Begin the Begin, Research Time, 15/12/2017

Last week, I wrote a bit of a free-wheeling post. I’m writing about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, so being a little free-wheeling and weird is generally acceptable. One thing I wanted to get off my chest was my frustration that Deleuze considered only the Western tradition to be real philosophy.

I mean, if you have a conception of philosophy as catching hold of chaos in thought, it makes sense that such an activity will take many forms besides this curious Hellenic tradition of writing, discourse, and thought.

That's what I take Western philosophy to be – the tradition of conceptual engineering that began with the sages / educators / scientists / mathematicians of Hellenic Greece.

A reproduction of a painting of Ibn Rushd, one of the
greatest philosophers in the history of Spain.

Now, that means what I count as Western philosophy is a bit larger than a lot of what I was taught in school. I don’t really expand the tradition by much.

I consider the medieval Muslim and Jewish thinkers of the Abbasid Empire the direct successors of Hellenic philosophical and mathematical traditions. More than only following the Greeks, Persia, Syria, and the Maghreb contributed major new creative directions in ontology, mathematics, medicine and the nature of divinity.

Also, I read some very interesting writing about Ethiopians’ contribution to the Western tradition of philosophy in the 1600s and 1700s. So I don’t just stick to Europe and America.*

* What an odd coincidence that these are the two regions at the top of the old global colonial hierarchy. Funny, isn’t it?

I’m not writing to catalogue the world’s traditions, though. I’m writing this to make a more straightforward account of my last problem with Deleuze. It was a vicious tension in this last work that I think he could (and should) have reconciled if he’d had a few more years of productive life after What Is Philosophy?.

As it is, he developed an insightful account of why philosophy developed in Hellenic Greece. Which is really an insightful account of why Western philosophy developed in Hellenic Greece.

That region had a curious and peculiar position in the Mediterranean world when philosophy and geometry developed in communities of sages – the Pythagoreans, Plato’s Academy, and the Lyceum.

Greece had a fluid, plural, and largely non-hierarchical cultural environment – they were close enough to the Persian Empire for maritime trade but, for the most part, were beyond the point where they could be easily conquered.

So Hellenic cities were free of subjugation to a monarch, and had a much more dynamic relationship among themselves than the static role of submission to an imperialist authority.

Being a seafaring society also encouraged a culture of friendliness and openness among cities and trading partners. There was a similar culture of friendly rivalry among the leaders of each individual polis – governed by argument and debate among a local parliament of jovial neighbours.

These were the unique conditions of one of the most philosophically vibrant and creative cultures of human history. They were not inevitable – a few inconvenient famines or a better Persian shipbuilding industry could have destroyed Hellenic philosophy when they were largely still mystics in the woods.

Western philosophy is a unique tradition, with many strange and surprising transformations. But it isn’t the only philosophical tradition. It simply happens to be mine.

Constructing a Geometry of Thinking, Research Time, 30/11/2017

Let's actually get a little bit into this idea of a geometry for philosophy. I talked yesterday about what a plane of immanence is – now let’s get into how particular planes work.

So Gilles Deleuze’s term, plane of immanence, is a map of concepts, a map of their mutual possibility. If you can develop a coherent philosophy out of a set of concepts, then that set all exists on the same plane of immanence.

That they can cohere means that their components and structures can all fit together without internal contradictions that make nonsense of the conceptual machinery. But that’s just one philosophical system that fits on the plane.

Imagine that you’re Bernhard Riemann. Sitting in your office, doing mathematics, like a mathematician would. You’re setting up some guidelines for how a particular type of space would work. You can extrapolate from those mathematical rules what types of shapes can exist in your space.

Deleuze: "The components of the schema are as follows:
1) the "I think" as an ox head wired for sound, which
constantly repeats Self=Self; 2) the categories as universal
concepts (four great headings): shafts that are extensive
and retractile according to the movement of; 3) the
moving wheel of the schemata; 4) the shallow stream of
Time as form of interiority, in and out of which the wheel
of the schemata plunges; 5) space as form of exteriority;
the stream's banks and bed; 6) the passive self at the bottom
of the stream and as junction of the two forms; 7) the
principles of synthetic judgments that run across spacetime;
8) the transcendental field of possible experience,
immanent to the "I"; 9) the three Ideas or illusion of
transcendence (circles turning on the absolute horizon;
Soul, World, and God).

A shape that fits a spherical-section space – space curved like a planet – will flay apart, unable to hold itself together, on a negatively-curved space – curved like a saddle. Same goes for shapes that work on saddle spaces splitting apart on spheres.

Now imagine that instead of setting up the boundary conditions for this geometric space, you had to figure out its parameters by trial and error. Try constructing different kinds of shapes and see whether they can exist together. If they can’t, then they each project from themselves a different type of space.

Well, that’s Gilles Deleuze sitting in his office, doing philosophy. But instead of shapes and spaces, he’s working with concepts – frameworks of organizing perceptual and cultural thought to understand our experiences and lives in different ways.

In philosophy, there’s no function to set the boundary conditions for the concepts you develop first. Philosophical concepts have many components organized in complicated ways. Check out this example of Kant’s philosophy. It’s a ridiculous-looking diagram, but it’s a genuinely pithy description (and depiction) of his concept of subjectivity.

Analyze this concept. Think about all of its components and their dynamic relationships with each other. How does this concept help us understand our own subject-hood, mind, personality, and experience? Once you understand all the concept’s components, internal dynamics, and practical effects, then you can start the next step in the process.

Yeah, I know. You’re not even done after all that work. At least this is only one possible process for philosophical thinking – it might be the most admirable, if you consider only the dedication to such a strange and difficult task. So here’s the next step.

Figure out its plane of immanence. Extrapolate from those components, dynamics, and practical affects what other concepts are compatible with this particular way of thinking. If you’re lucky, the thinker you’re studying has done a lot of the work for you. Like Kant, who developed concepts in morality, aesthetics, theology, and philosophy of science alongside his central concept of subjectivity.

Maybe you’re a bit less lucky, and the map expands across the work of many thinkers. You might study a particular tradition of thinkers, like the Abbasid-era Aristotelians.

Or maybe you do comparative philosophy, looking for conceptual compatibilities across cultures and civilizations – analyzing structures of thought developed in Chinese Legalism of the Warring States period and contemporary authoritarian philosophies like those of Carl Schmitt, Giovanni Gentile, or Vladimir Lenin.

Most terrifying task of all in mapping planes of immanence – straight-up creating concepts from near-scratch and testing them for mutual compatibility. If they fit, you have another few points on the map. If not, rinse and repeat.

How to Think How to Write and How to Teach, Composing, 15/06/2016

I’ve had a lot of ideas lately for posts here, which is a shame that I’ve been so busy since coming back from Calgary, I’ve only been able to update sporadically. 

I’ve finished reading Commonwealth and wanted to add some thoughts wrapping up my long engagement with Antonio Negri’s trilogy. I also started reading Louis Althusser’s For Marx, and have a few ideas about how we understand history that I want to work out here. And I’ve been thinking about the medium of messaging apps, mulling over the mechanics and meanings of how we interact with chatbots. 

But I discovered something very disconcerting a couple of days ago. My old employer, McMaster University’s Philosophy department, was accused of racist practice by a former Master’s student in a pretty bold forum.

The home building of my old department was also one
of the oldest and best looking buildings in the otherwise
drab and brutalist McMaster campus. Plenty of green at
that university, though.

Udoka Okafor wrote a piece on Huffington Post alleging mistreatment and a lack of respect from the professors in McMaster’s department. A PhD student at the department, Jorge Humberto Sanchez Perez, wrote a response that was posted at the less mainstream* venue of Brian Leiter’s blog.

* A blogging space exclusively for university-based philosophers, and quite a controversial one in that community, thanks to Leiter’s creation and stewardship of the “Gourmet Report” rankings and his indefensible defence of formerly-Northwestern University’s Peter Ludlow after his sex scandal. I’ve already written about all this mess.

You can read Okafor’s piece online and download the .rtf file** of Sanchez’s hit job – I mean rebuttal! – to read yourselves. You’ll be about as well-informed of their characters as I am. Both joined the department well after I left my position at McMaster, and I think after I left the city of Hamilton as well.

** Seriously?!

But you can tell where my sympathies lie. If you take Okafor at her word – and you have no reason not to – you see an ambitious young thinker. And I’ve never been one to cut away at ambition. 

Having worked in McMaster’s department for five years, I certainly see why they’d discourage Okafor pursuing such a massive project as a striving-for-completeness comparative study of Western and African legal theory. It’s impossible to do in a single year. 

But if I were in their position, I wouldn’t have outright discouraged her from moving in that direction at all. What would have provoked the best work in the long run is for her to have figured out some kind of preliminary project to the big one. 

Maybe contrasting a Western and African legal theorist whose work, juxtaposed together, reveals an interesting or illuminating idea. Now, I’m just riffing here, but there’s no reason why some similar riff couldn’t have appeared in the few minutes of a grad student’s committee meeting. 

Thanks to Barry Allen, McMaster
has a firm base for new approaches
to comparative philosophy. That
should have made a project like
Okafor's quite at home.

My own supervisor, Barry Allen, has been working on comparative philosophy for about a decade now. He’s written two books on ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, the general survey Vanishing Into Things and the exploration of philosophy of the martial arts, Striking Beauty. He would have been an excellent supervisor for such a project.

But Okafor was part of the Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law program, over which Allen never really had much influence. That program focussed very much on North American and British legal and political theory, and was largely conceived as a philosophical prelude to law school. That’s how its founders discussed its role when I was there and they were designing it.

That's the local-level set of issues. It expresses the institutional conservatism of the department, a fairly common attitude there, which I think held the faculty back from achieving more progress in teaching, research, and creativity than the good work they did do.

Because at a larger scale – as an expression of trends throughout the academic institution – Okafor describes a group of people operating in blindness to the crisis unfolding throughout the university system and the philosophical discipline in particular.

I’ve written my own perspective on this institutional crisis at the Reply Collective, twice actually. And if you take what Okafor says seriously, you can see another perspective on academic philosophy’s crisis of institutional conservatism. 

One of the most common and most effective ways to hide your head in the sand about serious problems among your discipline’s leaders is to divorce what they say from the context of their lives. Here are some concrete examples to illustrate what I mean.

In November 2013, McMaster’s Philosophy Department hosted Peter Ludlow in a prestigious week-long series of talks – mere months before his career-ending exposé, but well after his condemnation by Northwestern’s Title IX board. One McMaster Philosophy professor who’s been a good colleague and friend to me is a devotee of the disgraced Thomas Pogge's philosophy of mass charity from wealthy to poor countries. 

Now, my own problem with Pogge’s argument was that it smacked of the same imperialist condescensions that were embedded with the creation of mass poverty in the Global South in the first place. It's built on the insulting reduction of the entire formerly-colonized world to a charity case, and puts all agency on the former colonizers, treating the entire non-Western world as a passive receptor of our goodwill. 

I always found the political imperatives of his philosophy
as horribly smug, as if he never questioned if there was
more to the moral problems of a post-imperialist world
than simple differences in material wealth.

More specifically, Okafor describes, in the most problematic of her problems, being taught Pogge’s philosophy without any permission to make an issue of his years of using his Yale position for sexual predation. She wanted to introduce the hypocrisy of his position to problematize his ideas. But she was told that his vile character had nothing to do with the value of his ideas when considered in the abstract.

It makes for a curious parallel of my own problems with Pogge. His abstract ideal of justice as an imperative to restore egalitarian fairness would work out in real application to a repetition of empire as infantilizing charity on a civilizational scale. 

Following Okafor, the appeal of his abstract argument for egalitarian justice suffers when spoken from the keyboards of a man who exploited gender, economic, and post-colonial hierarchies for his selfish sexual pleasure. Real hypocrisy deflates the power of an abstract argument.

In summary, Okafor’s critiques and problems with our former colleagues at McMaster Philosophy have much in common – we both appear able to see the hypocrisies and self-undercutting of abstract arguments for justice and fairness made from a material situation of institutional conservatism.

Having such an eye for that conflict of the abstract and the material makes me think she’d have a good home as a contributor to the Reply Collective. 

As for Sanchez’s rebuttal? Just read the bloody thing. It looks like a condescending, dismissive screed at a young woman as an irrational fool not worth listening to. Appeals to empty buzzwords like ‘political correctness’ that are used to delegitimize movements against racism all over the West. Insulting the genuine need for Western philosophy to embrace a global scope as the mere fetishization of 'diversity.'

The sadly typical huffing and puffing of a grumpy old man.
• • •
Editor's note. A few hours after the post went up, a friend of mine who was a classmate of Okafor told me that the course on Pogge's philosophy took place before his recent exposé, so I can understand why what were – at the time – only rumours were bracketed from its discussion.

But the neo-colonial critique of Pogge still stands (he reminds me of John Stuart Mill's justifications for British sovereignty over India as a "civilizing mission") and Sanchez still sounds like a pig.

Thought Needs New Ideas and Wild Collisions, Research Time, 01/05/2015

I mentioned a while ago that I finished Barry Allen's book about ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, Vanishing Into Things. His conclusion was as concise, complex, and modestly ambitious as any of his own major works that I've read.* It reminded me of how lucky I feel to have had him as a supervisor and worked with him so closely for four years. It also reminded me of why we worked so well together.

* Or even just his lecture courses. I thought his closing lecture in the third-level Nietzsche course, for which I was once his teaching assistant a few years ago, was one of the most artful summations of four months of talks as I've ever heard.

Barry started his book with a gripe about how comparative philosophy is usually done in academic settings. I think some of the best writing is in part motivated by gripes, because they create something to push away from. It’s how I treated H. P. Lovecraft in the writing of my own sci-fi debut. 

But a gripe can’t consume your writing. Otherwise, you stay reactive, making an entirely negative critique without even gestures to an alternative. and the scope of your thinking remains small. It’s a kind of petty, spiteful nihilism in writing. 

Remarkable men from three different civilizations meet
and their conversation will begin a vibrant new
tradition.

Barry’s gripe with standard comparative philosophy is a different kind of small thinking that he found quite common in the field, according to his introduction. It’s a smallness of ambition in engaging with the philosophical traditions of another culture. Whether through a misplaced post-colonial ceding of space to the other, or a colonial treatment of the examined tradition as a fossilized museum piece, they both do the same thing. 

Chinese philosophy is described and interpreted without genuinely engaging in the conceptual conversations that come when traditions with very different fundamental presumptions have collided throughout history. Such cultural collisions have historically been the most philosophically fertile in our history. Barry describes one such collision as having resulted in Zen Buddhism itself. I think of the centuries-long engagement of Arab philosophy with the Greek classics in the Abbasid Empire as another example.

But the modern manners of comparative philosophy that describes without engagement achieve the same result as the colonial encounter of dominance that makes taxidermy of the tradition: it’s treated without life. Engaging with the Chinese tradition as living philosophy would dialogue with these works to create new philosophical concepts and arguments.

Barry ends Vanishing Into Things by sketching where a living Western engagement with Chinese philosophy can go. The traditions that began in ancient China constitute a 2,000 year heritage of understanding the world as process, primary flux, becoming as prior to being and static identity. 

China’s tradition offers just as many variations on thinking in terms of becoming as the Western tradition does with terms of being. What's more, it's a philosophical tradition of primal becoming that never had to overcome a mainstream that ontologically prioritized being. 

Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze all developed fascinating and complex philosophies that prioritized becoming as the primary nature of reality. But they all had to set their philosophies as reactions to more than 2,000 years of tradition that understood stability and the static as the essence of what is. 

At many points throughout his book, Barry describes how a given Chinese thinker or school may resemble a famous Western thinker, but how the Western -ism just didn't fit. The character of a Western approach to a process way of thinking had to strain so hard against concepts of the static that it heightened the intensity of arguments that a parallel Chinese thinker would never have had to make. 

No one around the Chinese philosopher would ever have asked the questions that a Westerner would. Only when the traditions came into contact could those questions be posed and the new creative time begin. To understand and engage with such a different way of thinking as a colleague, they'd all have to create a ton of new concepts. And that’s what philosophy is.

Dreaming Out of Stereotypes, Research Time, 14/04/2015

Can you write a book about historical Chinese philosophy and not mention the single most famous (to white people) passage of Daoist thought? I guess not, because Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream shows up on page 88 of Barry Allen’s Vanishing Into Things. 

Am I a butterfly or am I a person? Is that the right
question?

Zhuangzi had a dream that he was a butterfly. Then he woke up and discovered that he was a man. But it was equally possible, says Zhuangzi, that he was actually a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. At this point, we walk away, amazed at the mystical confusions into which the Chinese have sent us. That’s how all Chinese people think, or so the stereotypes of our popular culture would have us believe, in unsolvable riddles and self-contradictory puzzles to empty our minds. 

I think the first time I heard Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream was in a fairly shitty movie, where a token Magical Yellow Man tells the virtuous white male protagonist this story. Its pop culture version always sounds emptily profound, the pretentious meaninglessness that spews from the mouths of barely literate hippies who read a couple of passages from the Zhuangzi or the Daodejing in between a bong hit and not showering during a busy day of trying to grow flowers in their dreadlocks.

Barry’s treatment of the passage occurs in a discussion of Daoist skepticism, comparing it with the central works of skeptical philosophy in the tradition’s Roman Empire period, those of Sextus Empiricus. Dreams are a recurring element in skeptical philosophy, whether in Descartes’ Meditations or Linklater’s Waking Life. The usual question is if and how you can tell that you aren’t dreaming.

A question sets the conditions of your thinking. Those conditions are what you’d have to include in your response for it to be a sensible answer. Working through and investigating a question guides the kinds of priorities you will have in thought. When I ask “How can you tell that you aren’t dreaming?” we inquire about the truth of what we know, or conceived more broadly, whether the world that we now experience is the true world. We think in terms of an either/or: truth or illusion.

Zhuangzi’s question seems to fit in this kind of framework. Am I Zhuangzi who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly to dreams of being Zhuangzi? Which of these is true, or real? How am I to decide which is real? What should I look for to discover which of these is the real world, and how am I to look for it?

A profoundly insulting mistake when reading the
philosophy or literature of another culture's past is the
failure to understand that culture as a living entity, and
take it instead as a set of static contexts with a unique
and absolute essence.

Barry provides an answer that makes for solid history of philosophy here. I say this because it’s clear that he’s read the entire Zhuangzi, and is reading this more cryptic lesson of the butterfly in the context of an earlier passage that also touches on the particular meaning of what a dream is.

What I think is important in comparative philosophy* is maintaining the cultural context of the thinkers you’re writing about without treating that foreign culture like a museum piece, as if it was an unvarying set of norms and presumptions instead of a living, fluctuating, messy culture. That means being careful about when you start your comparison of a concept in one culture’s philosophical tradition to your own. The problem with most Western accounts of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream is that they take the conception of what a dream is from the Western tradition.

* And I could be wildly off base in what I think because I haven’t really studied much comparative philosophy at all. 

This earlier passage is a story about a student of Kongzi who describe how we can become lost in our dreams. When dreams consume us, we don’t really know anything, instead flitting about interpretations of the world which themselves are dreams. Then the student describes how, after countless generations, a sage appears among the culture and leads a great awakening. 

To wake from a dream is to shift the style and focus of your life from petty concerns to profound questions and journeys. It’s an ethical transformation of life itself. One culture and history comes to an end, and another begins. 

Live in the Now II: To Find the Perfect Way (or Wu Wei), Research Time, 09/04/2015

Continued from last post . . . In the era of the foundational Confucians – Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi – the origin of Chinese civilization was already more myth than history. The Xia Dynasty was treated as a union of both, a mythical time when the empire’s rulers had fantastic powers, an intuitive grasp of the ritual that channelled Qi, the fundamental force of material becoming, to lead a society and house souls of perfect harmony.

I’ll import my own engagement with the foundational Western myths to engage with this idea. One major concept in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a critique of what I (and a few others) call an Edenic way of thinking about nature. 

A scene from my personal favourite retelling of the
myth of Eden.

The Western myth of Eden conceives of the origin point of the world as a place of perfection, where humanity’s forebears lived in an intimate relationship with God. This is a time without history because genuine becoming is unnecessary. The Western myth conceives of the beginning of history as a fall (or rather a Fall, as it was a categorical transformation) from divine intimacy. 

Some interpretations of the myth of Eden conceive of the Fall as a product of rebellion against the order of God, and some specify this rebellion as the discovery or formulation of the knowledge required to rebel against God’s order (or God’s orders, depending on how authoritarian your conception of God might be). 

Aside from moronic Biblical literalists, no one really believes that Eden was a specific place in the world. It’s more often conceptualized precisely as a myth, a story to tell about humanity’s relationship with the divine. 

The Xia Dynasty is different. This was a real political epoch in the history of China, a real imperial line and government. Little direct record of it survives, but Xia is one of the foundational origin points for human civilization as it exists today. Xia ranks with Ur, Egypt, the Inca Empire, and the Abrahamic era of the tribes of Israel, to name just a few of the ancient genesis points of modern agricultural humanity.

Yet Barry’s book describes the foundational Confucian philosophers writing about the Xia Dynasty as if it had been a living Eden. Xia was an epoch when people were naturally in tune with the flow of the world’s generative energy, able to channel the productive forces of existence without resistance, producing a society in perfect harmony. Ritual emerged already perfected in the Xia era, humanity had since fallen from that perfection, and the task of Confucian philosophy was to restore the knowledge and practice of ritual to its perfect state.

So far, so Eden. But Barry raises an argument which, on the face of it, appears devastating for the conception of Xia as a harmonious society thanks to ritual’s perfect practice. It is a non-issue because Xunzi would conceive the problem of origins precisely as myth instead of history.

I can conceive of Eden as a perfect state of humanity because the Fall is a categorical transformation ontologically. The nature of humanity’s existence was different in the Edenic state of communion with God. But there was historical continuity between the period the Confucians idealized and their own time.

The Xia Dynasty was a historical forerunner to the era of Chinese civilization where Confucian philosophy developed. There is no ontological break between the people of the Xia era and that of the Warring States. Just a thousand years of history of which we, and the Confucians themselves, have sketchy knowledge.

The critique is, in essence, the question of who taught the people of Xia-era China the perfect rituals. The wisdom of a sage could not have developed spontaneously in a perfect form if the people of Xia were ontologically continuous with the people of Xunzi’s era or ours. Human nature, according to Xunzi, tends to pettiness and short-sighted selfishness. The last thing that could develop spontaneously among humanity is the wisdom of the sage. So the singularity of the Xia appears impossible.

Xunzi’s answer is literally as I described it at the beginning of this two-part post. The sketchy past of the Xia Dynasty provides a blank space in the popular sense of history into which you can throw in whatever you want. If you want to romanticize the Xia Dynasty as a period of perfect cultural and political harmony, you can. It’s not like there’s any evidence to contradict you.

The Western segregation of Eden from living humanity in its essence keeps us from conceiving of a genuine permanent solution to the Fall without the direct intervention of God on this plane of existence or another. 

You can imagine a historically and ontologically continuous culture with your own as having achieved the ideals that you want your own society to meet. Porting the ideals of perfect ritual and harmonious society to the Xia makes the goals of Confucian philosophy concrete. Because we can imagine this real society in our ancient past as having achieved such a difficult task, we understand the achievement as within our power.

So it doesn’t matter what the real circumstances of the Xia Dynasty were. The myth of the Xia is powerful because it’s a narrative of people who made themselves supermen. So the myth can guide our own work in our own era to build a better society.