Creative Energy I: The Problem With Philosophy, A History Boy, 06/12/2017

I’m getting back on my wander through What Is Philosophy? with a few of his difficult ideas. Gilles Deleuze’s approach to philosophical thinking showed me what I thought was the best way to deal with the whole tradition.*

Like looking for pictures in the clouds. I can see a pattern of light
that suggests Deleuze's face, as water flows over two rocks at the
centre of the frame, by the bottom edge.

* Traditions. Only one thing bugs me about Deleuze, that he makes philosophy itself a Western creation. Western philosophy is one tradition of a general feature of human society that develops anything you could call a tradition of wisdom. Creating frameworks for understanding the world is much more fundamental to human thought than this one contingent Hellenic vector.
• • •
I felt like I had to get that note out of the way. It was bugging me all the way through reading this book. That was the biggest difference between when I first read What Is Philosophy? and when I read it again this Fall. 

A man develops a way of thinking about philosophy that makes it central to some peculiar essence in humanity itself – the wisdom that separates us from the animals. That makes us an order above the other animals.

One man, steeped in the left-wing politics and intellectual environment of a country coming to grips with the loss of its empire – the spectre of radical equality. He’s also a keen mathematician, a careful student of sciences that depend on calculus – he understood intimately how fundamental dynamic differentials were to reality. 

A pure materialist who understood how profoundly stupid that metaphor of the clockwork mechanism really was. One of the very few. So he roots humanity’s remarkable nature in our ability to develop frameworks of thinking self-consciously – we can build intellectual machines to change our instincts. That’s the power of philosophy!

One man, steeped in profound ethnic national
culture, with deep feelings of connection to land
and soil, as if it were in his blood, understands
his chosen field of thought, philosophy, in the
same way – mystic wisdom of a people who
speak with the voice of being itself, revealing
its nature through the prophecies of a sage. A
sage we now call philosophers. This, he
thought, it what makes us an order above the
animals.
Deleuze's dark and terrifying mirror.

Yet it begins in Hellenic Greece. Like we wouldn’t have been doing that for the hundreds of thousands of years it took us to diverge from all the other hominids. 
• • •
There’s such a strange paradox that I see in philosophy. Maybe it’s just from my own experience, which is unlike anyone else’s. Maybe my experience is more typical. I’d like to know whether I’m on to something when I say this.

Side A. Here’s my experience of philosophy as it tends to be taught. You analyze texts to understand their arguments, you critique that argument using the different rules of reasoning. Has Descartes made a good argument that we cannot trust our senses?

Side B. The key works in the history of any tradition in philosophy are not always all that concerned with point by point rebuttals back and forth. But it’s very tough to get to the intensity of thought where you’ve built such a profound conceptual mechanism that you influence the character of your whole culture’s thought for centuries after.

Too many higher education programs teach philosophy as if it were training in argumentation. Now, that’s important, but it shouldn’t be taught as the primary skill, as the essence of the discipline.

The problem is that when you hear the professionals talking philosophy – the professors, grad students, nerdy upper-levels – they’re all arguing. It’s professional, it’s clinical, it’s sometimes a little too cold, it’s expert, it’s insightful. But it’s all the back and forth of argument, critique, counter-argument.

We’re not doing what the people we talk about did. Next couple of posts this week, I want to work out some ideas about what we should do to fix that.

Our Greatest Dignity Lies in Weird Humanity, Jamming, 12/09/2017

What I admire most about Hannah Arendt is her fearlessness. There’s an intellectual daring running under so much of her work that’s remarkable in the philosophical tradition. She had a force of spirit to stand at the same levels of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

She does. Read her work and take it seriously as philosophical creation – not as an instance of any other field, not as political history, feminism, the theory of human rights. Michel Foucault’s skills included the same versatility across disciplines as she did. But Michel is called a proper philosopher a lot more easily than Hannah.

There's a tension in our relationship to numbers. We resist being called
by number. "I am not a number! I'm a free man!" We think of it as a
means to destroy our humanity, maybe when we see numbers tattooed
on forearms. Yet each number is a uniqueness, as each of us are.
Here's the solution to that problem: 2 can't become 3.

Funny, that.

Arendt’s philosophical talent operates most freely in The Human Condition. I’m going to spend the next little while working through the book again for the first time in about ten years.

Reading the introduction of the latest edition, scholar Margaret Canovan discusses how many people consider this book impossible to categorize. Its subject matter ranges over so much of human concern, you could call it an investigation of universal thoughts.

To me, I read it and it’s clearly a work of philosophy. Yet a scholarly plurality (the best scholars’ consensus can ever get) maintains that The Human Condition is somehow frustrating, difficult to pin down, unexpectedly difficult. From the ordinarily popular and accessible Arendt. Yes, Hannah.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Creativity is the essential power of humanity, Arendt says. We are creatures whose greatest power is our ability to create. So the greatest human freedom is always the freedom to create, to be unique.

As I think about it, to become singular – to live a life whose character diverges more and more from the ordinary of society. The unique as a path in phase space, a continuing development that gets continually deeper into weirdness.

Becoming weird is the best use of our freedom. It’s the freedom to create the new, a different direction by choice and plan. There are few more weird things to create than an entirely new concept, a new framework of thinking itself. Philosophical creativity creates launchpads for new paths of becoming weird.

In The Human Condition, Arendt got weirder than I think she ever did in any of her other books. Her writing was at its most free.

As much as Bertrand Russell himself lived a full, worldly life,
especially in his political activism, I can't turn down this image. He
embodies the destructive stereotype of philosophy as the armchair
intellectual, if only as an icon, a figure.

It’s a wonderful rebuke to academic orthodoxy. It’s not a rebuke to Martin Heidegger, her former older professor lover. For one thing that’s a really insulting way of reducing her original thought to the mere expression of jealousy.

Funny, isn’t it? How a woman gets her work reduced to an expression of obsession with a man.

Her personal feelings about Martin were much more complicated than even the most complex philosophy. Besides, she was a powerful enough thinker that any attempt to reduce her ideas to anything less than their own scale is laughable.

Try to tell me that Arendt was a mere reactive woman after actually reading her work and letting it stimulate your own thinking. I’ll tell you that you must be an illiterate.

Heidegger becomes, at most, a distant symbol in her work. He indicates everything that can go wrong in a thinker thanks to his masculine, dominating, self-certain ego. In his nature as a figure in Arendt’s thinking, he becomes just the most intense expression of a philosophical and scholarly ego that was bloody everywhere.

That’s at the centre of her confrontation with the philosopher’s focus on contemplation, retreat from the world and society inside the mind to search for truth. Forget politics and science, says the philosopher, I can find the truth of God in my office armchair.

Thought mutates into stir-craziness when it turned inside itself. Real creativity comes from thinking in the complex mess of worldly life.

The Abject Humanism of It All II: The Problem With People, Composing, 20/07/2017

You want to know my problem with humanity? The poverty of our vision is the foundation of the poverty of people. Human vision is poor when, in this context, it collapses into a humanism.

Now, you can’t write in a philosophical context that you’re critiquing humanism without someone in the audience mentioning Martin Heidegger.* His “Letter on Humanism,” the most famous text where he engages with this concept. He spent virtually his entire career critiquing humanistic ways of thinking, in different words at different times.

* Usually an academic specializing in writing commentary on Martin Heidegger.

But Heidegger’s thinking can’t go far enough in the critique of humanism. His quietism, piety, and fatalism get in the way of understanding the most profound aspects of what humanistic thinking does in the world.

We consume our whole world as if it were a fancy meal in a restaurant.
This is humanity at its most pathetic – turning the cosmological into
a petty pleasure. Image by Brittany Jackson.

Consider this post a stab at my own critique of humanism. It’ll likely be translated into my full manuscript for Utopias eventually.

Humanism is, quite literally, understanding all experience as ultimately related to human ends. It universalizes human ends to all things.

That’s part of what Heidegger has to say. But his concerns are to restore a proper relationship between humanity and being in a sense very disconnected from the problems of suffering and destruction. Destruction – social and ecological – is for Heidegger a symptom of a greater ontological failure.

For me, the priorities are reversed – Actually no, not reversed. Merged. The Heideggerian way of thinking merges questions of being with social and ecological questions. But it subsumes the social and ecological into questions of being, because for him being is the paramount question of philosophy.

For me, screw that. If I could give my philosophical perspective a label – at least for today – I’d call it a pragmatist anti-humanism. We destroy our societies and our ecologies with self-absorbed humanist ideas that our chauvinist priorities are the only ones that matter for human action.

You want an example? Okay, go back to Friedman’s words about national parks. You can think of many reasons to create national parks and wilderness reserves.

As far as I’m concerned, the best reason to conserve significant tracts of wilderness is to keep complex ecosystems functioning. There’s a humanistic angle to this, because humans need complex ecosystems to maintain all the processes that keep us alive – atmospheric balances, dealing with air pollution, cleaning water, preventing erosion of our land, preserving the processes that keep our soil arable and our food growing.

But there’s also the priority of wanting more complex ecosystems because ecological complexity builds a robust biosphere. The complexity of our ecologies are literally what keeps the Earth alive. Earth is a body that literally dwarfs humanity, no matter how powerful we’ve become.

We’re one recently-evolved, self-destructive species on a remarkable planet 4.5 billion years old. Earth is a body with far greater dignity and majesty than humanity. Humanity are pests compared to the Earth. And we tend to be pests on the Earth as well.

Take seriously the material existence of cosmological majesty. Humans are petty, small creatures. We can do amazing things, and we have a lot of potential. Our science-fiction can be the vehicle of our ambitions to achieve our greatest potential. But we won’t achieve that potential until we understand our pettiness and purge ourselves of it.

Pettiness like Milton Friedman writing that the purpose of national parks and nature reserves is to provide good customer service to campers and hikers.

Hopeless Helpless II: To Mystify, Composing, 22/04/2016

Continued from last post . . . Here’s what my next big book of philosophy, Utopias, will be: a multidimensional exploration of the power of people to revolutionize our societies, developing whole new ways to be human. 

Here’s what it will also be: a refutation of some of the most remarkable arguments that such revolutionary change is impossible, that humanity has no power to change its nature. 

A message in popular culture that resonates with my
political thinking in Utopias: "Never give up; Never
give in."

Utopia is, in simple terms, an embrace of action – no matter whether it’s physical and social or purely imaginary and communicative – to drive and encourage social transformation. So the enemy of utopia – humanity’s idealistic striving – is not any other contrary vision of progress, but passivity. Will you continue to strive? Or will you give up?

One of the biggest challenges of political activity is actually getting people to wake up and care about the crises happening all around them. Getting people excited about the correct stuff is hard enough – there are plenty of times in history when people have mistaken their enslavement for freedom. And it’s a tough time convincing them otherwise.

And there are so many ways to keep someone from acting in their best interests. Hell, so many ways to keep a person from wanting to do anything to rock their own boats. 

One way to do that is to confuse people with profound language and ideas – meditations that end up breaking down all your own powers. All your abilities to act. Martin Heidegger and his philosophy is one of these vortexes of action.

I’ve always seen this weird tendency in a lot of Heidegger scholars I met back in my academy days. The ideas of Heidegger consumed them, and they related every philosophical discussion they could back to Heidegger. If they couldn’t find an angle to relate a conversation to Heidegger’s work, they walked away. It was a peculiarly awful self-absorption. 

The academic culture surrounding him had a similar gravity. I comment, during one of my brief discussions of his work in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity that you can’t refer to Heidegger without the entire discussion starting to revolve around Heidegger. 

Expertise is a stern taskmaster.

It goes beyond the usual command of the commentary that academic culture demands you have before you’re allowed to say anything legitimately like a critique. It’s the ability to ward off any counter-argument that begins anything like, “Ah, but have you read Russon’s article on the concept of verfallenheit?”

So what’s going on when Negri brings up Heidegger? Negri’s critique is that Heidegger offers a moment of mystifying the real power of the poor to make real change in the world. As Vienna falls to Allied troops and the Soviets are about to march on Berlin, the enthusiastic Nazi Martin Heidegger delivers a lecture on poverty.

His goal is to deliver, in the face of his movement’s inevitable defeat, a lecture on poverty. Its outcome – the poor are powerless, and their apparent power in such political movements as communist states and political parties is a self-delusion. 

The poor, says Heidegger, already possess a wealth greater than the superficial riches that communist ideology promises them. In their poverty, they’re closer to the spiritual truth of being, less distracted by the stresses and worries of wealth. The suffering of poverty and destitution is not something to be cured. It’s a path to spiritual fulfillment. 

His conclusion comes from analyzing a line from Friedrich Hölderlin, the German poet at the centre of Heidegger’s own philosophical vision. 

“With us, everything is concentrated on the spiritual; we have become poor to become rich.”

Unpacking this single line for a whole lecture, he concludes that being poor means you have spiritual richness – you live in the proper essence of being itself. You don’t have anything but absolute necessities, and any of those non-necessary things would only distract you from what make you truly rich.

The roots that Hölderlin experiences today are mostly
plants. Ba-tum-tish!

And that is knowing your proper place in the world and living it. 

Heidegger’s analysis itself is composed of long, profound meditations on a few specifically selected words of classic poetry, and includes a discourse on the ancient meanings being his (dodgy) etymology of old German words – in this case, the roots of frei, freedom, in an idea of preservation, guarding its essence. 

Heidegger confuses you by leading you to believe that a stern piece of dogma – “Don’t you get any ideas above your station, young lady!” – has a profound philosophical essence. That it’s rooted in the fundamental essence of human thought when it’s closest to being, and in the ancient roots of the most philosophical languages. 

Don't let your desire for the profound and deeply meaningful deny you your natural power. 

Doom Prophets III: A West in Crisis, A History Boy, 22/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . In his brief list of the prophets of modernity’s self-destruction, Antonio Negri includes Martin Heidegger. The reason is quite obvious, and there are several. 

One of those is that Heidegger was probably the most profound theorist of nationalism. Or rather, he was the most profound nationalist philosopher in the Western tradition. 

Now, I haven't read his Black Notebooks yet. I don’t know when I will, or even if I’ll ever bother. I never wanted to become a Heidegger scholar – I feel almost sick when I surround myself with his ideas for long enough. 

His thinking carries a constant weight of angst, loneliness, and surrender to fate. He makes you carry the same. 

The Black Forest in Germany, home of the German soul.

So, no, I never wanted to become a Heidegger scholar – I had other priorities as a thinker and writer than burying myself in his shrines. But the Black Notebooks would seem to be the most blatant statements of Heidegger’s nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, the other works like his Introduction to Metaphysics from the same period – when Hitler ruled Germany – express similar ideas with a terrible profundity.

They're part of how he engages with the end of modernity, the end of the West’s cultural certainty in itself and its military conquest of Europe and the world. Heidegger saw the catastrophe of the First World War as the highest intensity yet of a trend that began in ancient Greece and dominated the entire Western mind-set since Plato.

Technology, the technological approach to the world. Philosophically, ethically, speaking – the technological approach looks at the world primarily as a resource. It’s something to be used for our own ends. 

Instead of letting the world be and living within it, we chew up the world in the violence of consumption and turn it into fuel, into resources for projects that express our own hubris. 

Martin Heidegger where he felt most authentic.

Part of what Heidegger wanted to do with his philosophy was to push humanity back toward this approach to life of letting-be. This is why he’s had such a following among environmentalists, because of his hostility to the idea that the world is our resource.

But Heidegger also had some very terrifying ideas about how people thought in an everyday sense. An individual couldn’t achieve this enlightened letting-be attitude on his own. Only a culture, a people, could achieve it. 

People had to be conditioned into encountering the world this way from infancy onward. By the time we were adults, age had calcified us too much to genuinely change the mode of our whole existence. Only a whole people could produce an ethic.

This is where the racist terror of Heidegger’s philosophy unfolds. Only a scant few cultures were capable of pushing against the world-as-resource technological mind-set. Those cultures not only had to have a language whose concepts depicted being most authentically. 

They also had to be connected to a land that pushed back against their efforts, but in such a way that they still felt at home, that their land was a happy place where they could thrive. German people had the right language, and the right environment in the Black Forest. 

A culture’s connection to its land had to be suitably profound, deep and continuous enough that it could only be the product of centuries of environmental acculturation. The culture literally grew around the land, and in constant feedback with it. 

Cultures who didn’t have these deep connections couldn’t fully actualize themselves as humans. Cultures who had been forced into nomadism for centuries became so disconnected from the divine presence of its land that they weren’t even complete humans. They weren’t even complete humans.

Edmund Husserl, philosophical inventor.

You know. Like the Jews in Europe. 

And now it becomes absolutely terrifying. 

Phenomenology, the philosophical discipline of thought whose goal was to experience and describe the world and its objects in the purest terms, was Heidegger’s method to connect with being as it was in the immediate sphere of his life. Its methods let him focus on the ideas and actions he wanted to explore. 

And that’s where the philosopher I added to the list comes from Edmund Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, and Heidegger’s mentor. Husserl was also Jewish, blacklisted by the German state generally and Heidegger specifically in the last years of his life.

All Husserl’s books in his phenomenology period were subtitled introductions to phenomenology. He kept trying to perfect the method, always taking different routes and contexts to explain it. The last attempt was cultural in The Crisis of the European Sciences, written in 1936.

In that book, Husserl took the phenomenological method from the tool of an individual thinker to the tool of a culture to understand its own place in the world and history. With that method, he developed the concept of the life-world.

Life-world is what we really experience in cultural existence – the constantly fluctuating web of interacting individuals, all building each other’s personalities. He opposed this vision to the theoretical attitude toward the world, where the environment only mattered as far as you could quantify, measure, and control it. 

That theoretical attitude had long been the dominant way Western thinkers engaged with the world. It was a mistake because it made our world feel dead, or never alive to begin with. Still, having to leave this theoretical attitude behind, knowing that it was growing bankrupt, left the West in crisis. What would replace it?

Husserl didn’t know. Heidegger hoped for a return to an older way of existence, that you could resurrect it with enough effort and luck. Even if at the end of the day, only a god could save us. 

The real answer is tougher. You’d have to create it. . . . To be Continued

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 . . . 

A Science of Humanity III: Only the Eternal, Research Time, 27/10/2015

When I was a grad student, I'd meet people who thought
philosophers came up with trippy, strange ideas. That
we were essentially professionalized hippies who
could explore the astral plane in thought. They were
always a little disappointed when I'd tell them how
sober, technical, and reserved most writing in
academic philosophy was.

Continued from last post . . . What is truth? It’s a question that can only be taken seriously when you mock it. “What is truth, man?” he said between puffs on his joint. Ask this question in a serious tone and you don’t sound like a reasonable person. You sound like a pretentious philosophy student.

I say student because, as I worked my way through the academy of university philosophy, you never heard the experienced, long-tenured profs speak this way. Their questions were always about Thinker X’s conception of truth, or comparing different isms about the nature of truth. It was good scholarship, but not innovative philosophy.

The students were no better. I’m counting myself among them, the kids who asked profound questions that they didn’t even know how to think about. After ten years of studying the tradition and writing books and articles that contribute to this tradition, I’ve still only just figured out how to ask the question thoughtfully.

You’ve got to know your way around that question – What is truth? – if you want to understand the most profound way Strauss got his hate on for sociology. Same with the rest of modern conservatism. 

Theirs is a very old-fashioned concept of truth that roots the true in the eternal. If a principle is true, it must be true eternally. Or else it’s meaningless.

The question gets appropriately profound when Leo Strauss asks about the truth of political principles – questions of natural human rights. The first major chapter of his Natural Right and History confronts historicism about political rights. 

His description of historicism: Because different cultures and eras hold different political principles, there’s no true natural right aside from these contingent shared beliefs. No universal standard of human rights. 

“There cannot be natural rights if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable.”

Strauss doesn’t say their names, but it’s clear to someone who knows their ideas that when he’s talking about the endgame of historicism, he’s talking about existentialism.

If Martin Heidegger is one of your
philosophical enemies, then you have
good taste in villains.

Mostly Heidegger, because of the brutal results of having your existence entirely determined by a fate beyond your control. You can’t control where and when you pop into being. So you can’t control what culture you’ll have. 

If you can’t control what culture you’ll have, then you can’t control what rights and principles will be universal truths to you. There were only two possible reactions to realizing this fact of your existence.

1) Embrace your contingent, happenstance existence for all it’s worth and dive in to whatever set of ideas drives your culture in your era.

2) Fight against the happenstance nature of your life, and live in angst trying to find space for genuine, meaningful choice. Individually, maybe through trying to live your life on your own terms. As a group or a society, building networks and friendships that resist mainstream trends. 

Strauss mostly talks about option one. Martin Heidegger was his most profound opponent, philosophically. I’m not sure how much Jean-Paul Sartre, who gets the most credit for option two, figured on his radar.

Embracing your contingent fate means that you entirely give in to whatever beliefs about rights and justice your culture finds intuitive. You don’t believe in a standard of justice that transcends what a given culture finds instinctual at a given time. 

If you believe in a universal standard of justice at all, it’s because you’ve uncritically accepted your culture’s intuitive beliefs. If you’re lucky, as Heidegger believed himself to be, you’re born in a culture whose intuitive philosophical orientations let him conceive of the contingent nature of human fate at all. 

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to conceive of the emptiness of universal concepts of justice. Strauss won’t stand for this. He won’t give up on the philosophical tradition’s quest to discover universal standards of justice. 

It's not to Strauss' credit that he seems to ignore Jean-Paul
Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. Their existentialism
foregrounded human freedom and political action,
whether for his anti-capitalist social justice vision, or
her critical feminist priorities.

Existentialist philosophy is, for Strauss, only the most extreme and clear form of the historicist beliefs that dominated philosophy after Hegel and the social sciences that developed in the second half of the 19th century. The historicist frameworks of social sciences make them a factor that will inevitably obscure the search for universal justice.

But you don’t have to get stuck in the Strauss-Heidegger impasse. Believe in transcendent eternal truths of morality, justice, and politics. Believe in the historical contingency of all human existence, thought, and ideals. With all their problems. 

Or choose another way.

I think about the truths of justice ecologically instead of humanistically. We don’t need a set of rights that applies eternally, because no set of human rights claims will make sense in a world without humans. 

Human cultures have a lot of variant principles, and figuring out which principles of justice we should hold is a matter of figuring out which principles and demands for justice define our time. 

Underneath all that variation are some invariant truths about the human need to be happy, sheltered, joyful, and loved. In all the variety of human culture, we should strive to achieve that one common ground.

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 . . . 

Not Quite the Essence of Totalitarianism II: Death Drives, Research Time, 10/03/2015

Continued from last post . . . Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom has some interesting comments about the role of ideology in totalitarian regimes. They’re utterly mistaken about the nature of ideology itself, but it’s nonetheless interesting. I think this is why doctrinaire libertarians* continually parrot the common Tea Party message that Barack Obama’s policies put the United States on a track to a Hitlerian or Stalinist state.

* Such as the former friends of mine who have supplied, for better and worse, my primary examples of doctrinaire popular libertarianism. I’ve been exploring libertarian political forums lately to discover how representative they were, and that’s certainly been confirmed. There are many nuanced people on libertarian forums, but quite a number of people who parrot empty messages like “Government Regulation Bad! Private Control Good!”

Actual socialists find it hard to understand what precisely
is so socialist about Obama's policies.

I always found the idea that Obama was a Nazi (at best a Nazi who didn’t know it) unsettling, kind of racist, and a completely weird thing to say. But finally reading Hayek has shown me the rational and quite profound (if terribly mistaken) argument that lies behind this insane-sounding rhetoric. 

Hayek directs the philosophical critique of The Road to Serfdom at the bureaucratic institutions of the state, particularly the totalitarian state. He begins the book with a scathing criticism of mainstream ideas in political life of Europe, even in proudly democratic countries, that a complex technological economy could only function properly under the directed management of a bureaucracy whose power covered all activities and territory of the nation.

The politics of the time when he was composing The Road to Serfdom was the violent confrontation of democratic countries and authoritarian regimes. Hayek saw the spectre of tyranny in the politics of economic nationalization and state industrial planning. This was a political program whose goal was the elimination of all restraints on the government’s bureaucratic power over people’s lives. This is a feature of totalitarian politics.

But it isn’t the only facet, because totalitarianism includes an element of racism that Hayek thinks is insignificant. He devotes a long chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the role of ideology in totalitarian governments. And he’s unique among the philosophers I’ve read so far in that he doesn’t think it’s very important. 

Understanding disciplinary modes of governance
and population control is why libertarians and the
modern liberal right wing should read Michel
Foucault and take him seriously.

Hayek analyzes how people with the personalities of brutish thugs are drawn to positions of power in regimes that bureaucratically manage nationalized industries. It requires disciplining an entire population to follow the orders of a hierarchical authority, the government. The population of the whole country must follow orders without question, and people who are accustomed to giving and following orders without question are best suited to this.

Such thuggish people aren’t typically very intelligent people. Once they’re in positions of power, says Hayek, they would act through their petty motivations. But as the dictators of a nation, they have to justify their actions as grounded in a philosophically nuanced set of moral and political concepts. 

So they commit some violent act against their country’s population or a segment of it, and create a post hoc justification by appeal to the common prejudices that thuggish brutes understand well. Add a bunch of these cobbled together justifications of empty brutality together, and you have the ideology of a totalitarian regime.

I don’t know for sure why Hayek was blind to what was obvious to Arendt. Arendt was a Jew who lived in Germany itself as the Nazi movement grew in that culture. She saw friends, acquaintances, and even her lover Martin Heidegger fall into the most virulent anti-Semitism. 

Heidegger, one of Arendt’s most intimate friends throughout her life, developed a profound and difficult philosophy that venerated German volk as having the potential for near divinity, and Jewish existence as irredeemably inadequate to being, capable only of “empty rationality and calculability,” as he wrote in his Black Notebooks. 

Heidegger demonstrated the immense power of
philosophy by articulating ideas that, most of the time,
are the most brutal and stupid racisms as profound ideas
that enrapture thousands of readers.

Arendt saw the power of philosophy to make what at a cursory glance appears to be a crude racism into a profound conception of existence itself. Such power, to make the thoughts of one person mythic and mystic, is philosophy. Heidegger’s was a philosophy for a totalitarian time, one that wrote racism into the fabric of being itself.

Philosophy is irreducible to biography, of course, for the same reason that it’s irreducible to historical context alone. But your life experience shapes how you see the world, what you notice more easily than other things. 

Hayek was the cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but was himself Austrian nobility. He moved to Britain to work at the London School of Economics in 1931. He still had family and friends in Austria, but his daily life was in Britain, where he watched the rise of Hitler from afar. With his eye only on the relation of state institutions to individual people, he couldn’t see how the ideas themselves gave life to the Nazi movement, the most horrifying death drive in human history.

Arendt saw totalitarianism as a social movement that permeated every interaction of individuals. It was not a matter of state bureaucracy having such a power, but the power of the death drive itself percolating from every human interaction and institution. Nazi ideology was a movement to destroy individuality in the collective movement of the volk, and to purify the volk through destroying all that was different.

Hayek saw profundity as the empty justifications of petty idiocy, dull wits like Hitler and Göring justifying their brutishness and prejudice. Arendt saw profundity as the power of an idea to make people its puppets in a process that overcame the will of any individual. Totalitarianism was the formation of the mass man, the nation as a unity expressed in the will of the Leader driving Germany (Germanity?) to suicide, extermination. To be continued . . .

The Masochistic Pleasure of Mourning a Tradition, Composing, 17/12/2014

Martin Heidegger appears a couple of times in my Ecophilosophy manuscript, and I edited the last half of chapter two today, which revolves around how he influenced environmental moral philosophy. Of course, Heidegger influenced one entire side of the disciplinary parallelism of the last century of philosophy.

He demands your absolute attention and obedience. No
wonder I don't like Heidegger.

His work has an unfortunate gravity to it. I remark when I first discuss him in chapter two that it is a difficult task to bring Heidegger into any philosophical discussion without it soon becoming all about Heidegger. Nietzsche wrote disparagingly of the spirit of gravity that appears in too much Western thinking of his own time (and later times as well), a powerful despair that brings forces and currents from far away spiralling down into its whole. Heidegger embodies such a spirit of gravity, possibly the greatest in the Western tradition.*

* I’d venture that Jacques Derrida offers a similar gravity, thanks to the density of his language and the hypnotic power of the cyclical aporias out of which he builds he arguments. But Derrida found his most powerful gravity when he was channelling Heidegger’s themes, carrying on a detailed post-mortem after his predecessor’s diagnosis of philosophy’s death.

Heidegger’s influence in environmental philosophy is amorphous. He’s often talked about by writers and activists informally, but never a figure of analysis. No one declares themselves a Heideggerian in the typically very left-wing communities of environmental philosophy and political activism (I wonder why?). But the basic idea in his critique of technology is profoundly insightful, even if its surrounding conceptual framework can be utterly hateful and contemptuous of human variety in a profoundly terrible sense.

The roots of technology go back a long way in Western culture, according to Heidegger. He thinks they only go back to Plato, thanks to his veneration of the pre-Socratic sage philosophers. I actually think the key attitude finds its origin in the early days of hominid species, maybe even in the imperatives of the most vestigial forms of self-consciousness. It is to see the world as a resource: all your thinking is ultimately oriented to working out different ways to use the world. Heidegger, and the more contemplative of environmentalist philosophers and activists, just want you to see it.

This insight led to Heidegger’s uptake by environmentalist philosophers. But it can only go so far. Environmental philosophy’s origin as a self-conscious sub-discipline lies in activism, and Heidegger’s thought includes a pervasive quietism. The actions of people cannot save humanity. “Only a god can save us.” Only the movements of nature itself, and a people’s readiness and capacity to be moved in the correct way by nature, can drive genuine change. 

For a writer who uses martial metaphors as much as Heidegger when discussing the practice of philosophy, the man’s work provokes a feeling of powerlessness. Here was a man who saw the entire history of the discipline and tradition of writing and thought, Western philosophy, as having been in decline almost from its very beginning, the downfall having begun with Plato and Socrates. Heidegger’s own era, in his view, was the aftermath of the final crash in the work of Nietzsche.** Just as the language and life of the Greek culture in the era of Anaximander revealed being itself in a moment when people could be perfect conduits of nature, so were the language and life of the German culture in the era of Heidegger ready for a new beginning.

** Another reason to despise Heidegger as much as he surely would have despised you: he treats Nietzsche as a crashing end, rather than the glorious new beginning that so much of his thought was. 

Instead, there was the crash of the Nazi era, and the growth of environmental catastrophe. Since Heidegger held such stringent beliefs about the impossibility of most peoples in most eras to think being, when the critical moment passes, there is no chance of salvation anymore. He spent his career chasing false gods, mourning lost opportunities, and pining for a future deliverance beyond any of our controls.

I think he enjoyed despair.

Reading Obscure Jaspers III: The Saving Power of Reason, Research Time, 03/10/2014

Continued from last post . . . Karl Jaspers sometimes sounds like a twisted, atheistic version of Immanuel Kant in some parts of The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man. Of course, if Kant himself were to grapple with the ethics of nuclear warfare, he wouldn’t sound anything like what we read of him now. The whole concept of the sublime, for one, would be turned upside down and inside out once he realized that humans had the power to level casually an entire city in a moment.

Where he sounds like Kant is in his discussion of reason. Jaspers distinguishes two kinds of thought that are often referred to with the word ‘reason.’ One of these is the usual technocratic mode of thinking: knowledge is specifically segregated into specialities, disciplines, in which there is a continuum of amateurishness and expertise. This is the knowledge of goal-setting, of work and achievement, specific tasks and focussed knowledge procedures to carry out those tasks. We are setting out to act in the world such that we change it.

He was an expert warrior with a job to do, and at least
he had fun doing it.

This, says Jaspers, is precisely the problem when reason — its technocratic version, at least — operates in the age of the nuclear arsenal. Simply setting particular goals and developing the expertise to achieve them, what he calls the reason of cognition, is no longer adequate to the challenges we face when we’re capable of destroying the world. The solution lies in what Jaspers calls the reason of freedom. 

I’m still fairly early in the section of the book where he begins to describe this solution to all our technocratic impasses, but already he’s impressed me with the detail with which he’s managed to describe this kind of reasoning, which he calls, in a phrase that’s evocative to anyone who’s studied the major figures of German philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, the saving power. 

This is how Jaspers also sounds at least a little like Martin Heidegger, in his discussion of the saving power. However, Jaspers is also more hopeful than Heidegger in this regard. Heidegger’s discussion of saving power was entirely pessimistic: he only ever discussed it in vague, suggestive terms, as if he couldn’t even articulate what kind of thinking would constitute this power.

That’s entirely appropriate to Heidegger’s late-career pessimism. He saw no alternatives in the world to the technological way of existence where everything was understood only as a resource, as a means to serve man’s ends and desires. The saving power of thought could only arise in authentic existence, of a people whose actions were a perfect resonance with being itself at both the individual and cultural levels. This was only attainable through many centuries of cultural continuity with a place or a land, achieving a kind of intuitive community of a people with its land through its perceptions, myths, and language. 

Probably the second-most awkward notion that Heidegger scholars have to deal with is that he thought only the ancient Greeks and contemporary Germans had achieved such authenticity. The most awkward notion for Heidegger scholars to deal with is that he believed the National Socialist movement had the most potential to express this authenticity politically. 

With the failure of this movement, as it descended into its own technocracy of totalitarian government, universal war, and genocide, Heidegger thought the saving power was impossible to discover, which is why he wrote so little about what its positive content could be.

Jaspers begins developing his alternative, the saving power of reason as freedom, in the last four chapters of The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man. The problem for this series of entries is that I’ve only just started reading those chapters, so aside from a basic framework of Kant-inspired intimations, I don’t know yet what Jaspers says about this conception of reason, its powers and potentials, or whether it ultimately succeeds as a saving power in the nuclear age. 

I can say, however, that it’s quite inspiring to read the book, and offers me an intriguing possibility to approach the style of philosophical writing with which I want to approach the Utopias manuscript over the next few years. To be continued . . . 

Reading Obscure Jaspers I: A Forgotten Existentialist, A History Boy, 01/10/2014

I usually read multiple books at once, as well as whatever I’m working on for my schooling, when I’m in a program, like the one I’m in right now. It does make for full days, but I largely don’t stop feeding my brain. 

So in addition to the detailed notes and reactions to Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I’m reading another philosophy book just for general pleasure, although it’s just as stimulating. It’s an unusual book, because it’s actually kind of obscure to someone who’s gone through an education in philosophy. 

Karl Jaspers stares at you provocatively.

Karl Jaspers was well-known in his time, and in the Weimar era and post-war years of Germany was widely considered a rival to Martin Heidegger in German existentialism. Because the German university system of philosophy in those years was such a small and intimate club, Heidegger and Jaspers knew each other. They offered incredibly different takes on the basic existentialist idea, to the extent that they were philosophical rivals for the early part of their careers in the discipline and became bitter rivals when Heidegger came to support the Nazi movement so enthusiastically.

Jaspers himself was married to a Jewish woman, and managed to avoid death at the hands of the Gestapo or another chaotically overlapping security service by a combination of general respect, a host of influential personal connections, and sheer fantastic luck. 

Philosophically, Jaspers is actually much more akin to my own approaches to the discipline than Heidegger ever was. Heidegger considered philosophy to function only when it was pure, untouched by other disciplines, as all other modes of knowledge had been corrupted by the technological way of living which saw all around us as potential resources. There are moments when I read Jaspers when he says the same of modern rationality, that it makes us think of the world only instrumentally, and that this is a dangerous attitude, especially given our current technological powers.

But Jaspers himself was a psychologist before beginning to write in philosophy, and pioneered many of the biographical methods of psychological assessment that remain influential today. When he entered philosophy, he took ideas from many different disciplines to build his concepts, especially from sociology, thanks to his close relationships with German pioneers of that field such as Max Weber. 

As someone who has been influenced by theorists (really philosophers) from sociological backgrounds, and who has close friends in that discipline, I can most certainly understand why Jaspers would have found that field so stimulating for thought.

All that being said, I suppose I should say exactly which book by Jaspers I’m reading. Well, my own decision came to me in a moment in my Communications program a couple of weeks ago. The program chair, Andy Coxhead, likes to keep us on our toes in a variety of interesting ways, one of which is regularly quizzing us about what’s in the news of the day. It’s an obligation of the profession of professional communications that you keep up on current events so you can scan for any events that may affect your actual work. 

In response to one of these inquiries, one of the other students in the class spoke about some of the recent developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Putin’s standoff over his Grand Old Empire games with the European Union, United States, and United Nations. She mentioned a curious phrase that most of us in my generation thought we’d never hear spoken seriously, which older generations had lived with as a matter of course.

She said there might be a nuclear shooting war over this.

Now, we all like to imagine that no one would ever think about using nuclear weapons. The very thought of it seems absolutely insane to us. No rational leader of a modern state would ever actually use the arsenals that were amassed over the 20th century — they’re capable of destroying all life on Earth. We consider nuclear weapons something to be used by fanatics, those we consider insane with the irrational and anti-rational beliefs of religious fervour. These are the types of people who would sincerely believe that an apocalypse in nuclear fire could return God to Earth, or some such horrifying nonsense.

I picked up my only book by Karl Jaspers in a book giveaway at the McMaster Philosophy department. These free books weren’t being given to the Wilson Library room at the department,* but instead simply given to whoever wanted them. I wanted them. So I took them.

* Honestly, if they had stayed in the Wilson Library, I doubt they would have ended up being read. It’s wonderful to have all these books, but students aren’t allowed to take them out of the room. Without a genuine loaning system so people can devote time to the collection on their own, no one bothers to read them.

That’s how I ended up with Karl Jaspers’ The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man. To be continued . . .