The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence I: Questions, Composing, 22/07/2015

In the early days of Adam Writes Everything, when I was still very uncertain what precisely this blog was going to be, especially its content and tone, I wrote a couple of posts under a category called “Triangulation.” They were essentially comparisons of different thinkers and ideas.

Eventually, I decided not to write these anymore, because they didn’t actually seem very fertile for developing ideas. And they didn't seem all that engaging for readers. These are the two questions that I ask myself about whatever I post here. 1) Will writing a post push a vague idea in a creative direction or otherwise help me figure out something that puzzles me? 2) Would someone actually enjoy reading it?

Those early posts just plunked two coincidentally similar ideas next to each other. Sometimes, two or more writers discussed the same topic, and sometimes, one writer actually influenced the other and I wanted to think about how. But coincidences don’t really make good philosophy.

The influence of Marinetti's Tactilist art appears in a
decadent and depraved American Hollywood film.

Here’s an example. I noticed an odd coincidence reading an old Marinetti essay the other night. He was discussing the framework of a new approach to art that he called Tactilism. It was artwork that you were supposed to experience not by looking at it or listening to it, but by rubbing your hands over it. They were panels whose material was designed to the smallest detail to provoke a particular tactile sensation.

Marinetti described how he first thought of this idea when he was a soldier in the Great War, serving in the battles against Austria. He was stumbling through a trench in total darkness trying to find a place to sleep, his hand passing over dirt, metal, clothing, flesh. He realized that this was a whole new way of seeing the world, through touch. 

We hardly ever think about just how detailed our tactile sensations can be. So he developed a form of art that would emphasize tactility, let us develop our hands to higher capacities of perceptivity than we typically do.

As Marinetti thought about what touch actually was, he came to understand it as the fundamental sense. All other perceptions – visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioception, and so on – were derived from the basic nature of touch. All perception is detection of objects around us and moving through them. Touch and avoidance of touch.

It occurred to me that Marinetti’s insight, which he developed in the context of his artwork, was fundamentally the same as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s when, in the last years of his life, he developed a philosophy of perception that saw touch and physical contact as foundational to all experience. 

Merleau-Ponty was working in the sub-discipline of phenomenology, particularly the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Merleau’s work during and shortly after the Second World War built on and expanded many of Husserl’s ideas, rooting them in a scientific context as research on brain injuries* discovered the complexity and depth of perception’s interdependence with neural architecture. 

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of opportunities
to study the effects of shrapnel head injuries on
human perception.

* The Second World War, particularly its flying shrapnel, produced many examples of traumatic brain injuries that were quite valuable for the growth of humanity's knowledge, even as their sufferers struggled to return to a worthwhile life.

I remember one professor I had as an undergraduate, who thought Merleau did little beyond expanding Husserl’s yet-unpublished papers. Merleau's mid-career work often ran into the same fundamental problem that Husserl did: how to get out of the subjective perspective. 

Merleau overcame this through a simple shift in focus from analyzing vision as essential perception, to touch. From there, he developed the conception of the subject not as a viewer, but as a field constantly interacting with other fields and bodies around her. This concept of the subject as a field of affects integrated in a huge complex of overlapping fields is the lynchpin for the conception of the subject at the heart of my ecological philosophy writing.**

** I’m in the process of booking my in-person and virtual speaking tour to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So more details coming to a campus near you.

Marinetti mentions this concept of the subject as a field as a logical derivation from his own reflections on the perceptual primacy of touch and tactility. He arrived at this profound, revolutionary philosophical concept through thinking about art. 

Here, we have two solitary figures with no actual historical relationship where Marinetti could have influenced Merleau philosophically at all. We only have their coincidental development of the same concept. Why bother thinking about it at all? To be continued . . . 

21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.

In a World Ruled By Fear: Arendt-Hobbes Triangulation, Research Time, 04/11/2013

There’s a short section of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she discusses Thomas Hobbes as a philosophical precursor to totalitarian government. He had long been considered a precursor to authoritarian government, focussing on his foundational argument in the most popular sections of his masterpiece Leviathan. But Arendt examines this argument in terms of a totalitarian principle of governance: rule through fear.

While Arendt would later complicate her conceptions of how totalitarian and fascist governance worked (wait for my posts on Eichmann in Jerusalem for my thoughts on that), Origins focusses on the dynamics of political fear. Here’s how she takes up Hobbes’ argument. 

Not much historical research exists on how many people
lived in fear of Thomas Hobbes specifically. Likely not
too many by the time of his death at 91, an impossibly
old age for the 17th century.

The core principle is that the natural state of men is to live in fear of each other. Every person is a competitor or potential competitor of everyone else, every person out to expand his property at the expense of everyone else. Given that everyone has become a threat to everyone else, the only rational way to regard others is fear. And because this is a situation where all possible force can be brought to bear against someone from any possible source, the only way to bring this chaos under control is with a power powerful enough to overcome (Hobbes uses the term “over-awe” and Arendt falls back on this repeatedly) all the individuals acting in force. This power is the state, and it rules by means of having the most powerful weapons: the police. 

For Arendt, this conception of people in constant competition, conflict, and fear of each other describes the morality of the petty bourgeoisie. I use the word ‘petty’ here in the sense of petty-minded, those unscrupulous businessmen who never seem to have any friends, and can speak and think only of the next ventures, the next profit, the next investment, the next swindle. They believe all people see each other in terms of their potential financial or material gain because that’s how they see all people. A society of these people is a society without empathy. Charles Dickens was wonderful at sketching such people, I thought of another way to sketch such a character, and it saddens me that they exist. 

This, as Arendt describes it, is not a condemnation of capitalism, but pinpointing a peculiar vulnerability to capitalist societies. The person who sees all human relations as reducing to ruthless competition for scarce resources among individuals is vulnerable to investing in a total government: a monopoly on force that prevents people from living in fear of each other because we’re all shuddering in fear of the Leviathan: the state and its police. 

The funny thing is that Hobbes is something of an ironist, and Arendt is aware of this. Despite philosophical arguments in favour of the state monopoly of violence, there is a current in Hobbes’ thinking that undercuts this. Within his conception of the social contract, a curious inversion takes place that would mutate this society of fear into a kind of public utopia of continual negotiation and compromise. Arendt works through the implications of the standard presentation of Hobbes’ philosophy in the above argument, but there’s a footnote where she describes how Hobbes’ secret democracy comes through. I paraphrase.

Footnote 36. The social contract that Hobbes describes is an agreement among all in a society to operate their politics to work toward satisfying all individual and familial private interests as best as the society can manage. Literally, the public interest is the satisfaction of private interests harmoniously and transparently within a community. The textbook version of Hobbes sees him advocating an over-awing state power that crushes private interests for the sake of overall public safety. Power descends from the state upon the people. The structure of his hypothetical social contract itself makes the adequate satisfaction of the various complicated private interests to be the primary interest of the public. Here, the desire for peace flows from the people to the institutions of power. 

That this paradox can exist within Hobbes fascinates me, and he may become a historical touchstone in my further university career as a researcher. 

Philosophical-Historical Triangulation: Sartre-Hegel, Research Time, 15/09/2013

Another part of our experiment, an inconsequential joke at Hegel’s expense for a Sunday post. 

Throughout one chapter of Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre returns repeatedly to different parts of his analysis of the French Revolution. He conceives of the Terror as a kind of institutionalized paranoid violence, the ability to expel anyone from the revolutionary community. A radically fast converter of friend to enemy. But remember Friday’s point about betrayal: the new enemy is always a brother and the object of love. The Terror is a social machine, constituted from the actions and relations of a community of individuals. Its purpose is to identify traitors, but it’s gone a bit wonky, and the people who themselves are the machine don’t catch on to what they’re doing wrong just yet.

He calls an institution with this power the Sacred, a term that clearly evokes religion and religious institutions. In a later chapter, he discusses membership in the Catholic Church as a phenomenon of giving someone the freedom to leave it. He discusses parents saying that they’ll baptize their child at birth, expecting him to decide for himself what religion to follow: Catholicism, or to be an atheist like his parents. Sartre has adopted the Hegelian tradition; he is writing a dialectical philosophy, after all. But here is a massive departure from Hegel which I think I should take seriously as I research this tradition of thinking about history.

For Hegel, a uniform religion which drove the personal, political, and social morality of the people was essential for a culture/state (by this point in Hegel’s conception of a culture’s development toward highest reason, the two are now synonymous) to achieve harmony among its parts and with reason. This struck me as being very important to Hegel’s thinking. Surely a dialectical tradition would have to follow the logic of the dialectic, following the unity of the people from a community to a culture to a state to a religion.

I make a hash out of a complicated philosophy, I admit it. But hyperbole aside, I think it’s a legitimate question when you research the development of philosophy, and do philosophy yourself, to ask what it means for one thinker to follow the tradition of another. How far can a thinker depart from his ancestor before we no longer call him an ancestor?

For one, religion is one of the penultimate developments of a society's harmony and uniformity with reason. For the other, religion is an evocation of institutionalized violence on social scales, and a simple lifestyle choice on familial scales. I certainly know which of the two visions I like best. But it's interesting to see the departures in figures that are considered, at least with this book, to be in the same tradition.

Philosophical-Historical Triangulation: Sartre-Agamben-Hobbes, Research Time, 14/09/2013

This weekend, I thought I’d try out an experiment. Some of you might remember a post earlier this week where I described, in a little footnote, how ridiculous it is to waste time composing a journal article showing the links between different philosophers across eras and cultures. The best philosophical works and corpuses are remarkably singular creations, taking the unique starting point of a cultural perspective and creating a complex system or assembly of conceptual tools and machines that really can’t be compared to the works or any other such figure, except in details so superficial that you can’t really do anything with them anyway.

However, it can also be fun. So today and Sunday, I’ll post brief meditations on some common themes that different figures from the history of philosophy have with the ideas Jean-Paul Sartre explores in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. These will mostly be fun comparisons, just around to provoke some curious thoughts. All these posts come with the caveat that the concepts of the actual philosophers I’m discussing are vastly more complex and intriguing than the brief, almost stereotypical accounts I give them here. Just the thing for a weekend.

One of the central stereotypes of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was that, without some overarching governmental authority, human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” I’ve even heard people use this phrase in casual conversation when I was doing my undergraduate degree. This is because, without a single party having a monopoly on violence, all members of a society can commit violence on each other, resulting in a paranoid social state where everyone is under continual threat, or at least the possibility, of being killed.

Friday’s post discussed the paradoxical fraternal love of revolutionary communities. One aspect of this ability to do violence to each other is that violence actually brings the group together, in contrast to the vision of Hobbes. Solidarity through mutual violence would work something like this. Each member of a revolutionary community has a right to commit lethal violence toward each other member (including oneself, perhaps) in the case of their betrayal of the community or the cause, or some other serious internal threat. Because every member has the right to kill every other member in this case, the threat brings the community together. The ubiquity of possible killers means that death is inescapable in the case of betrayal, so the revolutionary brothers are brought closer together by the legitimacy of killing each other.

The violence of killing traitors includes its victim in the community even as the community rejects him in murder. The murder of traitors is the limit case of the community, but the members never sever their relationship with the betrayer. Truly severing their relationship would mean that their killing of him was illegitimate; he would no longer have been a betrayer, simply an enemy. Killing a traitor would actually affirm the traitor’s inclusion in the revolutionary community. Precisely because he remains a brother, the community has the right to kill him. This notion is reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the sacred man. Such a person has had their humanity rejected by the community: his punishment is that anyone in the community is allowed to kill him at any time. But the rejected person is still included in the community, because if he were rejected in every sense, he would simply be an exile. Because the community can legally kill this person, this person remains part of the community. He’s a limit case, but still a member.

As far as the utopias project is concerned for the moment, a principle like this shows just how ridiculous and terrifying political violence, no matter the justness of the cause, really is.