Digressions&Impressions

On How to Read The Man in the High Castle

The oracle...was sound asleep all through the writing of the book. Sound asleep in the corner of the office. Philip K. Dick (1963) The Man in the High Castle.

of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:12

One branch of political philosophy is a species of comparative institutional analysis; in which the earthly models of the heavenly exemplar are developed in different ways because they are based on different empirical axioms. I have proposed to call this genre, Socratic political theory about ideal theory. In the past I have suggested that More's Utopia and Le Guin's (1974) The Dispossessed are instances of the genre. (To say that does not mean they don't belong in other genres, too.)

I picked up The Man in the High Castle at an airport recently. I am grateful to the TV series for making it so easily and widely available, but I  have not seen the series. The Main the High Castle can be read as imaginative counterfactual history about what would have happened if the Axis powers had won the Second World War and the Axis powers have divided the spoils. It's clever and troubling (it's a world of massive genocide, racial hierarchy, betrayals, censorship, but also uncommon moments of humanity, etc.). Yet within the novel, and arguably the key theme of the story is another book writen by Hawthorne Abendsen [a homage, perhaps, to Asimov's Nightfall or, Wiesel's Night, or, perhaps, Celine's great novel], who has authored The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (itself an allusion, as Wikipedia notes, to Ecclesiastes 12:5). This books is also a counterfactual history, but -- even if you agree that there is no metric for such things -- closer to actual history (the allies win the war, although with plenty of variations from actual history).

We can say, then, that we are explicitly invited to compare two imagined, but institutionally rich worlds to each other. One means for doing so, is by looking at what remains the same in both imagined worlds despite the historical and institutional variation as well as what differs in both worlds despite points of contact. Some other time I want to say more about this, but there is a further complication. For the The Man in the High Castle also goes meta on us (I forget who gave me that phrase recently---apologies!), because the way Abendsen's book is supposed to be interpreted is also a matter of, well, conflicting interpretations throughout the book. And here I want to close with a note on it.

At the end of the The Man in the High Castle by relying on an interpretation of the I Ching (cf here), we are presented with the thought by Juliana (one of the main characters who turns out one of the few heroes of the plot and who is compared to a daemon from the underworld) and Abendsen that the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy has an Inner Truth. (The idea also angers Abendsen.) Remarkably then, we are explicitly invited to consider that books have a surface meaning and an inner truth. A few pages before Juliana had already concluded that the point of Abendsen's book is not about that novel's "make-believe world." She grasps that its inner truth is a commentary on her world (the one in which the Axis won).

We are, thus, invited to treat The Man in the High Castle not just as counterfactual history but also as a commentary on Dick's actual world (ca 1963)--that is on the nature of the civil rights movement and the nature of US imperialism (both issues in the two novels). For example, in Abendsen's imagined world discrimination between 'Whites and Negroes' is ended by the second world war, and US and UK imperialism compete for global victory. How to think about such a commentary in a methodological fashion -- as rigorous as the interpretation of the I Ching -- is for another occasion. 

Can Philology Save Us? On Justin Smith's vision for the university of the 21st century

For philology may hold out not only the promise of reviving the humanities, but also of reestablishing the lost unity of the human sciences with the sciences of nature. Part of philology's apparent irrelevance today has to do with what we may diagnose as our society's radical and unprecedented presentism. No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and indeed this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to Tweet and to 'text' and to share memes that consist in part in strings of words, we are in fact moving into a post-textual era....This presentism not only cuts us off from what was long understood to be a central concern of the human sciences --to know who we are by knowing where we've come from--, it also perpetuates and deepens the contingent and unnecessary separation, as I've suggested, of the human from the natural sciences. Understood as philology, as a search for origins, the human sciences in fact share a great deal with a number of other sorts of inquiry often cordoned off from the human sciences on the other side of what has been called, since C. P. Snow introduced that term in 1959, the 'two-cultures divide'. Philology shares aims and objectives, and sometimes also methods, with archaeology, as also with paleontology, evolutionary biology, and perhaps even those branches of theoretical physics that deal with the distant origins of the universe. All seek to account for how the world got to be the way it is....

History...should be elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science in the emerging universities of the 21st century. It is the best hope for an exit from the current dérive of the humanities, and, much more than this, it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the human and the natural sciences. History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be. Pollock notes that philology "has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been." This ubiquity was however grasped, for example, by the early Islamic field linguists who went out to build their lexica from the oral poetry of the Bedouins. Nor, at other times in history, as for Leibniz and William Jones, was the boundary of the genealogist's project set at the limits of language, but indeed extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today's humanists have relinquished all these things to the natural scientists, who for the most part do not know what to make of them. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, natural science stands to gain as much as the humanities do: to rediscover its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.--Justin Smith "A Forgotten Field Could Save the Humanities," The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Behind a paywall; HT DailyNous.]

Justin Smith is probably the most creative and playful historian of (early modern) philosophy today.* So, I was sad to learn that he is "increasingly" leaving it "behind in view of its woeful provincialism." In his piece he also rejects 'localism' (which he associates with a deplorable, it seems, "new strain of identitarianism in the humanities.") He embraces, rather, "a global, rather than provincial," perspective. (He is quoting Sheldon Pollock, but in context he is endorsing it.) From context it's clear that the 'global' is something distinct from the 'universal' (or, at least, the purportedly universal that he associates with Anglo professional philosophy). Presumably, a universal perspective homogenizes, whereas the global makes space for differences due to (again quoting Pollock approvingly) "historicity, constructedness, and changeability," not in the least in the trajectories of knowledge production. This becomes clear from Smith's dazzling display of examples of "early Islamic field linguists,"  the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz debate, William Jones's research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, and Leibniz's vision.

It is worth noting that the natural antonyms of the province and 'provincial,' are not just the urbane and broad-minded, but also empire or imperial. And, in fact, the material and administrative precondition for the the global vision is often some kind of empire. And while we tend to think of colonial empires as great projects of subjugation and effacement of local difference, there are empires in which there is unity while respecting provincial diversity--it's these empires that most need (to quote Smith) a "unified project." One way to generate such a project, is to project "the lost unity" (emphasis added). These projects are fueled by restorative nostalgia that is, simultaneously, hyper-modern and a source of immense creativity. Such projects also involve an insistence that perspective matters and that hopeful greatness needs to be projected on a larger canvass. [For an excellent literary treatment of such matters, recall John Williams' novel Augustus.]

While Smith may wish nothing to do with something as crass as a military empire, his project does involve elements of restorative nostalgia (e.g., "elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science") and a fondness for taking about 'we' when it suits him. He insists, also, that the present view of philology is mistakenly diminutive (see also the "diminished" view of the humanities) and "yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be" in order to be more "lofty." In addition, he is not against the (selective, prudent) use of force because he insists that there must be 'compulsory instruction' in order to ensure that certain kinds of forgetting does not occur ("no one ever forgets that in the end there are no truly atemporal sciences.").

Like many who embrace such restorative nostalgia (Carlyle, Nietzsche, etc.), the criticism of the present is acute and insightful:

"Among the humanities, philosophy...is surely the field in which European area studies has most successfully disguised itself as a universal and timeless form of inquiry. How often do we hear philosophy professors demur, when the subject of, say, classical Indian logic comes up, that they "regrettably don't know anything about that." What they really mean is: "My professional identity is wrapped up with my not knowing anything about that." This is something we learn as graduate students: a period of socialization in which we learn not only how to display our knowledge of, and commitment to, a given circumscribed domain, but also learn how to scoff, subtly, at whatever research interest falls even slightly beyond that domain. This is an acquired syndrome, transmitted from faculty to graduate students in the course of their own professional reproduction.**

My sense is that Smith's diagnosis is an apt characterization of our teacher's generation (although we both know exemplars that displayed different attitudes). The new generation of professional philosophers is embracing a different ethic; one in which any topic or puzzle is a legitimate opportunity to display technical virtuosity. Such technical sophistication is, of course, compatible with (although need not entail it) a thin understanding of the topic (and its historicity, etc.)  

An impatient reader sympathetic to (various bits of) Smith's project may suggest that my remarks thus far are distracting from the main agenda of his piece: his research agenda, that is, to combat 'presentism' and to promote a unified project in which the humanities and the sciences jointly "make sense of the world, and of our place in it," in part, by taking our path toward the present seriously. There are certainly opportunities for such thick collaboration between the humanities and (for convenience sake) the life-sciences. (About a decade ago, I penned a series of three papers in which I claimed that the history of astronomy and the history of economics are crucial to astronomy and economics (conceived as a policy science.)) I do hope that some enterprising university Rektor of a "non-Euro-American, university of the 21st century," hires or consults with Justin to help her implement a university with three faculties (a 'faculty of history', a 'faculty of the atemporal sciences', a 'faculty of new stuff') along the lines envisioned by him.

But in his essay, Smith offers us the matter, but not the form of this unity which, thus, becomes unexpectedly its own telos. Smith offers us the institutional strategy without the standard that may justify or vivify it. Without such a vision it is not obvious why the experts of the present and future will join in the shared enterprise (and they will persuade their paymasters to block it). To put the point jokingly, what's missing is the sense in the sense-making (I might say, the utopian concepts). Previously, this form was supplied by (say) revelation or philosophy. By bagging Spinoza's criticism of revelation, Smith cuts himself off from the former. By turning his back on the latter, he seems to leave himself without resources. But, perhaps, he thinks, with the Romantics, that poetry or art can supply the form. That uncertain, transformative path must seem tempting.

On Lack of Progress

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.-- Thoreau, "On Reading," Walden.

If we can get past Thoreau's immodesty -- he comes close to grouping himself among "the wise" --, we can understand him as saying that there is no progress in the underlying circumstances of human life. There is, however, variation in the answers  given to the enduring "questions that disturb and puzzle and confound." Some of that variation can offer a "new aspect," but he resists the idea that the new is also an improvement. Rather, the best books (past and present) make available in speech what we may call, purportedly impossible thoughts ("the at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered"). The denial of progress does not entail pessimism. For, as Thoreau insists time and again, once articulated or exhibited, impossible realities can be made to exist: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Thoreau insists that the wise exhibit a kind of integrity between words and deeds. That is, philosophy and philosophical lives disclose and revive options that are were locally unavailable in word and deed. These disclosed options can be improvements over the present baseline--they are "salutary" because they are life-affirming (recall), but it is clear that Thoreau thinks these do not secure permanent improvements. Why this is the case is not explained entirely. (To be clear: Thoreau thinks industrial and material advancements are not an improvement because they generate wants that make us psychological slaves.)* Evoking Montesquieu, he claims that ages have spirits apt to them; but Thoreau warns his confident nineteenth century readers, eras come and go. 

While, in context, Thoreau is primarily concerned with spiritual and cultural flourishing, there is also a political tenor to his remarks. That's clear from the fact that the section ends with the observation  that "to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions." Here "our" refers to American or, more likely, New England's (or even just Concord's) institutions. In fact, while there is (echoing Emerson's Self-Reliance) a non-conformist, individualist strain in Thoreau, he also recognizes that at least in some ages, collectives are the proper locus of action for some purposes: "Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men."

Thoreau's general denial of progress keeps him relevant. (This is compatible with the thought that some changes involve some moral progress.) Every generation thinks itself ahead of those that came before; that our belated, temporal starting-point somehow secures us special privileges in solving life's questions. (I often note with fascination how students can be amazed to discover the characteristics of their modernity in texts written one or two millennia ago.) By this I do not merely mean that we have not beaten death nor that we have not implemented an equitable tax-regime yet. Rather, every age has eluded finding a formula to generalize living wisely or, what amounts to the same thing, peacefully.** Yet, as always, there is no paucity of seers that point the path toward the annihilation of our enemies.

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

Why the Canon Fight is Different in Analytical Philosophy; on Heroworship

For a brief spell in the 80’s and 90’s, higher education was consumed by the canon wars. For those too young to remember, the canon wars were some earnest and intense battles among people who couldn’t agree on which authors needed to be taught for students to be considered properly educated.--Inside Higher Education (2013).

A year ago Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman succesfully managed to ignite discussion within professional philosophy about the status of the canon (recall my response).* Other humanists might think -- paraphrasing a quip falsely attributed to Heinrich Heine (which doesn't stop the Wall Street Journal from recycling it) -- that philosophy is the Netherlands of higher education, everything happens there three decades later. (Genuine humanists know that debates over the canon are as old as the canon itself.) While there are solid sociological-demographic reasons that help explain why philosophy remained aloof from the canon wars (the short version: professional anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly white, male, change-averse and unreceptive toward unmasking narratives), there is also a key intellectual reason: within analytical philosophy the (Western) canon is largely irrelevant to disciplinary conversations.+ No command over the details of the text is ever presupposed. This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded -- self-consciously mimicking Descartes's dismissiveness toward book-knowledge -- as a revolt against historical approaches to philosophy.

While the days may be gone in which one could count on all literature professors to recite Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Dante, and the other mighty dead, especially Middlemarch, from memory, to this day working knowledge of some such books provides a shared, contested frame of reference in literary and cultural studies even if nobody thinks that command of such books is a mark of civilization or even a signal of one's cultural capital. And while close reading persists in college courses, the idea that literature can replace Scripture has long been deconstructed, and De Man unmasked; I would not be surprised if it has had its brief, ironic revival prompted by a Simpsons episode.

By contrast even when I present on David Hume's Treatise to professional historians of philosophy, let alone generalist philosophical audiences, I make sure to prepare detailed excerpts of key passages. Hume is the fourth most admired philosopher in history (according to a recent poll); he is the highest ranked English language philosopher--his Treatise the acknowledged masterpiece.** Even the anti-historical logical empiricists would say nice things about Hume. My excerpts are not merely aids to memory; I know that the passages I am calling attention to are simply unknown. Professional philosophy is not a discipline in which texts from the past are internalized. (Yes, there are a few Hume scholars that have working knowledge of some texts, but even among that lovely crowd -- dominated by professional philosophers -- there are very few people that know Hume's major works really by heart.)

Even when working positions come to be known as Humean or Carnapian (etc.), odds are we are dealing with Hume* or Carnap*. It doesn't matter, really, if Hume is not a Humean. (The relationship between, say, Carnap and contemporary Carnapians is very interesting and illuminating.) While there are a few magisterial clubs within professional philosophy -- Kantians often really try to get Kant right (even at the price of introducing anachronism), Wittgensteinians even have a second-order debate whether it makes sense to get Wittgenstein right, etc. --, philosophical puzzles and controversies do not get settled by authoritative interpretation of major texts. Of course, interest in such puzzles can be started by way of some such interpretation. 

The above is not to deny that there is an image of philosophy prevalent within professional philosophy in which a limited number of historical, canonical figures are very prominent: starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant (etc). These folk are often, indeed, implicated in subtle and not-so-subtle forms of ideological domination (or worse). It is worth serious reflection why Gorgias's Helen is unread; why even specialist scholars are unaware of the male feminism of Toland, Mandeville, and John Millar--all eighteenth century figures that were once extremely famous. (Even world class Nietzsche scholars tend to be ignorant on the genealogy of genealogy.) It is shocking that (the first) professional interest in early modern female philosophers only commenced less than a generation ago.  

If we abolish the canon in professional (analytic) philosophy, we just give folk another excuse not to read books. This trend may be unstoppable anyway: the textbook is beloved by university technocrats who hire cheap labor to teach pre-set curriculum with well-defined (achievable) goals.

For, in addition to the image of philosophy, there are classic works, often drawn from those canonical figures that figure in the image of philosophy, which are routinely but not exclusively used to introduce students to philosophy (e.g., an intro to ethics course with Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill--hopefully Sophie de Grouchy before long, too) [recall, recall, and more if you use Google]. Arguably, Nietzsche has become canonical within professional philosophy because teachers could not resist the allure of assigning him in their courses. There could be quite a bit more experimentation and innovation in the pool of such classics. In preparing a course on Islamic philosophy, I encountered Ibn Tufayl (recall) and was certainly not the first to be struck by how easily he could fit in any text-based introductory course in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. 

What does exist in professional philosophy is a kind of hero-worship of living authority figures and the recently deceased.* Manifestly odd views can endure because they are associated with some such hero and, more importantly, because they put (often informal, but no less tight) conceptual and methodological constraints on what is acceptable within professional discussion. Williamson describes the mechanisms involved in a recent essay: he patiently explains the fear factor that surrounded Quine for a while [recall my post]. This is why in the overthrow of such heroes we find more than argument--there is also rhetoric; Williamson describes Lewis's metaphysics as "extreme" (9) and memorably, but unflatteringly, notes that Lewis is "also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power, mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era." (8)

This hero-worship is associated with a lot of the worst features of the discipline; the common cruelty, the lack of respect for viewpoints associated with outsiders, the willful ignorance, and the awful systematic demographic patterns of exclusion. So, if we abolish the canon in professional philosophy without ending the hero-worship not much will change about the professional practice.

Ibn Tufayl on Transformative Experience

Suppose a Man born Blind, but of quick Parts, and a good Capacity, a tenacious Memory, and solid Judgment, who had liv'd in the place of his Nativity, till he had by the help of the rest of his Senses, contracted an acquaintance with a great many in the Neighbourhood, and learn'd the several kinds of Animals, and Things inanimate, and the Streets and Houses of the Town, so as to go any where about it without a Guide, and to know such people as he met, and call them, by their names; and knew the names of Colours, and the difference of them by their descriptions and definitions [alone]; and after he had learn'd all this, should have his Eyes open'd: Why, this Man, when he walk'd about the Town, would find every thing to be exactly agreeable to those notions which he had before; and that Colours were such as he had before conceiv'd them to be, by those descriptions he had receiv'd: so that the difference between his apprehensions when blind, and those which he would have now his Eyes were opened, would consist only in these two great Things, one of which is a consequent of the other, viz., a greater Clearness, and extream Delight.--Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail  The Improvement of HUMAN REASON, Exhibited in the LIFE of Hai Ebn Yokdhan [also known as Philosophus Autodidactus], translated by Simon Ockley (1708).*

The great joyous zenith of Ian Mueller's medieval philosophy course (recall), was his treatment of Avicenna's (or Ibn Sinna) flying man argument. He would carefully take you through the argument, step by step sometimes nodding ahead to Descartes, sometimes glancing backward to Augustine. He would note the little slips and offer gentle improvements along the way. But at the end of the treatment, he would sigh softly and whisper, Isn't that something? Awe replacing his more usual embrace of aporia.

It is well known that Ibn Tufayl's [or أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن محمد بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي ] twelfth century, philosophical novel is ingenious; its debts to Avicenna, who is acknowledged in the first sentence, is obvious even to a non-specialist like me. Ibn Tufayl was born in Andalusia (present day Spain) and the intellectual patron of Averroes ( أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد),(recall). But reading the sparkling philosophical prose for the first time produces a kind of shock of the unexpectedly familiar that is not quite identical to what is known.

Ibn Tufayl's treatment of the blind man's color vision is closer to L.A. Paul's pregnant Mary [recall] than to Jackson's color-blind Mary.**  In context, Ibn Tufayl agrees with Paul and Jackson that the discursive does not exhaust the knowable, and that is, in fact, the immediate point of the thought experiment (which is meant to illustrate the nature of a kind of mystical, intuitive knowledge of the highest truth, or union with God). But, strikingly, Ibn Tufayl does not point to the what it's like part of experience that is not knowable (suggesting a lack of anxiety about any purported opposition between the third vs first personal stances). Nor does he use the example to undermine faith in the transferability of testimony or teaching.

Rather, what he points to is that new experiences that add to the empirical base or foundation of one's knowledge can be transformative of one's emotional state. One need not agree with Ibn Tufayl's particular diagnosis that it's joy that will follow the new-found color-clarity of experience in order to recognize that transformative experiences may generate intellectual sentiments (wonder, admiration, surprise, joy etc.)

One may find my classification of joy among the intellectual sentiments a bit dubious. For example, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Adam Smith omits joy in his list of intellectual sentiment; and while he recognizes a form of joy subsequent to intellectual tranquility, he tends to understand joy as one of the more natural passions. Even so, we may say in proto-Spinozistic terms that for Ibn Tufayl joy is consequence of  the mind's movement toward greater perfection.

 

On Diminished Support for Universities

Just a personal note to you, beyond the standard leftist ideologies that you support, do you also welcome ideologies that you reject?  Is it analytical ideology you like or your political team's winning? As someone who doesn't share your politics but benefits from the nonideological portion of your writing, I usually turn off during your political chest beating and fist pumping.  Why don't you interrogate the dominant leftist ideologies that actually control the universities? Getting a sense of how overwhelmingly monolithic university politics actually are might help you to understand why the outside political coalition for supporting universities full of committed ideologues is diminishing. Who wants to fund institutions dedicated to ridiculing and despising them? Thanks again for your insights and writing (especially the nonideological bits!)--Anonymous.

My comments policy has reduced my stress level compared to when I was moderating comments at NewAPPS. I get fewer comments, relatively fewer obnoxious comments, and I can make snap decisions on what to accept without second thoughts. Not surprisingly, when people's views are connected to their public identities they tend to be more cautious, especially when they suspect -- correctly or not -- that their views may hinder things they value, too, like friendships, professional advancement, and reputation (etc.). The benefits of moderation should not be underestimated, but obviously it may also generate a status quo bias. Even if the status quo is very pleasant (at least to those that benefit) this also reduces the opportunity of learning. Balloonists are happy to take the high ground but I recognize that other blogs may have other interests -- some noble (inclusivity, openness and experimentation) and some less so (drive traffic and advertising numbers) -- and will encourage anonymous comments. Anyway, it's nice to be informed so kindly that some of my readers are willing to keep reading me even when they do not agree with my purported ideological positions.

I welcome analytical ideology studies because it is developing useful conceptual tools that will facilitate better analysis of political events and movements; it is also regenerating analytical philosophy as such. This is useful because analytical philosophy had grown too comfortable with technocracy and too quietest in light of major social upheavals. Regardless of the ideological orientation of those most prominent within analytical ideology studies, it is foreseeable that the tools they are developing will be used to analyze many kinds of ideologies and ideological stances, including ones cherished by those active in it today. Analytical philosophy does not have the intellectual resources to prevent this.

It is amusing to note the lack of irony among those (including my anonymous commentator) that applaud the use of state power in order to curtail or prevent the lefty political orientation of university professors. Leaving aside irony (which gets tiresome), American elite universities thrive in insanely competitive global markets. Yes, there are subsidies in all kinds of ways, but the existing patterns of outcomes are a consequence of lots of free and responsible individual choices within the market for higher education among students, their parents, university administrators, and faculty all in light of global developments, changing job markets, and public opinion. For good or for ill the very best public universities quite clearly emulate the elite private ones (Cf. my imitation of Veblen). I welcome ideological competition and it is good that within philosophy some programs self-consciously steer non-standard ideological courses (e.g. Arizona), just as it is great that within the philosophical blogosphere there are different options (recall).

This is not to deny that philosophers and professors more generally can take the political for granted. It is, in fact, to be expected that contestable and controversial values will be contested by political forces--I blog about this in terms of the Socratic Problem. My own read for why "the outside political coalition for supporting universities" has diminished is subtly different than the one proposed by my interlocutor: it has more to do with a decline of a certain form of civic religion in the American heartland much indebted to late 19th century Protestantism in which education is valued alongside dramatic demographic and economics shifts such that the rich can expect to exit safely from local institutions (including public universities). You can help destroy Madison if you expect your kids and grandkids to go to Yale (where they can be taught how to think carefully about ideology). 

I do not deny the claim that there is considerable group-think even among those that pride themselves on independence of thought. I know of tenure cases that strongly appear to be decided on ideological grounds. Like all human institutions, we find sources of corruption within professional philosophy and the academies that support it. We are, I fear, also in the midst of a newfound receptivity toward rule by the intellectual and educated elite among the wealthy and highly educated and an increasing distrust of popular democracy. Ironically, the most vocal supporters of this trend are on the Libertarian right (e.g. Jason Brennan), but in Europe the technocrats are playing with the idea of substituting lotteries for ballot boxes, and the novelists imagine submission to a form of political Islam. Undoubtedly, Stateside, Liberals were too fond of appealing to the sophisticated judgment of elite judges when they could not win elections and, unsurprisingly, we have seen Conservatives emulating their practices: good tricks get emulated which is why the first one to do so bears a heavier responsibility, if history knows any morality.

On finding a copy of Faust in the Mud

"[The] most striking recollection I have of those evenings is the reading and translating of Goethe's Faust by Ella Schliesser, who had found a copy in the mud.--Claudette Bloch-Kennedy

The quoted recollection describes conditions at Rasjko--a sub-unit of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, where there was an agricultural research station during the war (see here for some details; and here, too.) The woman described was my dad's aunt, Ella Schliesser, who by all accounts was a remarkable woman. (She was the subject of this German play in the early 1990s.) As a teenager she was a member of a communist agit-theater group, "Rote(s) Sprachrohr," in Berlin. After she fled Germany she got advanced degrees in (I believe) chemistry in Paris. She survived the war, was expected to be part of the Communist leadership that would rebuild (East) Germany, but committed suicide in 1947.

Ella Schliesser is a family legend, I had heard stories about her spiritedness at Auschwitz. But until I read the quoted sentence this morning, I had not encountered, I think, direct eye-witness testimony about her war-time activity. (My dad's family was basically apart from her for much of the 1930s and 40s.) I assume Ella Schliesser was translating Faust from German into French (several of the other women in that research group were French), but, perhaps, it was into Yiddish.

The detail about where Ella found that copy reminds me of a passage in Faust:

Have you, O Thales, in a single night

Brought a mount, from mud [Schlamm], to light?--, Anaxagoras to Thales, Goethe.      

Anorexia

Despair's a maudlin ecstasy of baroque romanticism. You wait for signs.-Chris Kraus (2000) Aliens & Anorexia (46)

[A]ll these readings deny the possibility of a psychic, intellectual equation between a culture's food and the entire social order. Anorexia is a malady experienced by girls, and it's still impossible to imagine girls moving outside themselves and acting through the culture. All these texts are based on the belief that a well-adjusted, boundaried sense of self is the only worthy female goal…Anorexia is a violent breaking of the chain of desire.—Kraus (161-3; emphasis in original)

Cynicism travels through the food chain. To stop eating is to temporarily withdraw from it. Kraus (173)

Euclid, who wrote only about things which were quite simple and most intelligible, is easily explained by anyone in any language. For to grasp his intention and to be certain of his true meaning it is not necessary to have a complete knowledge of the language in which he wrote, but only a quite common and almost childish knowledge. Nor is it necessary to know the life, concerns and customs of the author, nor in what language, to whom and when he wrote, nor the fate of his book, nor its various readings, nor how nor by whose deliberation it was accepted.—Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, chapter 7. translated by E. Curley.

One of the threads running through Kraus's Aliens & Anorexia is a re-interpretation of Simone Weil's philosophy and, with it -- and maybe more importantly – the way anorexia is represented and conceived. Apparently, Weil's "writings are often read as biographic keys," (165) and, in so doing her writings are reduced (belittled, and dismissed, etc.). There can be a kind of violence in reductive readings, which can entrench further patterns of harm.

However, reading the writings of somebody as "keys" to their lives need not, in principle, be reductive if the life and text are thought of as exemplars worth emulating or if they have something to teach us about, say, philosophy (art, sport, politics, faith, etc.) or how one ought to live. After all, some authors invite at least partial reflection on their lives through hints or strategic autobiography; even when they do not do so explicitly, often these circumstances are – as Spinoza notes in the passage quoted above -- critical to a contextual understanding of their aims and methods.

That is, there is a complex ethic of reading. Even when we antecedently know, if such knowing is possible, that the life in question is to be censured because the life counts as some kind of consequentialist mark against the all-things-considered-worth of a philosophy (Heidegger, De Man, etc.), such an ethic may, nevertheless, encourage gentle re-readings or, at least, receptiveness to possible new framings.

Kraus encourages her readers to re-think of anorexia as, in part, a kind of moral responsiveness to intolerable cynicism in our culture. And indeed from the moment we are born the way we are oriented toward food is suffused with cultural significance and this often includes acts of violence not just toward the animals we have slaughtered for meat. For example, when my wife was becoming practiced at breastfeeding our then-infant-son when still in the hospital after his birth, I was shocked by the forthright, physical brutality of the attending nurses toward my wife's breasts over and beyond the whole mass of norms and cultural imagery that all seem to conspire to create guilt and self-doubt when mothers/parents feels most vulnerable.

Until reading Kraus's novel it never occurred to me to think of anorexics as seeing through our systematic distrust of each other that makes us view all of other people's acts as incapable of nobility or of generosity. It's not that I couldn't discern that eating disorders may be shaped by the harmful culture we inhabit, but I tended to understand anorexics as passive victims (of their parents, of the media, etc.), to be approached with tact (and maybe humor) and without judgment even if their behavior evidently harms themselves. Not for the first time, I recognize that in trying to resist our culture's flawed categories (after all, it's often said that anorexics just (sub-consciously) want attention or need treatment, etc), I have also reinforced the culture's patterns of harms.*

For, Kraus invites her readers to judge an anorexic's sensitivity and decisiveness as a sign of a life that would require a much-needed recasting of the social order to flourish. (Obviously, it is also dangerously reductive to treat another individual solely as a symbol for all our expressed and suppressed suffering, but to get the conversation started it is a useful corrective.)

Stoner and Augustus On Love and Freedom (and Parenting)

There is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die, and the children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of low in which you…have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.

And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surround this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power…It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.

I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, thought it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. "Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus"--John Williams Augustus: A Novel (306)

In the face of death and delirium (when one can be "more reasonable than most men"), there are, we are told, three kinds of love:

1. One consequent the pleasure of, let's say, body-coupling. (This is fleeting.)
2. One (Platonic) consequent our intellectual awareness of our lack of knowledge about our intimates—a form of unstable, self-knowledge that is revealed to be an imprisonment.
3. An enduring love that the scholar-craftsman feels for one's necessary creations, which – upon further reflection – is revealed as love of power.* 

It is no surprise that an emperor would identify his own ruling passion with a love of power; nor surprising that a novelist would have him say so. It is a bit more surprising that at the end of this novel about the art of ruling, which is simultaneously about the art of parenting, the novelist would allow his reader to entertain the thought that her immersion in the written text is a form of subjugation to the author's craft.

So, we are back in familiar terrain of the modern novel: the novelist as prosecutor of his own craft. We might say that the main defense of the novelist is that he acts from "necessity" ((305) or "destiny" (295)). While the propagandist's utility for the novel can be aimed at directly (recall), if there is genuine utility to the novel – elevating minds toward greatness (recall this post on Grunberg/Coetzee) – it is an unintentional byproduct of the love of power. (This is the secondary defense.) Williams lets us enjoy the irony that the emperor is wiser on the novel's possibility, and takes it more seriously, than his poet-propagandist (recall Maecenas here and here). But this very possibility is also destabilizing psychologically and politically; for the novel leaves no doubt about the dissatisfaction that follows from wise rule. Our excellence is revealed under duress (privation), not in prosperity.

This writer's necessity is not opposed to freedom (although there seems little room for the readers's/subjects' freedom--John Williams's sudden popularity offers a window on our limited aspirations). On the contrary, Augustus is recorded as claiming: