Tuesday, February 28, 2006
(8:09 PM) | John Emerson:
Ethics and Surgery
In my recent review of McCumber the question of philosophy as a "second-order" discipline came up. McCumber thinks, and I agree, that philosophers should do first-order work, and write about ethics itself, rather than limiting themselves to teaching the logic or the grammar of ethics.
I agree with
Gerald Dworkin and Jason Stanley that moral philosophers are not "better than the average person in coming to correct answers about first-order moral matters".....The point is that expertise in critically examining your deliberations, though useful, is not the same as expertise in carrying out those deliberations, which (as Jerry put it, and Jason seconded) is likely to require "sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight".
While I agree that first-order ethics can not be scientized the way second-order ethics can, I don't think that the separation should be as clear as Velleman makes it. The presumption should be that a philosophical (second-order) ethicist should be at the very least bright normal in first-order ethics. Ethics is a practical discipline like surgery, and while second-order textbook knowledge of surgery has great value for first-order practitioners, an autonomous second-order textbook-only science of surgery, uninformed by experience, would be a monstrosity. Second-order ethics should be a handmaid of first-order ethics, and since ethical behavior is not a difficult kind of performance (as in music or sports) of which some people are incapable, second-order ethicists should be expected to have "expertise" at first-order ethics too. And just as surgery is usually taught by the case-study method, ethics should probably also be taught through the detailed examination of a range of actual cases, starting with the routine and moving toward the difficult.
In sports there are a few wheelchair-bound coaches, and there are many excellent coaches who were not great performers. But ethical behavior is not a special skill, but something which is expected of everyone. Velleman's formulation seems to leave open the theatre-of-the-absurd possibility of Gandhi taking an ethics class taught by the Marquis de Sade, and flunking.
(3:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The American Academy of Religion
Does anyone want to try to come up with a paper session for the next AAR? I don't have any real ideas for a topic, nor do I have any idea how one would even go about putting together something and proposing it or how much chance we would have of being accepted. I just know two things:- I just got an e-mail saying that the deadline for next year's CFP has been extended to next Tuesday at midnight.
- It would be really efficient if Weblog affiliates could all meet while at the same time making a huge splash in the scholarly world.
(12:10 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tuesday Hatred: Curriculum Vitae of the Other
I hate it when people don't remember stupid jingles that I remember. (For instance: "Give a hoot / don't pollute / Help keep America / Lookin' good!") I hate it when I feel like I'm getting sick of coffee. I hate falling asleep on the couch when trying to read an unreasonably long book. I hate sitting up at the computer working on a proposal late in the evening, such that I won't be able to fall asleep. At the same time, having noticed that I am much better at staying awake when sitting at the computer than when reading, I specifically planned to do this proposal late at night to make sure that I wouldn't fall asleep too early. What I hate, that I do.I hate the equivocal use of the term "the other." On the one hand, "the other" is good. Yeah! I love the Other! On the other hand, "the other" is BAD! Boo! "Othering" is bad! Marking someone as "other" is bad! But wait -- I thought that we were supposed to respect the other in the other's otherness. Perhaps Luther had it right: "Here I stand, I can do no other."
I hate how long I sat and thought about whether that last pun sucked too much. I was well aware that it sucked -- it's just the degree of it that I wasn't sure about.
I hate trying to think of something that I can give up for Lent. Most years, I just figure that my life is too ascetical as it stands and that giving up one more thing wouldn't be good for anyone.
I hate that Scott Eric Kaufman wrote me requesting I help a friend of his find an Italian copy of Homo Sacer so she can track down what Agamben writes in the passage on page 108 which begins "the special proximity of werewolf and sovereign too." Scott's friend hates that she doesn't know what "special proximity" is in the Italian. I hate that this third-order acquaintance also demands help finding the Italian version of the last two sentences in the translation, which read: "The inevitable encounter with the ex-wife and the punishment of the woman follow. What is important, however, is that Bisclavret's final transformation back into a human takes place on the very bed of the sovereign." I hate the fact that Scott composed this poor ventriloquism himself and emailed it to me. I hate that he'd presume I'd publish it. Or possibly I hate that he tried to blackmail me into doing so.
Okay, anyway, if you guys have any information about that, you can comment or else e-mail Scott. Tomorrow afternoon or Thursday I might be able to check the Italian at the Joseph Regenstein Library, but if someone was able to do it before then, that would save me some time, which of course is very important.
I hate that the odds of my getting through the Latin book before the Augustine class starts are looking slim -- I'm on chapter 18 out of 40. I had a pretty good rhythm at first, but then I got into a vicious cycle where I got behind my self-imposed schedule and so started doing a lot of work all at once, then I started to put off working on Latin because I started to think of it as something that took a big time commitment all at once, &c. But my so-called "devotions" of reading Benjamin in German are quite manageable and have been very thought-provoking. Reading the small sections has really helped me to fine-tune my grammar skills by allowing me more leisure to look at it in detail -- but now I must say that I hate that the German Word Family Dictionary, which reportedly would really help me to work on the various roots and prefixes, is $60.00 used. I've put it on my wish list, though, so I'm sure someone will go over to Amazon and waste $60 so that I can have that.
I hate how much I still have to do before Wednesday morning.
I love the McElroy Family Experience.
(12:05 AM) | Matt Christie:
Animals entering the scene
Did you know...that some elephants are now painters? Elephants are mostly, but not all abstract expressionists, and apparently all left-handed, or whatever. This is a picture painted by an elephant.It is priced at $500, though sadly, the artist's cut will be only just enough on which to get by.
Monday, February 27, 2006
(3:03 PM) | John Emerson:
McCumber II: What should philosophy be?
My first piece on John McCumber’s Time in the Ditch (Northwestern, 2001) mostly dealt with McCumber’s theory that Cold War pressures led to the triumph of analytic philosophy. McCumber also made some substantive criticisms of analytic philosophy. I am going to pick up a couple of McCumber’s criticisms which I found to be especially valuable, and add a few related criticisms of my own.First, I think that philosophy should be a first-order discipline:
In other words, ethicists should write ethics, and not just meta-ethics. Philosophy should try to be the most inclusive, most comprehensive, most useful, and best discussion of whatever it is it studies – and I say this in full awareness of the fact that this would be a never-ending, Sisyphean task. Somewhere in the university people should be studying ethics itself, and I say that that place should be the philosophy department.“Philosophy, as a second-order discipline, was to reflect the nature and
conditions of that enterprise, whose validity…. was simply assumed. The
confinement of philosophy to such second-order inquiry was also carried through
in ethics. Philosophers of the day were not to take ethical stands or give moral
advice but simply to reflect on the meaning of ethical terms….” (McCumber, p.38).
Second, philosophy should be more than the search for truths. McCumber (p. 41) cites Richard Hofstader: “The meaning of intellectual life consists not in the search for truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.” Philosophy, in other words, should always have an ear out for questions, whether or not they can be immediately, or ever, answered. But this search for questions should be guided by larger concerns: analytic philosophy is too good about inventing far-fetched hypothetical questions for the sake of proving or disproving some particular point, and not good enough at figuring out which major questions most need to be addressed. (Philosophy as questioning: Michel Meyer).
Third, philosophy should be constructive, or at least should allow constructive thinking on the Deweyan model. A constructive idea cannot be a truth, because it talks about something which doesn’t exist yet. In this, as I think Dewey would say, analytic philosophy amounts to a revival of the metaphysics of "What There Is", and abandons the method of science, which consists of repeated experiments aimed at finding out what can be done. (A constructive or experimental science in human affairs, of course, should be normative, and rather than simply stipulating conventional values, it ideally should make the investigation of “values” part of its subject matter).
Fourth, philosophy (or some of it) should aim for comprehensiveness even at the cost of sacrificing rigor. The analytic and the synthetic movement both are philosophically and intellectually valid, and neither should be favored excessively. And again, scientists do work in both directions. A scientist working on a given phenomenon can either analyze it into its parts, or see how it functions in its larger context, and while most scientists work in one direction or the other, in most cases they need to have an awareness of both.
This point relates to a couple of other points. Aspiring scientistic studies tend to be very protective of their autonomy, to the point of becoming windowless monads. By contrast, there are no firm disciplinary boundaries in the self-confident scientific sciences. Any science can be relevant to any other science, and hybrid studies like biophysics or physical chemistry are quite normal and uncontroversial. Defensive sciences, such as analytic philosophy, economics, or almost any other social science, too often wall themselves off with definitions and stipulations -- to the point that they feel justified in ignoring analyses which come from other fields (notably, in the case of philosophy, the first-order normative discourses, as well as history in its concreteness).
A further problem with defining philosophy as a specialized technical activity is that the specialist is always a subordinate. The boss ideally supervises people who know their jobs better than he knows his, simply because specialists deal with specifically with particular well-defined and routinized topics. The boss, by contrast, has to know something about everything that the specialists do, and must also deal with anything else unexpected or problematic that happens to come up from anywhere. Thus, analytic philosophy’s decision to make itself a technical specialty, while it might possibly succeed in getting philosophy accepted as a science, really amounts to accepting a subordinate position and renouncing one of the claims that philosophy customarily made before 1950.
In turn, the renunciation of holism amounts to the renunciation of public philosophy. Philosophy used to be one of the main tools that intelligent, well-educated people used when they tried to make sense of the world. Meticulous technical discussions of minute points cannot function that way, and that’s what most of philosophy is. Even the rare more-comprehensive works of analytic philosophy are usually not usable as public philosophy, partly because of what seem to be deliberate attempts to make the writing unintelligible to non-specialists, and partly because the analytic framing of philosophical questions tends to miss the questions that most need asking.
Note that I am not talking about “popularization”, which usually means watered-down writing for less-smart, less-educated people, but “general philosophy” on the model of “general science”. For example, imagine three brothers with very broad, all of them eminent in their own fields: one historian, one biologist, and one philosopher. Imagine them deciding that each of them will write a book about their own discipline for the other two. “General philosophy” would be what the philosopher would write.
A final consequence of the absence of holistic philosophy is that the big decisions nowadays are made on the basis of philosophical gut thinking and hunches by committees comprised of economists, engineers, marketing and media experts, fundamentalist Christians, political consultants, military men, and politicians. There won’t be any philosophers there, and given the state of the biz, there aren’t many philosophers who would have anything to contribute there, or even anything to teach the members of the committee. The peculiar mix of technocracy and mass entertainment which rules our lives is in part a consequence of the present devastated state of philosophy.
(P.S. One criticism I've seen of my rants against analytic philosophy has been to say that the field has changed since I was last in more-or-less direct contact with it 15 or 20 years ago. I am open to suggestions as to which works of contemporary analytic philosophy would change my mind if I gave them a fair reading. Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell I already know about, and I don't count Toulmin as an analytic.)
(12:04 AM) | Anonymous:
Monday Picture Blogging: Traditional Cat Blogging
Due to a headache and busy schedule, I'll mainly let the cuteness speak for itself. I hope there is no overcorrection for anyone to deal with today.Where babies come from.
Mazie looking very Theotokos.
Pippin plotting the destruction of the world from the comfort of my lap.
I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.
Sid and Søren in a moment of peaceful interspecies mingling.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
(5:33 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Scattered Theological Thoughts
I'm reading Hans Küng's On Being a Christian -- a huge and hugely presumptuous book -- and this has spurred some thoughts. First of all, it occurs to me: if you are concerned that your particular branch of Christianity has declined into a kind of petty legalism and think that's a bad thing, just say that -- leave the Jews out of it. There is no reason why the Jews should be subject to critique for the failings of the Code of Canon Law, for instance. An empty ritualistic religion seems to be undesirable in itself, without any need to add, "because then you'd be like those damn Jews."Secondly, as regards "the historical Jesus": just admit it, you're making him up. Küng in particular seems to have an almost spooky knowledge of the historical Jesus -- for the good of humanity, he needs to reveal the time-travel method he used to go out and personally listen to the Sermon on the Mount. Hanging too much on the deeds and mission of Jesus seems to me to be really wrong-headed, for reasons I can't fully articulate. I know that many have critiqued the creeds for leaving Jesus's ministry out, and I can see what they mean, but I ultimately don't agree. Of course, all of my ideas are based on a more or less hallucinated version of early church history, and I'm not a Bible scholar so I'm not allowed to comment anyway -- but I think that just knowing he was born, that he died, that he rose again, that he was the messiah, is enough. He needs to be something of a cipher, something of a formal element.
Yes, part of the formal structure of the Christ event would be an opening of everything to radical critique, so that the (more or less artfully concealed) attempt to father one's own critique of culture on Jesus is moving in the right direction -- but I'm just not satisfied with the argument from authority, ultimately. Take responsibility for what you're saying, for your opposition to the authorities -- don't be a coward who says, "Oh, well, I'm just sharing with you the results of the finest and most recent historical scholarship...." It's okay to be a smart-ass and say that just to piss people off (if you're conscious of what you're doing), but it's not okay to disavow your own convinctions and claim to be serving the mere facts. Take responsibility.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
(10:15 AM) | Anonymous:
Being and Event Reading Group: Week 2 (pp. 60-120)
Just some notes and comments on the reading:Meditation 5 To pick up a theme from last week: notice that the axioms do not make a claim about the existence or not of being. They are "completely compatible with the non-existence of anything whatsoever," (62) such that even those storied ultra-Humeans may have a place at the table. But if there is being, if there is presentation, the axioms of ZF are meant to be the rule by which it is presented. Interesting that Badiou does not appeal to the doxa that "of course there is being," but affirms the presentation of being indirectly, by affirming, first, "the unpresentable alone as existent; on its basis the Ideas will subsequently cause all admissible forms of presentation to proceed." (67)
Meditation 6 This section follows Aristotle almost all the way through - identifying void not with the atomist universal milieu (and hence not with the modern Cartesian sense of space), but with the question of natural situation (rocks fall because the ground is their natural place, remember). There's the rather shocking discussion whereby Aristotle allows that void might be "the matter of the heavy and the light as such," and then that matter is "in some manner a quasi-substance." Void thence as almost-being. Any Scholastic readers are hereby invited to get all philological on us at will. Badiou gives Heidegger credit (70) for making this kind of examination of Aristotle possible; for at the very least some decent cites, see my paper from last fall on Heidegger and maths.
Meditation 7 The discussion at pp. 86-89 - a defense of the two claims that the void is a subset of any set and itself possesses a subset - is of particular interest because it defends the introduction of the void into the notation with more attention than even the textbooks provide. Typically, we learn that the power set of A (where A = {1, 2, 3}) is just {{ }, {1}, {2}, {3}, {1, 2}, {1, 3}, {2, 3}, {1, 2, 3}}, or A, { } (the null set or void), and all the combinations of A. The null set satisfies the axiom, so it's included. Badiou gives a nice demonstration of this deduction, and this is a wise move since he derives so much (everything hereafter, you might say) from the excess of inclusion over belonging.
Meditations 8-9 Nine is a demonstration in politics of the principles of eight, is interesting, and if anything needs de-emphasizing. It's just an example: the claim that Badiou's is a "philosophy for activists" only holds if we ignore his fairly strenuous effort to dissociate philosophy from its four conditions. So where the notion of the state of the situation is introduced, we read that this notion has [only, I say] "a metaphorical affinity with politics" (95). Eight is crucial for the introduction of the difference between presentation (belonging) - where elements of the situation are counted as one - and representation (inclusion) - where presentation itself is counted. Also, we meet the normal, excrescent, and singular multiples which, provocatively enough for any phenomenologist, are "the most primitive concepts of any experience whatsoever." (100)
This week is technically supposed to take us through 10 as well, on Spinoza. But who has the time?
I've added a section on Spinoza. -APS
Meditation 10 Badiou's Spinoza, represented through the language of set theory, is the creator of a philosophy that "forecloses the void" by assuring each count-as-one through the metastructure of what he calls God or Substance (113). For Spinoza the finite of causality always refers back to the finite and not to the infinite origin of causality. It is here that Badiou makes a potentially helpful statement on the void, "The rift between the between the finite and the infinite, in which the danger of the void resides, dos not traverse the presentation of the finite (117)." Or, in other words, a supreme count-as-one (God or Nature) may suture both the state of a situation and the situation itself, it will still not annul the excess of inclusion over belonging (which is the errancy of the void) (120). Badiou says that Spinoza's "infinite mode" is this naming of the void, thus showing that Spinoza has failed to foreclose the void.
(8:43 AM) | John Emerson:
John McCumber's "Time in the Ditch"
Time in the DitchJohn McCumber
Northwestern, 2001
McCumber’s book includes a history of American philosophy up until 2001, a criticism of analytic philosophy, and proposals for what philosophy should be like instead. I have my own ideas on the third point, but much of what he says on the first two points meshes with my own opinion.
The red meat here is McCumber’s claim that analytic philosophy became dominant in the American university in part because of McCarthyism. During the Fifties the various sorts of accusers seemed to have especially focused on philosophers, and a number of careers were ended. Because analytic philosophy was politically innocuous, it was less dangerous and became more attractive both to individual graduate students and to departments.
I would change McCumber’s emphasis slightly. First, the primary target was not Marxism or Communism, but politically engaged pragmatism of the John Dewey sort. (Many of the analytic philosophers were politically left, notably the logician Irving Copi). Pragmatism is America’s main indigenous contribution to philosophy, and before 1950 it had been a powerful if not a dominant influence in the American philosophical world; but after 1950 pragmatism almost disappeared. Pragmatists differed from analytic philosophers (some of whom were pragmatists in some abstract sense) by their willingness to involve themselves, as philosophers, in social issues and social movements. (Similar takeovers led to the marginalization of the study of political economy and of the institutionalists in economics, the disappearance of the tradition of C. Wright Mills in sociology, and the rise to dominance of the Straussians in political theory). Pragmatists were public philosophers, and analytic philosophers weren’t, and for me that's the big quiestion.
Second, while I think that the negative impact of McCarthyism was important, at least during the early stage, after a certain point positive incentives did all the work. After political neutrality was written into the work-rules of the profession, aspiring philosophers stepped into their roles without the awareness that anything was missing. Those who were interested in the kind of things analytic philosophy did would enter the field, while those who were not went elsewhere. For those who entered the field, philosophical engagement in politics had been written out of their job description from the start – it was no longer a personal choice, and if they wanted to, philosophers could still continue their political activities on their own time. (A 45-year-old philosopher of today entered college as an undergraduate in about 1979, when analytic dominance was already well-established).
A second point of McCumber’s is that analytic philosophy has dominated the field through an institutional arrangement which gives control of the whole profession, ultimately including hiring, to about sixty professors at top universities. (In this he follows Bruce Wilshire: Fashionable Nihilism, SUNY, 2002.) His argument looks good to me, though not everyone agrees, but I think that it can be somewhat expanded.
What’s ultimately is at issue is jobs. Philosophy is proud of having become a profession, and professions are defined in terms of the kinds of qualifications they require for hiring. Analytic philosophy dominates philosophy to the extent that it controls hiring. There are still non-analytic departments, but they have trouble placing their graduates in jobs, since they are (more or less by definition) low-ranking departments. McCumber mentions that deflationary forces on the profession over recent decades mean that almost all hiring comes from about twenty top schools, almost all of which are analytic, so that the minority tendencies can only place students in departments they themselves control. (He also mentions a pluralism revolt led by Wilshire around 1980, but seems to feel, as does Wilshire, that this revolt was not very successful).
This sounds like a cynical, quasi-Marxist smear, but it’s just a consequence of professionalism, and their professionalism (on a scientific model) is something that analytic philosophers are proud of. (Leiter’s Philosophy Gourmet Report makes it pretty clear that philosophy is, first and foremost, a job).
Thinking professionally also helps us answer the question, “What is analytic philosophy?” Defenders of the status quo often deny that there’s any such thing as analytic philosophy, pointing to the diversity within the field. Quine even once denied that the term philosophy has any meaning at all – though the effect was to allow him to exclude people from philosophy who had till then been regarded as philosophers; he did not mean to say that philosophy departments could hire just anybody.
However, a non-trivial extensive definition of "analytic philosophy" can be given simply by listing a handful of teaching lineages, and it is also easy to define by exclusion and list a very large number of philosophers and schools which are just plain not analytic. (Of course,some of these schools barely exist any more, and the non-analytic philosophers driving taxis can hardly be called professionals, and thus are not philosophers any more.) Analytic philosophy has a definable inside and a definable outside, so we can say that it exists.
(More later)
UPDATE:
Dominic Fox Murphy and the mysterious "kmbjttt" have made a number of points in the comments to which I will eventually respond in a new post. There are a few points which can be dealt with immediately.
I think that McCumber made a mistake by stressing McCarthyism per se as much as he did. Overt McCarthyism was only one of a number of positive and negative incentives driving the analytic takeover of philosophy. Included among these, of course, were legitimate philosophical arguments, as well as other non-philosophical motives besides anti-Communism and fear of McCarthy.
Analytic philosophers were included among the McCarthyite targets, and one of the philosophical supporters of McCarthyism was Sidney Hook, a pragmatist student of Dewey's. Thus, the lines were not as clearly drawn as I implied or presumed in my original piece here. However, one of the McCarthyite philosophers, Arthur Lovejoy, was a longtime adversary of Dewey's, and Dewey himself, who was at the end of a long life, did not support Hook.
One target of the investigations was Irving Copi, an analytic philosopher now known mostly for his work in symbolic logic. I think that it's reasonable to wonder whether Copi would have been so resolutely apolitical without the motive of fear.
And as I've said, the goal of the witch hunts was not to replace leftists with rightists, but to replace engaged public philosophers with technocratic specialists. Conservative ideologues weren't happy with the post-McCarthy university either.
Holbo on McCumber / Ogged defends McCumber /
Holbo responds to Ogged / McCumber defends himself
Thirteen cases of McCarthyism in philosophy, including at least six cases in which careers were ended
Pragmatism and the McCarthy Era (Link corrected. Piece by John Capps, Rochester Institute of Technology, 29th Annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy).
Review (not very favorable) of Wilshire’s “Fashionable Nihilism”
Bertrand Russell and the Cold War
Russell, Wittgenstein, and Hartshorne on Nuclear War
Friday, February 24, 2006
(4:09 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Score yourself!
If you are learning from the Worst, what does that make you?Rate yourself according to David Horowitz's latest clown act. Scroll through the list of 'the Worst', give yourself 1 point for every name you readily recognize, two points if you've ever read anything by or attended a lecture, panel, etc. with one of these professors, and four points for every one you've had a class with (not cumulative - so if you know, have read, and have had a class with Cornell, only give yourself 4 points, not 7).
I come in at a measley 24.
(12:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Image of God
I don't have time to post, but I keep coming up against something that bothers me in my theological reading. Many liberal theologians (counting identitarian theologians among the "liberal" camp) seem to deploy the idea that humans are "created in the image of God" completely unreflectively, as though it were self-evident that once someone is recognized as being created in the image of God, salutary moral consequences will ensue. That is to say, once someone is recognized as being in the image of God -- or, parallel with that, as being "fully human" -- that person will be accorded all the rights and privileges to which human beings are entitled, first among them being "respect." Another way of putting this (among very liberal theologians) is that there is something "divine," perhaps a "spark" of the divine, in each and every one of this, and our negative treatment of each other results from failure to "recognize" said spark of the divine. We can't think of Christ as having a monopoly on this divinity, because it's essential to see divinity in every human being, because then salutary moral results will necessarily follow. And who could possibly be opposed to good moral results? QED: humans are all created in the image of God, are all divine in some respect.Right.
My only question is this: Where did anyone ever get the idea that in the modern world, we're all about showing "respect" toward the "divine" or the "sacred?" Where did people get this crazy idea that under the tenets of liberalism (broadly construed), our primary goal is to make sure not to violate anything sacred? Isn't it in fact exactly the opposite, so that the test case for the exercise of liberal rights is precisely to draw cartoons gratuitously insulting what Muslims (for example) take to be sacred? Isn't irreverence our most precious cultural value, the key to "edginess"? Why this big rush to redeploy the language of piety in service of some kind of political goal when the driving creative force in modernity is the critique and rejection of piety?
(I'm of the school that human beings do not "retain" some kind of "image of God" and are not "divine." Human life is not, or at least should not be regarded as, "sacred.")
(9:34 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: GWF?!
I confess that I had to read the intro and conclusion to Hegel's Faith and Knowledge for class this week and that I found it to be thoroughly opaque. I confess that I was whiny about an assignment that was actually pretty minor. I confess that I contributed to the destruction of the planet by driving to school Wednesday morning rather than taking public transportation. I confess that I'm getting tired of Zizek.I confess that I don't want to read Hans Küng's On Being a Christian for 20th Century Theology next week, primarily because my copy of the book (purchased used off Amazon) is moldy. I confess that instead of purchasing my textbooks at the Co-op this year and supporting an independent bookseller on whom I have come to rely, I bought them all off Amazon because I had a free trial Amazon Prime membership. The library is also looking better and better for books that don't seem crucial to my personal library, particularly since there are seven or eight good theological libraries in the neighborhood I go to school in.
I confess that I have a lot of reading to do this weekend, and I want to do a proposal as well. I confess that I am now a member of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.
I confess that The Weblog's traffic has grown slowly but steadily during my partial leave.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
(12:01 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
American Religious History (pt.1): the Enchantments of Labor
Last week, after fourteen months or so of reading in bits and chunks, I finally put away the final pargraphs of Sydney Ahlstrom's massive 1100 page standard in the field of U.S. Religious History: A Religious History of the American People. Ahlstrom, long time dean of the American Studies department at Yale, was influenced more than a little by Max Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, particularly through the work of Perry Miller who wrote a major work in the late 1930's arguing that all of American religious history has had to take its stand with, as a deviation from, or at least against the backdrop of Puritanism.Ahlstrom, finishing his work in 1972, spends the last pages of the last section of the book ('Toward Post-Puritan America') basically arguing that the 'turbulent sixties,' and especially the role of black religions in the civil rights movement, have put him in the awkward position of believing that everything he has written up until now needs to be rewritten in light of developments that signalled the end of the Puritan era. I'm going to do a series of posts on Weber and Ahlstrom, American piety and the enduring problem of capitalism. In next week's post I plan to do a longish review of the salient features of Ahlstrom. As a preface to this series, I thought I'd excerpt 'Rationalized Labor: the End of Enchantment?', a paper my wife recently finished on Weber and Madness and Civilization:
*************************************************************************
... Weber asserts in The Protestant Ethic that he means to offer a ‘contribution to the understanding of the manner in which ideas become effective forces in history.’ Weber argues that the emergence of modern capitalistic rationalization was impossible without a preceding radical ethical transvaluation that could make licit the appetitus divitarum infinitus (unlimited lust for gain). ‘To speak here of a reflection of material conditions in the ideal superstructure would be patent nonsense.’ Ideas do sometimes shape history, and Weber asserts that there is no better example than the crucial role that the Protestant notion of calling (beruf) played in the development of capitalism. Yet, Weber is quick to assert that it is not his intent to supplement ‘one-sided spiritualistic’ for ‘one-sided materialistic’ causal interpretations of culture—either would impede the pursuit of historical truth. ...
... Luther’s elevation of the concept of the holiness of a vocation was of vital importance to the development of capitalism, but as finally understood by Luther himself, it was not at all foreign to Catholicism’s understanding of the biblical texts from which the term was lifted. According to Weber, Luther and Catholicism’s understanding of beruf merely involved promoting an acceptance of the traditionalist class in which one is born, one’s station in life. While Luther may have tinkered with an alternative conception early on, such realities as his allergy to the peasant revolt firmly set Luther in the conviction that ‘in the concrete calling an individual pursued’ there resided ‘a special command of God to fulfill these particular duties which the Divine Will had imposed upon him.’
... The genius of Calvinsm was the way in which it married a rational moral order, a transcendent God, and absolute determinism in a way that was ‘much more modern’ than the milder doctrine of the Lutherans that still allowed for God to be moved by human importuning. Calling as understood by Calvinists became central to a thoroughgoing reorientation of ethical asceticism. Beruf no longer carried the meaning of accepting one’s place in the world but rather of discerning ‘one’s life in the world as a task.’ ... The idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God is critical to understanding a central mystery pursued by Weber ... How does it come to be that only in the West a particular form of rationalization develops, specifically Western economic rationalization (capitalism)? Central to Weber’s answer to this question is the assertion that only in the West was recourse to magical efficacy finally cut off. In Sociology of Religion, Weber writes, ‘no other view of the religious relationship could possibly be as radically opposed to all magic, both in theory and in practice, as this belief in providence.’
At face value this is a strange claim to make. Why would belief in an all-powerful God result in the expurgation of magic from the world? Weber’s answer has been so influential that it simply seems natural. Weber’s Calvinist, in perhaps the most brilliant and counter-intuitive move in cultural history, works because all efficacy of works is denied him or her. Weber argues that when the ideal of a provident God had been completely rationalized, humans began to live in a strange world wherein any importuning of God is vain. ... The Calvinist work ethic, therefore, is derived from the stark proposition that works are not efficacious for one’s salvation. Still, while works cannot produce salvation they can serve as a sign that one possesses salvation. ‘Thus however useless good works might be as a mean of obtaining election … they are nonetheless indispensable as signs of election.’
... At a couple of crucial moments in Weber’s history of thought in the West, the doctrine of predestination serves as a midwife for a radically new way of being in the world, a completely new ethics. The first moment arises insofar as predestination was crucial to the elimination of magic from the world, a phenomenon that Weber elsewhere terms ‘disenchantment’: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.’ Disenchantment opens the way for economic rationality and scientific rationality for we ‘no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, …[t]echnical means and calculations perform the service.’
Almost simultaneously, stark determinism proves critical insofar as it midwifes a distinct way of being in the world, a way of being Weber calls this-worldly asceticism. Luther had rejected the value of monastic life for the Christian. He had argued that such a withdrawal from the world was actually a sin against brotherly love. Nonetheless, each believer was to be a priest called to do God’s will in this world and to live a life of ascetic self-renunciation. With Calvin’s strict determinism and theology of a God who could not be swayed by confession or ritual, Luther’s this-worldly asceticism became a totalizing, methodical, and rationalized ordering of human life. And, with the triumph of Calvinism in critical sectors of the West (namely, England, Holland, and above all else, America), the worldly ascetic became the driving, bourgeois force behind the unparalleled rise to prominence of capital.
... All of this, however, almost inevitably raises a question for those of us living in a world far more secularized ... than even the world in which Max Weber lived and wrote. If bureaucratic capitalism requires for its sustenance individuals who feel called by God to bear the cross of carpal tunnel, why does capitalism persist in a world no longer under the spell of Puritanism?
... While Weber’s available answers to a proposed post-Puritan query are quite helpful, they remain incomplete in certain critical respects. Does work really no longer bear with it a magical necessity along the line of ritual? Is it true to say that work is disenchanted, completely rationalized? Furthermore, what are we to make of capitalist participation by traditionally Catholic sectors of the population in the West? While there are other tantalizing hints in Weber’s work, for a more satisfactory answer to the question we must turn to ... Madness and Civilization, especially insofar as that work relentlessly pursues the genealogy of those who make up the underside of capitalist reason.
... Foucault himself has suggested that he purposely avoided naming those with whom he was most in dialogue or debate, and this because he distrusted the wisdom of open polemics. It may well be the case that Weber is one of Foucault’s silent dialogue partners in Madness and Civilization. ... For Foucault, it is not at all insignificant that soon after the Reformation, all those who did not work began to be institutionalized, initially without regard to the variegated reasons for their lack of labor. While it seems evident that Foucault learned a great deal from Weber, it is also the case that there are a couple of crucial differences, two of which may help us to resolve questions posed at the end of the preceding section. Most important of all, Foucault understands the situation after Protestantism to be one in which enchantment is not banned to the periphery by a view of divine providence. Rather, ancient views of magic and ritual are reinvested into labour itself. At the heart of discerning this new enchantment of labour is the reconsideration not of those who prove by their thriftiness that they are elect, but rather those who by sloth prove themselves to be reprobate.
... Foucault comments that in the new moral order created post-Reformation, Sloth replaces Pride as the chief sin: ‘idleness is rebellion—the worst form of all, in a sense: it waits for nature to be generous … as in Eden, and seeks to constrain Goodness.’ ... In such a moral order charitable giving is no longer a demonstration of love. It has been ripped from the moral universe in which giving is understood ‘mystically,’ no longer does the saint give the shirt off her own back in order to be joined with the divine. Instead, as Weber argues in keeping with his disenchantment thesis, charity becomes a ‘totally rationalized pursuit, and its religious significance was therefore eliminated or even transformed into the opposite significance.’ Moreover, Weber argues for the disenchantment of charity in spite of the fact that it sometimes takes the form of ‘dressing institutionalized orphans in uniforms reminiscent of fools attire and parading them through the streets of Amsterdam to divine services with the greatest possible fanfare.’ Foucault, on the other hand, is quick to point to rituals such as parading orphans as fools to illustrate not the disenchantment of the moral universe but of its re-enchantment. ... The reason for the special place for sloth in the new moral universe according to Foucault is in part because work is by no means rationally disenchanted.
In the classical era labor lost the idea of a productive capacity and was vested with a power of ‘moral enchantment.’ As Foucault describes it, ‘Produce and Wealth were not to be found as the terms of a dialectic of labor and nature.' ... Instead, in the classical era labor acquired the new ritual of the clock: work was to be methodical and continuous. Foucault argues that this was a sign of the new enchantment of labour. It was no longer laboring productively that mattered, but laboring continually. Foucault quotes Calvin to the effect that ‘we do not believe … according as to men will be vigilant and skillful, according as they have done their duty well, that they will make the land fertile, it is the benediction of God which governs all things.' Once labor has taken on a new moral enchantment, humans no longer receive the blessings of the land by wise work but by a continued diligence in toil all the while hoping that God will show signs of his nevertheless undeserved favor.
... Foucault is sensitive in a way that Weber is not to the way in which a Calvinist view of labor itself gains some of the magical power that Weber believes to have been banished from the world by determinism. While Weber takes it that placing a wedge between works and any possibility of obtaining God’s grace finally opens the way for a rational view of the world, Foucault alternatively sees the loss of something really rather rational – that part of traditional religious understandings of the world which views works as having a productive capacity.
... It must be admitted that The Protestant Ethic itself provides a good deal in the way of resources to answer the questions posed in this paper regarding what happens in a post-Puritan world. In present times, Weber argues, ‘religious asceticism … has escaped from the cage’; it has taken on a new, worldly form, absolutely essential to our modern economic ethos. However, capitalism needs this religious foundation no longer. It is able to be carried on by the sheer force of material factors as mundane as the world’s supply of fossil fuels and by the inescapable bureaucratic structures originally developed by loyalist, whether witting or not, to the Puritan cause. Yet, Foucault’s account shifts the emphasis ever so slightly from the subjectivity of the religious ascetic to the question of the structure of a moral universe. For Foucault what the Protestant ethic brought into the world was not a disenchanted moral order but a new one in which ‘moral obligations are attached to civil law.’ Cites of confinement like the asylum, the poor house, and the prison exhibit a new strategy of power, a strategy of power that only makes sense in the new moral universe created by Protestantism but carried forward as well by the Counter-Reformation. Foucault takes us into the present in a way that allows us to see where the new moral boundaries of our communities lie – for the middle-ages, sickness and death with leprosy; for the classical era, a fear of sloth and madness; for the nineteenth century, the newfound alarm of economists like Malthus who feared (echoing Calvin) that the land will someday spew us all out. In each instance the moral purity of the community has to be protected. In many ways the experiments of the poor houses and asylums were the first strategies of a new, biopolitical way of maintaining life. ...
... Foucault’s attention to those madmen and others who refuse to be swept up in labor’s power puts a new spin on Weber’s thesis concerning Protestantism and the triumph of capitalism. Work itself is our new religion, replete with all the magic, ritual, and exclusions of traditional forms of religion. Those who play by the rules of work are healthy, wealthy, and wise, while those who spurn the charms of labor are chastised, excluded, a thorn in society’s flesh, and, finally for Foucault, prophetic.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
(4:41 PM) | Brad:
I Get Letters!
Today, in the absence of wanting to do anything that resembled work, I read old email. Ah, the treasures one can find -- such, a a distraught email friend in Glasgow. Upon re-reading it, it reminded me of all that is wrong with the life of a postgraduate student, but in being so wrong and elicting so much angst and worry, and perhaps nearly-violent anger, we are jolted back into an intense awareness of life, versus the sedative daze that encompasses most of our lives, especially the inevitable self-loathing that creeps in from time to time. (This same philosophy, by the way, was fully validated upon returning to the States, and being overwhelmed, in the bad sense of the term, by the overwhelming attempts at good public service. There is, in hindsight, nothing like truly being in the moment of one's rage at the shitty customery service on offer throughout the Old World.)I have a nasty red-wine hangover, and I feel all yucky, so I think I'm going to stay home and lounge around in my pyjamas (did you know that 'pyjamas' was spelled with a 'y'!?) until the throbbing and dehydration go away. Have a nice time, and give A. all my love.
The lecture last night was good, particularly because I weaseled my way into a free dinner afterwards. I was standing around drinking cheap wine (that's why I feel like shit, free wine + me = drunk) chatting with M. [ed. visiting lecturer from Yale Univ.] when J. [ed. Associate Professor in the dept.] said that they had an extra space for dinner if I wanted to go. Hmm . . . let me see . . . free dinner at a posh restaurant that I can't afford. Okay!!
We went to 'No. Sixteen' [ed. note: a fine fine restaurant right around the corner from my flat at the time] and had a delightful dinner, with more red-wine (not so cheap, still free). So, after consuming too much, I stumbled home into bed around 11. Sadly though, in my drunken state, my self esteem was seriously deflated.
At dinner, I sat at the table between A. B. [ed. A prick my friend and I have had to deal with far too often] and J., and across from J. B., P. and M. V. [ed. The first two are profs. at the univ., and the latter, again, is the visiting lecturer], thinking that I was about the dumbest person at the table. A. prattled on (as he does) about some philosophical thing that I nodded my head pretending that I knew what he meant, while P. responded with equally erudite philosophical / theological rebuttals. Meanwhile, J. would occasionally say something in French as a rejoinder, causing everyone to politely chuckle. P. mentioned something about Derek Parfit (my dialogue partner in my last paper) and J. encouraged me to respond (thanks, J.). Anyway, I sounded like a mush-mouthed moron, and think I did little to impress or inform the plump German, who I imagine will be my internal examiner at the Viva. Yippee Skippy.
The coup de grâce was when I was listening to M. talk about how great Yale was to teach at (indirectly convincing me that my original assumptions about the redundancy of doing a PhD in the States - with all its course-work, exams, etc. -- was pretty much unfounded), and at the same time overheard J. B. complain to A. and P. about how the UK PhDs have become devalued because Americans come here for the 'cheap and quick' PhD, which to many academics back in the states has become a 'joke'. That's what I want the leaving head of the department to be saying, yeah!
So, the free wine + over-my-head conversations + Yale is a great school why didn't you go there -- oh yeah you didn't have the pedigree + facing my future that I have a 'cheap, quick' PhD that my potential employer will consider a 'joke' = 'I'm a big-fat-retard!' Thankfully, I'm feeling a little more stable now, but reeling from an assault to my psyche! In the parlance of the LSD culture I was reading about yesterday, 'I had a bad trip, man.'
Me -- the big-fat-retard . . . maybe if I work out more people will like me . . . I should learn a foreign language, that will impress people . . . if I get published, yeah, that's it, publishing will get me the big job . . . I should write more . . . I should be publishing all my musings, yeah that's it . . . maybe if I switch to a vegetarian diet, my health will be better and I'll have more energy to work . . . I should sleep less and work more . . . I'm too easy on myself, a harder regime would get me further . . . maybe I'll do another degree at the same time . . . I should go back to work and get a real job . . . maybe I should fulfil my dream to be a potter . . that's it, find an art that only I can do, and then I'll be special . . . no, my shit would suck, just like everything else . . . maybe I'll . . .
Now, as with all stories, there is more to be said about this -- namely, the dirt I have on the visiting lecturer, which made our hero in this email much happier to hear; the fact that the current level of my indebtedness to the U.S. Stafford Loan program indicates that this degree o' mine is anything but 'on the cheap'; not to mention my well-articulated, yet ambivalent, dislike for academia in general -- but it's not nearly as interesting and life-affirming as my friend's self-hatred.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
(9:04 AM) | Anonymous:
Letter From a Radical Theologian
Friends,Having begun Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, and before becoming wholly immersed in his exegesis of the Apostle’s Creed, I am impelled at this stage to record my ironic apprehension of the good cardinal or pope as being a "death of God theologian." No one can open this book without immediately becoming aware of the ultimate importance of the year of its publication, 1968, as one is initially given a reprisal of the book by its author written in 2000, calling attention to the year 1968 as a time of ultimate nihilism, when an abyss of nothingness was at hand, and everything changes as Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is realized in our midst. This is the context in which this book was written, and one accounting in large measure for its deep impact, and even if Ratzinger can say that he is writing in the spirit of Karl Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism, a radically new world is here at hand. Not even Rahner was open to our nihilism, and at that time in the world of Catholic theology only Teilhard was open to nihilism, and Teilhard has had a real impact upon Ratzinger, but virtually none upon other major Catholic theologians. It is well known that Ratzinger reacted very strongly against 1968, but this is commonly associated with the student radicals of that period, whereas his own book makes it overwhelmingly clear that he was most deeply responding to a new and ultimate nihilism. And to judge by the prefaces of the book, his understanding of nihilism is far deeper in 2000 than in 1968, leading one to surmise that Ratzinger has reflected more deeply on nihilism than any other Catholic theologian, which I suspect is the deepest ground of his conservative and even reactionary theological turn.
It is remarkable how few are aware of the possibility that it is a new and comprehensive nihilism that has been the deeper ground of our new conservative theological world, just as it is also fully possible that it is a reaction against such nihilism, even if only an unconscious one, that is deeply responsible for our new conservative political world or worlds. The truth is that very few among us have a serious understanding of nihilism, and there is no critical agreement today upon the meaning of nihilism, indeed, there is not even a good book on the subject, with the inevitable exception of Book One of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. Yet Ratzinger does have a truly astute understanding of nihilism, and in Introduction to Christianity he can allow this to set the stage for a new investigation of the Christian faith, almost reminding one of the young Luther, and particularly so as Harnack presents him in the final sections of his History of Dogma. We are want to forget that Ratzinger is a deeply German theologian, and one who has inevitably been affected by a uniquely German philosophical theology, which is our only truly modern philosophical theology, and perhaps most modern in its ultimate enactment of the death of God. All too significantly many of Rahner’s opponents have found such a philosophical atheism in his work, just as conservative Thomists find it everywhere in modern philosophy, as marvelously enacted in Cornelius Fabro’s God in Exile. Of course, Barth, too, had a deep understanding of modern atheism, and it is not only at this point that Ratzinger can be associated with Barth, but also insofar as each have battled so fiercely with uniquely modern expressions of religion. This is most manifest in Ratzinger’s assault upon Liberation Theology, for this is not only an attack upon a Catholic expression of Marxism, but also an attack upon a radically independent form of faith and community, one setting itself against the Hierarchy of the Church, and even against all hierarchy whatsoever. Now it is just in a nihilistic or radically atheistic context that an overwhelming need of hierarchy looms forth, one not only creating the radical hierarchies of modern totalitarianism, but profoundly affecting all institutions, and most clearly so the Catholic church.
Ratzinger is the first pope who is a professional theologian, or a major theologian, and one who theologically eclipses virtually all of his theological critics, so we can expect to witness gnats battling an elephant, which hopefully will lead the Catholic world to take theology far more seriously than it now does. To judge by his first encyclical we can expect Benedict XVI to be fully responsible theologically as Pope, and there is a particular power here insofar as this is a theological response to an abyss of nihilism, one that John Paul II attempted to articulate, but was unable to do so. But given our comprehensive ignorance of nihilism, we cannot expect astute responses to this Papacy, or even an appreciation of an ultimate battle that may well now be waged. One is reminded of a story that Ratzinger tells in the opening of Introduction to Christianity: a traveling circus in Denmark catches fire, the manager sends its clown into a neighboring village, where he screams for help, but the villagers think that this is only a circus performance to lure them to the show, and despite the clown’s weeping they can only laugh at him, until finally the fire engulfs the village, and everyone perishes. Obviously, Ratzinger associates himself with this clown, and this could even be an image of his Papacy, for there is an apocalyptic sensibility in this pope which is rare, and also an astute sense of an absolute abyss looming within and beneath us, and one that inevitably must explode, so that the deepest duty of the Church is now to prepare for that explosion, and to provide sustenance against it. Ratzinger is known for preferring a far smaller but far stronger Church, here one can sense the impact of Kierkegaard, but his commitment to orthodoxy is not that common one which appears about us, it is far rather a commitment to a new orthodoxy, and one occasioned only by an absolute crisis.
Perhaps the clearest analogy to this crisis is the Augustinian crisis in the ancient world, then a world was clearly coming to an end, and one demanding a truly new theology, Augustine created such a theology, and thus made possible not only Western Christian theology but a Western Christian world. Now we can expect no such miracle from Ratzinger, but is it possible that he is now in position to initiate such a transformation, and even to give it an institutional foundation? For there surely has been no previous pope with such a sense of an ultimate crisis that is a theological crisis, one profoundly uprooting us in our deepest foundations, and therefore ultimate challenging our deepest faith. At the beginning of his first Preface to Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger remarks that the Christian faith is enveloped today in a greater fog than at almost any earlier period of history, and this not simply because of a comprehensive watering down of faith, but because of a contemporary faith hiding a complete spiritual vacuum. Apparently no other Catholic theologian has such a deep sense of this vacuum, so that in his opening discussion in this book of belief in the world of today, he can speak not only of the power now of unbelief, but of the bottomless abyss of nothingness that now can be seen, and even seen as he observes by our saints themselves. This can induce him to initiate an apparently new theology, one in which God is essentially invisible, and while he speaks as though this is simply Biblical theology, the Biblical world or worlds surely did not know a bottomless abyss which is an incarnate abyss, and thus inevitably drawing forth a truly new or absolute invisibility of God. This is very close to Kierkegaardian language, and truly distant from traditional Catholic language, to say nothing of the whole world of natural theology. True that world has long since perished, but Ratzinger knows this all too well, and knows it as no previous pope has known it, to say nothing of the common forms of Catholic theology. So Ratzinger may yet prove to be a revolutionary pope, even if he is revolutionary by establishing a truly new Catholic orthodoxy, an orthodoxy inseparable from an ultimate and comprehensive nihilism, and only made possible by that nihilism itself. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky have given us such an orthodoxy, but none such has yet arisen in the Catholic world, can we realistically expect such a gift from this Papacy?
(9:03 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tuesday Hatred: In every victory, let it be said of me....
I hate getting cheesy Christian songs stuck in my head. In particular, lately I have had the Christmas children's choir classic "Happy Birthday, Jesus" in my head, which occasionally segues into Michael English's breakthrough hit, "In Christ Alone." I hate that last week when I was in the Div School coffee shop, they were "ironically" playing a Boyz II Men CD, but my first thought when I heard it was, "Why are they playing dc Talk?"I hate that whenever I share this musical burden that is ruining my life, no one knows what the song "Happy Birthday, Jesus" is. Thankfully, I have found lyrics to the chorus:
Happy Birthday JesusIt is physically impossible for a child to sing those lyrics sincerely.
I'm so glad its Christmas
All the tinsel and lights
The presents are nice
But the real gift is you
Happy Birthday Jesus
Jesus I love you!
I hate that I got up late and Richard was able to beat me in the eternal race of hate against love.
I hate it when I'm unable to have a bowl of cereal in the morning. Even if I'm going to have a nice prepared breakfast, such as French toast, I usually prefer to have a quick bowl of cereal beforehand.
I hate burning my mouth. This seems to happen most often when I drink coffee I have purchased from a coffee shop. I also hate that the laws of physics dictate that it will cool down faster as there is less actual coffee in the cup, giving me the opportunity of drinking scalding hot coffee and disgusting cold coffee over the span of a single cup.
I hate that the only dream I've remembered recently was one in which I was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology.
I hate being out of envelopes -- although I do have plenty of 8½"x11" envelopes, so maybe I could just use those.
Last year, I got back a paper which the professor felt was a "forced reading," too occupied with questions of religion when that was not the main issue in the text of which I was offering a reading. Just recently, it struck me: I overemphasized religion in my reading because I was writing the paper for a course with the word "theology" in the title. The reason I hate this is because I regularly see the professor and thus am regularly tempted to explain it to him, but doing so would be stupid from every possible perspective. The main reason that I have even been thinking about that paper is that I have been hoping to write something new that would end up using a lot of the material from that one, but (and here's the hatred) I can't see how I could possibly write such a thing before July or so.
I hate the amount of intellectual overhead involved in being neurotic.
Monday, February 20, 2006
(12:15 AM) | Anonymous:
Monday Picture Blogging: My Cute Friends and the 1st World's Attempt at a Sweatshop.
So this week I'm going to bring you the good and the bad.First, the good:
This is a friend of mine since high school, Tiffany. She came to visit Hayley and I for the weekend and to buy paper for her bookbinding class. It's nice to have friends who still care about their personal appearance. I'm quite jealous of her jacket that she found in a thrift store back home in Princeton.
Now, the bad:
This is my personal work station at an undisclosed data entry company. I don't actually work for them, I work for a temp agency so that the data entry place can pretend I don't work for them thereby leaving the door open to kick my ass out without notice. Direct your attention to how blurry this place is. It's really like that! They do have free soda though, so, you know, we can all be fat.
This is what the stations look like right next to one another. Those tables are the same crappy tables you'll find in reception halls or Church gyms. I really, really hate this place and all that it fails to stand for.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
(3:49 PM) | Brad:
Waiting for the Synthesis...
From F. Fukuyama's latest offering in the New York Times Magazine.Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
So, to speak in bastardized Hegelian terms, if Zizek's Lenin is the thesis, Fukuyama's is the anti-thesis, where/what is the synthesis?
(11:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Womanist Question
I'm taking a course on Womanist and Feminist theology, and one of the points that womanists frequently bring up is that white women try to gloss over the real differences between black and white women's experience with a superficial appeal to "sisterhood." Since the two groups have historically been in such an unequal relationship, attempts at "sisterhood" seem to be just a way of assuaging the white women's guilty conscience.This dynamic has led me to wonder if there are any significant novels or films where the plot hinges on a close friendship between a black woman and a white woman. There are all kinds of artistic tributes to friendship between black men and white men, or at least some kind of partnership, but I'm really having trouble coming up with anything with female cross-race relationships. If there were no such cultural expressions, it seems to me that it would be significant.
I don't claim to be a self-contained cultural encyclopedia, though, so it's completely possible that I'm missing something obvious. Any suggestions?
Saturday, February 18, 2006
(8:30 AM) | Anonymous:
The laicity of axioms
Anthony raises two good questions: 1) whether use of mathematics as a discourse about ontology is similar to phenomenology, and 2) regarding the status of axioms in Badiou's system. I'll only take up the second point.Badiou admits only two points of pure decision: 1) the claim that 'maths is ontology' (although there are arguments and historical references made here in support, so maybe it's just an induction?); 2) the new occurs in being as an event - which amounts to assigning temporality and causality to the jumble of conclusions reached about sets (inconsistency, infinity, the possibility of forcing etc). Once induction #1 is made, and once set theory is selected as the mathematical language, axioms follow promptly - and not for any reason other than those that led Zermelo down that path in the first place.
Naive, intuitive - that is to say non-axiomatic - set theory, Cantor's original paradise, entered its post-lapsarian phase with Russell's paradox. Although he never stated them, all of Cantor's operations are said to be derivable from three axioms: the axiom of extensionality, the axiom of abstraction, and the axiom of choice. (Suppes 1960) The problem is with the second: simply put, it was too broad, too powerful. Instead of asserting the existence of sets unconditionally, Zermelo's axiom schema of separation makes the assertion of a particular subset completely conditional. Consider:
- (Ey)(Ax)(x e y iff p(x)) (axiom of abstraction)
- (Ey)(Ax)[x e y iff x e z & p(x)] (axiom schema of separation)
- (Ey)(Ax)[x e y iff -(x e x)]
- [y e y iff -(y e y) (taking x = y and instantiating)
- [y e y & -(y e y)], which is logically equivalent to (2), and contradictory
- (Ey)(Ax)[x e y iff x e z & -(x e x)]
- [y e y iff y e z & -(y e y) (again taking x = y)
But with the axiom schema of separation, things look different.
Although Zermelo's axiom schema of separation gets supplanted by Fraenkel's axiom schema of replacement, the important thing to note here is that the first step toward axiomatization developed directly in response to early paradoxes. So although, as Anthony points out, the assertion of axioms seems like some kind of unfounded, "faith"-based step, in fact in this case it is the non-axiomatic description (Cantor's use of an unformalized version of the axiom of abstraction) that credulously asserts the existence of sets that turn out to be contradictory, and the positing of an axiom is instead a step back towards the demonstrable, towards presentation.
(8:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Being and Event Reading Group: The First Meeting (1-59).
My hope for these weekly responses and discussion is that they will not merely be a mere repeating of Badiou's words. Surely we must learn to understand his vocabulary (and that of set theory), but I'm not going to shoulder the burden of re-presenting what it is we already read for the week and cannot hope to express it all. This is in the hopes of keeping this as informal as possible allowing Badiou's own pedagogy to stand or fall on its own with each individual reader, since there is no real instructor in this group (though surely Jared comes close, but I wouldn't want to demand the time neccesary from anyone).To begin, I must voice a complaint concerning the department politics of Badiou's rise in popularity. It seems that every book I've read by Badiou mentions that his thought reflects "philosophical rigour" and that "unlike many contemporary Continental philosophers, Badiou [...] writes lucidly and cogently making his work accessible and engaging." OK, we get it, he's not Derrida! He's not Guattari! Fuck, he's not Alliez (who, surely, is kind of an insane constructer of sentences)! It's really insulting that this has to be mentioned every time and concedes too much room to those who dismiss other French thinkers simply because, at first glance, their writing is difficult. Can we please stop bleating on and on about how clear his work is? For some of us, like me, mathematics is anything but clear. It's beyond mystical and will likely remain so.
Now to my own meager response to the section:
Badiou is very good at getting us to be more rigorous in what our words refer to. We are warned not to confuse ontology with being itself, for ontology is the presentation of presentation (7). So his controversial thesis that ontology is mathematics should not be taken to mean that being is reducible to mathematics, but that mathematics (specifically set theory) determines what is expressible of being qua being (8).
What is interesting to me here is the way that mathematics appears as a quasi-phenomenology. Certainly not in a Heideggerian mode, but Husserlian. I can’t go into a complete analysis of this here, but if you accept that mathematics is merely that which determines what is expressible of being qua being (and thus, does not speak for being itself) then you have something like a Husserlian noumenal and phenomenal that are not separated from one another as in Kant. So the question that immediately comes to mind is, what does Badiou’s system offer to thinking that phenomenology hasn’t already, in some form, offered? I hope to translate a bit from Alliez’s book later in the reading group (that should be embarrassing) where he basically says that Badiou and Deleuze are the two options after the end of phenomenology. At this point, however, I remain unconvinced that Badiou, for all the protestation he would surely have with such a charge, is not creating a phenomenology that replaces experience with mathematics (but isn’t that an experience, even if it is a consistent experience?).
My next point has to deal with Badiou’s hinging everything upon an axiomatic system. Now, as Badiou defines it, “an axiomatic presentation consists, on the basis of non-defined terms, in prescribing the rule for their manipulation (29).” Further he states, “It is clear that only an axiom system can structure a situation in which what is presented is presentation (30).” In other words an axiom system conditions ontology. This seems to be true (another axiom), but at the same time is not an axiom system beyond the demonstrable? So that the very conditions of ontology must be taken on something like faith? Is the axiom system not a piety? Of course, we know that Badiou is going to eventually talk about fidelity to the event (and thus the grand atheist will take part in a bizarre religious discourse), but for all the talk of Badiou’s extreme rationalism are we not ignoring that his system begins with its own leap of faith? I am here skipping over speaking of an individual axiom, but surely we should speak about the axiom of compositions (There are only multiples of multiples.)
There’s quite a bit we can talk about in these few chapters. I think it may be best to skip some of the issues brought up in his introduction, simply because they we will come across them again in later chapters. I have barely touched on the more interesting aspects of his thought, like his ‘recasting’ of Plato or his making the Void the proper name of being. For the latter I have not commented upon it because I am confused as to whether he has the right to name the Void as being and still claim to be presenting presentation through mathematics.
Friday, February 17, 2006
(9:43 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Real State of Exception
[I don't want to be too cavalier in breaking my semi-hiatus, but this post has been building up for a long time. Since I am having trouble getting started on anything else this morning, I might as well put it out there on a weekday so that perhaps more people will comment on it.]In a democracy, the role of the people is that of sovereign -- that is, the people decides the state of exception. All discussions of "direct democracy," with substantially all citizens voting on substantially all matters, are a red herring, because they misidentify the essence of democracy as voting. The essence of democracy is not voting. It is that the people decides the state of exception.
Concretely, this means that the role of the people in a democracy is to demand that the state of affairs be changed and to shut down the country until such action is taken. The "proper" occasions for such actions cannot be legislated in advance, and the role of the people cannot be written into the constitution (if any) of the state.
Many state-forms are compatible with democracy, as long as administrative, legislative, and judiciary powers are dispersed to a substantial degree. For the majority of citizens to be required to attend constantly to matters of state administration would be not only cumbersome, but incompatible with personal freedom. The most appropriate means for the most important government officials to be selected is by a vote of the citizens, and indeed I cannot think of a more appropriate way for government officials to be chosen in a democracy, yet the essence of democracy does not lie in the practice of voting.
From these considerations, I conclude that the United States of America is not a democracy, nor is it exporting anything that can meaningfully be called democracy to Iraq or Afghanistan. This is because the people of the United States never riot, and when certain marginalized portions of the population do riot, their demands are never met. The peaceful, well-organized, polite protests in the lead-up to the Iraq War were a testament to the people's refusal to sieze sovereignty.
The people of the United States do not participate in politics -- rather, they are periodically consulted on the question of who will administer the empire. Since the people are generally poorly educated and are occupied with all-consuming labor in order to service their huge load of debt, such votes are now largely random, with their outcome determined not by some supposedly independently-existing "public opinion," but by the propaganda operations of the two wings of the technocratic class.
Were the right to vote suspended in the United States, one would hardly notice. Arguably, the only reason that right still exists at all is because its symbolic value is still relatively high, despite the continued efforts of the political elites to cheapen it by progressively eliminating genuine choice. Thus, paradoxically, the withdrawal of the right to vote would be the only plausible occasion on which the American people at large might be persuaded to take to the streets, such that one might theorize that the fetishization of voting as a practice is the primary obstacle standing in the way of the assertion of popular sovereignty.
Yet perhaps it is wise not to assert popular sovereignty in the face of the most powerful military apparatus in the history of humanity. Certainly during the Civil War, Lincoln would not have hesitated to use poison gas against his own people if he had had it available -- in the event of a popular uprising, we can expect no hesitation from our would-be King, heir to a political movement that has cultivated a deep contempt for leaders who capitulate before the demands of the people. But in the last instance, would Clinton have hesitated either?
(8:03 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Again: Friday Afternoon Confessional
I confess that I don't take the expiration date of milk as seriously as I perhaps should.I confess that I have jury duty on March 13, which is only for one day unless I get selected for a jury. I confess that I hope my pursuit of a PhD will make me an unsuitable jurist, at least for a very long trial.
I confess that I'm a little annoyed that I have to go to the post office for 2¢ stamps before I can mail my bills.
I confess that I've really sucked at chess lately.
This is more a prediction than a confession: I confess that once online dating becomes really widespread and the algorithms become more and more accurate, there will be a whole new series of neuroses wherein people beat themselves up because they can't even make the scientifically proven relationship work.
I confess that even though I don't want to clean up the spot where the psycho cat peed, I'm going to, because having a urine-soaked Amazon box in the dining room is decidedly uncool.
I confess that I need a new bookshelf. I'm already using the tops of both of my bookshelves as a makeshift shelf, and the beginning of the new semester has brought with it the dreaded horizontal stack.
I confess that I am feeling happier lately than I have felt in a long time, and it's a little worrisome.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
(5:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Some Random Remarks
This is going to be an extremely abbreviated "philosophical" or "theological" post.- It seems to me that Zizek is moving more and more in the direction of Walter Benjamin.
- It strikes me that one can best understand Agamben's rather enigmatic (and often frankly creepy) comments on pornography in the context of Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" -- a work that Agamben does not, if I remember correctly, ever cite in the books I've read.
- In the 20th Century Theology seminar, I volunteered -- somewhat at random -- to read Friedrich Gogarten's Christ the Crisis. It was refreshing, in the context of my usual reading, to have someone take Jesus seriously as a thinker (as opposed to Paul). In my opinion, this is a book that should be read, just in general.
- I plan to do my second dissertation on the concept of law.
- A Derrida survey like Caputo's Prayers and Tears, except from the perspective of psychoanalysis, would be very useful. Doubtless, in the seething mass of Derrida literature, such a survey exists, perhaps several, but I doubt they're as well-done as Caputo's, nor are they quite what I'm thinking of. I'd want something that could follow up on the discrete references to psychoanalysis in his works that aren't overtly "about" psychoanalysis -- Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas would probably be a good starting point for that.
- Last night while browsing in the Co-op, I came across Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History". It is part of Verso's apparent new strategy to publish very short books in hardcover and charge $30.00 for them. I don't feel I can support such a strategy, personally. I have, however, added the item to my wish list, which everyone is free to mock from whatever perspective they wish.
- If it weren't ridiculous, I would love to devote some serious study to Baudelaire. Someone who was so important to both Derrida and Benjamin can't be a total waste of time, and I think it would be funny if I turned out to be a theologian (or religious studies person, or philosopher of religion, or whatever the fuck I'm doing) who instinctively turned to Baudelaire in the same way that Agamben instinctively turns to Benjamin, for instance.
- I think that people who take disciplinary boundaries and questions of method very seriously in the context of the academic humanities alternately annoying or amusing. The way I see it, if I wanted to be doing science, I would be doing physics -- or, you know, another science. The only thing that disciplinarity and methodology seem to me to accomplish in the context of the humanities is bureaucratization, meaning a highly questionable parody of "meritocracy" (by which I don't mean to imply that "meritocracy" is ever anything but a parody of itself). This is not to say that I don't want to publish or go to conferences as much as is practicable.
- I don't think anything should be run like a business, even businesses.
- If it seems like I've mentioned Benjamin a lot in this post, it's probably because I'm reading the "Theses" in German -- more details are available here.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
(8:50 AM) | Brad:
A Departure from Shitty Protestant Theology
I've not really participated too much in the conversations elicited by Old's very provocative posts recently, re: cells and political action. This is mostly because any number of participants voice questions, elaborations and objections identical to my own. Perhaps I'm just lazy, willing to let others do the work of typing out cogent comments; or perhaps I have too much faith in others to do things for me -- but for the last couple of Thursdays, it's worked fine. And yet, what are blogging privileges on a blog not one's own if one does not take advantage of having the stage?So. First, a quote:
One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece against a bad world, of one even worse. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the same time the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another. With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoise, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual, also strengthened, perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love. (T. Adorno, Minima Moralia)
Although here Adorno uses the image of "family," this really needn't be restricted to bloodline. More generally, what he points to here is the necessity of a political action based in a relationship bound together by something more, or at least more intense, than simple resistance. This is, I suppose we might say, the problematic of political engagement, that it is neither simply a violent resistance to, nor even that it is a promise of a future relationship with, the existing order -- such being the case for so many resistance movements that they come become what they oppose (e.g., Sinn Féin, perhaps). Rather, perhaps even most fundamentally, engagement is a sensual / spiritual / emotional / etc. absorption in the present.
To me, this is precisely to key to approaching the points raised by Matt below. That is, is this absorption / engagement a truly present possibility, in such a way that love (to bring it back to Adorno) is the animating spirit of our resistance, be it transcendent or immanent (depending on your perspective), that allows real change to happen -- maybe even to the point that we could not dare or possibly imagine -- that allows our resistance to be more than itself? Or is this intensity that binds our "families", i.e., that of love, by its very nature, that which eludes our resistance, to the extent that we lose control of what we're engaged with, of resistance itself, of "the Party" and politics?
Or, alternatively, is there a way to unite the two perspectives? In such a way, for example, that the "family" exists as a means (presently) to pick up what remains of a system bound for its own (future) destruction? Is this, maybe, one of the values of religious liturgy and ritual -- that it resists, almost like judo (not to neglect the non-Western commenters), by not aggressively resisting at all? By following the force of an aggressor's movement not by just taking the punch and turning the other cheek, but by fluid, traditional movements and anticipations? (BTW, Anthony, doesn't this seem like Philip G.'s political program? That "awareness" won't necessarily save the world as it exists now, but that it its inherent value is in offering a new way of thinking and recasting whatever is left?)
I'm not sure.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
(10:37 AM) | Matt Christie:
More Groovy Street Theater
(Please relax dear Kotskodians, the Tuesday Love is right below. Indeed, there is love aplenty floating about. So forgive then, if you will, a few mild and mannered digressions.
(For the best commentary on these images you need only click here, here, here, and here.)
The title I got from Scott of course, and it references a blogfight that continues to rage on elsewhere. Sorry, Anthony.)
Following on from last week's post, and persisting, indirectly you might say, in an effort to connect the dots, I'd like to offer--oddly enough, die-hard Derridian (though hardly deconstructionista) that I am, and as the left-wing blogosphere currently gears up to capitalize fully on the latest metaphor and ridicule campaign--a rather apposite quote from Badiou. It comes in the preface to the very recently translated Metapolitics. Badiou has just outlined a certain, seemingly rather crucial "political trajectory" in France, one that he says "may be unfamiliar to an English, American or Australian reader." This trajectory is divided into four periods as follows: prior to 1965; the "red decade" from 1966-1976; the counter-revolutionary period 1976-1995; and then from 1995 up until today. It is from the description of this last period that I quote (from my own copy, and not Google's, though you may also find it there if you search within for any phrase from the following):
One of the singularities that I share with my friends from the UCFML (1970-85), is to have yielded nothing to the current of counter-revolutionary betrayal. Certainly, we have modified the intellectual framework of our political commitment from top to bottom. But we have done so by accepting the revolutionary past, and at a time when opinion is almost unanimous in considering it a deadly illusion.From 1995 (which saw the great strike and protest movement of December) to today, a slow and tortuous evolution has taken shape, which intersects dramatic reactionary phenomena (racism, hostility towards the Arab world, violent defense of Western consumer comforts, unchained Zionism...) with a progressive recovery, perceptible among youth (a renewed interest in the experiences of the 1960s, massive hostility toward American hegemony...). Of course, this progressivism is sacrificed by the disastrous alliance of economic reformism and the vain adventurism of 'movements', an alliance whose strange name is 'Other-worldism' [altermondialisme]. I hope this book will help to make sense of the impasse towards which the inhabitants of the immanent 'multitudes' of 'Empire' lead their followers. That being said, the fact that politcal recoveries are always weak and confused to begin with is the law of history. What counts is the future juncture--although for the illegal immigrant workers [ouvriers sans papiers] this is already a reality--between a new political thought and organised popular detachments. After twenty years of sombre reaction and fierce counter-currents, when merely standing firm was a difficult enough virtue, we find ourselves amid the vicissitudes of reconstruction. (xxxv, my emphasis)
Now, I'm not sure whether Badiou would place this preface among his explicitly "polemical essays" or not, but the stakes of his larger project do seem to emerge early on, and clearly, and yes quite seductively, in this book. I suppose my central question at this point would be simply: where does Badiou's conception of 'metapolitics' place him vis. a vis. Schmitt? (And is Badiou not also vulnerable in his certain fidelity to Althusser? Would I furthermore be correct in suspecting there will not be any serious engagement with either Specters of Marx or Politics of Friendship immediately forthcoming...?)
According to (the translator) Jason Barker's introduction, the concept of 'metapolitics' is necessary in order to gain crucial distance from both political philosophy and from direct, mundane confrontations with the State, to articulate that which is "...beyond the accepted limits of political theory, philosophical practice:"
The inspiration here is clearly Lenin, although Badiou is at pains to qualify any such attachment. Not only has metapolitics no interest in the ways and means of parliamentary democracy, its militant thoguht-praxis cannot take the form of a party. (Barker, xii)
Badiou's own definition is given from the very beginning:
By 'metapolitics' I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think 'the' political.
-April 1998 [first published in English by Verso, winter of 2005--way to be on the ball, translating industry]
In any case, it seems clear that Badiou is setting up an argument for a very specific sense of 'politics,' to wit:
The central operation of political philosophy thus conceived...is, first and foremost, to restore politics, not to the subjective reality of organised and militant processes--which, it must be said, are the only ones worthy of this name--but to the exercise of 'free judgement' in a public sphere where, ultimately, only opinions count. (page 11, my emphasis)
And:
It is clear, then, that what politics is the name of concerns [for Arendt and for Revault d'Allonnes], and only concerns, public opinion. What is overtly eradicated here is the militant identification of politics (which, for me, is nevertheless the only identification which can ally politics and thought).
As soon as 'politics' finds its sole rightful place in public opinion it goes without saying that the theme of truth is excluded from it. For Hannah Arendt, reader of Kant, as for Revault d'Allonnes, reader of both Kant and Arendt, politics is anything but a truth procedure. (page 13)
But perhaps we are now fast approaching the limits of blogability, not least of all as I am not the one to ask (not by a long shot, yet) about what Badiou's 'truth procedure' exactly entails. Hopefully this will have been a useful provocation or stage-setting post, regardless. And so something to be continued...