Sometimes It Just Isn’t Worth Including, Composing, 26/01/2015

I was back to editing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity at the end of this weekend, though most of my time was spent dealing with the logistics of my move to Toronto. That will be next weekend. As of Thursday, the blog probably won’t hear from me until a few days into February.

I posted this image in one of my earlier posts, but that
was over a year ago, and I think it just looks really cool.

But I made a significant cut to chapter seven Sunday evening. The original dissertation version included a brief passage of about three paragraphs where I analyzed a concept in a book called The Natural Contract by Michel Serres. My supervisor, Barry Allen, recommended the book as an interesting source of ideas when I was originally researching the project. While it’s a brilliant book, the concept I discussed in the dissertation had its problems.

It was the concept of an environmentalist scientist-philosopher-sage called The Third-Instructed, or Le Tiers-Instruit if I can formulate it in a language where it makes some grammatical sense.* I wrote about Serres a few times on the blog, because I was reading his book Le Tiers-Instruit (its title was translated into English as The Troubadour of Knowledge) in the early months of Adam Writes Everything.

* Serres is a brilliant writer in his native language, able to use many of its grammatical and semantic subtleties to communicate some fascinating ideas. The problem with this brilliance is that it’s so difficult to translate because his subtle points play off connotations that are idiosyncratic to French. 

Aside from my general interest in Serres’ thinking, I ordered this book during my first post-graduation round of revisions of the ecophilosophy manuscript because I thought I had dealt with this concept of Le Tiers-Instruit too quickly in the dissertation. I mentioned it briefly, over a mere three paragraphs, in the last major chapter, where I dismissed it as a concept with some potential, but which was limited because it was still described using the language of opposites. 

Serres described this troubadour of knowledge as “archaic and contemporary, traditional and futuristic, humanist and scientist, fast and slow, green and seasoned, audacious and prudent.” But he never progressed the idea beyond this union of opposites, which can only gesture at progress instead of actually pushing you toward it. Philosophical writing that unites opposites is all too often counter-productively vague.

I seriously couldn't find any decent
images of Serres through a Google
search where he looked younger
than 70 years old. It made me
wonder if he's always been an
elderly man.

Then I discovered that he followed up The Natural Contract with a book that explicitly focussed on Le Tiers-Instruit. This was a massive potential embarrassment, for me to have critiqued Serres’ concept without even considering the input of the book that spent 200 pages discussing it.

But when I read The Troubadour of Knowledge, I found that Serres had developed the concept more as a philosophy of education instead of the openly ecological and environmentalist direction it had in The Natural Contract. It was an appropriate development, but it made a full account of the concept at that point in the manuscript very inappropriate. 

What’s more, I only included Serres in the dissertation manuscript where I did because it was in a chapter that dealt largely with concepts from the influence of Serres’ contemporaries and fellow-travellers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. How I dealt with the concept, critiquing the vagueness of its oppositional language, better suited my critiques of vague language in environmental philosophy more generally, in the earlier chapters. But because Serres developed the concept into a completely different context than this, discussing it in the context of environmental philosophy’s problems wasn’t appropriate either.

Why is this a Composing post instead of A History Boy, then, given how much time I’ve spent talking about my own history with Serres? Because of the result of this reflection on how limited the concept of Le Tiers-Instruit was in my manuscript, how its limitation came from working only from a book where it was treated briefly, and that the book which specifically focussed on it set the concept in a context that was completely different from the ecological philosophy I’m working in.

I cut it entirely. There are now no references to Michel Serres in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. 

When you write philosophy, you can reference a lot of whole bunch of stuff. It’s a complex tradition, and many different writers have dealt with similar concepts in different contexts across the last three thousand years. And I’m just talking about Western philosophy. Including Asian, Indian, African, and Amerindian traditions complicates our conceptual heritages even more. 

Serres is a better role model for me as a writer than in
his particular philosophical ideas and the problems he
explores. He uses language brilliantly, and weaves
concepts together with incredible subtlety. We're just
interested in different things.

When you write a dissertation, there's institutional pressure to include as much of what you researched as possible, because part of its goal is showing your committee the scale of research you can do in the program's time frame. 

When you're writing professional academic philosophy in other contexts, like journals, there's a similar pressure to include as much stuff as possible. Reviewers tend to default to a very obvious criticism: Why didn’t you include author X? Clearly, this paper is inadequate and not worth publishing because you didn’t include author X. 

Sometimes, this is a legitimate point because X is an important figure in the particular tradition that you set yourself in, so missing him is a genuine blind spot.

But academic publications, especially journals, operate in a prestige-based market. Part of a journal’s prestige lies in its rejection rate. And the more prestigious a journal is, the more submissions it will receive. So a reviewer will be under pressure to reject a submission at all costs. So he may think of any other writer who has dealt with a similar concept as you and your research background, and fault you for not mentioning this historically tangential but conceptually convergent figure. Not a morally blameworthy act on the reviewer's part, just the pressure of the institutional position. 

So sometimes, you have to take control of a creative process when you have the power to do so. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity has been accepted based on a proposal that focussed on its conceptual originality, not as a historical work. What matters is the clarity of the concepts. In this case, cutting Serres improves the clarity of the conceptual argument. Better leave him aside entirely than treat him superficially.

So this is one of the few Composing posts where I actually have some direct advice about writing. Who ever thought that would happen?

Questions of Heritage, Research Time, 10/10/2013

I finished The Troubadour of Knowledge Wednesday night, though I prefer to call it Le Tiers-Instruit despite my reading the English translation (as you’ll recall from my earlier posts, I had to read it to make sure I didn’t miss a book where Serres anticipated any of my thinking, and I had to read it fast to discover that he didn’t). And I thought I’d end my brief new engagement with him by offering a few thoughts about the intellectual tradition that he’s part of.

Here’s a controversial thing to say on a blog. But if anyone on a university faculty search committee discusses the idea with me, I’d tell them the same thing. I don’t really believe Continental philosophy is a unified tradition at all, even though many researchers in North America identify as Continental philosophers, and I say I am on my faculty C.V. It’s more commonly defined by what it isn’t: the writers and works pay little attention to the Analytic tradition (which is a unified thing, thanks to its clear line of descent), and mean-spirited Analytic philosophers tend to make fun of it or dismiss it. Analytic philosophy was a self-identified movement against the metaphysical philosophy of the idealist thinkers of the 19th century Cambridge establishment. Continental philosophy became the buzzword for what philosophers in this tradition disliked about the philosophy that was coming out of Europe throughout the 20th century.

French philosophy has many silly stereotypes
in North America, and this photo of Deleuze
wearing a black turtleneck sweater doesn't
help overcome them.

I see six relatively independent streams of thought in what is, in North America, called Continental philosophy. 1) The phenomenological tradition that originated with Edmund Husserl, and has seen diverse influence in philosophy, psychology, and animal behaviour science. 2) Existentialism, the more openly ethical philosophy whose current form starts with Martin Heidegger’s appropriating phenomenology for his own projects, but saw its greatest figures in the ethical and political philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. 3) The deconstructive methods of scholarly research developed by Jacques Derrida and carried on largely in cultural studies and literary theory in North America. 4) Political philosophy and activism inspired by Marx and taken up into the social philosophy of Louis Althusser, continued in Félix Guattari’s and Antonio Negri’s political writings. 5) Philosophy inspired by psychoanalysis, developing philosophical principles from the medical theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan. Slavoj Zizek’s work merges the ideas of post-Marxism and psychoanalytic philosophy. 6) The philosophy that is normally called post-structuralism, but this is an inadequate term for a group of thinkers who have reiterated the ideas of Benedict Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson into one complex new tradition. I’d call Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault the major figures in this tradition. None of these theorists ever called themselves Continental philosophers. On the European continent, the term is meaningless.

I think Serres, if he could be said to fit into one tradition, would continue the sixth, Spingsonzsche tradition. He makes a point that Deleuze returned to frequently throughout his own work. Serres considers the relation, in classical music, of variation to theme, and wonders why the theme is given a special status as if the variations were just imperfect imitators of it. Really, the musical phrase we call the theme is another variation, one more peculiarity among all the other peculiarities. Deleuze let this point rest at the abstract level of philosophical metaphor. Serres brings the idea into specific contexts. One point is political. Consider the king (the parable of the emperor’s new clothes was a touchpoint at the start of Le Tiers-Instruit). We hold kings, royalty, dictators, the elite members of any society, be they politicians, rich businessmen, or rich businessmen who become politicians, to be separate from the common people. Themes. But they’re men just like us, their peculiar situations categorically no different from the peculiar lives and characters of the least politically significant among us. Serres explicitly identifies the political point to the theme-and-variation argument that Deleuze was content to let remain implicit: the central idea of democracy (and Christianity done right), that the most noble of us stand equal to the least of us.

The more I engage with Serres' work, the more he impresses
me. Especially now that I've found this picture, which
reveals that we have the same taste in sunglasses.

More than this, Serres includes an interpretation of the idea that I could call ecological or cosmological, depending on where you want your emphasis to lie. We often think of human life and the Earth as particularly special. I’ve read so much popular science journalism that defines the Sol system as being an exception from the general order of the universe. We have gas giants far away from the centre of our orbits, protecting the rocky inner planets from asteroid bombardment that would be terribly destructive to life. Most solar systems are arranged in the reverse, at least most solar systems we’re able to examine in detail with our current technology. But the structure of the Sol system is one peculiarity among many peculiarities. The planets have a unique arrangement, but in terms of uniqueness alone, all solar systems have unique arrangements. If human intellectual history can be said to have any progress, it’s that this idea has developed and spread: Humanity and Earth is not the centre of the universe, not its purpose, and we are one bundle of beings among a vast and complicated collection of worlds. 

We are slowly learning and accepting the humility of understanding that our uniqueness doesn’t make us superior to an otherwise generic world, that uniqueness is ordinary and ubiquitous. If my ecophilosophy project has any single core concept, this is it.

Yet a melancholy aspect of Serres’ philosophy, as I’ve encountered it so far, is his peculiar appropriation of Spinozist ideas. In Le Tiers-Instruit, Serres discusses how he understands God to exist as every body in the universe, and the universe as a whole. This is basically a Spinozist point, to conceive God as a pantheism that is also functionally equivalent to an atheism: God as Nature itself. Yet there is a curious phenomenological element to how he expresses the idea in this book. He makes the subject an exemption from God/Nature. “Everything is God except the one who writes him, who lets fall His pen amid tears,” he writes. 

The philosopher himself becomes alienated from creation in the act of writing his account of creation. At least in this ethical sense of the tears that flow as he lets go of his pen (which is, being part of Nature, itself God). The one who understands the universe, at least in how he lives, transcends the world in doing so, reminiscent to me of Husserl’s old concept, the transcendental ego. Yet he describes an alienation of the philosopher from the world, even from contact with the divinity he writes about. An unbearable separation just because he’s decided to learn and write.

Going Too Far, Research Time, 09/10/2013

A post without a clear argument today. Call it a meditation. My job applications continue for the 2014 academic year, as I make the best case I can that I should have a full-time tenure-track philosophy position in ten months’ time. The waiting is the hardest part.

When I discovered that Michel Serres had written a book called Le Tiers-Instruit, I was afraid that he had anticipated my own conclusions, that he had described an ecological virtue ethic, a paradigm of the ecological person. It turns out that his book explores a very different path, but it contains meditations that are related to the idea.

I don't know what to make of this
jacket. All I know is that it makes me
admire Serres more than I do already.

Serres’ writing is of a peculiar style. I have compared him to Nietzsche, and that comparison stands. He doesn’t write in the typical scholarly style of advancing a clear thesis in tightly argued language and rigorously sourced research. There are very few footnotes in a Michel Serres text. I could say more accurately that Serres writes in meditations and ruminations. They are philosophically profound, and reflect a life of long learning. He refrains from footnotes and copious sourcing, I think, because the footnotes would become too copious. He composes every paragraph drawing on a encyclopedia worth of works from the history of literature, science, and philosophy. The sources, learning, and erudition are all in the back end. What we see is a relaxed poetry of concepts.

It’s very dangerous to write this way. It risks being seen as a crank or a fool. Or even worse for a career as a university scholar — a poet. Yet he does it anyway, I think because after decades of work writing according to the conventions of scholarship, he’s earned the right to get weird. Having already proven his intelligence and learning, Serres can let his writing do more than simply argue. Argument and logical rigor is important to philosophy: it’s how we make ourselves understood, how we make our principles and ideas explicit and clear. Serres’ writing in Le Tiers-Instruit is far from explicit, but it’s very clear.

Tuesday night, I read a meditation that could be said to unite the ethical lessons of Aristotle with the ethical lessons of ecological science. He describes the terrible destruction that can occur when one order of being or life achieves dominion over an entire planet. He understands destruction as the loss of the ability for novelty, new directions in movement and life, to appear. A planet that grows too cold freezes; growing too hot, it boils; in a world that floods, everything drowns.* Humanity today constitutes one of these dominants, as everything on Earth lives in direct response and reaction to human activities and institutions. We have achieved the dream of every animal and dominated the Earth entirely.

* A clear euphemism here. The ecosystems of oceans, when they function most vibrantly, are intensely creative places. The only force more powerful than creativity and adaptation in ocean realms is the violence and murder of daily life undersea. I’m reminded of an Antarctic diver interviewed in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World who studies the micro-organisms of the deep sea. He believes that organisms adapted to amphibious and entirely terrestrial conditions to escape the horrifying brutality of the ocean. The film includes footage of micro-organisms killing and eating each other. That kind of death is unspeakably horrifying.

But dominance forces the world into a drab uniformity: everything is a variation on human institutions and activities. To fight for total dominance is animalistic, a desire that in our moral lessons we hold more brutal than humans at our best. Serres advocates an attitude of holding back from dominance, stepping back from the role of Earth’s totalitarian species, giving other creatures some room to breathe. He calls true wisdom knowing the full extent of one’s powers and holding back from using them.

Serres writes, “In expanding, good itself, just like the sun, quickly becomes evil.”

Roots Bloody Roots, Research Time, 04/10/2013

So today, I picked up a copy of Michel Serres’ Le Tiers-Instruit from my campus mailbox. Well, the English title is The Troubadour of Knowledge, but the subtleties of translation are difficult with Serres. I wasn’t kidding when I compared him to Marcel Proust and Albert Camus last time I wrote about him. Lately, Serres’ writing style reminds me of Nietzsche, particularly the Nietzsche of Also Sprach Zarathustra; difficult to translate, idiosyncratic, philosophical analysis through methods of narrative, allegory, and symbolism, all of which is underlaid with a profound understanding of scientific and mathematical principles and concepts. 

I picked up this book as a result of a small crisis of confidence as I was preparing my ecophilosophy book manuscript. My original composition had referred to Serres’ 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel (English translation 1995 as The Natural Contract), and this peculiar figure of Le Tiers-Instruit, literally translated as The Instructed Third or 3rd-Instructed. He described this figure using contrary terms that were difficult to parse. I included him in my own analysis of the ecologically/ecocentrically virtuous person as a starting point, but concluded that the tension of contradictions in the concept made it difficult to put into practice. I made a terrible facepalm when I discovered, during my revisions, that he had written a follow-up book that specifically explored that concept. Had Serres beaten me to a description of ecological virtue by two decades?

The more eccentric images I find of Serres on the internet,
the more I want to see how he crafts his public image in his
own country. I have a feeling he must have to compete with
Alain Badiou. If he does, I'm definitely Team Michel.

It seems that he hasn’t, happily for me. Le Tiers-Instruit seems, at least after reading the first third of the book as of this writing, seems a reiteration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, a philosophy of education that includes some elements of his earlier ecological thinking, but also moves toward the ideas he’d develop over the 1990s in philosophy of science. 

He has a very interesting analysis in the book so far, though, which I may incorporate into various parts of the ecophilosophy manuscript anyway. He discusses the human relationship with origins, which is very important to my own analyses in the utopias project. The more of Serres that I read, I’m increasingly convinced that if part of my philosophy career can include translating, or perhaps I should say transmogrifying his ideas to North American debates in ecology, ethics, politics, and theory of science, I’ll have done some good work.

I’ll discuss one aspect of these ideas abut origins so far today, and perhaps another aspect on Monday. One stereotype of French philosophy, at least still prevalent in North American philosophy/theory departments and programs, is that it’s dominated by voices, figures, and styles like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Serres. But while these figures may have been influential in North America, during the 1980s, their works were totally renounced in France. The rise of socially conservative liberals* in the French intellectual scene (I’m thinking of Bernard Henri-Levy, Maurice Clavel, André Glucksmann, and most importantly for this post, Luc Ferry) vilified and repressed the country’s radical thinkers. The goal of the socially conservative liberals was to take back French universities for old-school enlightenment humanism. The radicals, they said, had hijacked the tradition of French philosophy to endorse moral relativism and defend totalitarianism on the grounds of preserving cultural differences. The only way to preserve democracy against this theoretical attack was to return to universalism and the image of one true unified reason.

* Yes, this is a thing that makes sense, at least conceptually. 

The French radical philosophers were incredibly complex and multifaceted in their thought. But the ideas that defined them, according to the socially conservative liberals, was that the Enlightenment tradition contained a hidden imperialism, the suspicion of anyone who was so convinced that they had discovered the truth that their mission was to spread this truth to all others, and that views which diverged from that truth had no value. Essentially, the idea was that Enlightenment humanism was a philosophy of a secular missionary. The socially conservative liberal response was not to respond to this critique intelligently, but to bury it. 

Serres’ The Natural Contract explored how to change our perspective so that our concerns grew beyond care for humans, and to care for nature, and followed this program to very ontologically deep and complex territory. Luc Ferry (Minister of Education for the conservative Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and President Jacques Chirac 2002-4) responded with The New Ecological Order. This book literally denounced all philosophies of environmentalism as totalitarianism, and environmental activists as fascists who would return humanity to medieval conditions by elevating the rights of insects, plants, and ecosystems to equal standing with humans.

As much as I dislike Luc Ferry as a philosopher, I have to
respect his frankly fantastic hair.

Ferry’s book was a remarkable critique insofar as people actually took it seriously. His attack on environmentalism was based on a ridiculous mistake. Bear in mind, I am simplifying his argument. The book was a well-researched documentation of the earliest self-identified ecologists, a group of German life scientists and geographers working during the Nazi era: one among them Walther Schoenichen, mangled their research into propaganda. Ecology's basic idea is that living organisms interact in deeply integrated relationships where destabilizing events could unpredictably cause cascading catastrophes. Nazis could make use of it for their romanticizing propaganda about the purity and authenticity of our Black Forest. Therefore, environmentalism (ecology's discoveries turned into activism) is an inherently fascist belief.

Ferry conceived of himself this way. He wrote as a defender of humanity along the classical Enlightenment model: humans are the only free creatures, the only creatures that can escape being determined by our birthplace and heritage, that can define themselves. He saw environmentalists as trying to root humanity in a specific place from which we should have no ambition to leave.

There are some environmentalists who have thought like this. But they’re the retrogrades of the philosophy. Serres picks up the matter in Le Tiers-Instruit, which I can conceive as a response to Ferry’s critique. Aside from The Natural Contract's more profound concern of redefining what humanity can be (which is the focus of my own ecophilosophy project), in the later book, Serres discusses how humans relate to their roots. We are born in a place, and we have no control over the initial conditions of our existence. We can depart from these initial conditions, but that genesis will always be a part of us. Even after we've left, we are still departing in reaction to the conditions of our origin. So even the Enlightenment vision of the man who can emancipate himself from his roots depends on those roots. They’re the launchpad from which he springs into his new life. We won’t have a complete understanding of human nature if we don’t include the potential for free self-development alongside our dependence on our conditions of origin. 

One of my favourite films is Five Easy Pieces. Jack Nicholson stars as a man who’s spent his entire life running away from his past and his current obligations. Even as he succeeds in starting multiple new lives with no reference to his origin (a Las Vegas pianoman for a showgirls revue, a roughneck oilman of the California interior) his birthplace and family history remains a part of him, the world whose gravity he’s trying to escape. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he’s drawn back. But the ability to free himself from his past depends on the nature of the past from which he runs.

Contraries as the Act of Straining Against Language, Research Time, 25/09/2013

Returning to philosophy today, I’ve almost finished the edits on my ecophilosophy manuscript, and have several intriguing ideas not just for updates to my thinking to throw on the blog, but for actual essays that can be published in professional journals. I’ll get to writing about these over the course of this week. 

One passage in my last pre-conclusion chapter is about a particular idea of Michel Serres. He wonders what kind of person could be an exemplar for environmentalist activism and lifestyles in his 1990 book The Natural Contract. This is a strange little book, my first encounter with Serres and my only such encounter so far. I am, however, extremely interested to pursue is more recent work, which concentrates on developing a pluralist vision of philosophy of science. Depending on my what my next university position turns out to be, I’ll read these works sooner or later.

Serres' writing in his original language is
brilliant enough that I'd say the top three
reasons to learn to read French are the books of
Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, and him.

Serres’ vision for philosophy of science is developing methods of mapping and translating the core concepts of various scientific disciplines. Philosophy’s role would be as the messenger of concepts from one scientific world to another. I’m extremely interested in this idea, as it throws away the old notion in philosophy of science (that remains annoyingly persistent in some circles) that philosophy’s purpose is to analyze scientific knowledge or practice and faithfully describe what’s really going on, presuming that the scientists can’t. This is the notion that philosophy is an authority over the essence of science and scientific knowledge. It also moves away from another, equally problematic conception of philosophy of science, that a philosopher can only speak legitimately about a scientific discipline when she has received sufficient training to practice the discipline herself. This is the notion that philosophy can only ever be subservient to the disciplines of science, never offering critique of alternative ideas. 

However, I haven’t read those books of Serres yet, so this post is not about those ideas. Instead, it’s quite a critical post. The detailed argument will be in my manuscript, but the gist of it goes like this. Serres describes a type of person, which he calls Le Tiers-Instruit, who is the most environmentally virtuous figure. The sketch is tremendously interesting, but also tremendously frustrating. I’m not totally sure if he intends to advocate this figure as an actual role model for people, or if it’s a hypothetical construction to see how workable such a person is. Here’s the edited quote describing Le Tiers-Instruit that I use in my manuscript, drawn from the English translation of Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson.

“Knowledge’s troubadour: expert in formal or experimental knowledge, well-versed in the natural sciences of the inanimate and the living . . . lover of rivers, sands, winds, seas, and mountains; walker over the whole Earth . . . thus archaic and contemporary, traditional and futuristic, humanist and scientist, fast and slow, green and seasoned, audacious and prudent.”

The whole description is a collision of contraries. It’s a passage incredibly pregnant with meaning, but that meaningfulness doesn’t come from the image itself. It is meaningful because it provokes the reader to try to figure out what kind of phenomenon could articulate all those contraries, these attributes that appears opposite, yet might be able to fit together. It’s a passage more puzzling than enlightening.

Now, I’m not about to dump on Serres. I found pretty much everything else in The Natural Contract incredibly enlightening, at least when it came to meditating on the perennial problems of environmental moral/political philosophy. Serres covers more territory in a 125-page book than some environmental philosophers do in their entire careers. The problem is that while his perspective on those problems is fascinating and illuminating, he never seems to advance an answer to those problems, or at least a way to move those problems forward. 

I think my ecophilosophy manuscript manages something of progress in these recurring problems. I know how arrogant that may sound: “He thinks his work achieves what one of France’s greatest writers of philosophy couldn’t manage? What does he think he is!?”

I think I’m a damn good philosopher, that’s what.