What Are These Words For? A History Boy, 06/09/2014

Another one of those memes about the books most influential in your life has been going around my Facebook friends, and I thought I’d spell out the list more clearly on the blog, because I think it would be interesting. It’s also a good way for me to get a sense of my own influences as my own writing career finally picks up a little. But the reason these books were each influential on me kind of overlaps. So I thought I’d make several sub-lists of factors and group the books under them.

The Whole List, in chronological order of my discovering them

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot 

- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Series

- James Joyce, Ulysses 

- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason 

- Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain 

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

- Graham Greene, The Quiet American 

- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

- Philip K Dick, Ubik

- Benedict Spinoza, Ethics

- Kojo Laing, Search Sweet Country

- Alan Moore, Swamp Thing Vols. 1 & 2

Amazing Worlds

• Cat’s Cradle, Foundation, Ulysses, The Savage Detectives, Ubik, Search Sweet Country, Swamp Thing

The many are modifications of the one, but are no less
individual for that. Swamp Thing is something of a Spinozist.

These books opened my mind to the possibility of worlds that were very different from my own, threading narratives of a few particular people through a setting that was so complex to be an actual ecology. Foundation saw this enormously complicated galactic human civilization that was so much more than a simple metaphor applying to a single story, which too much science-fiction in the Golden Age was like. It also helped that I was maybe 13 years old. 

Ubik did the same thing, but escaped the epic register of which Asimov was so fond, and rooted a strange story in a humanity very much like our own, with shysters, criminals, nagging bosses, and loveable schlubs. The film version of Ubik in my head will always feature Seth Rogen as the protagonist Joe Chip. It was the first Philip K Dick I’d ever read.

Cat’s Cradle and Swamp Thing found strange corners within our own world to build their fantastic settings. Ulysses made the ordinary fantastic, and once again, brought the epic to the scale of ordinary folks and their personal and political struggles. Bolaño and Laing brought foreign lands that I’d never visited before to my own mind, and made them feel so familiar, it was almost as if they had physically taken me there.

Yearning for Justice

• The Idiot, Soul Mountain, The Quiet American, Swamp Thing

I felt in these stories a powerful force straining against and overcoming political and social oppression. Alan Moore used fantasy and horror to explore the struggles of humanity with the ecology where we developed, and the paradoxes that our fear of nature’s power and yearning to protect ourselves from its wrath may destroy us.

The Idiot is a profound story of one person whose basic kindness struggles against the more heartless perspectives of the people around him; the tragedy is that his virtue ultimately lacks the strength to combat the worst that humanity can offer. Soul Mountain is the story of one such person who succeeded, despite the violence and backwardness around him and in his own heart.

Graham Greene taught me never to trust the conclusions of anyone who looks at the world and says, “I know exactly what’s going on. It’s quite simple!” Ruin and death lie in these words.

New Ways to Think

• Cat’s Cradle, The Critique of Pure Reason, Soul Mountain, Beyond Good and Evil, What Is Philosophy?, Ethics

Philosophy isn’t just a matter of searching for the truth, and it isn’t just a matter of criticizing the ideas of others. It’s also about developing new ways to understand the world. Studying Kant first taught me how to explore a system so complex that it’s literally like rewiring your mind as you understand it. After my old philosophical mentor, Jim Bradley, walked me through the Critique of Pure Reason, I felt like I understood not just how to read philosophy, but how to philosophize.

When he was young, Vonnegut could still
laugh without crying.

Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Spinoza ended up doing the same thing for me, and taking me to places where I wanted to go anyway. I’ve read other philosophers than these three, but concepts at the forefront of their works are the biggest concrete influences on how I do philosophy myself. Beyond Good and Evil introduced me to the strongest critiques of morality, and I never took another moral philosopher or preacher (even an atheist one) as an authority again. Deleuze introduced me to an entire new paradigm of doing philosophy, geological or ecological philosophy, and What Is Philosophy? was the first of his large books I’d read. Spinoza was the ethicist of immanence that started it all, and was the first to make explicit the inter-relation of all the domains of philosophy, which common academic practice keeps separate.

Gao wrote a literal exploration of the multiplicity inside each of us as individuals. Vonnegut developed a playfulness to his own voice that was so utterly unique that the world is richer for its existence. And Cat's Cradle, his first book that I read, came early enough in his life that it had not grown too cynical to inspire.

Excitement for Writing

• Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, Search Sweet Country, Ethics

Moby-Dick was one of the first novels I ever remember reading. I first had an illustrated copy for children when I was maybe eight years old, and it fascinated me. I don’t know how many times I read it. I ended up having to buy multiple copies. That illustrated edition I left in a box in my grandmother’s house when I moved out and it was destroyed in a fire over a decade later. Then I bought an old second-hand copy, but that was too badly water damaged after loaning it to a friend. Then I found a cheap edition at a Coles in Hamilton and have had that on my shelf ever since.

Ulysses, Soul Mountain, and The Ethics were three books I read that redefined for me the limits of what language was capable of. I’m now leaning toward a definition of those limits as limitless. Bolaño taught me a way to express a character that was wholly new to me. Most importantly, reading The Savage Detectives inspired me to start writing fiction seriously myself. And reading Search Sweet Country two years ago nearly made me stop because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write such beautiful, poetic sentences as Kojo Laing.

Singularity in Art

• Cat’s Cradle, The Idiot, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, What Is Philosophy?, Ubik, Search Sweet Country

Gao spent many years in rural China, on
the run from the oppression of the Deng
government and the Communist Party. So
did I, you, and she, as well as he.

They used to teach me in high school literature class that a good character is consistent. What a load of shit. A character that’s true to what a person is will be paradoxical, self-contradictory, and utterly inexplicable. This isn’t the same as randomness, which is genuine sloppiness. A character truly adequate to human nature will contain genuine multitudes, and there will always be new complexities to discover. No one explanation for their behaviour will ever suffice to complete them. A person is impossible to complete. 

Characters who genuinely embody this impossibility of completion are Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin (and Stepan Verkhovensky, and Nikolai Stavrogin, and the Karamazov brothers), the narrator(s) of Soul Mountain, and Joe Chip. Vonnegut’s very narrative voice embodies this singularity. Laing did this for the entire city of Accra, as did Joyce for Dublin and our culture's most popular Greek epic.

The Savage Detectives showed me something different: the impossibility of, no matter the depth of your research and how many different angles you find to view a person, ever truly understanding them to the depths of their souls. After 54 narrators, we understand so much about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but in all that multiplicity, there is no essence. Of course, that’s the point.

Deleuze and Guattari’s work did this for the authors themselves, channelling their ideas and styles of expression and argument through so many different prisms and contexts the philosophy seemed adequate to the world if only because it approached a similar complexity (not in the dismissive sense of a reader’s confusion, but in the ecological sense of new details emerging from every new examination). The freaky thing is, Guattari wasn't even involved in writing the book; he was too sick with depression and heart failure. Deleuze writes as if he’s channelling his old friend, and when you read it, it seems that he’s really there. All of him. All of them.

What Needs to Be Said Anymore? Jamming, 2/12/2013

A few notes about my usual reading habits. I commonly read two or three books at once. Over the last few weeks, I read Alan Moore’s From Hell finally, a masterpiece that encapsulates the emotional and psychic terror, corruption, and destructiveness of Western society as it existed in the Victorian era. Moore depicts the acts of Jack the Ripper as an expression of power in the form of raw violence: both the political violence of an imperial throne and the brutal, bloody, personal violence of street murder. Genocide and serial murder are depicted as expressions of the same force: the intoxication of the power to destroy.

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism has much in common with Moore’s own mystical take on the subject. I’ve written many times over the last weeks about her description of totalitarianism as a pure movement in essence, a mode of politics that takes the essence of a particular idea (ex. racial superiority, class warfare), understanding it as implying an inevitable endpoint for history, and uses methods of terror and public fear to move a populace with the most radical speed toward the ideal of that essence. Basically, it’s the achievement of utopia through fear and terror. 

Eddie Campbell's stark artistic style in
From Hell accentuates its brutality.

Moore’s take on the idea is mystical, given the orientation of his book as a serialized comic, but there’s a striking similarity in theme. The politics of the imperial and totalitarian era of Western culture is ultimately defined by fear and terror as its methods. 

The third book I’ve been reading concurrently with all that is Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, his analysis of how various expressions of the expansion of imperialism and the struggles against it reveal various aspects of the whole phenomenon. While I’m also incorporating its ideas into my thinking as I plan the utopias project, Said’s is mostly a book that I’m also reading for entertainment value. I’ve learned a lot about some wonderful elements of world culture and writing in fiction and history that I didn’t know before (the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o is on my list now, and I’m particularly keen to acquire some of his books that were originally written in Gikuyu). But I’m also reading Culture and Imperialism because I enjoy it.

Yet there’s one question that comes to my mind when I reflect on the coincidence that I’m reading all these three books simultaneously. Said focusses specially on the imperialist phenomenon, its politics, and its effects on everyday people, the same multi-scale eye as Moore and Arendt. This is especially true for Arendt if you include Eichmann in Jerusalem as part of her historical work on totalitarian politics, one example of an individual at the causal epicentre of totalitarian genocide. After these last weeks of reflecting on imperialism and totalitarianism, I’m left with just one question, at least with regard to my political conscience.

Why were any of these basic ideas controversial? I cannot wrap my head around the fact that we now know all that we know about the physical and cultural violence of imperialism, particularly its aspects as economic exploitation. We admit that slavery is horrifying, yet as a culture, we seem unable to understand that hideous squalor is an injustice. We all seem aware that most of our technological products (and I don’t just mean the awful labour conditions in computer factories, but even a lot of the global textile manufacturing sector) are produced in such conditions of poverty that they amount to slavery in all but name and intended bondage. When states do it, we call it imperialism and say it must be destroyed. When businesses do it and avoid the actual purchase of labourers like chattel, we call it the natural economic development of the free market. But it amounts to the same kind of poverty and violence.

It’s not as if I know how to stop any of this, but at least there are times when I bring this situation to the forefront of my thoughts and feel terrible about it. Yet I remember Rick Perry, a mainstream American politician and governor of one of its most populous states, Texas, running for US President and openly advocating the re-invasion of Iraq. Few people in modern politics suggest that our current economic system has some major poverty problems.

Each in their own ways, Moore, Said, and Arendt show the subtle and complex links through which a whole society is implicated in political, economic, and personal violence. Having learned that lesson, I don’t know that anyone has any idea how to escape it.

Expressing Philosophy as Fiction, Composing, 18/11/2013

I’ve mentioned my first philosophical publication to be accepted earlier on the blog, a chapter in Doctor Who and Philosophy that interprets the Doctor as a Nietzschean Übermensch. It had quite a lot of personal importance to me, because Doctor Who has always been important to me as a piece of culture, and I was glad one of my earliest efforts would contribute to a book of essays about it. Plus, it was a popular philosophy volume, so I could have many more people see, and hopefully enjoy, my work.

In a way, my work in philosophy and fiction converged there in multiple ways. I was writing a philosophical essay that used an example from fiction to illustrate an interpretation of one of Nietzsche’s concepts. In my mind for the potential audience was simply regular people who’d like reading a softly challenging, maybe slightly kooky, book. More like the readers of my fiction than my technical philosophical work. 

There are many ways philosophy can inform fiction, and fiction can inform philosophy. I see the two as similar in many respects, in terms of the analysis of form and content that the best works require. The author’s level of craftsmanship in both fields be very high, as a slight change to a word’s place in a sentence, or the precise expression of an idea, can cause serious changes in what the reader tends to interpret. We work in dialogue with the figures of our past; so much of the best undergraduate philosophy programs expose students to the highlight of the canon, and the best authors are lovers and systematic appreciators of literature. I could go on.

It's important for young writers to know, starting out, that
we all have to take on a variety of unexpected and different
work than we may have initially planned. Like
impersonating Rasputin in a Vegas retro dance show.

One way to go on is to discuss my current entertainment reading, Alan Moore’s From Hell. The book is actually informed by many themes in my own broader approach to political and ecological philosophy. I’m no expert on Moore’s work; I only got into comics in the last few years, a latecomer to the medium. And I know he’s an obvious choice to talk about the creators of great comics. But I do think his work is incredible, and when I compare it to other comics that I read, his work is original and accomplished in so many formal and emotional ways simultaneously, that he’s far beyond the talents of any other comics author I’ve come across so far. And I think I can assert that I will continue to find other comics writers are not as good as Moore. So I’m sort of a fan.

As for the ideas I see in his work, they express many elements of my own thought. I’m very interested in understanding social relationships as ecological relationships. No social link, even to institutions, is reified as permanent in any real sense. All is changeable and flexible, and its changes are interdependent. So while we’re actually free in that there’s no physical necessity precisely determining our thoughts and acts, our freedom is very restricted because we move in a world of pressures from many other movements, often occurring at distances and levels that we can’t usually comprehend in our immediate experience. 

Just as you must diagnose a culture to diagnose a single crime, Moore’s central idea in From Hell, we act freely to create a culture that conditions and guides us as individuals. The human personality is fashioned from the give-and-take of cultural movements and traditions guiding our development and values, in conflict with our desires to adapt and innovate to forge unique paths. The tension of conservatism and rebellion.

In those two paragraphs are ideas about the nature of determinism, a meditation on the problem of moral responsibility in a world of contingent cultural influence on individuals, an epistemological problem about our limits in knowing what affects us beyond what we experience, an existentialist problem of an individualist vs a communitarian ethics, and the political version of that debate as well. All this from thinking for a moment about the basic ideas that went into the production of From Hell.

My Assignment: Earth essays over the last couple of months essentially did the same thing. I’d like one day to be able to write a work of fiction in the form of a comprehensive production guide and history for the fan market of a show that never existed. It would be a show that covered philosophical and ethical ideas (like whether there is a single perfect morality to which lesser peoples should be guided, meditations on the nature of empire, or the ability of friendship and empathy to build virtuous people) in its stories. It would be a work of fiction, in part, about the possibilities of popular fiction to express philosophical ideas. 

The major difference between philosophy and fiction is that philosophy is much harder than philosophical fiction writing. A fiction writer can build his characters and include enough moments in the narrative that allude to the philosophical ideas he’s working with. A philosopher has to be explicit and precise about the ideas; philosophy is a mode of human knowledge that deals with raw ideas in this sense. When I write philosophy, I can’t obfuscate or imply; I must display my concepts blatantly in your face. 

This also touches on another difference of philosophy and fiction. Moore doesn’t have to come to any solid conclusions, as if From Hell was an argument for a specific position. He can introduce the idea, let it play out in different ways, and let the reader think over it and come to their own conclusions. Philosophers have to take a stand on their issues. Even when a stand is a refusal to take a stand, we must explicitly justify that stand. It’s far more difficult to achieve, and far more rewarding when you do.

Is Mind Over Matter If Mind Is Matter?, A History Boy, 25/07/2013

A long time ago, in the last year of my undergrad and during my MA at Memorial (from about 2004 to 2007), I knew exactly what kind of philosophy I wanted to work in, what stimulated the most interesting ideas in me, and what could benefit most from those ideas. Philosophy of mind.

My friends might be surprised. But I wrote my MA thesis in philosophy of mind, considering one possible answer to the problem of materialism. This is the problem of whether the world is entirely material or if there is a second substance of mind. Aside from this one approach to materialism/dualism I was considering, all the various thought experiments and problems on the subject fascinated me. Yet there was an element of this sub-discipline of philosophy that would become very difficult for me. 

All those more minor thought experiments and problems had developed such vigorous debates that they became their own sub-disciplines of philosophy of mind (itself already a sub-discipline). Everyone in philosophy of mind operates in these sub-disciplines; it isn't that kind of specialization. But when I would meet other practitioners of philosophy of mind at guest lectures and conferences from around 2007 to 2009, they'd tell me that the ideas developed in one debate didn't apply to another. Yet I kept coming up with ideas for projects that would apply, say, an idea from the materialism-dualism debate around Donald Davidson's Swamp Man to the identity theory debate around Swamp Man.

In the case of the perspective I took in my MA thesis? I chose the most unforgiving example of the typical materialist point of view in the last decades of the debate: Paul and Patricia Churchland. What if this kind of strict materialism could still permit processes that create all the intentionality, subjectivity, and inner life that we think dualists need the mind substance to do? What if I could find a set of ideas that generated all the phenomena we call mind from plain old matter? I could conclude that the conflict of materialism and dualism wasn't necessary; we could be minds made of matter. I'd just need to find a set of ideas that I thought could generate all that from material and walk you though how that happened. And I thought I knew exactly the philosophy that could do that: phenomenology, particularly the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. That book gives you the tools to walk through how a complete human personality develops from the material stuff of an organic body. Phenomenology is the perfect non-reductive materialism.

Yes, it did start as something of a joke (Swamp-Man, Swamp Thing). Then
I realized that Alan Moore's Swamp Thing character dealt with issues of
identity and memory central to philosophy of mind. 

Even before I had any idea whether it was appropriate, I was genre-mashing in philosophy. And I still do. This post isn’t for getting into my takes on the divisions and categories of philosophical disciplines (spoiler: I don’t like most of them!). But my greatest philosophical successes in the last five years have come from these genre collisions. I apply traditionally continental thinkers to analytic problems, just as in my MA thesis, or yesterday when I wrote how Thomas Nagel could learn so much from Henri Bergson. And I apply analytic thinkers to typically continental problems: Ian Hacking has a lot to teach Bruno Latour and the Foucauldian philosophers of science. I’ve even gotten philosophical success and peer-reviewed publications from seeing what philosophy and literature could learn from each other. I have an essay under review at a critical theory journal, which I’ve also presented at the Canadian Philosophical Association, that makes heavy use of H. P. Lovecraft to understand an aspect of the interaction of mysticism and science. I published an essay in Cogency this summer that critiques the problem in analytic theory of knowledge on the rationality of peer disagreement by drawing ideas from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I had an idea to get back into philosophy of mind last year with an essay that explores different aspects of Donald Davidson’s swamp-man thought experiment, taking it in new directions thanks to engaging with the ideas from Alan Moore’s run on the Swamp Thing comics in the early 1980s. I haven't started on it yet, because there's so much material in philosophy of mind alone to constantly catch up on. I've spoken about the idea with my friend D, who does philosophy of mind. One day, if he's still amenable, we can actually get started writing that essay together.