If We Can’t Go Back Then We Have to Overcome, Research Time, 19/12/2017

It’s a wistful book, What Is Philosophy?. There aren’t too many philosophy books that you can call wistful. But Gilles has his moments.

There's a moment about halfway through the book when Deleuze wonders whether the uniquely vibrant spirit of Hellenic culture could emerge in human communities again. The Hellenes lived with convivial hearts, where your ambition was to get rich enough to spend it all, leading your society through a jovial parliament of friendly, back-slapping rivals. Can it return?

There was once a young man who was very strong, with a good
heart, but who could not express himself in words. He could dream
about terrors that were coming to his people. Death and terror.
He wanted to warn them – he had to warn them.

Of course it can’t, because we live in a contingent universe where nothing can return exactly as it once was. But you can ask whether a human society can produce a similar cultural balance of brotherhood, ego, and intelligence.

But that spirit can’t return. Deleuze knows it. The question is why. When you ask why, you’re asking for reasons. Now, reasons are different from causes. A cause is a question of how, not why, but that’s a matter for semantics.

The distinction between why and how can help work out the difference between a reason and a cause.

Causes bring new processes about – they’re production processes. The universe being as complex as it is, nothing really has only one cause. That we ever thought causality worked that way was a matter of cultural stupidity – Western culture understood causality with images of billiard balls and clocks.

Compared to our contemporary understanding of complex systems – the sciences of turbulence, chance, and contingency – the West at the beginning of the imperialist era were worse than blind. They were foolish. Especially since the best ancient philosophical tradition that could help Westerners was about to get hit with a shotgun blast of colonialism.

But I’m digressing a little. Causes refer to the field of dynamic material processes whose activity constitutes the universe. Reasons refer to conditions – What about the world has to change to make a particular event more or less likely? Possible or impossible?

They were his friends, his family. He had to warn them, make plans,
do something to protect themselves from the coming horror. But he
could not speak well. He could only speak from his heart, not from
his mind. All he could say was, "The horror! It is coming!"

It’s what Bertrand Russell called the difference that makes a difference. Punny Brit bastard.

But yes, the question why hunts down possibility conditions, what kind of world there has to be for something to happen. So what’s changed possibility conditions so radically that the boisterous friendships of Hellenic culture can’t emerge in a new context?

Capitalism is one. The Hellenes never had to deal with the universal social solvent. Pick your flavour of capitalism. Industrial capitalism is a system whose products include mass manufacturing, revolutions in medical and communication technology, and pollution so thick and omnipresent that it’ll likely kill us all.

But the more relevant aspect of capitalism is the venture finance capitalism that I talked about yesterday – the one that converts the profit motive into billion-dollar piracy. Yet capitalism itself has that spark of freedom at the heart of all its processes – creativity in destruction. You have to raze to build again, even if the fires are horrifying.

No, Deleuze picks a worse fire than capitalism. However terrible the effects of unrestrained capitalist desire are, there remains a liberatory force in the structure of its system.

Held back from piracy and governed with heart, capitalism can lay the conditions for a free society – it’s the liberal vision of freedom. Maybe the liberal vision has become impossible now, but it could still have been – at least in its ideal, conceptual, philosophical form – a flight to freedom on many vectors.

Even for us, who think we're so smart and articulate, we find it tough
to talk about the real horror. We can make films, paint amazing
images of terror and its looming face. But look into the abyss itself
and it will do more than stare back. The abyss will make you as
empty as it is. Unless there's a friend to hold you back from the
ethical solvent of the desire for horror.

No, Deleuze is thinking of the Holocaust. We’ve become a people – humanity, that is – who kills by the millions. Worse than that, we’ve come to find it ordinary. Even worse than that – as if it could get worse – we’ve come to find it fun. It’s something we want, a desire for genocide. Mass murder has become a path to personal and community fulfillment.

Not that this happens very often. Anytime is too often, but there are rarely more than a few active genocides happening at a time. Most of them are slow matters of cultural displacement. This century, things are getting more terrifyingly frequent.

But a crime like the systematic murder and displacement of millions has become a matter of course. An ordinary thing. People run on this as a campaign platform in elections, win, then do it.

Can we be convivial friends in such a world? Deleuze doesn’t think we can, and I don’t think so either. Consider the magnitude of the destruction we bring on each other every day. Friends can’t smile and joke when faced with that kind of knowledge.

Philosophy in a culture where this horrific violence has become so ordinary can’t be so jocular or congenial. Philosophy for humans in the 21st century emerges from the tears of friends consoling each other over terrible losses, wondering how and why such things could happen.

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.

Slowing History Down, Research Time, 12/10/2017

Here I am continuing the short but dense post I wrote yesterday. The real unfolding of history – the complex web of interconnecting events and processes – is too chaotic for us to understand it as a whole.

Our histories simplify the world. Look at how we discuss history over centuries at a time. We focus on a few great leaders, the activities of governments, business leaders, and massive economic interests. Zoom in or zoom out from the village to the globe, and it's the same structure to the story of the place.

Human spaces are carved into simple patterns and clear paths. All
other creatures are driven from the space. Co-existence – even
though ecological co-existence is always kind of dangerous and
rarely peaceful – becomes impossible, or at least rare.

We can contain much of the immense detail of history, but only if we either stick to a single phenomenon, or a very short period of time.

I once knew a professor of history who concentrated almost all the research articles of his multi-decade career on a few key decades of industrial development in early 19th century Montreal.

It’s immensely impressive, but I’m reminded of an image I came across once. You can achieve incredible things in a narrow specialization, but ultimately you have to put it to use. But now you have to wonder if you need more than narrow or broad knowledge to act best.

If you do need that level of knowledge, you’re screwed because that knowledge is practically impossible at the speed of human life. We can build datasets that big, but comprehensively understanding that dataset takes way longer than any time we’d have to act on what it can tell us.

Here’s a place where Hannah Arendt’s discussions of Greek culture turn out to be pretty enlightening for folks living in the nuclear age. You can – with reasonable accuracy for such a big, complicated, chaotic assemblage – describe modern civilization as an attempt to grasp hold of the world by paring it down to the human story.

Raccoons are called human-adapted species because they've done so
well adjusting to life in human urban spaces. They're one of very few
success stories in humanity's industrial age.

Human geography is simple – like a European park, we shape our world into simple structures. Boxes with clear boundaries. Specific lanes segregated for different kinds of vehicles and directions of traffic. We build our cities in grids and circular patterns – simple shapes.

We bulldoze the complex patterns of multifaceted ecologies. To see the chaotic mess of wilderness disgusts many of us – unsanctioned plants are weeds. So we reduce the world to human structures – cities, highways, farms, parks – to simplify this complexity.

Then we’ll at least have a better chance of grasping hold of the world. It won’t be so chaotic, and it will have a pattern of entirely human design. The world won’t change so fast because there won’t be so many ways for it to change. In paving the world, we’ll slow it down enough to grasp it in our knowledge.

When we shape our society to make it last forever, we finally have a world that we can understand. It won’t escape from us.

Arendt finds this idea in the political thinking of Plato and Aristotle. They saw the greatness of humanity in building a world that lasted – a permanent world. It would be a world built by craftsmen, designers. That’s the image of the legislator, the mythical founder-leader who builds a city and a society just as an architect and team of masons builds a temple.

Laws and institutions exist to constrain human behaviour and
channel it in directions where it can be understood. If you
understand it, then you know how to control it without the
chafing violence of constraint.
Can we even achieve that level of constraint in human societies?
Why on Earth would we want to?

The designed order of institutions and laws would make the desperation of human action unnecessary. We wouldn’t need to fight with chaos to catch up with reality itself as it steamrolls us. Durable institutions are reliable, and human institutions are comprehensible.

We associate Plato and Aristotle with how the Greeks thought. They’re often the only Greek thinkers popular culture pays attention to. But they were rebels in their society – while they created concepts at the heart of our culture, they had little direct influence on their own for a long time after their own lives.

Most Greeks were creatures of the polis – the one durable institution in Greek society, built to hold the hurricane force of contingent, improvised action. These were the debates and duels of Greek politics.

The culture as a whole most valued fleeting glory than vain dreams of permanence. Instead of grasping for comprehensive knowledge, they were content to become the brightest light in the chaos for a moment.

Who do you think was most wise?

Save Us II: Only a God, Research Time, 11/12/2015

Continued from last post . . . You know, I remember at the height of the Greek debt crisis in international news, a lot of journalists who thought they were very witty would joke about ancient Greek philosophy. 

Lakewood Church in Houston is the largest church in
the United States, regularly drawing crowds of more
than 40,000 to its weekly sermons. So I'd say that
North America is still a pretty damn Christian place.

But that pagan culture no longer has any direct influence on the Greek character. For about 1600 years, Greece has been a Christian country. Christianity changed the philosophical landscape of Europe categorically, but a lot of ideas and concepts from the pagan world survived and defined the Christian world-view.

When I was reading Leo Strauss talking about these Greek concepts of humanity’s corruption, it reminded me of Christian ideas.

I’m not a Christian myself. But I was raised in the West, Newfoundland in particular, so the Christian religious and philosophical tradition influenced my culture pervasively.

Even though I write and think in my nonfiction work from a perspective that keeps God out of things,* I did draw on Christian imagery about Eden. Edenic thinking describes humanity as inherently corrupt. In environmentalist thinking, this is usually part of a dualistic way of thinking of nature and humanity.

* This isn't the same as an atheist perspective, though in short form, that's how I explain this part of my approach. Basically, since Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity deals with human politics and scientific principles, I see no need to bring God into things. 

There’s the natural on one hand, and the human or technological on the other. Nature is a positive pole in an Edenic thinker: beautiful, harmonious, self-sustaining, godly. Humanity is therefore the negative pole: ugly, destructive, violent, debased spectres of death. 

The version of the story of Eden that I remember best
from my childhood.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity argues against this way of thinking about the world and humanity. Not only because it's untrue. That’s the least interesting part to me. But I argue against it because, even though many environmental activists and philosophers think this way, the idea’s message is that activism is useless.

If humanity really is inherently (that is, essentially, inescapably) corrupt, then the only way that nature will be safe from destruction is when humanity is gone. There's nothing we can do to make ourselves better, or live in less destructive ways. 

Humanity is fallen. No, check that. Man is Fallen. In the very nature of our being, we're corrupt. So aspiration to be better is inherently futile. Strauss paints this notion as the centre of Machiavellian thinking in the modern tradition of political philosophy. 

The Machiavellian idea: the primary goal of politics isn't raising ourselves and our communities to some more noble way of life or set of virtues, but simply keeping us all alive in a hostile, violent world. 

This idea forms the basic core of modern political thinking, in combination with the Hobbesian idea: the only reason communities even come together in the first place is to avoid violence. Any higher goal of justice is impossible.

It’s also that side of ancient Greek political thinking that describes human justice as a diluted form of the divine. Human justice resembles true justice, but is limited in accord with our abilities. Humanity is permanently debased.

Martin Heidegger was remarkable in
expressing so much of conservative
Christian philosophy in the context of
a thoroughly atheist existentialism.

Is there any relief from this hopelessness? Not really. This is why Calvinism is so bleak. It's a form of Christianity that defines humanity's relationship with God through the Eden story: the essence of humanity is a corruption that we have no power to heal on our own.

So the only way out of our corrupt nature is through the grace of God. And we, being inherently corrupt beings, have no way to earn this Grace. We're infinitely distant from it. All we can be is what we are. Grace is an intervention from beyond being. A crack in reality to save us.

I reject this simply because it is so pessimistic. It makes us passive, hopeless, depressed. We dwell only in our corruption, fixated on the permanently abject status of our debased nature. 

If we accept this, we’ll never work toward justice, because we'll consider justice infinitely, categorically, and ontologically separate from human possibility. And I have a very complex, nuanced argument why I can’t accept this.

Because fuck that. To be continued . . . 

Save Us I: Abject and Garbage, Research Time, 10/12/2015

Your political priorities have a lot to do with what you think of human nature. What we’re capable of, and what’s impossible for us to do. 

The message, common in American political discussions
after horrifying gun violence incidents, that the only
defence against a crazy person with a gun is your own,
preferably bigger, gun, has a genuinely interesting
philosophical idea behind it. It's that humanity can
never become mature enough to solve conflicts
without violence, and your only defence from
violence is your own readiness and ability to kill.

G the libertarian once wrote me, “Don’t you believe in human nature?” He implied that human nature was inherently violent, selfish, animalistic, cruel. That’s why governments could never be trusted to ensure people’s welfare or a fair society, because leaders and officials would abuse their power. That’s why people needed to stockpile as many guns as possible, to defend themselves against governments and other groups who’d suppress and destroy them.

Inherent. Think about what that means. Immutable. Essential. Unchanging. Unchangeable. That’s how we’ve historically thought about human nature. No matter what we think that nature is, it is what it is, was, and always will be.

It’s taking humanity a long time to understand that change is possible. Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze. Me. We still need to learn the message.

Different civilizations have had different conceptions of what human nature is. Reading Leo Strauss on human nature is pretty slippery, because Natural Right and History doesn’t quite take an explicit stand on the subject* once he gets into the different epochs of this concept.

* And this is weird. I started reading Strauss thinking he was going to be the centrepiece of modern neoconservatism, but his own writing seems quite detached from the politics of his time. I’ll have to get hold of some of Shadia Drury’s work about Strauss, as she’s the primary source for this argument.

It’s going to take us a while to get through this. But it’ll be interesting. 

So Strauss spends a chapter examining the ancient Greek concept of human nature, and its political implications. His sources are mainly the philosophical writings of Plato and Cicero. 

The short version of this whole argument, exegesis, interpretation, and riff of overlong sentences and dry language goes like this.

Many heroic Greek thinkers have a disturbing tendency
to get themselves killed by the local statesmen.

Ancient Greek culture’s predominant philosophy culminated in Stoicism, of which Cicero was the most famous and politically powerful.** Skepticism was at the heart of this philosophical tradition, but so was political engagement.

** That didn’t stop him from getting killed by the imperial army after falling foul of the rulers. Killing your opponents has a much longer history in politics than peaceful compromise. At least when states are involved.

Because Cicero’s Stoicism began with Socrates. Socrates was the ultimate negative philosopher, whose method – when he was alive – was assaulting people and their beliefs, so that they could be torn down. Socrates believed that real knowledge of political and moral truths would be invulnerable to his dialectical attacks. If they weren’t, well then watch your world burn.

Plato developed this basic idea in a more profound direction that wouldn’t necessarily make enemies of your entire community. In Plato’s hand (or rather his pen), Socrates’ aggressive skepticism became a philosophy of aporias. 

There’s still no answer to the problem of whether you have knowledge of the good, but at the end of any of Plato’s books, you understand the question much better. You remain perplexed about what’s right, but you're not confused anymore because you understand the concepts around the problem. 

Aporetic thinking had a huge resurgence in philosophy during the late 20th century, particularly with Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. But ancient Greek society developed aporetic thinking in the direction of Stoicism. 

I'm coming to the conclusion that this is probably a
better analogue in popular culture to what kind of
person Socrates was than I was ever taught in class.

In this model, so says Strauss, there is a form of perfect and true justice. But this genuine justice is strictly in the domain of the divine. Humans are corrupt and can’t access true justice.

Humans aren’t completely debased, though. Depending on how you interpret the idea, which for the Stoics was an open debate, humanity could achieve a diluted form of divine justice. The concept of human justice as a dilution of the divine was an acknowledgement of our essential corruption. Yes, it’s something like divine justice, but not. The best we can do.

Or perhaps it was a secondary form of justice, different in character from the divine, but related to it insofar as it was justice at all. The secondary form of justice has a purpose, however: uplift. 

Humanity could pursue justice, and in doing so, repair our corrupted nature. The pursuit of justice wasn’t a compromise, but a route to restore our lost divinity. To be continued. . . . 

A Real Spectre III: Find the Truth or Tear It Down, Composing, 10/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . Well, I say Jacques Derrida was a major developer of the technique of meditative writing. But the one who really gave birth to the style was his philosophical forefather, Martin Heidegger. But they used the same technique for two very different purposes, so ended up creating very different works.

Heidegger was probably the most profoundly conservative thinker in the West's entire philosophical tradition. Three different points, summarizing very simply a lot of his very complex ideas, will let me use this label.

1) In the sense of his politics, Heidegger was a cultural conservative and anti-development. He was a well-to-do man who grew up in a small, socially insular, very traditional Catholic town in Germany, Messkirch in southern Bavaria, very close to the Swiss border. He considered this rural religious lifestyle the best for German people.

When I really want to make fun of Heidegger's vision of
true philosophy being mystic prophesy of being, I think
of Terry Jones' character Simon the Holy Man. Really,
the concept is much more disturbing, as Heidegger's
Black Notebooks show: he conceived of philosophy as
an authoritarian practice.

He was, correspondingly, very opposed to technological development and urbanization. These views have been picked up superficially to inspire the environmentalist movement, a terrible philosophical mistake precisely because nothing in Heidegger's thinking is superficial. He simply thought too hard for that.

2) He also thought that the philosophical tradition had been chasing the wrong goal when it started to pursue rationality and argumentation itself for a method. So with Plato, basically. This is another way Heidegger was taken up in environmentalist thinking, which rightly understands the messy, chaotic patterns of spontaneous natural development as a superior path for life than the clean, simple rationality of human grids.

Heidegger pursued this largely in philosophy, which meant that he wanted to return the tradition to its prophetic character. Philosophy, Heidegger says, should be the revelations of a prophet (like Anaximander, Parmenides, or Heraclitus) about the eternal nature of existence itself.

3) Heidegger saw himself as such an existential prophet, revealing these truths for the masses to accept. His meditative style of writing was meant to be a philosophical poetry for the 20th century and beyond, picking up the prophetic character of the pre-Socratics again.

This mission for philosophy was a dead end after Heidegger. I think he would have wanted it this way, as he often meditated on the end of philosophy. But the meditative style of writing could be much more than this dusty authoritarianism.

That's where Derrida was a departure. He picked up the same method of meditative writing, but applied it to progressive thinking. Derrida had a fundamentally different personal character than Heidegger, and that pushed his own writing in different directions.

Contrast their biographies alone. Derrida was a dark-skinned French-Algerian Jew, a minority many times over. Society stably conforming to centuries-old patterns makes someone like him homeless, an outcast, or worse.

Derrida's a tough writer who dealt with many different
problems in his books throughout his career. And I
think a good way to approach his work is to understand
his lifelong position as a person. Even though we're
often introduced to Derrida's writings in university
classes as if he were an authority, throughout his life,
he was a minority, a member of different groups, all
of which faced oppression.

Derrida was a Jew born in 1930, though his wartime home in Vichy-controlled Algeria meant only that he was expelled from the state-run school system. Being in Algeria, Derrida and his family were never targeted by the Holocaust's trains, but he watched the horror from the southern coast.

He was never all that concerned with finding stability, truth, or any kind of eternal ground. So while Heidegger influenced Derrida in his meditative writing style, the younger man had his own priorities. Deconstruction has plenty of problems, but it's an excellent philosophical nuclear bomb, Agent Orange, Death Star. And it's target is always authority, the established consensus, conformity to what's acceptable.

It's a way of interpreting a text that makes internal contradictions bubble up from whatever you apply it to. All of Derrida's most famous works in the late 1960s and early 1970s applied this technique to destabilize a lot of presumptions about the possibility of meaning and the powers of language. But when you blow everything up, you find yourself stuck with a lot of rubble.

So Derrida spent the later decades of his career, from about the 1980s onward, figuring out how to salvage something from the rubble. Ethics in particular. Spectres of Marx is one of these conceptual salvage operations, trying to find a politics of justice. Yet it accepts as a premise that genuine justice is impossible to achieve in the world.

How in hell does that work? To be continued . . . 

More True Than Truth, Research Time, 05/01/2015

I decided at the end of last semester at Sheridan College’s Communications post-grad program, that boning up on some media theory would help build my abilities in my new field. The program is very good at teaching the details and techniques of communications in today’s media environment, but I still see some gaps in exploring the details of why those techniques are effective and probing the limits of their effectiveness. 

So I whipped out a book from my shelf that I had ordered a year or so ago, with a vague feeling that I’d need it eventually: The Laws of Media by Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric (although Eric’s role as a ghostwriter for his father, and the book’s publication well after the elder McLuhan’s death is a sign that its author is mostly Eric). 

How we conceive of the world changes
the world itself.

The book starts with very foundational investigations that explore how our cultural presuppositions about the nature of space and expression condition how we experience and think. The central topic in these sections is exploring the differences between how the ancient Greeks conceived of and experienced the world, and how we do. It’s particularly interesting to me, as someone who’s studied a lot of Western philosophy over the last decade and change. 

In my time working as a philosophy teacher, I developed a lot of gripes about the way philosophy was typically taught in universities. Most of my gripes applied to the introductory levels. These should be the most important courses in an entire program, because it’s the first opportunity to sink your disciplinary hooks into new students and attract majors from among the general crowd. 

But because none of the students were all that practiced in reading, discussing, and writing about philosophy (as you’d expect of an introductory class), the material was often simplified to such a degree that it became either boring, irrelevant, or nonsensical. What especially bugged me was the simple way that intro courses typically handled ancient Greek thought.

It wasn’t that the central questions of philosophy, broadly conceived (What is God? What is the good? What is the nature of being?) are all that different. But there are radical differences in the presuppositions and the approaches that we and the ancient Greeks take to those questions. One that has particular relevance for the philosophical issues inherent to a Communications program is the ancient Greek conception of truth and what it means to speak truth.

The key term is logos. McLuhan describes the full connotations of this word for the ancient Greek mind, and it’s a fascinating concept. Forget its contemporary meaning as the root of our words for logic and the scientific disciplines (the various -ologies). 

Someone who speaks logos is literally speaking being. He isn’t just making a claim that he supposes is true, or makes a claim as part of advocating its truth. He isn’t pronouncing his own authority on what is true. To speak logos is literally to become a conduit that expresses existence itself. Logos is a speech act that makes what you say true. 

We don’t really have a concept for this anymore. The closest analogy I can think of in my fairly immediate reaction is the concept of prophecy in Jewish and Muslim theology. Their central presupposition is that prophecy doesn’t happen anymore, and that it was pretty rare to begin with, there being only a handful of genuine prophets over several thousand years. 

I've met many Analytic philosophers
who dismiss all European philosophy
because they consider Heidegger an
obscurantist. But he really did write in
a purposely obscure way, because he
wanted to restore philosophy to be a
discipline of sages, as it was in
ancient Greece.

But sages were everywhere in ancient Greece, and the ones we remember today, we call the pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus, and many others. We’re often taught their philosophies as if they were advancing arguments and giving reasons, but this doesn’t accurately reflect how they and their society thought of their work.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were the first to conceive of philosophy, the vocation of devotion to wisdom, as making claims, giving reasons for them, and developing techniques to move from one reason to another and ground a reason as such. Martin Heidegger called this the beginning of true philosophy’s decline precisely because it departed from the vocation of sages.

Parmenides writes:
Χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ' ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι, “Chré to legein te noein t’éon emmenai esti gar einai.” It needs must be that what can be spoken of and thought of is. Legein, in its infinitive form logos, is the speech that, in the act of speaking it, must be. 

Philosopher-sages (remember, the original model of philosophy that predates Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the typical Big Three) wrote no arguments, only poems and verses. Their texts were of the same form as epic poetry, performative recitations that expressed the nature of being, which were intended to be memorized in the immediacy of listening itself.

The original model of a philosopher was a prophet of nature.

Your Obsession with Sophists Is Juvenile Sophistry! Research Time, 31/07/2013

After working on post-doc proposals, going back over my fiction work, and a series of happy developments in my personal life, I’m back into research for my utopias project. This means, for the moment, more of Hegel’s Philosophy of History. One idea at the close of his chapter on ancient Greece caught hold of me, which was his account of the Sophists.

These were the people who, in ancient Greek terms, were teachers of rhetoric. If I were to update this into the parlance of our times, I suppose they’d be debate teachers, speaking coaches, or maybe law school teachers. It’s a stretch to put a profession that developed in the cultural industry of ancient Greece in contemporary terms. But basically, a Sophist was someone whose job it was to prepare people to speak in the constituent assemblies of Greek city-states, or speak themselves on behalf of clients. The assemblies operated by debates leading to consensus on practical political decisions, and Sophistry was the art of speaking in ways that could dominate these debates. The nature of the advocated cause was immaterial to the techniques of convincing people to follow it.

As far as Hegel’s concept of world-spirit developing historically goes, the Sophists were the conduit for world-spirit to become conscious of thought’s worldly power. After all, if man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said, then even the weakest version of this idea, that humanity has the potential to investigate and understand everything in the universe, suggests that we have an incredible power. Socrates was progress over this way of thinking, says Hegel, because he used the rhetorical tools of the Sophists — intense and fleet-footed critical argumentation — to seek a universal truth. Sophists themselves were content with being able to convince anyone of anything. This, after all, was the point of their art: being able to convince the city-states’ assemblies to go along with you. This is reason’s power directed toward the relative, when it should be directed toward the universal. 

All’s well for Socrates and Hegel. They’re dead, and so have more important priorities (or the luxury of having no priorities at all!). Yet if I have one beef with this idea so far, it isn’t a particularly deep philosophical one, but a beef as a contemporary philosopher working in a university setting. One of the major pieces of Socratic rhetoric students encounter when they first learn about ancient Greek philosophy is his opposition to Sophistry. He extols the universal over the relative, the enlightenment of truth over manipulation to convince. It’s very inspiring, and it does indeed inspire many students to condemn relativism and Sophistry, seeking instead the universal through pure thought.

If my language got a little pretentious explaining that point of view, then that was some of my rhetoric. See, one of the problems contemporary philosophy faces as an academic discipline is that there are so few women in it. It’s just us and the economists who still have a majority of male majors, graduate students, professors, and significant authorities in all the humanities and social science disciplines. What’s more, philosophy has become very isolated as a discipline, with few professionals in other disciplines interested in philosophical input in their concerns, or even conceiving of common problems in terms similar enough to have a productive conversation. And one of the many reasons why I think this is, is that a noticeably prevalent tendency of young, impressionable students when they first get into philosophy is go full anorak* on it. And many of those never recover.

* Anorak: a geek, usually male, whose obsession with his chosen subject matter often expresses itself in impressive feats of memorization of facts or the ability to manipulate debates, which are often displayed in public to assert dominance in the geek community and establish a twisted moral superiority over those who are inferior in this regard. 

Anoraks tend to create a climate very hostile to women, or indeed anyone who doesn’t find confrontational argument fun. To the degree that the anorak mode of thinking and conversation tends to dominate the culture of academic philosophy, it gives us a lot of problems, because confrontational argument has the practical effect of shutting down productive conversation and quiet careful thinking, in favour of sharp retorts and acidic critique. Insofar as we’re the only academic discipline that teaches its undergraduates to speak this way, philosophy has become largely shunned in most interdisciplinary conversation. It doesn’t help that our grown-up anoraks tend to consider other disciplines unworthy of conversation with philosophers because they do not speak with sufficient ‘rigor.’ Among good philosophers, rigor is precisely rigorousness. Among mediocre to bad philosophers, rigor is simply an excuse for dismissing a conversation partner because they aren’t talking to assert dominance, or they disagree with you and you want them to shut up.

This meme is the creation of a politically conservative
philosophical anorak. A politically liberal philosophical
anorak would call memes like this an example of modern
sophistry. They would both be wrong, because anoraks are
fools.

You can spot a philosophy anorak by seeing how much of Monty Python’s “Philosopher’s Song” they have memorized (hint: all of it), or whether they use the term “Sophist” as an insult. The irony is that most philosophical anoraks speak like stereotypical Sophists: they argue to win, and in winning, they belittle their opponent as the inferior philosopher. In second year, when serious students usually declare their majors, the most enthusiastic ones get involved in the department's student societies. If a high enough percentage of these are anoraks who, because he is the most romanticized hero in the history of philosophy, superficially take after Socrates, then anyone less aggressive in argument than history's greatest gadfly isn't fit to take part. And like a good anorak, if you can't meet their standard, you don't deserve to be here.

This is what upsets me about the contemporary use of the word Sophist: there isn’t one. The centuries-old rhetoric about the nature of philosophy is based on this confrontation between Socrates and Sophistry, the universal and relativism. So an anorak tends to believe that philosophical problems are universal, relevant to all times and places, and unaffected by change. But that’s simply not true. The priorities of philosophy have always been focussed on the problems of the time. Indeed, one of the positive aspects of Hegel’s account of ancient Greek thought in Philosophy of History is that he explains the Socrates-Sophistry conflict as a function of the political and social upheaval of the Greek peninsula at that historical epoch. It was a deeply unstable period for their society, their customary moralities under threat from foreign wars. The time cried out for someone to shore up their morals by grounding them in the universal instead of their contingent historical tradition. Or so Socrates may have thought. The ideas of the Socrates-Sophistry conflict can only apply indirectly to my modern world because those ideas were generated in an ancient world. And my world is incredibly different from the world of Socrates. This isn’t the cheap relativism that an anorak would accuse me of; I simply admit that different problems require different thinking to solve them.

Say a young person discovers philosophy and becomes an anorak about it, obsessing over cheap facts; technical terminology; talking to me about Kant’s theory of apperception when I’m 20 years old, at a house party, it’s 3.00am, and I’ve already had two bottles of wine; and going to war against ‘modern Sophistry’ in the name of ‘the universal.’ He isn’t doing anyone any favours, especially not himself. Philosophical progress doesn’t come from approaching closer to the final answers to the eternal questions of life, the universe, and everything. It comes from profound engagement with the contemporary world to figure out what life, the universe, and everything all means now.

We Escape Nature at Our Own Peril Because Nature Is Our Home, Research Time, 22/07/2013

Philosophy as a discipline has always existed in the shadow of Greece. No matter how hard some of us (not many) have tried to make a new start, or at least to leave this shadow in the past, the ancient Greek heritage is inescapable.

A contemporary interpretation
of the Greek god Hermes.

I consider myself a rarity that I don’t think ancient Greece is all that. Yes, it was remarkable. But contemporary humanity is so far from the cultural, historical, and physical problems that faced Periclean Greece that the well of inspiration is simply dry. Philosophy is the only discipline left in the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences that still embraces a significant portion of its Greek heritage. I know people who legitimately believe that the works of Aristotle contain all the important answers about the nature of the universe. Yes, the Aristotle of the geocentric cosmology, teleological biology, and separating the world into those suited to be citizens and those suited to be slaves. Aristotle. You aren’t about to find an Aristotelian physicist employed at a research university.

I say this because I’ve started the chapter of Hegel’s Philosophy of History where he explores the Greek national spirit from the period of the city-states through its subsumption in the Roman Empire. And once again, Hegel is fascinating and unnerving. Greek culture, he says, was the first movement of humanity beyond nature. Indeed, Greek national spirit no longer conceives of humanity as natural, but as a blend of the material and the divine. And this divinity of humanity is separate from nature.

Hegel takes this as a sign of progress, and perhaps it was. However, progress is defined not by where you will eventually go, but from where you have just been. Progress is a matter of improving yourself in the present from an inferior state in the recent past. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of modern humanism, on the Hegelian picture. I find that a sensible thesis, and an illuminating idea. 

Yet today, humanity faces a problem whose conditions were constituted by this Greek revolution in our civilization’s self-conception. It’s the global ecological crisis, about which I’ve written my other major philosophical project. The conception of humanity as separate from nature, or on some accounts and interpretations as having overcome nature, is a formidable problem for the contemporary world. If the Greeks progressed by stepping away from nature, then humanity (or if I want to be specific about location, the Terrans) has to develop a self-conception by which we are embedded in nature again. Perhaps it would be good to keep some of the divinity Hegel describes in the Greek self-concept (though I’m not fully sure yet what all the details of this divinity concept includes). But if the civilization that descended from ancient Greece carried the humanist concept of our species as beyond nature, then the civilization that descends from twenty-first century Earth must reforge our conception of humanity as natural. Progress may first have been in humanism. But progress now is in ecology.