Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
Philosopher's Cognitive Empathy
“Traditionally, God’s necessity is not logical necessity but some kind of metaphysical necessity, or aseity. Unlike Hume, I don’t think this is a silly or incoherent idea, any more than I think mathematical Platonism is silly or incoherent. As it happens, I am not a mathematical Platonist, and I do have conceptual difficulties with the idea of metaphysical necessity. So in the end, I am not sure that the Christian God idea flies, but I want to extend to Christians the courtesy of arguing against what they actually believe, rather than begin and end with the polemical parody of what Dawkins calls ‘the God delusion.’”
"Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs?" The NY Times, Philosopher's Stone Blog
In Our Time on Solitude
“Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of solitude. The state of being alone can arise for many different reasons: imprisonment, exile or personal choice. It can be prompted by religious belief, personal necessity or a philosophical need for solitary contemplation. Many thinkers have dealt with the subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. It’s a philosophical tradition that takes in medieval religious mystics, the work of Montaigne and Adam Smith, and the great American poets of solitude Thoreau and Emerson.”
Melvin Bragg's In Our Time, BBC4 Podcast, "The Philosophy of Solitude," http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046ntnz
On Arendt and Loneliness
Towards the end of one of the seminars I taught on Jewish thought this past semester a student told a story, which seemed quite apropos to Arendt's conclusion to The Origins of Totalitarianism. They recounted the experience of struggling with heavy bags to find a seat on a train. As they passed by, each person turned away or pretended not to notice. The student wrestled through and eventually found a place to rest. Then a man from Peru made eye contact - a moment of recognition that led to a conversation. Just four weeks prior the man had been beaten to an inch of his life by thugs, destroying his guitar in the process. Yet, of all those in the crowd, he reached out to connect.
This example perfectly sums up Arendt's notion of loneliness. Unlike solitude loneliness occurs in the experience of displacment and dislocation from others. The paradox being that loneliness requires another person and is accentuated in what Arendt calls "the masses." Part of Arendt's enduring relevance is due to this common experience in cities and factories today. Furthermore, as was the case in Melissa Raphael's work on The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the moment of recognition is crucial to Levinas' notion of "the face." Even clearing the mud from another person's face can be redemptive if its aim is to recognize them as a human being anew and as an end in themselves. This is especially true when we find ourselves in situations where people are treated as mere things or dispensable beasts.
Arendt's conclusion to The Origins of Totalitarianism, focused on the link between loneliness, terror and ideology. As we discussed, she asked her readers to think in their experience, not just follow the cold logic of ideas. She encouraged communication between a plurality of human beings, not just those bound together by common appearance or history.
In many respects, I hope our class discussions this semester embodied those aims.
As it happens, the Blake Prize is on tour at Newcastle University's Art Gallery at the moment. Well worth visiting, and there is one piece in particular that echoes the seminar conversations that occurred this semester. In particular, Franz Kempf's "The Outrageous Has Become Commonplace," which was this year's winner for human justice and can be seen on the Blake's website along with all the others.
On Religion in Style Guides
“When The Atlantic was revising its style guide for the web a few months ago, my cubicle unexpectedly turned into a metaphysical brawling zone. Our house policy is to capitalize ‘God’ when it refers to the entity worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. (Other times, it’s not capitalized—for example, when writing about how I’m the ‘god of the office candy jar.’) In my opinion, this suggests a belief on the part of the writer: Capitalizing ‘God’ means he or she believes in the formal existence of a thing called god, so that name is capitalized like any other name. My boss disagrees. Neither, he says, does capitalizing the protagonist’s name from The Big Lebowski entail belief in the existence of the Dude. So we capitalize God... Perhaps the trickiest of all is the entry for Jesus, who is described as ‘the central figure of Christianity.’ The philosophical twist is in the pronouns; unlike prayerbooks or the Bible, which refer to him as Him, the AP instructs newspapers that ‘personal pronouns referring to him are lowercase, as is savior.’ If Jesus is in the news, he can be the ‘Son of God’ or the ‘Redeemer’ (both capitalized). But when it comes to pronouns, the AP says, he’s a ‘he,’ just like any mortal man.”
"AP's Style Guide for Religion, Metaphysics, and God's Existence" The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/1hnH36o
It is interesting in particular that the editors at the Atlantic had to negotiate the theological issues at stake in the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon regarding how to communicate the humanity and divinity of Jesus. The issue is humorously echoed in Steve Martin's "Atheists Don't Have No Songs."
On Peripatetic Thinking
“For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked. Most were able to generate about 60 percent more uses for an object, and the ideas were both ‘novel and appropriate,’ Dr. Oppezzo writes in her study, which was published this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.”
On Research
I'm sometimes asked why my research writing is dense and rather complex at times. I usually respond with an analogy. Some of the most complex math today sits behind that simple white box on Google's website. People like the box but rarely do the math. Like Schroedinger's quantum calculations, most people only know the paradox of the cat in the box.
So what's my box?
It's the classroom teaching in a university, which sometimes spills out into the public through open access seminars, public lectures and media commentary.
My job as an academic is relatively simple, I write and I teach. Said another way, research university staff work to create knowledge and transfer it to others. In the end, the transfer happens in the classroom and the public spaces where philosophy and religion are discussed. Just like Google's box, mine depends on the math in the background, which demonstrates how philosophical questions continue to haunt contemporary life.
Students like taking classes on philosophy of religion, because they implicitly recognize the impact of the various aggregates that can be grouped under that concept, e.g. beliefs and institutions as well as transcendental claims on street corners and Facebook walls. Scholars use the teaching spaces to explain introductory concepts for further step by step, pedagogical understanding. But when students sometimes catch a glimpse of how high the staircase goes, it can look a little daunting. This is why I typically don't recommend first year students read my research work.
On The Grand Budapest Hotel
I saw one of the most beautiful films of the year this past week, Wes Anderson's masterful The Grand Budapest Hotel. It includes his usual fanciful flourishes and is utterly imbued with nostalgia. Unlike his past films which were more focused on inner family dramas, the main characters in this film are without family. Instead, Anderson steps out to convey the life of a hotel concierge Gustav H. (R. Feines), and his young lobby boy Zero (T. Revolori), who are caught in the throws of a verisimilar early twentieth century. The story is told from the perspective of the elder Zero, known as Mr. Mustafa (M. Abraham). The drama arises not simply from the contrast between a fading occidental civilization and new modern barbarism, but between Gustav H. and himself. One of Gustav's early pedagogical overtures to the young Zero, expresses the tension:
“You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant – (Sighs deeply.) Oh, fuck it.”
Anderson is sometimes referred to as a postmodern director. It's a term that focuses upon his aforementioned penchant for fanciful nostalgia and introverted insularity. It strikes me that this attribution misses the deeper sense of pain that drove his earlier work. The various philosophical and theological movements variously called postmodern did, in some cases, lose sight of this pain. However, the idea that postmodernity ends in today's austere times, overlooks the deeper exteriority at work in the "post," in these movements. It explains the return of metaphysics, not as an alter ego of philosophical absolutism, but a more profound "after" physics, and the sense in which meta always implies a deeper dissatisfaction with reductive physical accounts of reality. Moral, ethical and political dimensions can no longer be reduced to physics after the holocaust. Rather, we are more directly returned to a fragile notion of civilization laid bare in the twentieth century's darkest moments. As Gianni Vattimo argued in a compendium on religion, it too returns in these gaping unhealed wounds.
Anderson's recent film shows the twilight between a long gone past and the new barbarisms we live with today. He does so not with an historical farce, as such, but a personal story of one man who took responsibility for maintaining the highest expression of civility in the fantastical experience of a luxury hotel. Of course, it shows how civilization did not exist as a stable established "thing" in the first place. But it also shows what a beautiful dream it was, a whisper that the people of that era once believed in. As Mr. Mustafa (the elder Zero) explains at the end of the film:
“To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it – but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace!”
It seems to me that we go to movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel fully alert to today's public cruelties, the threat of global catastrophe and social injustice. The dark fantasy, however, is no more honest because of its darkness. Wes Anderson's recent film depicts, not unlike the work of the best postmodern theorists, both the fragility of civil societies as well as the painful work that goes into breathing civility to life in our social and political conditions. It is a nostalgic lost world, but its core is not an abstraction as such. Rather, it beats within the flawed heart of Mr. Gustav H. and makes you wish there were more of them today.
“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.... He was one of them. What more is there to say?
”
The Unknown Known
Errol Morris somehow made an interview style documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known. Toward's the end of the film Rumsfeld himself isn't quite sure why he agreed to do it. The title comes from the missing combination of terms in a 12 February 2002 news briefing. There, Rumsfeld responded to questions about the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, quipping that "there are known knowns... known unknowns... [and] unknown unknowns" (defense.gov). Morris focuses in on the statement's missing combination of terms, the unknown knowns. As it turns out, Rumsfeld was a meticulous recorder of memoranda, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of memos so numerous they were nicknamed "snowflakes." In a snowflake later in 2004, he reflected briefly on the fourth combination. There, he provided a rather odd interpretation, which he retracts towards the end of the film. I've included the film's transcript below not only because it is one of the most powerful scenes, but because it is as close to anything I've seen that Rumsfeld actually agrees there were things he did not know that he knew, or, more to the point, that he refused to face and accept:
“February 4, 2004
Subject: What you know.
Rumsfeld (reading): There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns. But there are also unknown knowns. That is to say things that you think you know that it turns out you did not.
Rumsfeld: If you take those words and try to connect them in each way that is possible, there was at least one more combination that wasn’t there, the unknown knowns. Things that you possibly may know that you don’t know you know.
Morris: But the memo doesn’t say that. It says that we know less not more than we think we do.
Rumsfeld: Is that right? I reversed it? Put it up again. Let me see.
Rumsfeld (reading): There are also unknown knowns. That is to say things that you think you know that it turns out you did not.
Rumsfeld: Yeah, I think that memo is backwards. I think it is closer to what I said here, than that. Unknown knowns. I think you are probably, Errol, chasing the wrong rabbit here.”
It is interesting that even in repeatedly reading the memo and correcting his own 2004 definition of "unknown knowns," Rumsfeld does not draw the conclusions that these are the more significant dangers. I can't find any evidence that Morrris read any of Slavoj Zizek's various repetitions of Rumsfeld's omission of "unknown knowns" in the 2002 news briefing. However, I am expecting Zizek to provide some comment in this regard insofar as Morris has actually sat down with Rumsfeld and had him repeatedly read his own memo on "unknown knowns." The surreal result is that, even the film interview, Rumsfeld doesn't seem to know what he knows. In any case, it makes Zizek's assessment all the more interesting: "If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the 'unknown unknowns,' the threats from Saddam the nature of which we did not even suspect, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the 'unknown knowns,' the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves... the situation is like that of a blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the picture appears continuous" (In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 457).
On Academic Writing
“Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called ‘Professors, We Need You!’ The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a ‘culture of exclusivity’ that ‘glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience’... As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. But I have a lot of sympathy for Kristof, too. I think his heart’s in the right place. (His column ended on a wistful note: “I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career.”) My own theory is that he got the situation backward. The problem with academia isn’t that professors are, as Kristof wrote, ‘marginalizing themselves.’ It’s that the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.”
"Why is Academic Writing So Academic?" The New Yorker - http://nyr.kr/1mGzE3P
18th C. "Book"
“But then you realize that a ‘book’ back then wasn’t what we think of as a ‘book’ now. Back then, there were a plurality of book-sized formats that were, like octavo or the slightly-smaller duodecimo, pretty compact, so these ‘books’ were only a couple of thousand words long. (Like the totally fun The Art of Memory by Marius D’assigny, from 1706.) Authors who cranked out 40 ‘books’ were actually writing pieces that are closer to a long magazine article.It wasn’t until the 20th century arrived that nonfiction books started to congeal into the 300-page quantum, for a host of economic and cultural and industrial reasons.”
"Why 18th Century Books Looked Like Smartphone Screens" - http://bit.ly/1e3x4uv