Philosophical notes…
On Unity, Liberty and Charity
“For Stout, secularization must be understood as a practical response to plurality, not an institutionalized ideology. Secularization thus creates space for deliberative religious discourse to flourish. The general categories of religious affiliation are not sufficient to determine democratic participation. However, Stout singles out for rigorous critique, support for theocracy and plutocracy, no less cruel and domineering forms of governance. Political theology returns at this point as a means of pursuing the pragmatist’s interest in building coalitions of the right sort.”
“On Unity, Liberty and Charity,” - politicaltheology.com/on-unity-liberty-and-charity/. This is part of my brief introduction to a special issue on Pragmatism and Political Theology for the second issue of volume twenty of the journal Political Theology. The collection draws together a series of essays on the theme such as: Molly Farneth’s “When God and State Don’t Dominate: Pragmatism: Political Theology, and Democratic Authority;” Jonathon Kahn’s “Pragmatism, Messianism, and Political Theology after Ted Smith’s Weird John Brown;” Sami Pihlstrom’s “A Pragmatist Approach to the Mutual Recognition between Ethico-Political and Theological Discourses on Evil and Suffering;” and, my essay, “The Pragmatist Question of Sovereignty.” My aim was to explore pragmatist calls to reinvigorate democratic practices. In particular I wished to go further with some of Jeffrey Stout’s claims in Democracy and Tradition.
On Good Arguments
“Philosophers are weird, so this kind of civil disagreement still might seem impossible among ordinary folk. However, some stories give hope and show how to overcome high barriers. One famous example involved Ann Atwater and C P Ellis in my home town of Durham, North Carolina; it is described in Osha Gray Davidson’s book The Best of Enemies (1996) and a forthcoming movie. Atwater was a single, poor, black parent who led Operation Breakthrough, which tried to improve local black neighbourhoods. Ellis was an equally poor but white parent who was proud to be Exalted Cyclops of the local Ku Klux Klan. They could not have started further apart. At first, Ellis brought a gun and henchmen to town meetings in black neighbourhoods. Atwater once lurched toward Ellis with a knife and had to be held back by her friends. Despite their mutual hatred, when courts ordered Durham to integrate their public schools, Atwater and Ellis were pressured into co-chairing a charrette – a series of public discussions that lasted eight hours per day for 10 days in July 1971 – about how to implement integration... When each listened to the other’s reasons, they realised that they shared the same basic values. Both loved their children and wanted decent lives for their communities. As Ellis later put it: ‘I used to think that Ann Atwater was the meanest black woman I’d ever seen in my life … But, you know, her and I got together one day for an hour or two and talked. And she is trying to help her people like I’m trying to help my people.’ After realising their common ground, they were able to work together to integrate Durham schools peacefully. In large part, they succeeded.”
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Reach Out, Listen, Be Patient. Good Arguments Can Stop Extremism” - aeon.co/ideas/reach-out-listen-be-patient-good-arguments-can-stop-extremism. More about the forthcoming film The Best of Enemies can be found here.
On Enlightened Cafés
“What, then, of the Habermasian vision of the café as an arena of civil society, and of civil society as the foundation of enlightened societies? Certainly the café could be the foundation of emancipated life—that was why Agnon’s generation rushed there so ardently. But the study reveals a paradox of some poignancy: no matter how elaborately articulated, no matter how high its ceilings and how dignified its servers, civil society can’t protect cosmopolitan communities from assault when it happens. The café may have been a foundation, but it could never be a fortress. The most heartbreaking scenes in Pinsker’s book are from Warsaw, where much loved ghetto institutions like Café Sztuka stayed in business right up to the final expulsion of the Jews to Treblinka, in 1943. Singers sang and dancers danced, with the forbearance of easily bribed Germans, and while many condemned the frivolity (and the implicit collaboration with the Germans) of these last cafés, the writer Michel Mazor rightly praised their ‘continuous existence in a city which the Germans regarded as a cemetery—was it not, in a certain sense, the ghetto’s protest, its affirmation of the right to live?’”
Adam Gopnik, “What Cafés Did for Liberalism” - .newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/what-cafes-did-for-liberalism. “They were essential social institutions of political modernity—caffeinated pathways out of clan society and into a cosmopolitan world.”
On Stored Beliefs
“While Clifford’s final argument rings true, it again seems exaggerated to claim that every little false belief we harbour is a moral affront to common knowledge. Yet reality, once more, is aligning with Clifford, and his words seem prophetic. Today, we truly have a global reservoir of belief into which all of our commitments are being painstakingly added: it’s called Big Data. You don’t even need to be an active netizen posting on Twitter or ranting on Facebook: more and more of what we do in the real world is being recorded and digitised, and from there algorithms can easily infer what we believe before we even express a view. In turn, this enormous pool of stored belief is used by algorithms to make decisions for and about us. And it’s the same reservoir that search engines tap into when we seek answers to our questions and acquire new beliefs. Add the wrong ingredients into the Big Data recipe, and what you’ll get is a potentially toxic output. If there was ever a time when critical thinking was a moral imperative, and credulity a calamitous sin, it is now.”
Francisco Mejia, “Believing without Evidence Is Always Morally Wrong,” - aeon.co/ideas/believing-without-evidence-is-always-morally-wrong
On Limitless Wonder
“Gray is equally interested in, and especially drawn to, those who practice what he calls ‘the atheism of silence.’ These atheists, like those who reject the notion of human progress, don’t often attract large followings. Instead of seeking surrogates for God, they try to acquiesce in something that transcends human understanding. Gray admires the mystical atheist Arthur Schopenhauer, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t particularly believe in reality, either. Gray also includes in this category thinkers who were clearly devout, such as Spinoza, who rejected a creator God but saw God as an eternal substance in all creation, and the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who wrote that reason had to be overcome in order for us to know God, and that revelation ‘carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities that comprehension admits.’ This kind of apophatic theology has a lot in common with godless mysticism, Gray argues, because saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. ‘A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,’ Gray writes.”
Casey Cep, “Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism?” - newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/why-are-americans-still-uncomfortable-with-atheism. This is a review of two recent books, Moore and Kramnick’s Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life, and John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism. The latter provides a much needed contextualization of contemporary debates. It builds bridges between intellectual traditions of atheism and wider theological debate about the application of the category of existence or being to God.
On Crow’s Nests
“Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient ‘interest’ in the voyage… but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 172-73 (towards the end of chapter 35). This is one of Ishmael’s narrative asides in the context of a discussion of long hours on lookout atop the Pequod’s crow’s nest. I read through this book this year after hearing a discussion of its contemporary relevance on In Our Time, bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09gzjm5. I was amazed to read Melville shift from a detailed discussion of nineteenth century whaling to his philosophical reflections on pantheist mysticism and Cartesian certainty. This passage often comes to mind while walking the hills of Newcastle.
On Appreciating Libraries
“As much as our world hurtles toward digitized information, physical books remain popular, useful, and revered items. We share, use, collect, and read billions of books every year, and we house our most treasured ones in libraries, in some of the most remarkable architecture around the world. And for those who cannot access these amazing buildings, there are volunteers who fill the need as they can, creating mobile libraries to bring books to people in remote places. Today, a visual feast—glimpses of libraries big and small, new and old, from across the globe.”
Alan Taylor, “Browsing the Stacks: A Photo Appreciation of Libraries” - theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/a-photo-appreciation-of-libraries/573811/. Number eight is the reading room of Melbourne’s State Library of Victoria. Seattle’s Public Library designed by Rem Koolhaas is twenty-four.
On the History of Ideas
A beautiful interactive timeline of philosophical ideas has been created by a communications designer. It’s an homage to the genre found at informationisbeautiful, but tailored to philosophy. Like any map, decisions had to be made about what to leave in and out. It’s as valuable for its sophistication as it is for its reductions and oversights. In any case, well worth playing with regarding your favorite philosophers. The snapshot here captures the section from Kant to Schopenhauer.
On Animal Minds
“Talking parrots, empathetic primates, playing dogs, and dolphins who recognize themselves in the mirror. On this episode of the LQ podcast, we talk to scientists and writers who are exploring the frontiers of animal minds. With Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, Frans de Waal, Virginia Morell, Irene Pepperberg, and more.”
Lapham’s Quarterly Podcast - laphamsquarterly.org/content/animal-minds. Excellent summary of recent discoveries about animal minds. It seems to me that philosophy of language could help sharpen the debate about the nature of animal linguistic capacities in particular. Moreover, while the podcast presents a challenge to religion and science, much work has already been done to bridge the gap, for instance, Sarah Coakley and Martin Nowak’s Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation.
On Rembrandt's Recognition
“There are actually three people in this painting. The first one, of course, is the embodiment of the philosophical mind weighed down as it is by wistful melancholy, as is the case for philosophers, at least in the classical writings about them. The second one, Aristotle has his right hand on the lyrical pate, the beautiful poetic brain of Homer. But there is a third person on whom the whole story… And that person is contained in a medal that hangs on the very chain that dominates the composition. If you look hard you will see that there is a little figure turned in profile. The little figure, you can just see his cute not very classical nose, but above all you can see the helmet. And the helmet would have told everybody this can only be Alexander the Great… Both are honoured in antiquity I need hardly say, but both also come to sad ends. Homer, blind, despised. Aristotle also essentially sent into a kind of ignominious isolation. So in some sense or other they represent for Rembrandt the complicated relationship between being acknowledged and being rejected… Rembrandt ever since he was a kid has been painting himself, his fantasies have him with one of these fancy golden chains. Does he ever get one? No, he absolutely doesn’t. ”
Simon Schama, “Schama on Rembrandt: Masterpieces of the Late Years.” - bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mhsn1.