Monday, April 27, 2015

Louis Menand on Pragmatism's Three Moments


This lecture is great. Menand, editor of Pragmatism: A Reader and author of The Metaphysical Club (an incredible book, and excellent as an introduction to American philosophy) is as intelligent and concise as his philosophical subjects. He also importantly points out in this lecture the blind-spots of pragmatism, such that while pragmatism (an idea about ideas) is a great philosophy to take down traditions and dogmatism, it's not great at pushing social movements. Which makes sense, really, when you think about pragmatism's Emersonian inheritance--the emphasis on the individual so strongly endorsed by pragmatism--William James in particular. Civil rights movements, for example, strongly rely upon the notion of universal human rights ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" etc.). 

Idealism relies upon certainty. William James said that "certainty is the root of despair," and his friend the Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. similarly said that certainty led to death. Conflicting certainty about ideals led to, oh I don't know, the Civil War for instance. In this context, Emerson's observations in "Fate" about slaves "crowing about liberty" seem slightly more understandable:
So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act...
Freedom is earned for Emerson by how you think, how you approach the world. It's not so much an ideal state one can attain via some document or legal status, but a process, a way of thinking. Of course, this is rather easy to say when you're not a second-class citizen.

One might go about this in a pragmatist way, but you sometimes need Idealists and dreamers (Martin Luther King Jr. would be one example of a dream, a visionary, a prophet of sorts). I'm still thinking about the problems of pragmatism as a political tool.

The American Voice in Philosophy Project

Wish I could go...this seems to happen every summer though. I guess the Irish do like us--we could talk about James and Rorty over Guinness! Check out the site, very cool work going on.

http://www.american-voice.org/index.php/summer-institute-in-american-philosophy

The project's mission/inspiration:
"About the Project Richard Rorty (1931-2007) and Stanley Cavell (b.1926) are philosophical contemporaries most recently moved to question the writing of philosophy in America. Intriguingly, the figures diverge significantly in their chosen philosophical inheritance. Cavell seeks to inherit the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (figures he regards as America’s most likely exemplars for intellectual life and national regeneration) while Rorty presents his work as a radical re-description of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Undoubtedly, it is significant that two of the most influential voices in contemporary philosophy – both inspired by the promise of a distinctively American tradition – so resist and embrace the standard narratives of U.S. intellectual history. 
What is offered in Cavell’s work is a perfectionist promise of our own lives’ validation, a validation before ourselves and before others. This promise might be glossed, alternatively, as the potential to authorize our own voice – in the history of philosophy as well as the history of culture. It is of the first importance for Cavell, and this carries particular resonance in his engagements with Hollywood film, that cultural participants never cede their aesthetic experience but work to possess it. For Rorty, controversially, self-creation is fully removed from public life. Finding voice and finding conviction, though of great personal interest, is not communally or inter-subjectively important. Achieving America, by the same token, is a matter for politics before philosophy. 
This project is inspired by such compelling conceptions of the American. Directed by the recent work of Rorty and Cavell, it expands to consider the history of philosophy in America as well as the distinctively American grain of such philosophical writing. Captured in William Carlos Williams’ resonant phrase are intimations of character as well as constitution, mood as well as ethos, spirit as well as style. This project aims to touch on all these aspects of American philosophical writing. It moves beyond the pragmatist and transcendentalist inheritance to encourage a fuller and finer attunement to philosophical America. To invoke William James, what we are finally concerned with are the varieties of American philosophical experience, the varieties of American voice."

Tim Morton on Subject Position

For me to remember. Probably the best advice for "how to read a poem" I've come across. I used to get depressed in undergrad theory classes where you walk away for the first time stuffed with poststructuralism thinking: "oh I thought "great poetry" meant something, but turns out I'm wrong, and sadly naive. Graffiti might be as meaningful as Emily Dickenson." That cost me a year or two of existential crisis, mourning the loss of what I had thought made great works great. Huzzah! There is middle ground! Poems talk to you, in a way. But you talk back too. This is somewhere between formalism and reader-response, which is nice. The poem and I are translating eachother, so something like a conversation is actually going on. Madness in the best sense. Read Tim's post here or on his own site: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/08/hegel-ecology-aesthetics.html Again, this work belong to Timothy Morton--I'm just spreading the word:
...a sneak preview of the first few pages of the talk I'm giving at Queen Mary University of London next month: 
The Time of Hyperobjects: Hegel, Ecology, Aesthetics 
Hegel's philosophical approach is intuitively very satisfying if like me you trained to study literature. From an early age as a literature student, you're taught that texts have narrators, and that these narrators are different from the author. For instance, a text might not have a single author, or even a human one. You could discover the text written in gigantic letters on the surface of Mars or floating at in the tealeaves at the bottom of the pot. No matter: all texts, these ones included, have a narrator. Now the thing about narrators is that they do two things, roughly: they establish a point of view (or points of view), and they establish a subject position (or positions). The point of view is fairly straightforward: it's the answer to the question, what or who is the narrator? Is the narrator omniscient, omnipresent? Does it have a gender, a race, a class? Is the narrator a character in the story? Characters? And so on. Slightly more difficult to grasp is the notion of subject position, but this is where it really gets interesting being a literature (or any kind of art) student, “where the rubber meets the road” as They say tediously over and over again in awful bureaucratic meetings where nothing is decided. I think that if you had to boil down what we do as humanities scholars into a single task, it would be identifying subject positions and working on them—which by the way makes me a good Hegelian. Because that's what Hegelian philosophy is all about. So what is a subject position? The subject position of a text or artwork answers the question, “Who are you, the reader?” In other words, what attitude towards itself does the text expect you to take? Think of a perspective painting. The vanishing points in the painting dictate where to place your gaze in order to make a 2D surface appear 3D. Your gaze is encoded into the picture surface. In the same way perhaps a flower's subject position is that of a bee, if it's painted with ultraviolet landing stripes. It tells you where to put your proboscis. This is the bad, or good news of literary theory, in a Lacanian, Althusserian nutshell. People come in to the theory class with the expectation that you can make anything mean anything. You will always get a certain essay on deconstrution that totally misinterprets it along these lines. No: that's what I call the pre-theory attitude. What you should leave the theory class with is the knowledge that not only is the interpretation of texts subject to all kinds of nonsubjective constraints, but also a place for you has been pre-established by the text itself. It's like those maps with the little red arrow that says, “You are here.” Now Hegel's great insight is that ideas come bundled with attitudes, in other words, ideas code for subject positions. When you think an idea, the idea's thinkability as such depends upon assuming a certain attitude on the part of the thinker. So when a Hegelian wants to debate you, she doesn't argue the toss about the truth content of your claims. She makes a beeline for the subject position that your ideas code for, and talks to that. It's a very disarming approach, as a matter of fact. I try my best to use it all the time. Again it's what I think the humanities were put on the Earth to do. Now honing in on the subject position is literally disarming, because it tends to be the unconscious of the idea, the idea's personality, as it were, and we sort of know from psychoanalysis that one's personality, how one appears to the other, is unconscious. So what happens when you hone in on the subject position is that you deprive it of its effectiveness. You collapse the idea and the attitude it codes for into a bundle. Now this bundle is yet another idea. And guess what? Since ideas code for attitudes, this one is no exception. So off you go, Mr. Hegelian: you now have to figure out that one. And so on. It's called dialectics. It means that philosophy is the history of philosophy, not the superficial occurrence of ideas “in” time, but a temporality and a temporalizing that is internal, intrinsic, to thinking as such. For instance, it has no reverse gear. Thinking is futural, since ideas don't know yet what they code for. That's what an idea is. (Cue the spooky Heidegger music.)

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Philosophy is Not a Luxury

Philosophy is Not a Luxury Blog and Podcast

Found this great podcast hosted by Jeff Carreira, and turns out he also knows the wonderful Timothy Morton. So someone else also has an interest in Morton's work and American philosophy.

I really like Carreira's ideas about Darwin's influence on the early pragmatists. The influence from Darwin came in two major ways, argues Carreira. 1) idea of the continuity of species (no essential, fixed species boundaies and 2) theory of natural selection (James's conception of the "cash value" of ideas). He writes that

"The pragmatists were completely captivated by this vision of a universe that was continuous and that evolved through a process of minute changed that propagate forward through time. In essence they saw all of reality as a continuous evolving flow that relentlessly self-generates through changed that carry on into the future. They wanted to take Darwin's model of evolution and apply it to absolutely everything so that they could create a theory that could describe every aspect of the universe from the physical to the spiritual as a singular evolving event."

Not sure I agree with everything (does this gel with James's conception of the pluriverse?) but very very smart, and certainly Darwin had a profound influence upon James's "weltanschauung", but who wasn't reacting to Darwin after 1859? So cool.