Interview #1

I wrote this little piece after graduating college in 2013. Obviously I was frustrated with the idea that I would need "practical skills." I now find myself standing a bit more in line with the interviewer voice, rather than the interviewee. Funny how we change. I still like that idealism though.
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-- Hello. I would like to apply for a position.

-- You have a degree.

-- I have a degree.

-- Give me applicable skills: _________________

-- Certainly. In spades: Exploring the human condition as expressed through language: the written word.

Better: Identifying and articulating underlying philosophical assumptions in a piece of writing. Deconstruction ala Derrida. Ala Nietzsche.

-- No no no. I mean concrete/practical/applicable/useable skills. I mean give me something identifiable.

Useful. Tell me the life skills you have acquired though your education. You have a degree. Where are the internships. Where is the networking. Give me networking. Give me names give me places.

-- I have a thesis.

-- You have a thesis.

-- I read and researched and wrote. And so I have a clever title and a passionately argued central vision.

-- Thesis schmeesis.

-- An original piece of research on the power of imaginative sympathy in modern environmentalism. I pushed these ideas until 3 am even. I worked very hard. There is a brilliant turn on page 14.

-- Who read the thesis? Who will ever read the thesis. Did anyone read the thesis.

-- . . .

-- No one read the thesis. The thesis does not matter. Give me applicable skills:________________

-- . . .

-- Can you work a copy machine?

-- I graduated with Honors. I have an even better than solid GPA.

-- Are you comfortable on a Mac or PC? Are you at home in Microsoft Office more specifically can you format spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel?

-- . . .

-- Wake up. Head out of the clouds. Come on down. What was your education for?

-- To ask questions.

-- Question: Can you give me applicable skills?:_______________

-- What does it mean to be human?

-- Can you come in on weekends? Are you willing to work the occasional Sunday?

-- Is there an objective reality outside of subjective perception, or is reality subjective perception itself?

-- Are you familiar with Prezi or are you more comfortable with Power Point.

-- And so can we live happy, purposeful lives even after dismissing free will? Do we have to dismiss free will?

-- Let us be honest.

-- I can do that.

-- No no no. Who are you kidding. Honestly. What is your plan. Where are you purposefully headed in the next five years. Where do you see yourself. Imaginatively speaking.

-- I will work hard.

-- You have debt. You have little experience and not very little debt. Write a thesis on how you will pay your debt.

-- I will pay my debt.

-- How.

-- I will get a job. I will use my skills.

-- Give me applicable skills:____________

-- . . .

Just a bit from an essay on Konstantin Kolenda

An Uncertain Scholar

   I am a graduate student, I should say, of literature and not of philosophy. My professor instructed my seminar class to find an archive and to write a paper about the experience. I loved the assignment for its openness—just do something interesting, she seemed to say.  Passing over old log books, a diary, collections of photographs, a beautiful book of paintings, and the delicate letters of Samuel Richardson, I searched a few days for the right project: I needed to be grabbed. Thankfully the Woodson Center has an online database of all archival materials. Every collection, or manuscript, or archival item is listed, usually with a detailed list of its contents. Such a search brought the Kolenda papers to my attention after keying in “American Philosophy” and, on a whim, “William James”.

    I should say a quick word about my attachment to James. English majors of a certain temperament tend to fall in love with dead people more easily than, perhaps, their relatively well-adjusted fellow human creatures. But intellectual backgrounds and erotic attachments notwithstanding it would be fairer to say that certain writers “do it” for us, no matter the temperament. And for me William James, even more than his brother Henry, was one who could “do it.”  As if anticipating my scholarly needs, James articulates this very phenomenon in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.” “The wildness and the pang of life”: I’m reminded here of Rebecca West’s famous observation of the James brothers that philosopher William wrote like a novelist, and novelist Henry wrote like a philosopher. William James was a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer. He insisted on clarity whenever possible, and retained a sense of play as well as a sense of humor in all of his work. John Dewey (a tedious writer with brilliant mind) noted in James’ prose a “clearness and a picturesqueness that will long be the despair of other philosophers.”

    Persons drawn to James’ pragmatic philosophy tend to be simultaneously attracted to what seems to be the nobility of an intellectual enterprise taking for its target the largest and most important questions ever posed, all the while being sensible to the perils of reveling for a lifetime in a project that may have no real application outside the classroom. Philosophizing can sometimes seem “as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together,” as George Eliot told us. But James has an answer: “What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.” [Note 1] If Kolenda had worked on William James I could fulfill the assignment and also read up on American pragmatism: here was the first hook. Admittedly, it was initially strange to me that a man with a foreign name could have been invested in American pragmatism, a strain of philosophy neglected by Americans themselves. Of course, if Tocqueville was right the nativity of any strain of philosophy would make no difference since “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”  

    I scanned the “Guide to the Konstantin Kolenda Papers, c.1950-1990 MS 436.” After spotting some papers on James, I glanced at the Collection’s abstract: “[t]he majority of this collection consists of Kolenda’s own writing (notes, drafts, source material). The next largest group consists of source material only on four philosophers (Peirce, Rorty, Ryle and Wittgenstein)…”  Rorty? Scanning the box index for Kolenda’s business correspondence I found Rorty’s name again, Box 5 Folder 29. I didn’t know who Konstantin Kolenda was but I was certainly familiar with the name Richard Rorty. Arguably the most prominent enfant terrible of the academic philosophic establishment from the 1980s until his death in 2007, Rorty was celebrated and reviled for his abandonment of epistemology-centered philosophy; philosophy, that is, with the central purpose of discovering big-T Truth.

    Most often considered a neo-pragmatist, Rorty turned away from his Chicago-school analytic training—quite the betrayal at the time—and toward a reexamination (and recovery) of thinkers like James and John Dewey. He found resonances between these American pragmatists and continental philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. “It is as if Rorty decided to mix apples, oranges, and nuts,” writes Kolenda in Philosophy’s Journey, “But…Rorty knew what he was doing.” Explaining further in his 1990 book Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism Kolenda writes that

The claim that it is the philosopher’s job to uncover the Truth about the Secret is the main target of Rorty’s criticism. Leaning on other thinkers preceding him, he points to the confusions underlying attempts to discover the foundations of all knowledge….He claims that…the entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant was motivated by this incoherently incoherent project…

The work of an ambitious man, surely. Rorty could be sardonic as when describing his escape from under the “collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about” and also unironically hopeful (“My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” The casual “pretty much” is typical of a philosopher whose prose, like his philosophy, bristles with the everyday. A rich correspondence, I imagined, awaited me: a trove of letters stuffed in some dusty old box stuffed in the corner of some old basement stuffed, as it were, in the Woodson archives of Rice University. I could already see the headline: BRILLIANT YOUNG SCHOLAR DISCOVERS UNKNOWN RORTY LETTERS NEW INSIGHTS PENDING DOZENS OF RORTY SCHOLARS EAGERLY AWAIT PUBLICATION. No ink would be spared.  I joked as much to myself, and yet I think a part of me took the idea seriously, the idea of finding something of vital interest in the letters between these philosophers—both prolific, one famous: was the other terribly overlooked?

    I’m not sure what I expected, but archives are both extraordinary and mundane. I found myself in the Woodson Center in a room of glass, carpet, and fluorescent lighting where two boxes were waiting for me on a cart near a large table. The Center’s archivists are wonderfully trusting, letting you handle most materials by yourself which is not always the case. The first boxes I had requested were chosen simply because I had seen names I liked: Richard Rorty, William James, Middlemarch. The latter two were folders with stacked loose pages of written notes, most scrawled in a barely legible hand. I skimmed through but decided to go to the Rorty letters instead. The folder, a slice of papers neatly slid (not stuffed) in a clean cardboard box, was disappointingly slim. And yet it wasn’t nothing, and my disappointment melted away as soon as I saw the penned signature at the bottom of the first typed letter: “All the best, Dick.” I always suspected Rorty to have been cuddlier than his philosopher persona—the casual “Dick” only encouraged me.

    The letters were typed, which was a relief. Unlike other folders of correspondence I later looked through, the Rorty folder had copies letters Kolenda had written and sent himself. Was this correspondence more important to keep intact? Did it mean more to him? The letters were in no particular order so I first had to spend time rearranging them from earliest to most recent. In doing so I was made more aware that I had no idea if I actually had the entirety of the correspondence, most of the correspondence, or only a sliver—I’d have to work with what I had. The first letter was dated 9 May 1983, and it was brief. But my eyes were drawn to the second paragraph under the greeting which had begun “Dear Konnie”:

It is nice of you to see me as a rejuvenator of philosophy, but I am not sure enough about whether there is such a thing to be sure of whether it ought to be rejuvenated. You are right in suggesting that I would prefer to regard myself as an intellectual, but not “just” an intellectual. As far as I can see, being an intellectual is about as far as one can go.

In 1983 Rorty would have been on the rise, but still quite controversial (not that he ever wasn’t controversial). My archival subject was an early admirer of the post-analytic Rorty it seemed. Kolenda replied that he was “exhilarated” by Rorty’s work and would be “reading as much of your stuff as I can lay my hands on.” Rorty writes that he was “very flattered” that Kolenda thought “[his] stuff worth working on.”

    The letters weren’t quite as deeply philosophical as I had expected. They talked about attending conferences, and about what the other was working on, like Kolenda’s Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism or Contingency, irony, and solidarity which was in the works in 1987-88. Kolenda had, in fact, offered editorial advice and is eventually acknowledged by Rorty in the book’s preface for “suggest[ing] a crucial rearrangement of topics.” Reading the letters though, my focus was on Rorty, since I assumed he would be the more interesting subject for my project—Kolenda was just a way in. But a letter caught my attention; it was in the Rorty file, but the sender instead was an Oxford publishing company called Basil Blackwell. Dated 18 January 1988 it began “Dear Professor Kolenda”:

I now have heard from our advisor about your proposal for the book on Richard Rorty. While the report is prefaced by a note to me saying that he thinks that the work is in fact very impressive both his and my feeling is that we oughtn’t to be publishing two books on Rorty in such a short time. As I think I mentioned in my last letter we’ve already contracted a book called Reading Rorty (a collection of essays about Rorty’s work and influence). Regretfully, therefore, we shall not be able to make you an offer for your book.

The sender assured they were “very sorry” for the “cautious response since I would have enjoyed working with you on the book.” This afterthought of an apology felt a bit cheap and insincere even if it wasn’t. Maybe this kind of vaguely saccharine rejection was a common occurrence for publishing academics, but I felt disappointed for Kolenda. Why couldn’t two books on Rorty be published?

    It was my first palpable response to Kolenda that had little to do with Rorty, and I think I felt a weird guilt at accessing Kolenda’s papers for a reason that had little to do with the work he had done over a lifetime, a life and work that could somehow be reduced to a dozen or so boxes of letters, and papers, and pictures, and manuscripts, and old date books. His papers had been given with the assumption that they would be of interest, that he was of interest, and that his intellectual work had been for something even if I had never before heard his name. Like finding a bleeding man on the sidewalk, I couldn’t in good conscience keep walking by. I was here, had chosen to be here; here to look, and respond, and (maybe) do something even if that just meant taking some time to read what he’d written, and taking too a good look at a life I had previously had nothing to do with. I would leave Rorty for another time. I turned to other boxes to begin answering a question I hadn’t yet asked: who was Konstantin Kolenda?

---

[1] In “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” James clarifies what he means by “positive connexion[s]”: “…Suppose there are two different philosophical definitions, or propositions, or maxims, or what not, which seem to contradict each other, and about which men dispute. If, by supposing the truth of the one, you can forsee no conceivable practical consequence to anybody at any time or place, which is different from what you would foresee if you supposed the truth of the other, why then the difference between the two propositions is no difference,--it is only a specious and verbal difference, unworthy of further contention.” We might think here of the dilemma of free will. Do we have free will, or are we blown about by the whims and drives of our own biology? The question itself is problematic, presupposing an intact “I” that either owns or is owned by the I’s body. Whether or not I really choose to eat a slice of pie, for example, or am instead driven by various physiological and environmental factors to eat pie, I’ll still either eat the pie or not eat the pie. Nothing else of practical significance is at stake for the moment.

Debating Protests, Safe Spaces, Jefferson

May I be forgiven for posting from the National Review. The article was a nice gloss on some of the logic operating...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Part II of "We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously"

I continued the post as follows:

Gordon Wood says it best: "Everyone, it seems, sees America in Jefferson. So the shame and guilt that Jefferson must have suffered from his involvement in slavery and racial mixing best represent the shame and guilt that white Americans feel in their tortured relations with blacks….Jefferson for this present generation has become the problem. The Jefferson that emerges out of much recent scholarship therefore resembles the America many critics have visualized in the past four decades: self-righteous, guilt-ridden, racist, doctrinaire, and filled with liberal pieties that under stress are easily sacrificed." ("Revolutionary Characters", p97) 

And then I noticed the Online Petition from U Missouri:

Sloppy, sloppy handling of history: https://www.change.org/.../the-university-of-missouri...
 They quote scholarship on Sally Hemings without ever including Sally's closest, most careful scholar Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed is African American Pulizer Prize winning historian of great reputation. They just casually drop in "This was a man that raped 16 year old Sally Hemings, a young innocent house slave (Burstein, 2005)." Burstein is a guy who wrote a book with the titilating title of "Death and Desire at Monticello." Great. No one knows or will ever know the nature of the relationship between Sally and TJ. She could have stayed in France, but came back to Virginia with him in 1789 after earning wages and living as a free woman for about two years. We'll never be sure, but these people seem comfortable using Sally for their argument without real responsibility. 

And I went on because at this point I was all wound up:

Our first clue as to the intellectual seriousness of the petition is the hyperbolic first sentence: "The need to project a progressive environment is just as important as food and shelter to survive." NO, not quite. I have to eat before I care about Foucault and structures of power. Let me be clear that I agree college campuses are places where a continual questioning of many things should take place: our assumptions, our history--really, how we see ourselves. The whole point of a liberal arts education is to realize that how you think you see the world is not merely "how it is" but that that perspective is shaped by culture and history among various other factors. But to breezily assert that a statue of Jefferson is sending out micro-aggressions of nothing other than hypocrisy, racism and sexism--this is intellectual thuggery at its worse, especially when it poses as the enlightened assertion of Social Justice. Talk about hypocrisy. Everyone has the right to an opinion. We've been calling out TJ for slavery for as long as he's been dead, as we should. But there are informed opinions and there are opinions informed by breeze-reading, intellectual editorializing, and cultural bandwagoning. 

My mentor outside the English department at KU commented that she was "proud" of me. Which would move me to tears had I some scotch on hand. Besides the many classes I took with the inimitable Dr. Valk, the two seachanges of my college education were Western Civ II and Islam in Europe--both with Dr. Urie. Her classes were oases of intellectual diversity and independent thinking.

I'm trying to--right now--write a term paper on Jefferson, and a lot of this stuff about the recent protests and intellectual coddling has made it into a footnote.

We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously

I would love to rant about how much of a joke salon.com is getting to be. That historian is cut out to be one of their...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Friday, December 4, 2015

Upcoming Project on Konstantin Kolenda