Each Together III: The Immortal’s Life, Research Time, 20/09/2017

When I first read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I didn’t understand why she made Greek thinking and values a focus of her inquiry. Surely, there are other routes to forgotten ways of thinking in other traditions of humanity.

There are. Ten years ago, I was wondering why we’d choose to return to the Greek tradition for inspiration instead of philosophical ideas from ancient China, India, Africa, or the Americas. But I didn’t yet understand that Arendt herself wasn’t able to do so.

They weren’t her traditions. I mean that in a personal sense – she hadn’t ever really studied them. Her own expertise was rooted in the Western tradition, and that began in Polis Greece. It’s also true in a civilizational sense – Arendt was a European, whose work and thinking grew from the minoritarian place of German Jewish culture (Jewish German culture?).

Why doesn't Arendt talk much about the Jewish roots of Western
culture in The Human Condition? I don't think it's because she
treats it elsewhere – I actually think it's because she doesn't
know much about the philosophical elements of the Jewish
cultural tradition. Arendt was raised a secular Jew in Germany,
a very assimilationist culture. Her works that engaged with
Judaism involved meditations on the particular culture of
Jewish people in Europe, in Germany most specifically. That's
a very different way of engaging with Jewish heritage than is
capable through the ethical tradition of a majority Jewish
society.

I know now, and I didn’t understand then, that the best people to explain those other traditions were those who grew up in those other traditions. I’ve downloaded the classics of Confucius, pre-ordered the latest book by Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson, and I’m looking eventually to get hold of key Indian and African writers too.

I’m not about to argue that only people from particular traditions have the right to speak about those ideas. No, that would be a very limiting cultural relativism. Presuming that there can be no communication between

But you understand a culture better when you grew up in it. Because you can see all the subtle ways that complicated traditions of thinking impact everyday habits when you see those everyday habits in your everyday life.

Growing up in India, you can better understand how ancient ideas survive and shape cultural presumptions and ideas of modern India. An Anishnaabe will understand how their traditional ideas shape their culture today in the small details of ordinary life. Despite the genocidal destruction that culture has faced for centuries now.

So a European will have a better idea of how foundational cultures of the West continue their influence over everyday thinking of European-descended communities. One of the central influences of Polis Greek thinking at the centre of Arendt’s inquiry in The Human Condition is the yearning for glory.

What is glory? There are plenty of terrible definitions for glory in our society. But Arendt is interested in a peculiarly Greek sense of glory. No, let me rephrase that. A peculiarly Polis sense of glory.

This kind of glory is a matter of remembrance. Polis Greek culture and thought, as Arendt understands it, was focussed on a division of being between the mortal and the immortal – the linear and the cyclical. Nature was immortal in that it moved in cycles. The seasons would repeat just as they always have.*

Nature appears immortal to us, especially when it's big enough to dwarf
us. The tragedy of Polis Greece was that mortal humanity was aware
of our mortality and could only fight against it as best we could. The
tragedy of modern humanity is that we built our civilization presuming
nature to be immortal, and once we realized that it wasn't, we were
probably too late to prevent so much destruction.

* Forget that we now know this to be false. This is a function of modern human knowledge of the contingent and finite nature of the universe. We know that the universe had a beginning in time, is of a particular age, and will one day fade into cold emptiness. Forget about this for now. You might want to.

Each human life, in contrast to nature, was finite. But in that finitude, it was remarkable. Natural bodies like trees, animals, and mountains may be awe-inspiring, but to the Polis Greeks, such bodies didn’t have the singularity of human life. To be mortal was to be unique.

But there was a tragedy to this uniqueness because the unique is mortal. The immortal, the cyclical, consisted of indistinguishable identicals – trees, mountains, animals, all the beings of nature.**

** Again, forget that we now know this to be false, that all beings are unique, that all beings are fundamentally processes – contingent and singular at once. The Polis Greek understanding of mortality and time never understood this because the singularity of existence is a conclusion from several hundred years of modern scientific work.

Yet there was one way to escape this tragedy – engagement in the Polis. The Polis, according to the era’s Greek thinking, was immortal. It was a human creation, but its existence survived the lives of any of the particular people who lived there.

So by engaging in the political life of your Polis, you could distinguish yourself through your remarkable acts. You could be remembered in the histories of your own city-state. That’s the glory at the heart of Polis Greek aspiration – unique acts in the leadership of your community could make some part of you immortal.

You’d live far beyond your death in the memory of your own people. That was the immortal fame for which Greek people strove. It was why they gave up all the wealth they’d acquired and spend it all living in cities leading the people. For the only immortality accessible to mortals.

Of course, as you can tell from my asides this post, things were much more complicated. For one thing, Polises themselves turned out to be quite mortal. The rise of the imperial Macedonian state proved that much.

Now the question of our Greek heritage becomes this – How does our yearning for immortality survive in a mortal world?

Grinding Us Into an Essence I: On Fundamentalisms, Research Time, 14/04/2016

So here’s another post about my philosophy research that contributes to bugging everyone I know to read more Antonio Negri. It’s been a busy week so far, but I’ve started reading Commonwealth, the culmination of his decade-long trilogy of masterworks co-written with Michael Hardt.

The first two books were largely critical. Empire was a diagnosis of the major changes in the qualities of our economy and politics as globalization reached its most intense form in human history. Multitude was an analysis of how to resist the different vectors of oppression – states raging against their falling power and the systematic pressures of poverty.

Commonwealth is about understanding what kind of new subjectivities can emerge from that struggle with the utopian potential to overcome our cycles of violence to build a more just global humanity. So that’s a pretty tall order for a 400 page book. Little steps make a big achievement.

The book’s first little steps explore the different politics that focus on the material nature of the human body. There are a lot of approaches to this, and not too many of the ones people have tried so far work at all. 

Probably the most visible politics focussing on the material body today are the fundamentalisms – religious, nationalist or racist, and economic. It sounds weird, but follow how the reasoning goes.

Religious fundamentalism – whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu, or Jewish, the major world religions with noteworthy such movements – focusses an enormous amount of authority on controlling how people treat their bodies. What they eat, their social lives, how they have sex and who it’s with.

Nationalist fundamentalism similarly exercises authority over people’s bodies, controlling their social networks, sexual, and family lives. It targets people for oppression and violence based on physical attributes like skin colour, ethnic markers, or physical stereotypes like big noses or even height.

Economic fundamentalism is the same, though we don’t often talk about this right-wing vision of humanity this way. Here, the material body faces analysis and control of its physical production and consumption. 

Then a contradiction appears in all these fundamentalisms. All that focus and effort spent controlling singular individual bodies is justified in the name of a transcendent ideal.

The religious fundamentalists subordinate the meticulous control of the body to a purpose of care for the immaterial soul. It forces conformity to its dogma of the divine. With nationalism, the singular nature of the body is ignored, and all that control ends up being only to maintain conformity to its vision of nationhood and ethnic character. Economic fundamentalism reduces all the different aspects of human life to economic relationships. Instead of individuals and people, we’re homo economicus.

But until the moment of that contradiction, the unwavering focus on people’s material bodies and what’s done with them makes fundamentalisms of all kinds into powerful biopolitical perspectives. And it’s a good route to help understand exactly what this overused but less-than-understood term actually means. To be continued. . . 

The Myth of Singularity, Composing, 20/05/2014

It’s not exactly novel of me to say that there’s a common mood of human civilization that’s trying to grip conceptually the reality of humanity’s end. If you ask Slavoj Zizek or another Lacanian, he’d tell you that climate change denial wouldn’t be spoken so powerfully if we didn’t all basically know this might be the end. Contemporary human technology, which in my Ecophilosophy manuscript I call enormous industry, is absolutely unprecedented in human existence, and it’s reasonable to say that its effects may ruin us all.

If I were to make a bet on it, I’d say we’d go down to a combination of more extreme weather from climate change wrecking our infrastructure, toxic pollution of our ground water and other food sources reaching a tipping point, and the extinction of pollinating insects from pesticide use crashing our agricultural system. 

There’s been quite a lot of art, among other forms of speculation, produced about the end of Earth and the end of humanity. But the Johnny Depp film, Transcendence, doesn’t seem to be one of those at first glance. Instead, it’s a film about the dystopian aspects of the singularity, the conception of what would happen to humanity when artificial computer/machine intelligence surpasses the power of humans. In his own discussion of the film, my elder compatriot from the social epistemology group, Steve Fuller, describes its Faustian themes and its very Christian take on the singularity, the moment at which humanity transcends itself. But a link that Vaka Rangi sent me to a Washington Post article makes a slightly different point.

The third time Johnny Depp has become a vision of
humanity's sad dystopian end. Jarmusch and Gilliam did it
much better than this, though.

The singularity is another example of the end of the world, but it’s taken to be a positive one. Even if humanity doesn’t survive this process of its machines surpassing its own abilities, it will have created a legacy in those machines themselves, which would carry the human story forward. If we are our narratives, then the singularity, even the dystopian formulations that Transcendence, AI, and the Terminator franchise offer us, is ultimately a utopian vision. Like the dying grandfather of a huge, proliferating family, we continue indefinitely into sempiternity, beyond our mortal deaths.* 

* A note on nerdy philosophical terminology. Sempiternity refers to the continuation of the processes of flowing time indefinitely into the future. Think of the Latin semper, meaning always. Eternity is the kind of immortality that transcends time, an escape into changelessness that negates the reality of time itself. 

All these ideas are important to how I conceive of my Alice stories, the science-fictional imagining where I’m spinning my stories of an immortal android sage travelling the galaxy for thousands of years. There are two story ideas that I’ve thought of so far that would use this character. One has a 20-minutes-into-the-future setting, and the other is in a vastly distant timeframe, thousands of years from now, when humanity has proliferated across light-years, having lived for so long that they may eventually forget where Earth was.**

** I acknowledge my debt to Isaac Asimov’s late Foundation novels, even as the basic ideas with which I’m developing this story is a complete philosophical and narrative rebuke to his own ideas in those books. Asimov was the first serious science-fiction that I ever read, really. His legacy on me is inescapable, even as my own priorities as a writer are completely different.

The story about a sort-of-contemporary Alice will be told from the perspective of an all-too-human human, a colleague of Alice’s human partner and original commissioner. This bastard Dr Farkas will investigate Alice to the point of stalking her, obsessed with how his nebbishy colleague could have attracted such a beautiful, vibrant creature. The irony is that he didn’t attract her; he had her custom-built. 

Farkas will, because of his pretentious and erudite personality, think about such androids in the dystopian way that Transcendence conceives of the singularity. It is a promise that becomes a threat, the type of superiority that augurs our displacement and replacement. Of course, this plays into my repugnant narrator’s personality: part of his motivations for his sexist, exploitive behaviour is a hostility to women. There is fear involved in this vision, though fear isn’t the only factor. I don’t like designing characters with only one clear motive for their actions; it’s very unrealistic.

Farkas’ paranoid vision is inadequate for the same reason that Alice’s other story that I have in mind now takes place thousands of years in humanity’s future. I see nothing incompatible about the co-existence of humanity with artificial intelligence. There have been multiple forms of intelligent life on Earth before (and I believe this is still the case; the complexity of whale sonar signalling and the solemnity of elephant graveyards signify a lot to me). There will be again. Only human arrogance sees our ascendency as a throne with room for only one occupant at a time. 

Alice laughs at that profound arrogance in the same way I laugh at slapstick comedy.