Tenui musam metitamur avena

Or, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." Ref. in Richardson's biography of William James, p.59. Coined by Sydney Smith, a founding editor of The Edinburgh Review. 

From Richardson:

"Smith was an ardent believer in the association of ideas, in the notion, first given its full form by David Hartley, that "complex mental phenomena are formed from simple elements derived ultimately from sensation." The belief that everything mental has a physical explanation and origin--one of the rocks on which positivism is built--is put forward by Smith by way of an attack on metaphysics, " word of dire sound and horrible import," says Smith. "A great philosopher," he says, "may sit in his study and deny the existence of matter: but if he takes a walk in the street he must take care to leave his theory behind him."

Notes on Nietzsche

Just re-reading my old notes on Nietzsche.

Tuesday October 7th, 2014

My Presentation on "On Truth hand Lying in a Non Moral Sense"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--Revaluation of all values

--Philosophy with a hammer. A tuning fork. Sounding out what doesn't ring true.

---Use Epigrams from Twilight of the Idols

15: "Posthumous human beings--like me, for example--are understood worse than timely ones, but they are listened to better. More accurately: we are never understood--and that's the source of our authority…

26: I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to  a system is a lack of integrity.

Did he read Whitman? Or viceversa: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

----"Judgements, value judgments about life, for or against, can in the final analysis never be true they have value only as symptoms….the value of life cannot be assessed.

Idol #1: SOCRATES: Poor Socrates. Nietzsche thinks he's absolute shit! Nietzsche has a taste for the preSocratics as we noticed last reading. Greek philosophy before Socrates didn't infect it with his dialectics ie an investigation of truths in philosophy etc. by systematic reasoning.

"Socrates was the clown who got people to take him seriously: what really happened there?--" aka WTF Socrates?! (Twilight, 14)

Read about Socrates Section 11 and 12

"Reason" in language: oh, what a tricky old woman she is! I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar…  (Twilight 21)

On Truth and Lying in a Non Moral Sense

--a touchstone for 20th century Deconstruction/Poststructuralism. Really for anyone ever who wondered if language and reality don't quite line up. Always a bit of ambiguity.

--Perhaps this is philosophical skepticism (Kant or Descartes. But even earlier pre Socratics like Pyrrho and Eastern philosophy.

--Truth as a comfortable lie.

--We the "clever animals [who] invented cognition"

--Human on earth "the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the 'history of the world;"

-There have been ETERNITIES where the human intellect did not exist! Actually quite a humble philosophy. PULL DOWN THY VANITY via Pound

--The ideological target of this essay: the western commitment to seek fixed and solid truths. We are always under the influence of our own subjectivity, "truth" as such can never be found.

--"…[T]he intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the entire world revolved." (874)

--illusion  as dream influences Freud (875)

--We only like pretty truth, pleasant truth

You want the truth?! You can't HANDle the truth!! We're not ready to let go of illusions. Truth could be painful. "If they will not content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty husks, they will for ever exhange illusions for truth."

--"Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?"

--Pure truth/"the thing in itself" is both impossible for language to grasp, but also undesirable. You don't even know you don't want it.

--Concepts are made by dropping what is individual and real. Plato's forms one of the earliest concepts in western philosophy.

"Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an 'x' which is inaccesible to us and indefinable by us." (878)

Emerson's influence on Nietzsche: "All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not."

Philosophy as a calling forth to find out who this thing you call yourself really is.

I think I have always found Nietzsche fun to read, as do many intelligent people (I think Kaufmann said this). You get that picture of the 15 year old with bad skin and no friends who reads Nietzsche for the first time and is like: Yes! Everything is stupid, and I have realized it and am now going to be cool and ironic about everything. I see the void now, no one else is authentically living. He’s been labeled a nihilist by people who haven’t read him. The great thing about his author’s not in Birth of Tragedy is that he realizes his own folly, as a kind of juvenile philosopher. It’s early work. He was too broody! That he learned to laugh in his later work is what is fun to read. I was thinking about your question Tim, would you rather be a nihilist or a hypocrite. Now my reading--you can correct all of this in just a sec if I’ve bungled it all--but my sense isn’t nihilism at all, or anyway it must be a qualified nihilism. Why did he hate Christianity. Because Christians are nihilists. Christians have seen this world and given up on it. They see it fallen and evil, and dismiss it for the real world to come. They don’t trust the senses anymore. The senses are all fallen, all subject to the devil in a way. They’ve lost human will. This is what he calls nihilism. He’s a hypocrite, but he revels in being a hypocrite because he can’t not be, and so to admit being a hypocrite is in some convoluted way to get out of it if only for a second or two. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Nietzsche contradicts himself. I think a great way to understand his affinity for Emerson. Emerson understood that the Self is under constant, neverending revision. That the books you love today will not be the books you love tomorrow. That what you say today will be different tomorrow and this is what it means to philosophize. To try to find out what is the thing you call yourself. Philosophy with a tuning fork--sound out the discord.

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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




-- 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:____________

-- . . .

Isn’t it Obvious?: Review, Sopia Rosenfeld’s Common Sense

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot…

Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

I walked into this class the other week, and so into a conversation. A few of my classmates, undergraduates, were enjoying their own bewilderment over the recent Donald Trump phenomenon. One of these bright young people had run into an unapologetic and—weirder still—an equally unironic Trump supporter. “I can’t believe he was serious,” my memory recalls this classmate saying. “How could anyone be so stupid?” was the unvoiced question. It’s common sense to my classmate that Trump is a fraud, a bully, disingenuous, privileged, a sexist, a racist. You’ve only to turn on the television and watch—no spin room necessary. It doesn’t take a Rice University education to figure this out.

   “Why dwell on the obvious?” This is the apparently unobvious question Sophia Rosenfeld takes up in her 2011 study, pragmatically and playfully titled Common Sense. Common sense isn’t really, wouldn’t you know it, just a matter of common sense after all. In proving her point Rosenfeld reaches all the way back to Aristotle, tracing the concept through the Renaissance, into its seventeenth and eighteenth century British, French, and Dutch variations, through revolutionary America (particularly with Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet), revolutionary France, and into modern political discourse. Common sense, Rosenfeld suggests, flourishes in, as they say, interesting times. As Rosenfeld puts it,

…common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself. (15)

A rhetoric of normalcy to ballast an otherwise listing ship of state—Rosenfeld sees that rather than righting us, that rhetorical bulk will right us right to the ocean floor.

   Rosenfeld’s study comes as in a tradition of complicating common sense (a touchstone study might be Clifford Geertz’s “Common Sense as a Cultural System”). Really the whole of academic endeavor is dedicated to complicating the obvious. No one dreads like the scholar dreads the mild words which could ultimately sound the death knell of one’s work: “Not bad. A bit obvious though, isn’t it?” And so we might see Rosenfeld eyeing rather an easy target. In fact her book turns on itself in a wonderful way: it’s really quite obvious that “the obvious” really isn’t that obvious after all. This is almost common sense, except unfortunately (according to Rosenfeld) it must not be, and so she had to write a book about it published by Harvard University Press.

   Common sense began in the body. It made us human, this super sense, this “koine aesthesis.” For Aristotle, common sense was a yoke for our other sensory faculties “comparing and coordinating the impressions received by [the rest of the senses]…and thus…allowing minimal judgments about sense objects to occur independent of reason” (18). An organizer and adjudicator. Historically its location has moved around: sometimes in the head and sometimes in the heart. But then something changed. Descartes, in fact, happened. Because he needed to get away from the body, Descartes took this super sense out of the body and altogether out of physicality. Rosenfeld writes that Descartes’s “mechanistic account of the body and brain, and his desire to root knowledge firmly in cognition rather than in sensation, rendered unnecessary the common sense as a specific, locatable mental faculty” (21).

   We’re coming closer to common sense as the wisdom of the ordinary. After Descartes, “[t]he watered-down Aristotelian notion of a common sense faculty merged…with the old Roman conception of sensus communis: the shared, though generally tacit, values and beliefs of a community” (22). Politicized common sense becomes a regulatory tool of the state. It could be rhetorically deployed to discourage ideological eccentricity; a tool, then, “in the creation of a noncombative common culture” (30). Common sense as common taste—not merely obvious, but shared, it could help maintain political stability (or political homeostasis). But Descartes would be, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, more a symptom than a problem. The ideological backdrop to her argument seems to be the threatening (and near constant) rise of skepticism. But Descartes’s answer to “How do we know anything?” and, really, “What makes things real?” simply didn’t take; not long after his 1637 settlement with epistemological skepticism, his cogito, his answer to the question of uncertainty, began to wear a bit thin. The problem of the era seemed to be “How do we live without certainty?”

   The drive towards common sense is, then, the flight from uncertainty. Rosenfeld’s history next takes us to Britain and the Scottish Common Sense school. David Hume was a particularly dangerous gadfly for eighteenth century anti-skeptics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid; Reid the founder of a rather self-congratulatory group called “The Wise Club.” These Scots of common sense were creating a new philosophy somewhere between Descartes and Locke. Rosenfeld calls Reid’s common sense “an amorphous set of basic judgments or propositions, evident in the common language in which it is entrenched, to which all sane adult people, anywhere, anytime, must subscribe” (72). Reid might have found a hero in Othello who also needed to know that he could trust his eyes: “Men should be what they seem.” Give me proof! Unfortunately, it is Iago rather than Othello still breathing at the end of that tragedy.

   So there came a taste for doubting in the wake of the Renaissance, and a counter rhetoric rose to combat the resultant epistemological anxiety. This seems obvious. But Rosenfeld is at her best when investigating the “radical” uses of common sense in Holland and France in the late eighteenth century. Eventually important to Holland, the early to mid-seventeenth century French le bon sens was “the very obverse of the kind of reasoning that formed the backdrop to the common sense philosophy of the Scots” (103). Le bon sens, or “good sense,” was the subversive French counterpart to British regulatory common sense. If British common sense loved its doxa, French le bon sens reveled in paradox. As with everything in France, this discourse eventually got classed. Rosenfeld points to the rise of “the philosophe” in this new “war over representation” (134). The other combatant? Common Sense de jour:

The philosophe, in other words, routinely chose unsettling language games over restoring the direct and long-established correspondence between words and things. His love of contradictions, like his refusal to follow either established authorities or the consensus gentium, pushed society in two directions: toward a generalized doubt about all that should be certain and toward the espousal of dangerous new absurdities under the banner of truth. (134)

We still find this formulation in variant forms of what we call “the culture wars,” often categorized by level of education, religion, geography etc. The Overeducated Coastal Snob (who knows quite a lot about very little) and the Ignorant Quasi-Bigoted Midwesterner, to make one generalized colorful example.

   Of course if Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” has any merit, French le bon sens likely never took much hold in America. Rosenfeld goes into great detail about American and French Revolutionary forms of common sense, but her most interesting thesis is that “in the radical Whig rhetoric of revolutionary Pennsylvania, we can locate the apotheosis of a brand-new and decidedly modern form of political legitimation known as populism” (167). Ours is a particularly provocative climate in which to be reading of the inchoate roots of populism. Rosenfeld continues, asserting that in Philadelphia was initiated a “style and form of politics that depended upon wrapping itself in the moral and epistemological notion of the collective common sense of common men more than any economic argument” (167). Her dismissal of the centrality of an “economic argument” is quite provocative and, the reviewer admits, not entirely convincing. She takes this interpretation as evidenced by a one-page pamphlet written by James Cannon in 1776; what he did “in a few short strokes,” Rosenfeld argues, “was turn a concept long associated with a plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-expert way of seeing the world—that is, common sense—into an ideal foundation for a new, and distinctly American, political order” (167).

   It’s a well formulated argument—smart and neat. If we distill the book down to one sentence it might just be: Ideas matter, and few would argue with that. But there’s something telling about the concluding chapter wherein Rosenfeld claims the common sense playbook, this anti-expert, anti-thinking rhetorical toolbox, as “increasingly the province of the right” (255). Palin, Huckabee, Beck, and The Great Communicator himself Ronald Reagan began “a second American afterlife” to common sense politics. This isn’t to undercut the value of Rosenfeld’s book which I found interesting, intelligent, and clarifying. But the problem connects for me to the conversation I sketched at the beginning of this review essay.

   Rosenfeld betrays, at times, the frustrations of the bewildered, beleaguered intellectual. So anxious about the cult of an American unthinking public, Rosenfeld has had to write a book ripping down the façade of the greatest rhetorical weapon of the “common sense conservative” —a book that will likely only be read by people already interested in why common sense isn’t a matter of common sense at all. Common sense is everywhere. Everyone uses it for divers purposes. Donald Trump has in fact said “I’m a common sense conservative,” but the political Left uses it with “common sense gun solutions” all the time. And most people realize that common sense is a rhetorical weapon of political whimsy; and most people don’t need to read Tristan Tzara and Pierre Bourdieu to figure this out. Thus when Rosenfeld closes with the injunction that “[i]t is vital that some individuals in the modern world consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” we see Rosenfeld waving at us from her self-regulated commonsense-free zone and we can thank her politely and keep on walking because it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to realize that wherever it’s located, and in spite of ourselves, we’re always bound to fall back on it. This doesn’t make us stupid, but it might make us vote for Donald Trump.

James reading Whitman's "To You" (or Picking Your Way)

last few lines from Whitman's "To You"

The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulgates itself;

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

William James, in the last lecture of Pragmatism, pegs "To You" to be "[v]erily a fine and moving poem" and that "there are two ways of taking it, both useful." The first way is to comfort yourself that you are always fine, no matter what life throws at you. The soothing of the self in all its "glories and grandeurs." He calls this reading the "monistic way":

...the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication.

The second approach to the poem, though, is less easy but also...well, its got more calories. Instead of telling the reader to take comfort and lie down, this reading urges--urges to keep going, keep moving, to take action and make the effort; to be humble too, and to "accept your poor life," and yet to keep on picking your way through the brambles along the path you continue to make of your life:

But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.

Self-Help

…what he most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge….It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

I read a good deal of a book last semester (in graduate school you seldom finish everything, if anything) which impressed me arguably more than it should have. Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is just what it sounds like. It is perhaps the first of what is now a lamentable genre, a genre avoided by all persons with a decent appreciation for the redemptive power of irony, and who generally avoid taking themselves seriously enough to warrant a course in self-improvement.

The appreciation of irony is a virtue in itself.

Self-Help is thoroughly unironic. Naturally, I went and bought another of his books, the moral heft of which isn't difficult to appreciate in the one-word title: Duty. 

But moral heft is what we're going for. Samuel Smiles wrote for "the every man"--men who wouldn't turn their nose up at a moral precept or a zinging cliche (of course, turning one's nose up at a cliche requires an ear for irony. One gets the feeling, though, that Smiles's patrons weren't reading Lawrence Sterne deep into the night). Well, Smiles was full of zingers, old and new. His book begins with an old one: Heaven helps those who help themselves. 

Oh I hear you groan, but those old chestnuts can be damn useful, can move men to action. Written at times in rather rosy ink, Smiles's books are full of anecdotes and hyperbolic portraits of all sorts of men (I do forgive him his exclusion of the fairer sex). Smiles wrote the book for those eager enough, yet unlucky enough, to be born socially below their intellectual station: poor in pocket, but not in spirit. Self-Help in particular was written for--and because of--such willful workers. Smiles introduces his 1859 publication "briefly": "The origin of this book may be briefly told..."

Some fifteen years since, the author was requested to deliver an address before the members of some evening classes, which had been formed in a northern town for mutual improvement, under the following circumstances:--

 Two or three young men of the humblest rank resolved to meet in the winter evenings, for the purpose of improving themselves by exchanging knowledge with each other. Their first meetings were held in the room of a cottage in which one of the members lived; and, as others shortly joined them, the place soon became inconveniently filled....

 Though they were for the most part young men earning comparatively small weekly wages, they resolved to incur the risk of hiring a room; and, on making inquiry, they found a large dingy apartment to let, which had been used as a temporary Cholera Hospital....But the mutual improvement youths, nothing daunted, hired the cholera room at so much a week, lit it up, placed a few benches and a deal table in it, and began their winter classes....The teaching may have been, as no doubt it was, of a very rude and imperfect sort; but it was done with a will. Those who knew a little taught those who knew less--improving themselves while they improved the others....Thus these youths--and there were grown men amongst them--proceeded to teach themselves and each other, reading and writing, arithmetic and geography; and even mathematics, chemistry, and some of the modern languages.

About a hundred young men had thus come together, when, growing ambitious, they desired to have lectures delivered to them... (Self-Help, Oxford pp 6-7)

"[A]nd then it was that the author became acquainted with their proceedings," the author, of course, being Smiles himself.  Like Duty, Self-Help fails often by falling into romances of toil; it positively revels in the nobility of hardship. And yet I keep finding myself moved--minding the pitfalls, Smiles can be damn good reading! It's a kind of philosophy, and much more fun (and...edifying...) than sludging though Heidegger or some other treatise of philosophical hand-wringing.

Duty is perhaps even more heavy-handed than its predecessor (the fourth of five in what eventually became Smiles's Self-Help series). But allow the words (or will them) to be fresh, and they will be:

He who has well considered his duty will at once carry his convictions into action. Our acts are the only things that are in our power. They not only form the sum of our habits, but of our character.

 At the same time, the course of duty is not always the easy course. It has many oppositions and difficulties to surmount. We may have the sagacity to see, but not the strength of purpose to do. To the irresolute there is many a lion in the way. He thinks and moralizes and dreams, but does nothing. "There is little to see," said a hard worker, "and little to do; it is only to do it." (Duty, p.31)

This really hits you if you're young, more intellectually inclined than the world has use for, and have a nagging moral urge to do good, useful things with your life. Emerson said that "the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Emerson has more credibility today than Smiles, but they're saying something similar.

Reading a book like Duty is hard if you really haven't done anything yet, and feel painfully aware of the fact. Really, I think you could hardly find a more fitting target of Smiles's ire than a neurotically self-reflective intellectual person who thinks without really doing.

While I don't think I'm as paralyzingly self-reflective as I could be, Smiles pushes us to think about weakness of character. I cringed at those parts of myself I like least: hesitancy, ambivalence, uncertainty, contentedness, irresoluteness, impotent (or empty) self-reflection (and we might add a tendency toward redundancy to the list...). Smiles articulates his vision of the feeble-willed, those with "weak wills":

...or no wills at all. They are characterless. They have no strong will for vice, yet they have none for virtue. They are the passive recipients of impressions, which, however, take no hold of them. They seem neither to go forward nor backward. As the wind blows, so their vane turns round; and when the wind blows from another quarter, ti turns round again. Any instrument can write on such spirits; any will can govern theirs. They cherish no truth strongly, and do not know what earnestness is. Such persons constitute the mass of society everywhere--the careless, the passive, the submissive, the feeble, and the indifferent." (33-34)

"Philosophers discuss," says Smiles, "decisive men act." I'm "discussing" resolve and action. My whole journey in philosophy now seems to me to have looped in on itself to begin eating its own tail--from idealization of the "examined life" through the great Western thinkers; through the narrows of questions of power, identity, free will, ontology, epistemology, skyhook universals of God or Nature; to language games, and slippage, and deconstructing binaries and assumptions and norms and the Human and the Nonhuman, and anything that could have once snuggily belonged under the only seemingly solid rock of Common Sense. The play of language, and puzzles, and more puzzles. It's something we need to do: to never take for granted that the world is what it seems simply because it feels right, or it's comfortable, or doing otherwise is a bit painful. I know this, I really do.

And then I'd go home, and something in the blood recognizes that there will always be binaries to live by. Family and not family; city and country; human and not human. And really, who needs shelves and shelves of philosophy discussing the fuzzy borders of the Human when we already have Darwin? The Origin is surprisingly tedious, but there's no doubting the profundity of the details of that book: he says over and over and over Look, look at this. Don't you see what this means? Isn't this wonderful? 

And so I began reading my way away from philosophy: the pragmatists like William James and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism, φρόνησις, phronēsis. Practical wisdom, experience. All of which I am relatively without, and all of which isn't merely to be found on a college campus. Wisdom is found in books, but rhetorical banalities aside, the plumber really does know something the Emerson scholar doesn't; the man who built the chair he sits in knows something I don't. I know nothing, but that's the jewel of Socratic wisdom I cling to. I don't want to abandon the "life of the mind"; I just want to begin walking in a different direction.

I remember a conversation with my parents. I was an undergraduate and just beginning to really get my head around Nietzsche, and Mill, and Shakespeare. I told my parents that people don't really take the time to think, and to look beyond the surface of their own assumptions. That if more people spent more energy examining the way they operate in the world, the world would be a much better place. I asserted that this was the most important pursuit an individual can take: the examined life of the intellectual. If you don't have that foundation, you simply cannot be a truly fulfilled person.

Or something like that. My father looked over his hamburger at me with brown eyes I inherited: "So the intellectual stuff, that's the most important thing?"

I affirmed this, and I don't think he argued the point; but in my faulty memory he keeps eating, maybe glancing at my mother, and says something about family being his most important thing. I probably pinked up and muttered something about not being able to have a fulfilling family life if you haven't yet pursued your own intellectual pursuits. But he paid for our meal with money from the job he doesn't really like, and we drove back to the house he built himself, the house I grew up in.

I'm aware I may fall into the Smiles fault: to romanticize the practical, and generalize; and certainly I risk being anti-intellectual to make an argument too irrational to stand. But I don't think Smiles is anti-intellectual. He wasn't criticizing scholars and intellectuals; he was criticizing those who never dug into anything, those who ever skimmed the surface, those who never pushed by the feckless pursuits to fruitful results.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to say. I'm not criticizing the intellectual life. Such a life gives the opportunity to throw oneself into a life of books and ideas; to enjoy and contribute to The Great Conversation about things that matter. I do think the pressures of professionalization and publication have pushed many scholars to intellectual dead-ends of trivialities and useless minutiae--the publishing of book that are never read, and of articles no one really cares about. Ever since the Humanities began having fits about needing to justify its own existence (give us results!) was when the Humanities began to wilt around the edges.

Ironically (for myself and for my argument here), that pressure was probably deployed though the rhetoric of pragmatics, the very rhetoric I find myself drawn to these days. The humanities don't really have cash value, and that's okay--that's actually a good thing.

George Eliot talked about "the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in--good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle" (Daniel Deronda, Penguin ed, p157). It's Dorothea Brooke's yearning for a vocation rather than avocation (mere enjoyment, or hobby).

I'm finding I need to get my hands dirty, at least for awhile. I've been in school since I was 5. The idea of staying in school until I die is basically a real soul killer at this point.

And I don't know whether I've come to the point of leaving academia academically, or if this is just a rite of passage for a person in their 20s who hasn't yet found their niche: the place to dig down deep, and find the pains and the joys of doing so. It's not so much finding what you think you're looking for as cultivating some patch of earth to fruition. Maybe life isn't a journey so much as a garden.

You'll pardon that aphorism. But Voltaire had said something to that effect, or Candide did at any rate. Back from the long journey, Candide settled down to a quiet life with Cunegonde. This settlement leaves a bit to be desired since we are told that "At the bottom of his heart Candide had not the lease wish to marry Cunegonde." This generation has been told over and over to achieve, and to shoot for the moon, and reach for excellence; we have been told that we can achieve whatever we can dream. We are told never to settle.

So poor Candide, we first think. Or maybe poor Cunegone who undergoes the narrative inconvenience of a Princess past her rescue plot--she too will grow old, will live beyond the romantic to the ordinary and banal. Pangloss keeps asking his questions; he asks "the best philosopher in Turkey...why so strange an animal as man was ever created." Pangloss gets no real answer, and a door slammed in his face.

They meet an old farmer who knows nothing of the world but is "content...with sending there for sale the produce of the garden [he] cultivate[s]": ""I have only twenty acres," replied the Turk. "I cultivate them with my children; and work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."" The wandering adventurers think about it, and return to the farm on which they had hesitated to settle. Pangloss even beings to philosophically justify such a course. But "Let us work without theorizing," says the cynic Martin; "'tis the only way to make life endurable":

The whole small fraternity entered into this praiseworthy plan, and each started to make use of his talents. The little farm yielded well. Cunegonde was indeed very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry-cook....and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here." 

"'Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens."

[work in progress warning]

Upcoming Project on Konstantin Kolenda

A rather abstract abstract proposal for ACLA Conference in March

(It's at Harvard! i.e. the only reason I'm applying is to gain access to Houghton library's William James papers...)

Thinker, Soldier, Justice, Die: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Pragmatisms of Ending

In 1911, a seventy year old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write that “the best way [to cope with mortality] is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead.” He would live to 93.

In his Introduction to The Essential Holmes Richard Posner writes that “a diverse cast of moderns….have been concerned with the…implications of taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks…” Pragmatism and Existentialism, in Posner’s figuring, stem from identical impulses, pragmatism being “typically American,” and existentialism “typically European.”

As has been observed by such critics as Posner and Louis Menand, pragmatism is both a post Darwinian and a post Civil War philosophy. Holmes, serving in the Union Army for three years, was wounded three times. Thus, as Menand argues, “the war was the central experience of his life.” Consequently, Holmes’s jurisprudential career was largely spent combatting those moral abstractions we might call universal principles or natural laws; such abstractions were, after all,  what called a young Holmes to enlist. But however “horrible and dull,” Holmes also found war necessary “everywhere and at all times.”

What I hope to contribute to this conversation on the interconnectedness between writing and death is an exploration of a particularly American voice of this soldier-philosopher judge. What are, for Holmes, the ends of pragmatic philosophy at the ends of life?

Practically Pro Choice

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” So said Joan Didion. I recently had a conversation about abortion, and while I said I was prochoice, I became conscious of a kind of paleness of conviction. Why was I prochoice? Why did I feel a tinge of guilt about admitting to be so? I realized that although I had stated an opinion, I couldn’t articulate satisfactory reasons for that opinion. Reasons, that is, beyond the usual rhetorical go-to. Feminism tells me that as a woman I have a right to the processes of my body, but the argument somehow feels a bit thin. This logic actually heaves more responsibility onto the mother of a child. Fatherhood begins to pale in comparison to the importance of childbearing motherhood. Men are pushed to one side, having little of importance to say unless they too act to shore up the battle line of Woman’s Right to Choose: get in line! You’re with us or against us! And yet, prolife feels immediately wrong to me. But I need reasons. I need a why. I need to be certain.

Prochoice most often rests its laurels on exactly what the moniker suggests—the right to choose. I am for choosing! This amusingly right-wing maneuver, this upholding of FREEDOM TO X, grounds itself with the breezily simple premise of “my body my choice.” Positive freedoms (freedom to rather than freedom from) are usually invoked by libertarians and conservatives as constitutional rights of the individual. Prochoicers, avid feminists or not, have good reason to ground the argument in My Body Land: after all, the mother bears the child, not the father. Men may express opinions, so this story goes, but the buck stops with the woman: her body her choice. No Republican WASPs beyond this point! Get out of the bedroom etc.

I always loved this argument because through it I was automatically a PIP (a Politically Important Person i.e. a woman). I was automatically entitled, then, to an opinion as a person politically-important-in-itself. As a woman, I’ve actually very little to do reading- and thinking-wise since being a woman makes my body “always already political” as any good academic person will offer. I quickly realized that anyone disagreeing with me on the subject of abortion either: does not actually have a right to disagree with me unless they have the physiological capacity to birth a child; secretly hates women pathologically; is just not culturally up to snuff; hasn’t read as many Slate articles as I have; is either religious or ignorant (the two are certainly not mutually exclusive); is a tragically misinformed (probably traumatized) exile of the sisterhood in dire need of a crash course on her cultural subordination and marginalization of which she was somehow blissfully ignorant; or is just an old person, and thus excused for their inevitable bigotry and general irrelevance.

Now I would maintain that many of these hyperbolic cartoons do proliferate (pun intended) in the prolife camp. In fact, given the choice (cf. previous parenthetical) between spending time on either side of the abortion fence just for drinks and mingling, I’m not sure I’d ever rub elbows with prolifers—moralizing from the religious right would seem to be inevitable (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia dramatized the difference beautifully as between a raging feminist and a religious whacko (as if one was stuck between a rock and a bat shit sandwich)).

All too often prolifers are as content with the gut reaction answer as prochoicers. Reasoning for the former rests on an unambiguous observation that we’re dealing with a life, and also that that life is sacred, vulnerable, threatened, and thus deserves to be protected. Now prochoicers can cartoonize prolifers until kingdom (doesn’t) come, but the my-body-prochoicers will always have to grapple with the eventuality that the argument falls rather impotently back in on itself. Tasty candy without calories, to scream Woman’s Right gets one exactly nowhere because the whole impetus behind the abortion procedure is that it isn’t your body. It’s another body, and one that for any number of reasons just needs to not be in your body anymore. If it was just one body, there would be no problem, thus why the my-body-my-choice argument is so tempting for the political Left: it erases the painful difficulty of a very uneasy responsibility for all thinking adults (not just women). As of 2015, 38 states have fetal homicide laws, 23 of which apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy. Is this unreasonable? I’m not sure.

Thus many painful rhetorical and moral difficulties ensue. The difficulty for any reasonably independent thinker is one of ideology: both camps are soaked through. Enlightened persons valuing women as independent, intelligent equals go prochoice. Persons with a steady moral compass valuing human life from conception to fruition steer prolife. Moral condescension infects both camps.

But it is a moral question, isn’t it. We need to decide if morality should be foundational or fruitional. Should morality come from high ideals for which we strive, or should we determine ethics as we go as a kind of tool for adjusting to the everyday travails of living. Both of our camps depend on vocabularies that are simply too difficult to remain coherent: where really does one body end and another begin? Where does an individual life begin? Words, vocabularies, rhetoric will never exhaust the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that constitute the processes of life in all its difficulty, wonder, and weirdness. But we need an answer for abortion, don’t we? Moral idealism fails us because it can never address the gorgeously inconvenient flux that is our ethical battleground of the everyday. Our problems of today are just that: of today. They are not all of yesterday, nor with they all be with us tomorrow.

Abortion now divides the American political landscape. It seems to be an issue irreconcilable, making de facto enemies and allies; an issue of freedom and of life, perhaps worthy of war (cultural or otherwise). But imagine that the other side actually has a legitimate point. We have, then, competing definitions of good. There’s a kind of tragedy here. Ethics is supposed to resolve clashes among moral claims, not create them. William James wrote that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.” People scream loudest when they are least certain of being right (if certain, you only have to whisper). No one is certain down to the very marrow with abortion. What if the mother is dying? What if the father wants to keep the child, and the mother does not? What if the child will be deformed, and can expect little beyond a life of alienation and pain? What if the mother is herself a child, and will later regret an abortion that seems convenient only for the present? Sidney Hook wrote about the tragedy of uncertainty:

I mean by the tragic sense a very simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of the moral experience and the phenomenon of moral choice. Every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity in which we ask: “What should I do?” takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good....No matter how we resolve the opposition some good will be sacrificed, some interest, whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be modified, frustrated or even suppressed.

The choice may be easy, or it may be difficult—but it cannot be certain. Hook was writing about the philosophy of pragmatism, a philosophy which dismisses platonic idealisms (the Good, Truth, Justice, Nature, etc.). Philosophy as the search for truth becomes the search for adjustment, an adjustment for living in a world of many values and many definitions of what the business of living should be. “Truth is made,” William James wrote, “just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”

Practically speaking, I see two possible worlds here: a nation where abortion is condoned, and one where it is sanctioned. Putting aside politics and high morality, we look at actual life of the everyday. To condemn abortion may well reinforce our reverence for human life. We would be surer of where we stand, and the responsibility for fetal life would be handled with a degree of honesty and righteousness not found in legal or political systems today. However, one reality will not change: women and girls will still seek abortion. It will be unregulated and it will be dangerous, but abortion will never be an option unsought. And where abortion may have saved a mother from a difficult pregnancy, there will be no legal recourse for a responsible doctor. Rape victims will either have unwanted children, or pursue more dangerous recourse. Women neither psychologically, emotionally, financially, nor perhaps even physically equipped for motherhood will be unduly tested--perhaps beyond reasonable capacity. Foster care will be further burdened, and young people beginning to climb out of poverty will simply sink back down. Parental planning will become a moral pamphlet with little to offer someone who did not plan to get raped, to have their life endangered by unforeseen complications, or who otherwise simply cannot be a responsible parent.

Permitting abortion is not without risk. The creeping in of a kind of casual regard to a very uncasual procedure is certainly possible. But I do not think it probable. Anyone even vaguely familiar with abortion seldom takes the procedure lightly. To create conditions where women who are either unwilling or unable to become a parent, or else are endangered by a pregnancy—to create conditions where these women are obligated to “go through with it” and take those consequences—that is a far riskier, uglier reality. If women are given the choice to abort difficult or unwanted pregnancies, perhaps every child born would be wanted. But perhaps not.

This is a better not best philosophy. Anyone thinking the issue simple has simplified it in order to feel certain about it. We lost certainty long ago. I come reluctantly back to prochoice, with less certainty but somehow also with more resolve. I know more now why I know not. Is this tragic as Sidney Hook writes? Surely we’ll continue to adjust, hopefully not without more thinking and even a little bit of play:

I have perhaps overstressed the sense of the tragic in human life in an effort to compensate for the distortions to which pragmatism has been subject. There is more in life than the sense of the tragic. There is laughter and joy and the sustaining discipline of work. There are other dimensions of experience besides the moral. There is art and science and religion. There are other uses for intelligence besides the resolution of human difficulties. There is intellectual play and adventure. But until men become Gods—which they never will be—they will live with the sense of the tragic in their hearts as they go in quest for wisdom. Pragmatism, as I interpret it, is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control. It may be a lost cause. I do not know of a better one. And it may not be lost if we can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom—and enjoy the blessings of a little luck.

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.