and take pride in, allowing my lectures to be interrupted by Q&A throughout.  In watching myself -- and my ridiculously chaotic slides -- I realized that I was not so much explaining the material, but sharing what I found interesting or exciting and tried to explain the grounds of interest, while smuggling in concepts and arguments I am supposed to expose them to. I took a childish pleasure into watching myself lecture.

But my responses to student questions were different altogether. I suddenly realized, as I was watching the recording, that I often had no idea what I would answer then, or could answer now, and I would marvel at how my recorded self would quickly and sometimes humorously manage to process and incorporate the questions into the lecture. He could think much faster, much subtler than I can now!* 

When I mentioned this to the university's occupational physician, she laughed a bit. And said that I should not underestimate the skill with which I could handle complex thought when I was not incapacitated. I did not put quote marks around that because I don't recall the exact wording, but that's because she did use 'incapacitated' (in Dutch: arbeidsongeschikt). 

Rooksby (an accomplished blogger and writer), who I knew from a far distance, seems to have died yesterday (here). And that gives his words a special poignance. It's interesting to me that he has tracked the social implicature of 'underlying conditions' as sub-human-status. Back in the day (March 2020), I registered 'herd-immunity' as code for 'culling' or 'dispensable.' And I even satirized that our pseudo-Darwinian age would be followed by a religious revival that would refer to our era as the 'great culling.' When I feel a bit stronger, I want to collect my thoughts on being an incapacitated, philosopher. 

But I am lucky that I don't feel a stigma that I am incapacitated for work; and grateful for hard-earned victories of earlier generations, that I can draw a salary while being pampered at home by my very busy, hardworking spouse. I do find it frustrating and embarrassing that my already overworked and more junior colleagues have additional work because of my disease. The Dutch government has opened the purse-strings, but not for our underfunded universities. I know better, but can't shake the thought am letting down those that count on my help in their career/professional advancement.

Even so, I spent most of my days watching netflix and daydreaming about invited research leaves in lovely climes. With gradual recovery I am willing to hope that I will be able to read and teach again...although last week I could not quiet altogether my simmering panic I may not. When I was a teenager I saw a documentary about Willem de Kooning's late art, which was so much sparser than his exuberant and overflowing earlier work. Later I learned that he suffered from Alzheimer's. I wonder if my post-covid work will have such clean and elegiac quality.

 

 

 

On Tuck Everlasting

"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."--Natalie Babbit (1975) Tuck Everlasting

When my son, now almost 11, first went to school, I had to get used to the fact that he was not especially forthcoming with what happened during the day. I learned that certain directed questions might make a difference, but he quickly and repeatedly alerted me to the fact that I ask too many questions. (Another way my occupation deforms me, I thought ruefully many times.) 

Since, I have been well trained to accept any information about his day from any source with gratitude. I have also learned to read signs of distress or success in oblique fashion. 

I don't want to suggest that I never learn anything at all about what goes on in school. For instance, a recent book they read in class -- Peter Pan -- was deemed boring and stupid. 

It is not because he dislikes reading. Our son is a voracious reader. While we are a rather bookish family, I have been, in fact, astonished by the speed with which he reads and the complexity of the material he assimilates. (Okay, I am a proud dad!) He reads so fast that he is perpetually running out of things to read. But despite the fact that he frequently faces a serious search problem, he is quite adamant that our suggestions won't do. (So, he and I most frequently bond over films and football, not books.)

The other day I was, thus, quite surprised that he recommended a book to me: Tuck Everlasting. I learned they also are reading it in class. When I asked him why he recommended it to me, his answer surprised me: it's very philosophical. But after that enticing morsel little else was forthcoming. 

I had never heard of the book. And I was amazed to learn that it had sold millions and was turned into numerous feature films. I suddenly felt very sheltered. It turns out my spouse was convinced she had read it and still owned a copy. After a fruitless search, and a repeated nudging from our son to me to read it, I ordered it online and read it Saturday.

Now, nearly all books I read I encounter with a reputation attached to it. I either know the author personally or by reputation; it's a classic I should have read or a work central to debates in my field; or it's a novel I have heard about (through reviews or word or mouth) or that has been gifted to me with some kind of comment. And in writing these sentences I realized it is, in fact, incredibly rare that I read a book without any sense of what I might expect.  

When I was a late teen-ager a family friend, Marion Zilversmit, gave me a paperback copy of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I am not sure whether it was for my birthday or a goodbye gift for my departure for college Stateside. For some reason I did not read it initially. And so it stayed in my room in Amsterdam, where I found it after I returned my freshman year. I took it with me in a backpack following the Dutch team around Italy for the world cup in 1990. 

After the (horrible) game against England in Cagliari, where all fans were treated as dangerous animals -- the police used tear-gas indiscriminately --, I found myself alone on the deck of a freight boat returning some of us to Palermo. The fans were packed in and the boat reeked of alcohol and piss. I found a spot on the upper deck, and started reading Auster through the night under the mediterranean sky. When I look back on it, I only see the romance because Auster took me into a vastly more fascinating and stimulating world than the one I was sailing; the smell and disgust are evaporated. 

The first major surprise of Tuck Everlasting is the incredibly abstract, even mythical style that is achieved at once:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Yes, my brain knows that this is strictly false in the Southern hemisphere and, in some sense, unintelligible prior to the building of the first ferris wheels. But simultaneously it feels like I have just assimilated a truth eternal. This sense is heightened by the next sentence with starts with an "Often..."

After I read the book my son pointed out to me, while we were on an errand, that Babbit's descriptions are simultaneously lively ("glaring noons") and austere ("silent," "blank"); that when you read it, you have to do a lot of work imagining what's going on, but this work of imagining does not feel like work. I recognize part of the point and whisper, we co-construct the story, as it were, with the author. He squeezes my hand. 

A second major surprise of my reading Tuck Everlasting is when I recognize (I hope he forgives me for sharing this) my son's recent bedtime questions to me in a passage early in Chapter 1:

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

At the time he did not disguise his disappointment with the inadequacy of my responses (something about local jurisprudence, scarcity, innate commitments) to his questions. I hope to do better some day.

The other day, I asked him if he wants to talk about Tuck Everlasting (which is a rather violent book). No. Did he identify with the main protagonist (also a single child around his age). No. I could tell I was risking asking too many questions. We eventually negotiated a compromise that I could write a digression about it.

That concessions feels like a pyrrhic victory here; what to say now?

You, perceptive reader, will have noticed that eternal return and heracleitan flux are key themes in Tuck Everlasting. And I don't share any spoilers if I say that the plot is accelerated by ordinary decisions about what to do with dangerous secrets that take on weight in virtue of the possibility of eternal return. 

And then, as I am contemplating a post about how Frodo has to leave Middle Earth, and wondering if I have written that already, and before I realize what's happening, I recognize something else my son was telling me, but hadn't heard; if he and I both co-construct the story while reading it, there is a sense we have not read the same story at all. And while I reflect on this, I discern that asking about the version he is constructing with Babbit would be a way of grabbing illicitly what's now his. 

 

 

 

On Plagiarism in History of Philosophy

The current affair, which extends far beyond the pages of Vivarium, raises the traditional concerns of academic plagiarism, as well as some novel considerations. As with many cases in the past, the theft of material denies the rightful author of the credit deserved and unfairly gives the pretending author an advantage in an increasingly competitive market. As editors, we are bound first and foremost to maintain the integrity of the journal, and that requires us to document, clearly and extensively, cases where that integrity has been compromised. At the same time, the practice of academic stealing is constantly evolving alongside the countermeasures deployed to catch it, and making public the methods and techniques used in contemporary cases of unattributed copying should help future editors and scholars identify the cases that we collectively missed.
We do not enjoy performing our duty. For marginal fields such as those served by Vivarium, we have seen from experience that the damage wreaked by plagiarism extends to institutions, bringing vulnerable positions, departments, and institutes to the attention of administrators eager to let the rationale of collective punishment direct the evisceration of budgets in Social Sciences and the Humanities. Our colleagues in adjacent fields will seize upon public cases of misconduct as an opportunity to reallocate scarce resources in their favor, thereby ensuring that those who previously lost out to plagiarists in competition for fellowships and positions lose out once again. Yet we believe that it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.
For these reasons, we present examples of what we know about the incidents of unattributed copying in Vivarium.-- The Editors of Vivarium "Notice The Retraction of Articles Due to Plagiarism" 256-257 [emphases added; see also: Dailynous]

Let me start with a note of appreciation. The editors of Vivarium, C. Schabel and William Duba, were contacted in July this year about the suspicion of plagiarism of papers in the journal. It is a good thing that, despite all the strains of the pandemic, they quickly decided to investigate, to take action, and to report. Their clearly written report leaves no doubt that retraction was merited. In fact, since they limited themselves "to verbatim copying of material available to us in digital form" (256) it stands to reason their report understates the problems they found or could have found.* I am grateful for their speedy and forthright Notice. As a regular reader of retractionwatch, my impression is that this is not always the norm, alas.

Their Notice reveals that two of the retracted papers were re-published (now retracted) in a collected volume of papers, The Instant of Change in Medieval Philosophy and Beyond, co-edited by the plagiarist and published at Brill (the same press that publishes Vivarium). This volume also includes a chapter by one of the co-editors of Vivarium. While these details do not justify the claim that the field is (and now I use the editors' language) "marginal," they do give a sense of some of the relatively narrow overlapping circles in the field. While I think of myself as being in an adjoining field, I did host the author of these plagiarized papers in a seminar series back in 2015. 

In the emphasized part of the Notice, the editors of Vivarium present the zero-sum, cut-throat nature of academic life in incredibly stark terms of political economy. In fact,they convey the thought -- I think (and hope) unintentionally -- that their decision to publish the retraction and the details of the case as itself the product of cost-benefit analysis of alternative possibilities ("it would be worse for the field were we to ignore the accusations, cast doubt on the charges, and claim that the damage done were minimal.") I assume they primarily acted from duty.

Even so, the editorial notice is also a missed opportunity. For, this is the second major plagiarism case (see also here) to hit the field in less than a decade. Back in the day,  I blogged quite a bit about the earlier case (e.g., here). At the time I noted that given its egregiousness, "the referee process is broken in rather serious fashion." As several high profile hoaxes, and the pages of retractionwatch, suggest refereeing is unlikely to catch all forms of fraud. But it is less likely to catch it, I fear, in a field that feels itself under threat in a low trust environment (as the editors describe) and with relatively small and potentially competitive networks that do not just compete for status and journal space, but also for scarce positions.

In particular, since scholars in the field must have familiarity with an enormous span of history of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, it stands to reason that staying on top of the field is very difficult. Since referees are themselves stretched for time and, if my experience is anything to go by, swamped with referee requests (while writing this blog post I received two!), I wonder if I could catch the plagiarism or am myself stretched too thin to miss it. (I have often suggested in my reports that papers are ungenerous to others, but I do not recall catching outright plagiarism as a referee whereas as a teacher it is not uncommon, alas.) 

The issue is structural, and it is not just overworked referees or the side-effects of possible journal capture.

In particular, my university has incredibly fine-grained book-keeping for my 'output.' It also tracks my hours spent on teaching, admin, and research. (Yes, really. It's meant to be a fairness issue so that we all do our fair share.) But refereeing goes almost entirely uncredited in this system. (Stateside it may count a bit as service to the profession.) Even though in many ways universities, and not to forget grant agencies, which play a huge role even in the Humanities in Europe, free-ride on the evaluative judgments of anonymous journal referees (and less anonymous, editors) in a lot of their decisions. One often feels that judgments of quality are largely outsourced to referees of, especially, high status journals. That itself tells you quite a bit (go read Trust in Numbers) about how low-trust the environment is.

I have mentioned grant agencies in the previous paragraph. These greatly amplify the zero-sum nature of academic life in European humanities. Since grant funding in the humanities (and social sciences) is incredibly tight (with very low chances of success and with a tendency to reward bullshitting), these agencies pick winners whose careers get an enormous boost (jobs, invites, more research time, etc.), while those that are passed over find themselves without resources to pursue ordinary research. For much of the past decade, there was also a clear bias toward quantity of publication. (Supposedly that's changing.)

So, the credit structure of the academy is a very steep prestige and economic hierarchy where the agencies most responsible for accelerating one's move up or down the hierarchy farm out the evaluation of the 'input' into their analysis (journal publication) to the nearly uncredited work by overworked and anonymous referees. And these referees often have an indirect incentive to promote the work of people they trust and admire and who enhance their own work/states or their network in the field. This predictably leads to possibly unfair rejections and, perhaps, too much benefit of the doubt in other cases. In the past I have offered suggestions to improve the process, but with little noticeable effect. So much for political economy.

In a famous piece, Agnes Callard claims, drawing on a paper by Brian L. Frye that I have not read, that "in academia the immorality of plagiarism is one of the few principles everyone converges on." Not unlike Seneca, Callard wants to reject the (what she calls an "extralegal") principle or "convention." With Callard I agree that it is a mistake to confuse this principle/convention with morality. And I am open to the idea that in some areas of intellectual life, things might go better without giving credit. As a scholar I am familiar with robust practices of anonymous and pseudonymous publication (and I have been very uneasy about recent practice of unmasking pseudonymous publication in instances where the only fraud is the fake name.) And, not to put too fine point on it, these Digressions are all written not just without advertisement, but also without attribution (although I have never made it difficult to guess my identity).

Callard has a tendency to treat the norm (that she rejects) against plagiarism as a violation of intellectual property, which is another feature of the political economy of higher ed. (Brill is a for-profit press.) And she points out that this sits uneasily with university life more generally which she, not unfairly, treats as a deformed honour culture. And in fact she offers a tempting genealogy of error: "We academics cannot make much money off the papers and books in which we express our ideas, and ideas cannot be copyrighted, so we have invented a moral law that offers us the “property rights” the legal system denies us." In her genealogy of error, the norm (mistakenly treated as moral) against plagiarism is correction to a kind of market failure ("cannot make much money").

Perhaps Callard is right about this for much of academic life. But some areas of intellectual life, especially those influenced, in part, by (of course evolving norms and standards of) philology, are constituted by scholarship and the art by which one conveys that scholarship. And plagiarism is, then, not, as it were, a second order effect of market failure, but a violation of the rules that do not merely constrain, but constitute the field. It's not just cheating (breaking the rules) or disrupting the market in ideas and the wider academic credit economy, but one has decided to play an altogether different game or to act in a different play. 

To put the point I am driving at by way of analogy. Lots of philosophers think that argument is constitutive of philosophy. I have protested this, but I know I am in the minority. If there is no argument there is no philosophy. This is why much wisdom, or insight, or intellectual history is not treated as philosophy by professional philosophers.

So, much the worse for professionals, Callard might say, and for good measure she might make fun of Max Weber, too. It's clear she thinks, and again this echoes Seneca (who undoubtedly is echoing true sages), that what matters in one's intellectual life is not the proper apportioning of credit. She suggests plausibly that to appropriate is to change one's identity, possibly, for the better. Philosophically and morally that's often true. 

But it is not true in scholarship. For all I know none of the functional arguments for proper citation can withstand scrutiny. Perhaps scholarship would be socially more productive and less dangerous for the psyche if competitive emulation (recall my response to Hitz) that characterizes it would disappear. I certainly recognize that intellectual fraternity is made difficult by oligarchic organization of academic life today.

But true scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence, including beauty, that constitute it. And these standards allow one to escape, in thought, the political and cultural economies that condition it materially and, simultaneously, experience the recognition by and, more commonly, one's recognizing of the skill of fellow scholars.

And if time permitted me I would offer you a proof of all of this in the margins of this Digressions. Sure, given the challenges facing humanity, it is comical to demand, as an existential matter, proper footnoting.

At this point the reader, if still awake, may suspect something religious. And, as is well known, footnoting has, as scribbling in the margins, or hyperlinking, a complex relationship with revelation, that is, scripture. And this, in turn, has been well deployed and satirized by Bayle and Swift (among the magisteria). Herman Hesse wrote a long, irritating and oddly moving novel, Glass Bead Game, -- which (recall) I read because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here), -- to try to convey even hints of this to a culture that cannot bring itself to confront such religiosity. 

I mentioned Zina Hitz, who is better equipped than I am to talk about religiosity, because she criticizes, not unfairly, the academy (and now I simplify) for its surrender to a fundamentally base political economy. And when one reads the vocabulary of the editors of Vivarium -- "countermeasures" -- it is easy to think she is right--that something essential has gone missing. That we have lost sight of what truly matters. 

But this is a mistake. Philology, with its roots in love of logos, expresses this love, in fact, from the start by the unmasking of forgery. It is because we recognize that human nature is weak, and that even extremely modest details might matter, sometimes greatly, to the life of many communities that we rest our faith in civilization, in part, by securing the integrity of the small print.

 

On subaltern horrors, Borges, and the Natural History of an Idea

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism .... I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.--Borges (1939) The Total Library.

I have quoted the concluding paragraph of "The Total Library," which is the forgotten sibling of Borges' more celebrated (and slightly younger) "The Library of Babel" although it shares some underlying insights. The Total Library is an articulating of the thesis that "the fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues." That we recognize the name of the story in the sentence describing the utopia of the total library alerts us that use and mention, and even baptistic designation intermingle on macro and micro level, which is a feature of the story, not a bug. 

The main narrative, such as it is, of The Total Library, is a history of ideas in Lovejoy's specific sense: an idea is treated as an isolated cultural unit with a clear natural history ("Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of European history"). The most familiar token, Dennett calls it proverbial, of the "typographical image" whose natural history is recounted is Huxley's claim that "half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum."

Inscribed in this narrative in the history of ideas, is a report on the "polemic" between the system of chance or necessity and the system of divinely organized order. This polemic is decided in favor of Democritus (the proponent of the system of chance). 

As an aside, Borges treats Cicero (not his character) as refuted. But Cicero had been introduced not as a proponent of the system of divine order, but as an ironic skeptic. In other words, Borges treats the rise of Darwinism (who is represented by Huxley) and Logic (Carroll) not, altogether without wisdom, as a refutation of the system of divine order, but rather as a defeat of ironic skepticism. This is, of course, not just an aside because one can understand Borges' story as the revenge, or eternal return, of ironic skepticism (which competes with a more successful skepticism familiar from the extension of the holographic principle to a holographic universe.)

The version told by one of Cicero's characters, and now I quote Borges, goes like this:

 I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade him-self that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.

Because of the familiarity of Huxley's token of this image in recurring debates over Darwinism, we might overlook that in Cicero the image is used to undermine an epicurean cosmogony (recall yesterday's post on Newton)--the existence of species is a mere subset of this. This cosmogony held that the structure we encounter is the product of the collision of atoms, which have an innate gravity, subject, as we learn from Lucretius and Cicero, to random swerves.

I don't mean to suggest that Cicero or Huxley are idiosyncratic to connect cosmogony to the origin of species. As I noted a few weeks ago, in the revised preface to his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell trots out Cicero's sibling argument -- which I have dubbed 'Posidonian,' which is just before the passage recounted by Borges' narration  -- in response to Darwin's Origin (as I learned from David Haig). And while Whewell treats the nebular hypothesis as plausible, he does not think it is sufficiently explanatory about the origin of the order it exhibits.

But rather than returning to that material, my eye stops at Borges' two-fold claim that Swift's "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul," (i) is a "museum of commonplaces," and (ii) itself a token of this idea. Part of the joke here is that the correct title of Swift's essay is "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind."  "Tritical" being (now archaic) "trite" or "hackneyed." And in the joke Borges' discerns that a single typographic mistake can be memetically or fitness enhancing.

And when we turn to Swift we find indeed a museum of commonplaces, which presents us not so much with a natural history of the typographic idea, but with a philosophical history, which as the title already suggests, itself a polemic against (ahh) then recent philosophy (and the commitments of an Enlightenment age: democracy, science, etc.).

And lurking in the essay is not so much the observation that democracy is vulnerable to demagoguery, which is indeed trite, but rather the more philanthropic point that would have been evident to Borges' initial readers -- that democratic theorists fail to grasp the true nature of the best kind of democratic public speech. This nature is not truth-telling (as democrats deceives themselves) nor flattery (as the the critics of democracy claim), but rather the art of hiding its artfulness ("in oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art.")

There is no better way to hide artfulness if the surface is random characters which "chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence." And this would be the case "for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings."

It is tempting to domesticate the thought by saying 'it's fiction' or 'science fiction'. But in the refutation of Cicero  the ground from which to deny we inhabit the subaltern horror became unstable, even a trapdoor.

 

 

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That dog – called aptly Dog – has a status that’s uncertain. He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away. Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man. Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor’s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any. Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch. Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not – he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it. One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away. On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started. I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn’t. Every night they’re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice – in this at least, Dog is reliable. I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed. He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi.--Amy Olberding

In order to save my marriage, and to get some research done, I rented a small office -- yeah don't cry for me -- in a different part of town a few weeks ago. I go there every day, and when I am not needed in zoom meetings, I work on my Newton's Metaphysics manuscript. The tube runs on a frequent schedule and the ride is under fifteen minutes.  Most of the time it's very easy to social distance inside the carriages. 

I found an excellent espresso bar a seven minute walk from my new office in the heart of Fitzrovia. It's one stop on the tube, but because the weather has been so nice, as it has been this whole pandemic year, it's a lovely amble through the back streets of the neighborhood. I enjoy the blue plaques with the names of former (mostly nineteenth century) prime ministers and (mostly twentieth century) authors and social reformers. Sometimes I first get a wrap at a very fine middle eastern hole in the wall on Goodge street.

On Tuesday, at my favorite espresso bar I noticed he had no sweets on offer. When I asked about the lack of brownies, the barista/owner mentioned that his supplier had stopped delivering because his orders fell below the minimum. I quietly wondered whether there were payment issues. I said that must cut into your profit margins. Behind his face mask I guessed a dry smile, because I was told that he just broke even. Emboldened by the small talk, I asked the barista whether the landlord had offered a discount. Indeed he had, 50%. But this had been declined because it was supposed to be added to next year's rent. The purpose behind this offer struck me as a bit dubious, too. I wondered if his rolex was a fake.

I mentioned the story about the brownies to the building manager on the way back. In response she told me the Pret around the corner had stopped selling her favorite tuna mayo sandwiches. She had complained to the store-manager, who informed her they stopped selling it because too few people were coming into the store. 

Anyway, today, i walked through the rain, to find the espresso bar closed. (This will not have surprised you, my perceptive reader.) I looked around and suddenly I realized the street was near empty. I checked my watch (no, not a rolex). It was 3:15pm. On the way back to my office I started counting closed bars and shops. Many were, in fact, boarded up; I stopped at two dozen. I found a bakery near Warren St. with decent espresso. On my way back to the office, on Euston Road, I registered the half a dozen homeless people hiding in front of a (closed) furniture store.

One of my son's favorite classmates' step-dads drives a real London black cab. It has the largest sky roof I have ever seen in a taxi. Anyway, recently he told me (the cabbie, not the son) that he was doing one third the business he did last year. This is no surprise: London is a city that thrives on international travel (tourism and business), and wealthy expats for a lot of its traffic.

A few weeks ago the official unemployment rate in the UK was 4,1% (that was up  to July). All kinds of temporary measures have ended since then. In August 2020 "the number of employees in the UK on payrolls was down around 695,000 compared with March 2020." It's getting worse. 

Let me change tack for a second. 

A few novelists -- Arnon Grunberg, Zadie Smith, and Niña Weijers -- tell the story of my social habitat especially well. (I leave you to guess who have satirized me effectively,) But during this pandemic I have been drawn to Amy Olberding and her epic Ozark Stoics. While I once commented on one of her papers, and am proud she has guest-blogged for me, I have never met Olberding. But as my life has closed in on itself, I have grown needy of her story-telling. 

I imagine her in her pick-up truck in the parking lot of a giant Wallmart, stealing wifi; after she has responded to student emails, and has uploaded her lecture, she writes up her intellectual diaries, with her rifle and her laptop on her lap. One of my favorite passages is this one:

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can’t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don’t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring’s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood – now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

Without thinking, I turn left to the tube station. It's slightly longer that way in the shadow of the BT tower. On the sidewalk I evade two boys  on their electric step-scooters who seemed indifferent to the possibility of running me over. It's pouring.

It's been a decade since Lehman. I see myself reflected in the window of another abandoned shop. I am clean-shaven today; not quite an old man yet, but when I look around I see an older man shuffling in a Zimmer-frame. He is drenched. I know I see the dreary future staring at me. He smiles. It's the first maskless smile from a random stranger in months.

As I walk to the entry of the station, all I can think of are those vast armies of yellow daffodils filling Fitzroy Square.

On philosophical love (or why I fell in love with Iris Murdoch) {Guest Post by Fleur Jongepier.}

[This is an invited guest post by Fleur Jongepier.--ES]

Have you ever fallen in love philosophically with a philosopher? Do you know the reasons why (not)?  Is there even such a thing as philosophical love? I believe there is such a thing, and that having such intellectual emotions is vital to philosophy as well as one’s own academic wellbeing. I also believe it’s intricately related to inequalities of various sorts, and that we also need to think about the sociology, if you will, of philosophical love.

Let me start with a confession: recently, I fell in love with Iris Murdoch. One can fall in love with someone after years of friendship, but this was not like that. I knew of her, but was never really ‘into’ her. I don’t think I was ready fall in love with someone like Iris, someone who worked on the topic of love and someone for whom the loss of faith constituted an important personal-philosophical theme. Back then I thought such topics were too personal to constitute proper philosophy. Also, she was never on any of my syllabi as a graduate or undergraduate student and none of my lecturers talked about her in any serious or respectful way. Happily things are different these days (see e.g. women in parenthesis, the Iris Murdoch research center at the University of Chichester, the journal Iris Murdoch Review, etc.).

In preparation for a lecture on ethics and aesthetics, I recently watched an interview with her on Youtube, and I was smitten. When asked whether she believed one can do philosophy in novels, she said that, at best, a novelist would be engaged in “idea play”. Dostojevski involved in idea-play, the audacity of it! I loved the concept of “idea play”, and I loved her mischievous smile when she said it. (I didn’t really love her accent, but we would get over that.) She said things like “I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories as such into my novels,” and I thought that was excellent. It resonated strongly with my own emerging views on philosophy and literature. But I also wondered whether she really believed it, that the two were so separate even in her own case. And then I wondered if I really believed it, and whether they were so separate in my own case. And so I wanted to get to know her better. I soon bought The Sovereignty of Good, a large pile of her novels, and listened to hours of excellent podcasts. So far, I’ve only read part of the third essay from Sovereignty, and none of her novels. I’m a little afraid I might fall out of love with her, and I’m not ready for that. That’s because I have reasons for loving Iris.

I don’t know if one might have reasons for romantic love, or parental love, or love for one’s friends. As yet I have no explicit views about the relation between love and rationality. All I know is that there are reasons for philosophical love in my own case. There’s a sense in which I needed to fall in love with someone who reflected explicitly on the very discipline of ethics and on how certain ways of doing and teaching ethics can be ineffective if not harmful. I had reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared about how teaching ethics matters to how persons might (fail to) become better beings. On the importance of distinguishing between theories about the good, and actually being a good person. Given that I recently took up fiction writing again, I also wanted to fall in love with a philosopher who wrote novels and who was (happily?) prepared to make philosophical sacrifices to do that.

I have reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared deeply about topics that human beings outside of academic philosophy typically also care about. I want to feel passionately about a philosopher who believes that working on humanly important questions is compatible with being a rigorous philosopher. I need to feel close to someone who could show me that writing well and clearly is compatible with embracing ambiguities and complexities in one’s writing. I want to fall in love with a philosopher with different and refreshing conceptions on what rigor and clarity in philosophy and ethics amounts to. I want to be together with someone with whom I might further explore freer ways of doing philosophy; to explore the boundaries of philosophy and fiction; to explore the role of language, rhythm, emotions and real life in my academic work. I want to love a philosopher who loved those things, and I want it to be Iris. 

I had another reason to fall in love with Iris, which has to do with my reasons for wanting to (continue to) be an academic philosopher in the first place. Philosophical love can make that one is unprepared to “let go” of certain positions when confronted with objections, like a dog unprepared to let go of a stick (even when it cannot pass through the gate). The distinct type of doggedness that accompanies philosophical love can – like any other type of love – create serious problems of having myopic views and whatnot. However, it can also constitute a form of intellectual virtue and an important factor to the vitality of certain debates and disciplines. It’s a good thing that, due to intellectual love and passion, some people are prepared to go to great – all too great – lengths, and it’s often because of love that they are so prepared.

Intellectual emotions are important to one’s academic wellbeing. For me, in any case, philosophy is something I want to remain genuinely passionate about, at least sometimes. I’m not prepared for philosophy to become a purely cognitive or instrumental affair of finding good “niches” to publish in.^[1] And even though I see the dangers of philosophical love slipping into heroism – and I’d prefer, with Liam Kofi Bright, there to be #noheroes in philosophy – I still want to be able to fall in love philosophically, with all that that entails. I want to be able to defend certain views, or indeed someone’s work, to irrational lengths. I want to be able to be sometimes epistemically vicious, as Quassim Cassam calls it. I want to be able to be dogmatic, closed-minded, prejudiced, overconfident, gullible, and I definitely want to engage in wishful thinking every now and again. Just as love can be blind (fortunately enough), so too can philosophical love. Such blindness can be a good thing, both for the discipline and the progress and vitality of debates, but also for one’s intellectual wellbeing. I started doing philosophy because I was passionate about it, and I want to keep it that way. But it’s getting more difficult, given the increasing specialization of the discipline and instrumental thinking and publishing strategies. And so I needed fire, I wanted to lose myself in intellectual passion like I used to, and so I had to fall for Iris.

I also had reason to fall in love with a woman, specifically. Widespread sexual harassment and all other types of behaviours in its vicinity in academia has acutely obvious consequences, but also has negative effects that are much harder to identify. I believe being able to (allow oneself to be) passionate about philosophers and their work, especially if they are male, in a position of power, and alive, is one such hard to identity consequence. Due to all sort of incidents near and far, and the disappointment and disgust I feel in response, I’ve come to realize that experiencing philosophical love and passion for male philosophers is not really an option for the time being. Not even dead ones. I’m genuinely sad I (appear) to feel this way, and I feel uncomfortable about how these unreflective disinclinations generalize against all philosophers (m) despite knowing full well there are many lovable philosophers (m) around. But that’s the way it is, and I fear I’m not the only women who has become rather reserved with respect to experiencing intellectual passions. Even if, for some, the disappointment is less acute, it seems we all have reason to be aware of the dangers and inequalities surrounding philosophical love. If only because some philosophers themselves are apparently unable to recognize the not-so-difficult distinction between romantic love and philosophical love, and are incapable of behaving appropriately when intellectual passion comes their way. It wouldn’t surprise me if the safest and most uncomplicated type of philosophical love is, if you would allow me, homoerotic (in acute contrast to romantic homoerotic love, needless to say).

It’s not just women that philosophical love affects differently, it’s also people of colour and persons with mental or physical disabilities. Philosophical love and academic passion can be a privileged thing to feel, to allow oneself to feel, to be open to, to (dare to) act on. Given the importance of being able to experience philosophical love and passion at no cost to oneself, it’s tragic that it’s likely to be less open to some.

Philosophical love is thus likely to be implicitly (or perhaps on occasion explicitly) sexist, racist, and ableist.  This should be evident when one regards the typical receiving end of philosophical love: male, white, abled. That’s simply the result of a lack of diversity in most syllabi, curricula, and department staff. That’s part of the reason why I didn’t have the chance to fall in love with Iris before: I never encountered her during my undergraduate or graduate years, and was taught to love the “cooler” type. I taught myself to be passionate about depressingly analytic styles of writing, where the joy of playing around with language and real life had no place. I eventually fell in love with Dennett, whom I thought was analytically respectable and an engaging writer, thus a fine compromise for my intellectual heart and mind. But not being able to love Iris may well have meant not being able to flourish philosophically more fully, or earlier on.

One might think that the fact that I have so many reasons to love Iris – many of which have rather little to do with her and all the more with me, with feminism, and with various disappointments – is love-debunking. Love-debunking, as one might think of it, is when there are explanations for why you love someone or something that aren’t actually good reasons to love. If you come to see and accept those reasons for love, they would undercut your love. But there’s no reason to think my love for Iris can be debunked (I know, that’s precisely what smitten people would say). It’s true that I have reasons to love her, and know that I do, but that fact in itself isn’t love-undermining. Explaining something doesn’t always have to involve explaining it away (pace, Dennett). For one thing, reasons to love and feelings of love might be different things running parallel: I (sometimes) love philosophy for instance and I recognize, looking at myself from a distance, that being the sort of person I am, philosophy is the sort of thing I must love, tied as it is to my self-conception, and so on.

The point here is this: we do not need to be so worried about the fact that we fall in love with certain philosophers for all kinds of personal and social reasons, good or bad. The fact that philosophical love is often explainable doesn’t make one’s love any less real, deep, or indeed any less of a valuable academic-philosophical drive. Maybe you fell in love with a philosopher because your PhD supervisor not so coincidentally shared the same love. Maybe you fell in love with a certain topic because someone whom you greatly admire was passionate about it. Maybe you fell in love with a book because you thought you needed to love that book to be a “serious” philosopher. I think we all have philosophical love stories like these, and I don’t think they are “fishy” love stories. It’s only to be expected that philosophical love will often, or always, have robust social and personal-level explanations. And it’s not “unscientific” to recognize the reasons why one falls in love with certain debates, books, articles, or philosophers and their work.  It’s better to recognize and acknowledge these socio-personal love-explanations than to pretend, on the basis of some naive idea of academic neutrality and objectivity, that there’s such a thing as pure philosophical love, that is, a purely content-induced love.

Given the dangers of philosophical love and academic passion more generally, one might want to try and root out these emotions and try to avoid them in ourselves and our students and strive towards “impassionate philosophy”. I think that would be a mistake. Such intellectual emotions are crucial to deciding to (try and) become an academic philosopher in the first place, and – for me – to (want to) remain one. Such passions are integral to philosophy and science (see also the recent piece by Helen de Cruz on the importance of awe). One’s relation to philosophy and science requires both the head and the heart. And so instead we need to design our institutions and behave in such ways that we, including our students, can safely fall in love with concepts and debates and, yes, to also fall in love, non-romantically, with philosophers and their work. We need to make sure, by taking diversity seriously on all levels, that there are concepts and debates and philosophers for us to safely fall in love with.

Do I really love Iris though? One might think philosophical love is, at best, love in scare quotes. If one thinks that, then I fear one must be prepared to narrow down the love domain to rather impoverished ends. If one can’t love philosophers but only ‘love’ them, then it seems one can’t love Bob Dylan either, or Bessie Smith, or Francis Bacon, or Sofonisba Anguissola. I’m not prepared to only ‘love’ Bob Dylan, and by modus tollens/ponens, I don’t just ‘love’ Iris either. But if philosophical love is anything at all, what might it be? Philosophical love meets many characteristics of romantic love, though not all (and importantly so!) One importantly shared characteristic is “depth” which makes love different from mere liking. Philosophical love will involve being prepared to dedicate oneself to certain (shared) values and courses of action, even at cost to other projects that one values. Also, loving someone typically involves knowing their faults and loving them regardless (see this Digression).

For me, loving Iris involves being non-instrumentally curious in her work and a willingness to find out who she is, to have a “softer view”, as Julia Driver puts it, on her flaws, and not to try and mold her into my ideal image of her. Most importantly, love, as Murdoch tells us, is a way of getting “away from the self” (or “unselfing”) and to focus wholly and lovingly on the other. One is directed “towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love”. If suddenly seeing a kestrel is, for Murdoch, a way of unselfing, then Iris is my kestrel. Loving Iris is a way of focusing wholly on philosophy, seeing strands of philosophy I didn’t even notice before, of forgetting about misbehaviours in academia and to be mindfully passionate in philosophical thought, to forget about my laundry, the bills I need to pay, my own existential worries and self-interested concerns.

And so, for all these reasons, and many others besides, I’ve fallen in love with Iris. I’m well aware that I want to love her, for my own academic wellbeing, philosophical vitality, and fiction-writing enthusiasm. Being Iris, she might be rather displeased that I love her for reasons, she might even think this means I don’t love her, but I love her all the same. (I hope we’ll get through the holidays; I’m not looking forward to the baked beans with olive oil.)

On Station Eleven, Civilizational Collapse, and the PSR

We have been blessed...in so many ways, have we not? We are blessed most of all in being alive today. We must ask ourselves, 'Why? Why were spared?'...I submit...that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason....For it has been revealed to me that the plague of twenty years ago was just the beginning, my angels, only an initial culling of the impure, that last year's pestilence was but further preview and there will be more cullings, far more cullings to come. Emily St. John Mandel (2014) Station Eleven, 59-61 [HT Neil Levy]

Pandemics are never welcome. But the present pandemic is badly timed because the Anglophone and cultural heartland of liberal thought, which for better and for worse is the military and financial epicenter of our civilization, has been struggling with a badly bungled aftermath of a massive financial crisis that ended up reinforcing the advantages of the rich and well-connected by impoverishing state capacity and threatening the privileges and self-confidence of those that formed the bedrock of conservative majorities. These have put state power in the hands of celebrity demagogues and political adventurers with no sense of public welfare and common good, and who strategically try to entrench the politics of zero-sum, and with noxious efficiency try to reduce mutual trust in which they thrive. And so the very powers that were left standing after the cold war, are now more fragile than they have been in two centuries. 

The conceit behind Station Eleven, which has a resolutely Canadian orientation, is that a deadly pandemic, much more deadly than Covid-19, arrives in the aftermath of an "economic collapse, or so everyone called it at the time," (218); I quote from an elegiac moment, in fictional time it is supposed to resonate where we were half a decade ago, when Miranda, a shipping executive who had once been married to a famous actor (Arthur Leander), is looking at "the largest shipping fleet ever assembled...fifty miles east of Singapore Harbor" just before she receives word of the death of Arthur and the first inkling that "the fabric" of civilization would be "unravelling" for a true collapse (239). In her marriage, Miranda had been a kept woman and she sublimated her sense of isolation and entrapment with a cartoon entitled, Station Eleven. The cartoon appears in a limited edition and is the plot device that  ends up connecting the main characters of the story and the invitation to have us reflect obliquely on the meaning of the story told.  

Arthur Leander, by then a faded star, dies while performing Lear in Act 4 of Lear. He dies just as he has been asked (by Gloucester) "Dost thou know me?" And one of the very clever conceits of the novel is that the answer to that question, and the double-life between representation or acting and reality, is unfolded as we try to put the pieces together of the intersections of many lives as if they are a scrambled jigsaw puzzle with constant oblique references to the play and the cartoon. 

And just as a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) -- "Nothing will come of nothing" -- structures the action of Lear, so, too, the PSR drives the action of Station Eleven (in addition the passage quoted above, see also p. 96) as we follow along a traveling troupe of musicians and actors (who perform Shakespeare), the so-called Travelling Symphony. And just as there are many oblique angles in the jigsaw, so the PSR has a multiplicity of meanings. For example, for some characters it entails that no moment has special standing and that "everything passes" (249). For others it is the ground for a new vision of life, such as Tyler (249, spoiler alert: "the prophet" quoted above). The vision is propelled by the explanatory demand "to know that" great suffering "happened for a reason." (259)

I read Station Eleven a month ago and it was uncanny how prescient the early pages of the book were then to the unfolding news. And while aesthetically Cormac McCarthy's The Road hangs like a shadow over the book,* and at times Station Eleven insists on making things too explicit -- "Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Travelling Symphony"  --, there is plenty to admire in St. John Mandel's narrative. And I thought one of the (Sartre inspired) lines captures nicely what makes the present lockdown so harrowing: hell is the absence of the people you long for. (144).

The book stays far from the politics of the pre-pandemic period. A key political point exhibited is that in collapse human diversity reasserts itself; in the state of nature we are shown different kinds of social experiments in human living. At one point the narrator, who turns out to be less omniscient than one realizes, says:

Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn't go out of their way to welcome outsiders. (48)

I don't betray much when I note that in Year Twenty in addition to these towns, there there are more sinister forms of communal life and that one of the most idyllic spots of the former American midwest is a regional airport with enough tranquility and safety to develop a Museum of Civilization.

The book suggests that pandemics unsettle previous commitments about transcendence. The most unsettling new religious vision we're presented with, a veritable "death cult," originates in the grave explanatory demands of the PSR, when a boy searches for the hidden meaning behind his lucky survival "why did they die instead of us." (259; see also 260-261.) The boy's creativity is channeled into a new theology: "A new world requires new gods." (261) And, of course, this new theology will draw on familiar elements. Because in the search for meaning, there is also a desire for the safety we associate with (romanticized) childhood ("we long only for the world we born into." 302))  And I wouldn't be surprised to learn, if I am around in twenty years, that away from the current headlines a new popular religion has originated in our midst. As viruses spread death, deadly memes spread alongside them ("insanity is contagious" (261)). 

Like much of dystopian fiction (recall), Station Eleven presents us less with an image of the future and more with an oblique mirror of our times. I would betray its message if I claimed that civilizational collapse is foreseeable. In the book and, presumably, in reality collapse happens when one is making other plans. But what the history of civilizational collapse also tells us (recall here on Sallust; and more abstractly here) is that it is thinkable in advance and often occurs when the knowledge to prevent it is available yet can't be acted on. In the narrative of Station Eleven, such knowledge is lodged in the surviving plays of Shakespeare, which return from palatial theatres to the circulating knowledge of people in deserted landscapes. But it reminds us, too, that whatever may survive from us beyond collapse, may just be be mere ephemera among the interstices of the cult and culture of celebrity. 

A Proto-Genealogy of Classic

Whenever a Gentleman and a Scholar tums Editor of any Book, he at the fame Time commences Critick upon his Author ; and that wherever he finds the Reading suspected, manifestly corrupted, deficient in Sense, and unintelligible, he ought to exert every Power and Faculty of the Mind to supply such a Defect, to give Light and restore Sense to the Passage, and, by a reasonable Emendation, to make that satisfactory and consistent with the Context, which before was so absurd, unintelligible, and intricate....But as I have laid it down as a Rule to myself not to be arbitrary, fantastical, or. wanton, in my Conjectures upon our Author, I (hall venture to aim at some little Share of Reputation, in endeavouring to. restore Sense to Pastages in which no Sense has hitherto been found ; or, sailing in that Hope, must submit to incur, which I should be very unwilling to do, the Censure of a rash and vain Pretender.
As Shakespeare stands, or at least ought to stand, in the Nature of a Classic Writer, and, indeed, he is corrupt enough to pass for one of the oldest Stamp, every one, who has a Talent and Ability this Way, is at liberty to make his Comments and Emendations upon him...And he, who has the Luck to be allowed any Merit in it, does not only do a Service to the Poet, but to his Country and its Language. This Author is grown so universal a Book, that there are very few Studies, or Collections of Books, tho' small, amongst which it does not hold a Place: And there is scarce a Poet, that our English Tongue boasts of, who is more the Subject of the Ladies Reading. But with what Pleasure can they read Passages, which the Incorrectness of the Editions will not suffer them to understand?--Lewis Theobald  (1726) Shakespeare restored, or, A specimen of the many errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet: designed not only to correct the said edition, but to restore the true reading of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet publish'd, v-vi

In his entertaining Philology: the Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities,* James Turner writes that "by the early 1700s, readers had come to see well-known English authors of bygone eras as "Classic" like Cicero or Homer; so Lewis Theobald called Shakespeare in 1726." (80) It occurred to me that my attempt to offer an analysis (inspired by Coetzee's treatment) of the nature of a classic in philosophy had missed an important angle: when (and perhaps why) did "classic" take on something like our meaning? So, I decided to leave Turner aside momentarily, and turned to Theobald. 

In the seventeenth century,  a classic meant something like, "of or belonging to the highest class; approved as a model" (in the still extant sense of being first in class). For many it was obvious (some of ) the Greek and Latin authors counted as classic in this sense ("belonging to or characteristic of standard authors of Greek and Roman antiquity" is attested in the 1620s). So, a "classic" in the seventeenth century sense is honorific and refers to a small class of excellent, ancient authors.  In the 1726 Shakespeare restored, Theobald does not use 'classic' and its cognates very often. But in most cases he uses it in the traditional sense.

So, for example (and one of interest to Berkeley scholars), at one point he argues that 'notion' should be inserted where the printed edition of Otello has 'motion.' And then, while illustrating what 'notion' means by appealing, he states "The Classics, I think, have employ'd the Word in the
same Sense: And Cicero, I remember, to quote no worse an Author, has defin'd it thus." (Theobald 1726: p. 129) Somewhat amusingly, Cicero, in turn, is quoted as quoting a Greek authority. 

In fact, in my opinion the only instance he is willing to apply 'classic' in innovative fashion to a more recent author is in the sentence quoted from the introduction above. That Theobald knows he is innovating by applying 'classic' to Shakespeare is, I think, clear from his phrasing. "As Shakespeare stands, or at least ought to stand, in the Nature of a Classic Writer," His "ought to stand" reveals it is not yet established practice, but a proposal.* 

And in order to avoid confusion, Theobald is not claiming that Shakespeare is corrupt  ("and, indeed, he is corrupt enough to pass for one of the oldest Stamp"), but rather that the printed editions of Shakespeare are corrupted (in the same manner as old texts get corrupted over time). Seven years later (in 1733), in the "preface" of his seven volume Works of William Shakespeare, Theobald makes the very point: "Shakespeare's Case has in great Measure resembled That of a corrupt Classick, and consequently, the method of Cure was likewise to bear a Resemblance." (xxxix; the sentence is also quoted by Turner on p. 81.) Here, too, Theobald is not yet insisting that Shakespeare is a classic; a resemblance not being identical to its exemplar.

So, I take it to be an open question when, exactly, 'classic' became decoupled from the small band of ancient exemplars. I welcome suggestions from my learned readers! I suspect, but this is a hypothesis, this only happened when in the battle between ancients and moderns, the balance of power/taste shifted toward the moderns. (Obviously, and as Turner notes later, in the nineteenth century a discipline called 'classical studies' or simply, 'classics' developed, so the story is complicated.) 

Okay, where does this leave me? I have learned that 'classic' in the modern sense may well have been invented in the context of the presentation of a text-critical edition of a text deemed worthy of such philological efforts. I have to admit this surprises me; my guess would have been that 'classic' in this modern sense was first deployed in an educational/curricular setting or, inspired by Coetzee, in a discussion about standards of taste/merit among skilled judges.