Posted at 08:00 PM in Autobiography, Meaning of Life, Medicine, Memory | Permalink | Comments (0)
I am taking my customary end of year blogging break, again. And I hope to return to near-daily blogging in January.
I have enjoyed and appreciated all the well wishes, my dear readers. (For my "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). It's a strange feature of my current disability that it is easier and more relaxing for me to write a blog post than to have a minor conversation in a café or restaurant. Social interactions are exhausting, and if there is ambient noise or more than one interlocuter, I am likely to have headaches and bad sleep (and a kind of 'soft'-brain fog--in which my thoughts slow down and my phenomenal experience is not as rich as it ordinarily would be). Unfortunately, the side-effect of such interactions is reduced time and energy for blogging, and other writing. (Basically I have been unable to do research while I taught my small Fall course.)
My occupational therapist has convinced me to try to limit social interactions to no more than thirty minutes. And to plan plenty of rest between them. Her theory being that longer interactions just drain me of all energy. 'Energy' is the explanatory concept, the goal, and the ground of everything the occupational therapist says to me. (In Dutch, the occupational therapist is an 'ergo-therapist,' and in conversation with her, I have to prevent myself from using random passages from Aristotle's Ethics.) She basically compares my brain to a car battery that due to my current activity pattern is incapable of fully recharging and, so, fails to retrain itself post trauma. (She alternates comparing my brain to one that has suffered considerable trauma and one that is suffering from burn-out.)
As I have noted before (recall), the occupational therapist has induced a number of behavioral changes all of which amount to avoidance of multi-tasking, doing a better job of relaxing when I should be relaxing, and to give myself a chance to 'build up energy.' Luckily, I don't have to teach for about eight weeks, and I will also try to do more exercise along the way.
The most recent meeting with the occupational therapist annoyed me greatly. Basically, all the new exercises (and 'home-work') involve planning exercises. These are chapter 2 of the exercise-book I was given. It took me a while to figure out why I found it annoying. (The occupational therapist is a funny and empathic person.) But after some reflection, I realized it was because I felt I with my particular symptoms wasn't being treated, but rather I was a number being put through a pre-existing training program. Undoubtedly, the training program is useful, but while i have some cognitive impairments, inability to plan my life is not one of them.
As I said it took me a while to figure out my irritation. What triggered it was her considerable surprise that reading and writing is relaxing for me. Her surprise didn't bother, but the lack of adjustment of the training program does. In particular, she sent me a number of videos (which her patients appreciate greatly) even though I had explained to her earlier that zooms and videos are especially draining. Paying attention to another's reasoned argument or explication basically sets me back a day; whereas reading is a piece of cake.
All of this is in the category, minor troubles relative to the sorrows of humankind. But since I have been sick for a year now, and the pattern has recurred with several other health care providers (go read the covid diaries), I am more attuned to it. Basically nobody knows what my underlying problem really is, and nobody is willing to spend public money to do the kind of invasive testing to figure it out. The testing itself is unlikely to produce conclusive evidence of what's wrong with me, and it is unlikely it will produce a suggestion of how to treat me. And since hospital visits actually set me back days on end, the medical system sensibly hopes my body will cure itself eventually rather than drag me in for lots of tests.
Since this gets repeated with most folk like me -- i.e., long haulers without clear lung and/or heart problems --, we're also disappearing from the system. Nobody is counting how many of us there are, and how much work is being lost. Basically, GPs and and occupational physicians keep track of their own patients, and they know I am not alone; and they share best practices in whatsapp groups. Often we read the same pre-prints when I come to them with experimental treatments. Interestingly enough, the London covid clinic prescribed me heavy dosage of melatonin, and then my UK GP refused to prescribe it except in very small dosage. (This is actually funny because in Holland melatonin is an over the counter drug, but my Dutch GP expressed surprise that this would work at all for long haul.)
My Dutch neurologist told me he rarely sees patients with long haul. (Meanwhile, the waiting list for the neurologist in the London long haul clinic is over a half year now.) Since in the Dutch system, the costs of the first two years of (partial) medical leave are born by the employer and employee (I have have a pay cut alongside my reduction in work hours and responsibilities). And that means that the government will only start noticing us in the Spring of 2022, when the first generation of long haulers will be pushed partially into social security. And since the employer is initially responsible for finding fitting work for the employee, the government will only notice those who are completely disabled or those working for very small companies. So, the numbers, if any, won't start adding up until later in 2022 and 2023.
If I could handle social interactions, this would be the moment I would try to mobilize a Dutch patient group for long haulers. But the very idea of trying to fight the system, and to coordinate many despairing and angry patients, is not 'energy enhancing.' And so I hope that by planning well and conserving energy, I recover sufficiently so that I can keep a version of my job by the end of next year. The system, of course, finds my defeatist response very welcome.
I have come to describe myself as cognitively 'disabled' and 'impaired' (or 'handicapped'). I know that sounds final, and I don't believe it's final. But I have also noticed that 'sickness' doesn't convey my situation and what I need. I need others to accommodate themselves to my limits, and it means that I have to police these limits in a way that I am not used to at all. (It reminds me a bit of when I had to keep visitors away from my partner and son when he was new-born.) And I am also discerning that I have to police my own activities most. Obviously, this risks a spiral of social isolation; I am no fun to be around because I can't do much or engage in much. Yesterday, when I was in the office, I literally had to keep well-wishing and well-meaning colleagues from entering my office because I needed time to recover. And it is very difficult to be a partner and dad, when you have to do it in twenty-five minute installments.
The reason I use 'disability' is because when people encounter me they can't see anything wrong with me. And while I don't fit some of the stereotypes of cognitive disability either, at least with cognitive impairments, we're used to them not being wholly visible in one's countenance. (Sometimes people notice I am tired or green/gray.)
As I noted recently, I have also been diagnosed with partial hearing loss. This has nothing do with covid, it seems, and is potentially reversible. But it occurred to me that one reason why social interactions are so exhausting is that because of the hearing problems I have to work harder at hearing and processing what people say. (This is a good place for your favorite joke about ignoring what others say!) One day, I'll write a paper about intersectional disability.:)
In January, I'll do a post on how all of this has changed my approach to teaching. But I have gone on long enough, and I need some time away from the screen. It is the way.
Posted at 03:03 PM in Autobiography, Meaning of Life, Medicine, Memory | Permalink | Comments (2)
By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]
We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics -- "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense.
Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?
As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise.
But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.
Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*
Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary." As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**
Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.
The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.
Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.
Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.
Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now. For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).
So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania). Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+
Posted at 12:21 PM in analytic philosophy, Books, Borges, Deleuze, Derrida, Early Modern Philosophy, Edward Snowden, Formal methods, Gulliver, Hebrew Bible (Philosophy), history of philosophy, Leibniz, Leitgeb, Memory, Meta-philosophy, Metaphysical Indeterminateness, modality, novels, Philosophy of Education, Plato, political philosophy, Quine, Revolutions, scientific philosophy, Spinoza, Swift, Tarski, Totalitarianism, Truth, War | Permalink | Comments (1)
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.
Posted at 12:54 PM in Autobiography, Meaning of Life, Medicine, Memory, political philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 02:51 PM in Autobiography, literature, Medicine, Memory, Philosophy of Death, Professional Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading "Covid Fellowship and Constrained Living with Invisible Disability" »
Posted at 01:17 PM in Autobiography, Daniel C. Dennett, death, Fatherhood, Meaning of Life, Medicine, Memory | Permalink | Comments (2)
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:
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.)
Continue reading "Leaving Your Ego at Home: on being a historian of philosophy" »
Posted at 11:44 AM in anachronism, Autobiography, Deleuze, Early Modern Philosophy, early modern science, Formal methods, Hebrew Bible (Philosophy), Heidegger, Hindsight Bias, history of philosophy, Meaning of Life, Memory, Metaphysical Indeterminateness, Nietzsche, Philosophical Prophecy, Philosophical Traditions, philosophy of history, Professional Philosophy, Ranke, Religion, Teaching philosophy, Walter Benjamin | Permalink | Comments (1)
[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.
Posted at 01:14 PM in Abraham Stone, analytic philosophy, Analytical Egalitarianism, Analytical Existentialism, Brian Leiter, Carnap, Civil Rights, Cosmopolitanism, Current Affairs, Daniel C. Dennett, Glymour, Hebrew Bible (Philosophy), Heidegger, Meaning of Life, Memory, Meta-philosophy, Origin of Analytical Philosophy, Philosophical Prophecy, Philosophical Traditions, philosophy of history, Plato, political philosophy, politics, Professional Philosophy, Racism, Religion, shame, Socratic Problem, soldiering, Theology, Truth, War, WW2 | Permalink | Comments (5)
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.
Posted at 11:01 AM in Arnon Grunberg, Hindsight Bias, In Memoriam, Meaning of Life, Memory, WW2 | Permalink | Comments (1)
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