Digressions&Impressions

Covid Midterms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

On Covid Tedium and Regretting Oblomov

One of the strangest features of my slow Covid recovery (recall here; here; here; and here) is the pattern of (ahh) asymmetric cognitive impairment. I don't mean here just the loss of skill in doing things which I have associated with a kind of gappiness in my consciousness.

About two months in I am still incapable of reading books and spending more than thirty consecutive minutes on responding to emails. If I try to do do so I get a headache and/or a fatigue that feels like my scull is filled with a lead ball about two-thirds its size. The same effect is also produced by conversation, which I find very taxing, watching lectures, writing blog posts, and even relatively short walks. I still find most music unbearable even when well rested and without other symptoms. And when I am fatigued, even background humming or whistling can set off irritability and a kind of noise in my brain.

By contrast, I can spend my bedridden hours watching food shows and action flicks on Netflix; play online Scrabble; or scroll through Twitter and Facebook feeds. I am also aware enough of my situation to write emails withdrawing from commitments, and to spend my time reflecting on what I might do with my life, how to earn some income, if I never manage to recover the skill, that is capacity, to read and teach philosophy again.

I could, I suspect, write philosophy in short increments. But it couldn't be a professional or scholarly philosophy because I can't engage with other people's writings let alone the literature. In reflecting on this, I sometimes feel regret that my adopted philosophical style, even in these digressions, where I don't have to play by the rules of scholarship, is structured by the artifice of the imaginary, disciplined conversation with others; as distinct from, and opposed to, say, direct contact with concepts or arguments.

The other day I was watching The Grandmaster, a late and self-consciously more artistic and philosophical entry in the IP man series of kung fu films. In the key, climatic scene one of the protagonists (played by Zhang Ziyi), who has just compared her commitment to honoring the code of her family and her filial duty,  says, "To say there are no regrets in life is just to fool yourself." 

When you have spent more than seven weeks in bed, you have plenty of time to linger on one's life choices. So, perhaps that's why the just-quoted scene from The Grandmaster affected me greatly. I decided her stance is a fine response to the "I regret nothing" attitude of hedonism. (It is no surprise that Edith Piaf's song gets appropriated so often in commercials.) Of course, a life with only regrets may be no life at all! 

The existence and acknowledgment of regret is not a sunk cost fallacy, but rather a consequence of accepting or tracking the consequences of meaningful choices. The realization that one could meaningfully have, perhaps from a certain vantage point should have, done otherwise is a sign that one takes a certain kind of responsibility or ownership over one's actions.* It need not entail that one would do anything different. If one dislikes sentimentalism, one can call regret an aesthetic by-product of being accountable to self.

As I scan the books in my library, including the piles of books I had intended to read the past few months, I realize regretfully that despite my familiarity with its conceit, I never read Oblomov. I wonder if I had read it, I would have been better prepared for the in-activity, the Oblomovitis of covid long hauling.

As I was lying in the dark, the vacuous spinning of my insomnia wearing off, I decided that I regret I never read Oblomov would make a fine title of my aphoristic, covid memoires. 

 

 

 

Covid Fellowship and Constrained Living with Invisible Disability

After last week's digression on the effects of my Covid, I was very touched by the many generous well wishes I received. Reading notes of encouragement in my darkened bedroom filled my time for a few days. Thank you.

Two kinds of responses surprised me. First, while commiserating with me, a number of people shared publicly their experiences of living with regular vertigo, tinnitus, and headaches. They did so on this blog, but also in other social media. My piece was a trigger for them to come out, as it were, and share their otherwise invisible disability in our wider professional circle.* These testimonials give a glimpse of stoic perseverance and alert us, perhaps, to quiet suffering. 

Second, a smaller, but not insignificant number of covid 'long haulers,' and their partners, privately reached out to me, to wish me well, to encourage me, and also to tell me that they recognized my symptoms. They have provided me with fellowship and support through the chat functions of social media. 

Because I find speaking quite exhausting, I am, despite my family, rather isolated during the day. But the fellowship -- as I call them to myself --, has made me feel connected to those who have a sense of what it's like. Relative to the people who died or were incubated in hospitals, we don't seem especially stricken. But we struggle in a world designed for activity.

Because I mostly lacked the canonized covid symptoms  -- fever, cough, lack of smell, shortness of breath** --, the fellowship has been reassuring. Knowing that others, too, experience the waxing and waning of dizziness/boat-rocking, fatigue, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and insomnia has given me a sense it's part of the territory. They have given me a window, a sense of familiarity, into how my experiences hang together. 

Last week, I discussed my inability to read and focus; I have withdrawn from all professional activity. In particular, classes start without me next week. Even the fellowship can't remove the dread I may never teach again. 

This week, however, I want to give a sense of the manner in which the inability to concentrate ('brain fog') manifests itself in other ways, too. The most obvious example is that three times since quarantine ended, I nearly burned down our kitchen. Each time I skipped an otherwise obvious step; e.g., pouring water into the espresso machine after adding the beans, removing the paper-towel-role or the plate from the burning stove. Each time I missed that something was burning in front of my eyes until I smelled the problem, and, eventually, registered it as a warning.  

In reflecting on my experiences I receive, I imagine, an oblique glance at the what it's like of Alzheimers and dementia (and, perhaps, other forms of consciousness in animals and AI). And  there is no difference in experience. Compared to my pre-covid self my steam of consciousness does not feel more granular or gappy. I don't have a sense, in the moment, of my blind-spots.

Thanks to Dennett's work I am familiar with the fact that even very healthy conscioussness is full of unacknowledged gappiness. Because I recall my past capacity, I recognize, after the fact, that some of my behavior exhibits less skill-full functioning, an incompetence at tasks I had once been familiar with. Since I am nearly fifty that's not a wholly new experience.

A few years ago, the work of Elizabeth Barnes on disability taught me that the human condition should be conceived as constrained living (here); (here), (and here). The gappiness of my possible blind-spots is not experienced as constraint at all. I don't feel handicapped when I walk into our kitchenette.

By contrast, while I have some recollection issues (with names, especially), I have a pretty vivid sense of my capacities before Covid. And this alerts me to a whole range of new constraints day-to-day. For example, I have learned to walk while dizzy, which involves an inattention to the sense that I might fall any minute; instead I trust in the sturdiness of my legs.

I also can't listen to any music. In fact, the only distraction I tolerate is watching already familiar films, but not musicals, or TV  (or highly episodic series). This is also familiar to the fellowship. One curiosity is that watching explosives or gun-fights on Netflix does not bother me at all, but any other background noise -- the barking of a dog in the yard, even my son singing happily -- evokes the horror of a scratch on a blackboard. 

  

Leaving Your Ego at Home: on being a historian of philosophy

And, herein lies, I think, one of the great things about doing philosophy through historical figures like Leibniz. Whilst it’s very hard to leave your ego at home, there is less personal at stake when trying to discuss what you think Leibniz thought about x than when trying to say what you think about x. For one thing, everyone knows deep down, it would be crazy to think that they understood Leibniz an sich, and, for another, we all know he was a lot better at philosophy that we will ever be! And yet the joy of thinking philosophically is ever present.--Paul Lodge.

If I am granted the (extremely) controversial claim that studying Leibniz is no different than studying any other canonical, and would be canonical, author,* then in the quoted passage from Paul Lodge, one can read (at least) four claims about being a historian of philosopher: 

1. One's ego is less involved in studying a canonical philosophy than philosophizing directly.
2. The people we study are "a lot better at philosophy" than "we will ever be."
3. It is nearly impossible to fully understand a canonical philosopher.
4. Being a historian of philosophy is a joyful activity.

Claim (1) will come as a surprise to those only focused on the often minute squabbles among historians of philosophy. Even so, there is an important element of truth to (1). This is not because historians of philosophy are by nature less ego driven or vain -- Schliesser is exhibit A to the contrary --, but because part of the training of becoming a historian of philosophy is a disciplined bracketing of one's ego. For, whatever one's ultimate goal(s) in being (momentarily) a historian of philosophy (and there are huge disagreements over this), an attempt to grasp another thinker(s)'s text is a key part of it. One central benefit of this disciplined exercise in understanding another is to become self-aware of one's presuppositions that one brings to the text. When historians of philosophy complain about anachronism, what they really worry about is the unthinking, un-methodical, even unconscious imposition of the reader's thought-world onto the text. This unconscious thought-world is a whole series of expectations about how words, concepts, meanings, terminologies, grammar, values, as well as political and cultural practices (etc.) relate to each other. We can become aware of such hard to detect expectations of our ego, when we systematically confront utterances by others that do not fit our expectations in usual even uncanny ways.

So, the historian of philosophy is increasingly skilled at being self-ware of central, usually hidden, features of her own ego while she gets increasingly skilled at entering into another person's text. So, the disciplined student of the history of philosophy is following the Delphic injunction to know herself. Along the way she learns to 'bracket' her own ego in  the midst of grasping the text of another. In practice, this 'bracketing' of one's ego is always imperfect, which is why, say, the writings of historians of philosophy tend to reflect the ruling fashions of the generations of their teachers (give or take). Either way, one way to understand Lodge's claim is to see that when one philosophizes 'directly' (without mediation of historical texts) the hidden life of one's ego is, even if one has a naturally modest nature, not as systematically bracketed all else being equal. In practice, of course, all else is not equal, and there are lots of other philosophical and social practices that can generate some such bracketing of one's ego (say disciplined by formal technologies, or by dissonances through one's cultural back-ground, etc.). Having granted that last point, so many of the worst social incentives in philosophy reward the hyper-projection of one's ego onto metaphysical or social reality; the previous sentence is not as cryptic as it sounds. Here's a small example: status in our discipline tracks rapid come-backs, witty put-downs, and bold conjecture (backed up with plausible enough systematic analysis); we rarely reward, in our public esteem, sympathetic colleagues that are incredibly good at listening to another and bringing out the best feature of their interlocuter's views. (Obviously, when we are drafting a paper we very much appreciate having the sympathetic colleague.) Being trained as a historian of philosophy is to be trained into becoming a sympathetic colleague. (Again, this is compatible with the further thought that a historian of philosophy is uncouth, listens to bad pop music, a jerk, etc.)  

On Being Silent on Gaza

[A]s meaningless as asking which points in Ohio are starting points.--Quine "Two Dogmas" (1961).

I’m what you get when you cross Quine with Ryle and add some cognitive science.--Daniel C. Dennett.

I am writing in order to disrupt any possibility that the horrible conflation of Zionism and Judaism become further entrenched this week. And I am writing to draw attention to the uncontroversial fact that whatever the merits and legitimacy of the State of Israel and its military actions may be, it does not speak or act in the name of the Jewish religion or in the name of the Jewish people...

Today is the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the greatest calamity in the history of Judaism and the beginning of our long and bitter exile. The holy rabbis of the century that saw the rise of Israeli nationalism as a response to this exile have taught me that I will sanctify God's name if I declare publicly the Jewish belief that the Zionist mission is a struggle against God's very will.--Prof. Curtis Franks, "An open letter on Israel and Gaza from Notre Dame philosopher Curtis Franks," Leiter reports.

The fabric of sentences that constitute the "lore" of Quine's fathers "is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention." Quine could not locate "quite black threads in it, or any white ones." Sometimes we do not have Quine's or Dennett's luxury in picking our (surrogate) fathers;+ in the lore of my family there wear dark, black hats tracing back matrimonially (and with a few genealogical gaps) to the Ropschitzer Rebbe. Given the possible puns on Ropschitz, I did not share this with my school friends; we can't all be a Prinz or a Gendler.* Of course, I could spin a story about myself as, say, Dennett's student (which is true), but it wouldn't fit with the work I do, so I have tried out others.

In professional philosophy, we tend to be separated by two degrees or less, but I have to admit I was unfamiliar with Curtis Franks. His website helpfully informs me that he "is the direct patrilineal descendent of Isaac Franks (b. 1772 in the Royal Province of South Carolina)." Not quite the Mayflower, or Newport, but certainly yiches, too. Franks is a logician, I learn, so undoubtedly careful with words. I was made curious because in his open letter, he cites a pacifist passage of the Chofetz Chaim al Hatorah approvingly with its author called "saintly."** It's been a while since I have heard "the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem" described as the "greatest calamity in the history of Judaism." (That's compatible, of course, with greater calamities --either the expulsion from Iberia or (in the one awkward locution of Franks's letter) "the most famous genocide attempt in all of hisstory" -- befalling Jews qua Jews.)

Of course, not in my lifetime would I have ever imagined to see the most important professional philosophy blog (and Brian Leiter is not exactly known as a friend of religion) give prominent space to ideas that I associate with Satmar and other ("Hungarian") Hasidic Anti-Zionists to whom I was sometimes introduced by my (non Hungarian/non-Satmar) grandparents during my childhood visits to Forest Hills. (To be clear Franks's Jewish authorities are neither necessarily Satmar or Hungarian.)

Yesterday Ingrid Robeyns asked me why I keep quiet about Gaza (etc.). She knows that recently I defended (in Dutch) the need for philosophy in the public sphere (while acknowledging that such philosophy is often a very different genre from what we professionals would ordinarily take seriously). Even so, because philosophers rarely have a comparative advantage when discussing newsy events, and we are not trained pundits (although some practice punditry),++ I think restraint on newsy events is advisable. Moreover, training in professional ethics, political philosophy, and meta-ethics does not, I fear, involve training in good moral-political judgment (and there is considerable evidence -- for those that wish to see it -- that becoming a professional philosopher corrupts one's moral reflexes as Ruth Chang has eloquently taught us and Eric Schwitzgebel documented.) The great danger of philosophical skill -- one not emphasized enough in our training -- is that when coupled with public utterances it becomes no better than extremely refined, lawyerly technique in the service of any end (but without the legal framework/rules), that is, propaganda, even war-time propaganda.

Remembering Klausje Weinberg

Yesterday, was Dutch memorial day. I had dinner with my dad, and then we went to the traditional two minutes of silence, at the Apollolaan monument erected in memory of the 29 victims executed by the Nazis in reprisal for the successful assassination of a notorious Sicherheitsdienst officer. It's at the corner of the Beethovenstraat, which is the center of bourgeois German- Jewish refugees's life in Amsterdam before the war, and some survivors after. (Arnon Grunberg has captured what it's like to grow up with their shadows in Blue Mondays.) Officially, Dutch memorial day has evolved into a cosmopolitan reminiscence; without much fanfare at the Apollolaan the focus remains resolutely on the Nazi victims.

My dad (now 76) spent most of his childhood at Westerbork, initially a refugee camp, but as Wikipedia reports, "the Nazis took over the camp and turned it into a deportation camp" (in German, Durchgangslager Westerbork). He was about a year old when his family arrived there as refugees from Berlin; he was almost seven when the Canadian armed forces liberated them. One need not be exposed to much of the science of memory to realize that his memories of this period are not entirely his own. Even so, in retirement (recall), he participates in an education program, where he shares his  wartime experiences. (He is also active in anti-Racist events. For those that can read Dutch, here's some quotes from him at a Muslim-Jewish dialogue.) He's articulate and, while hindered by a recent hip-fracture, mobile, and may well become the last Holocaust survivor despite being an avid chain-smoker. He travels all around the Netherlands to speak at schools, and today he'll be on Dutch TV.

Not unlike many of his generation, my dad was not very comfortable talking about his (nor asking others about their) Wartime experiences. He likes to think that he only started to open up after some self-help courses about twenty years ago. Indeed, he participated in the culture of silence, but many stories were already familiar to me already at a young age.