Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
On Listening
“As an activist on the left, I long assumed that my role consisted entirely of raising awareness, sounding alarms, and deploying arguments; it took me years to realize that I needed to help build and defend spaces in which listening could happen, too. As citizens, we understand that the right to speak has to be facilitated, bolstered by institutions and protected by laws. But we’ve been slow to see that, if democracy is to function well, listening must also be supported and defended—especially at a moment when technological developments are making meaningful listening harder. By definition, democracy implies collectivity; it depends on an inclusive and vibrant public sphere in which we can all listen to one another. We ignore that listening at our peril. Watching ‘What Is Democracy?’ today, I find that the answer lies not just in the voices of the people I interviewed. It’s also in the shots of people listening, receptively, as others speak.”
Astra Taylor, “The Right to Listen,” https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/the-right-to-listen. Interesting summary of themes in the recent documentary “What Is Democracy?” Well worth a watch as an example of deliberative democratic practices. As she rightly notes, deliberative theory can be overly enamored with speakers in an ideal public. However, more recent theory has focused on pragmatist accounts of discourse endemic to anywhere people are willing to explain themselves to each other. Moreover, as I’ve written last year, it can be coupled with democratic systems theory which apprehends interactive listening environments. Taylor pursues examples in the film as well as this essay’s debtor’s assembly. Systems theory aims to apprehend the way such assemblies could be made more robust as well as coordinated with other layers of democratic practice ranging from citizen’s juries, deliberation days, and mini-demoi to more familiar parliamentary institutions.
On Thinking to Some Purpose
“‘There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in the Penguin ‘Pelican’ books series, with that familiar blue-and-white cover. This little book, which could easily be slipped into a pocket and read on the train, in a lunch hour, or at a bus stop, was pitched at the intelligent general reader. In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe.”
Peter West - https://aeon.co/essays/on-susan-stebbing-and-the-role-of-public-philosophy. An interesting summary of what some hope philosophical skills can foster in democratic societies. The essay mentions John Dewey, who explicitly linked philosophical education to the practices necessary for democracy. As later pragmatists such as Jeffrey Stout noted in Democracy and Tradition, this relies on a rigorous defense of traditions that foster rich grass roots deliberative capacities. West’s essay on public philosophy has been widely circulated while the second impeachment trial is ongoing this week. Representative Jamie Raskin concluded his case with an appeal to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which he summarized as facts plain to most people as well as a human sense that is common. That latter notion made me think of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s summary of sensus communis in Truth and Method (p. 21-22) that looked back to Giambatist Vico who cited Roman Stoics interested in basic moral interest in the common good. It struck me that this is precisely what is eroding and what we must work to recover. Hannah Arendt discussed the challenge a bit in one of her last posthumously published 1975 lectures in a collection, Small Comforts for Hard Times. “Only when they [private individuals] can enjoy the public will they be willing and able to make sacrifices for the public good. To ask sacrifices of individuals who are not yet citizens is to ask them for an idealism which they do not have and cannot have in view of the urgency of the life process.” (.p. 105-107). Arendt was writing to a different time, but her words resonate as the pandemic rages on, economic struggles persist, and people are increasingly isolated from each other physically as well as through algorithmic information bubbles fostered online. The challenge remains to build democratic practices where common sense nonetheless persists.
On Voltaire's Questions sur l’Encyclopédie
“It may seem misleading to speak of a pirated edition in the case of the Questions, because Cramer did not purchase the text from Voltaire and he possessed no legal right to reproduce it. In fact, the consistory of Geneva would censor him for the book’s impieties in March 1772, while Voltaire dismissed the pirating with witticisms such as the following burlesque edict issued from Ferney: ‘It is hereby permitted to any bookseller to print my silliness, be it true or false, at his risk, peril, and profit.’ Yet Voltaire felt morally committed to his publisher and refused to offend him by collaborating openly with the pirates. He even urged Cramer to fight back against them: ‘You won’t be pirated if you take the right measures, and you can put a notice in Volume II that will discredit the pirated editions.’ In fact, Cramer knew very well that his Questions would be pirated. He merely sought to cream off the demand with a first edition by beating the pirates to the market.”
Robert Darnton, “An Enterprise of Solid Gold,” laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/enterprise-solid-gold. Interesting note on early print era piracy by a master in the field of book history. I’ve been writing on religious book making recently, and similar events took place in the reformation era. As Febvre and Martin noted in their The Coming of the Book, Luther’s various translations of books of the Old and New Testament Bible were pirated a number of times before publication.
On Information Overload
“These complaints about the consequences of printing were of course made in printed books, which added to the abundance of which they complained while offering various remedies to the overload: advice on how to read well, for example by taking good notes; judgments and reviews of books to aid in selecting them (a prime content of learned periodicals starting in the late seventeenth century); bibliographies to identify existing books (and possibly to deter the unnecessary composition of new ones); and reference works designed to collect the best parts of the best books to spare readers the trouble and expense of making these selections themselves. Printing prompted a new awareness of the need to manage information in and about books and also facilitated the development of new methods for doing so, among them printed questionnaires and lists, images and tables, cutting and pasting from printed books, or using the backs of printed playing cards.”
Ann Blair, “The Multitude of Books,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/multitude-books. The link provides an interesting excerpt from the edited collection Information: A Historical Companion. Reminds me of the advice we often give to students at the start of the semester soon to be overloaded with reading. The helpful guides in how to read a book take on new relevance, such as Mortimer Adler’s 1940 classic by that title. Or as is sometimes needed, Peter Barry’s guide for reading theoretical texts, Beginning Theory. It outlines the SQ3R approach to: survey; question; read; recall; and, review. These days I’ve been less interested in the initial rise of print, but rather the later impact when reading practices took root in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, e.g. Immanuel Kant’s essays on book piracy.
On Arendt's Lessing Prize
“In 1959, Hannah Arendt received the city of Hamburg’s Lessing Prize. Her lecture on that occasion drew attention to key features of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s enlightenment era notions of tolerance and humanism. In so doing, she both graciously acknowledged the importance of Lessing’s legacy, as well as critiqued the inadequacy of his ideas in the shadow of the second world war. While she shared with Lessing a life lived in what she would call ‘dark times’, her own response differed in important respects... Arendt’s lecture on Lessing provides a distillation of her vision of a political life beyond religious concerns. This has led some commentators to obscure her relevance to contemporary debates about the persistent and new interactions between religion and politics. However, Arendt never shied away from citing religious contributions to the development of her own viewpoints, nor did her vision of political spaces exclude religion as such.”
“Applying Arendt’s Vita Activa to Religion,” Politics, Religion and Ideology. By coincidence my essay on Hannah Arendt was published in the online release of this journal just prior to this year’s 27 January, holocaust memorial day. This essay is part of a series I’ve been writing the past few years which address ways to revitalize deliberative democratic practices in light of ongoing religious divisions oft-cited as the source of expanding fissures opening up in our societies. For instance, around this time last year, “Religion in Deliberative Democratic Systems Theory,” appeared in Religions, and the year before that, “The Pragmatist Question of Sovereignty,” appeared in a special issue of Political Theology, which also included a brief “Introduction.” A monograph is planned to bring together their increasingly urgent themes. It will begin with Arendt because she so adeptly identified many of the problems we still face in multicultural democracies.
“The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all countries of the globe.”
On #FoucaultandDerrida
“In these complaints, [Derrida] is often paired with Michel Foucault—a fusing that would have baffled two such disparate thinkers, who spent more of their lives disagreeing with each other, personally and intellectually, than they did in accord. Nevertheless, the pair are cast as absolute moral relativists for whom there is no truth whatsoever—a position which not only did they not argue, but were at pains to disavow. Those who accuse them are generally speaking from a position of wanting to defend some version of ‘normality’ from the leftists at the gate. The two are used as a bludgeon in the ‘culture wars,’ the complexity of their thinking being elided to argue that not only are the barbarians at the gate; they are also French and talk nonsense. In general, the way to stop these Twitter discussions is to simply ask the poster which section of #foucaultandderrida or #derridaandfoucault they are basing their ‘argument’ on. Having done this several times before growing bored, I have never received a useful reply. ”
“How Derrida and Foucault Became the Most Misunderstood Philosophers of Our Time,” - prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/foucault-derrida-post-truth-culture-wars-marxism. Writing on both lately, I can say one of the more fruitful points of comparison can be achieved with reference to their respective interpretation of Plato’s notion of hypomnesis, e.g. between Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and Foucault’s “Writing the Self.” The joke in this case is that both drew attention to the materiality of writing and in ways relevant to thinking about subjectivity on the internet today.
On Quietism
“Thanks to this history [of persecution], ‘quietism’ has become a pejorative term, reserved for heretics, defeatists and navel-gazers. Nevertheless, it was embraced by a thinker who had a significant influence on Beckett’s personal outlook and literary vision: the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Although Schopenhauer was an atheist and wrote caustically about religion’s absurdities and horrors, he nevertheless had a great admiration for what he called the ‘saintly souls’ of mystical religion: the ‘pietists, quietists, pious enthusiasts’. While such saints were useless as metaphysicians, they were extremely valuable, Schopenhauer thought, as guides to the highest happiness. He could do without their dogma, but he cherished them as soteriological geniuses... And so, Vladimir, interminably waiting for Mr Godot, needn’t have weighed the odds of salvation quite so anxiously. For the quietist, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, weal and woe, suffering and its end, are not distant poles, but perhaps two sides of the same coin. As Thomas à Kempis put it, in that phrase that Beckett confessed was made for him: ‘he that can well suffer shall find the most peace’.”
Andy Wimbush, “How Samuel Beckett Sought Salvation in the Midst of Suffering” - https://aeon.co/essays/how-samuel-beckett-sought-salvation-in-the-midst-of-suffering. An interesting reflection on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in wider context. Saw this play performed some years ago in Edinburgh with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the lead rolls. Wimbush’s references to Schopenhauer and wider therapeutic philosophy (Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans) provides helpful context to Buddhist and Christian thought on such matters. Beckett’s presentation of Vladimir and Estragon’s dialogue always reminds me of Derrida’s reflections in Body of Prayer: “I was hesitating between two ethics of prayer, so to speak. Two definitions of prayer. One has to do with improvisation. The prayer should be, in principle, pure improvisation. A way of inventing on the spot, the address, the addressee, the language, the code, so there shouldn’t be any book, any program, any rule to pray, on the one hand. Speaking of music, in that extent, jazz would be closer to prayer... But we know that in jazz there are rules too… So, although we know that the pure prayer should be improvisation, that is pure innovation, without any book, at the same time, we know that we need a book, the code of gestures, a language, and so on and so forth.” (p. 57-59). “Michal told us about the three possible semantic roots of words for prayer in Hebrew, and I think, of course, that the two last ones - to plea, to request, to sentence, to judge - are really secondary, let’s say. The most essential to me is the first root which means to wait, to hope, because it’s not a way of hoping for this, or looking for that, but hoping for the prayer to happen.” (p. 65). As it happens I’ll be teaching a course on comparative studies of suffering this year that will cover a similar plurality of perspectives.
On Lying
“The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that lying – no matter how noble or even life-saving a lie might seem – is always morally wrong. Kant’s view drew a distinct contrast with his utilitarian contemporaries, including the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose outlook could be boiled down to the maxim that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals’. In this lecture at Harvard University in 2009, the US professor and political philosopher Michael Sandel draws from the highly influential text Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) to explore Kant’s somewhat counterintuitive outlook on morality. In doing so, Sandel, with his talent for elucidating complex ideas, builds a deeper context for Kant’s worldview, including his thoughts on human uniqueness, dignity and agency.”
“All’s Not Well That Ends Well: Why Kant Centred Morality on Motives, not Outcomes” - https://aeon.co/videos/alls-not-well-that-ends-well-why-kant-centred-morality-on-motives-not-outcomes.
On a Glossary of Democracy
“auctoritas: (Latin) Might, power, influence, clout; the general level of prestige or reputation a person held in Roman society. Whence the English authority. Also, tutelage, tutor. ‘Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit’ (While power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate.)—Cicero”
“heeler: A follower who works to further the interests of a politician, esp. one who is obsequious or unscrupulous; a flunky, hanger-on. (Whence ward heeler.) Alludes to folk etymology of the patriarch Jacob; from Hebrew עָקֵב ,יַעֲקֹב, heel. In Genesis 25:26 Jacob is described as clutching the heel of his twin brother Esau when leaving the womb of their mother, Rebecca. In Genesis 27:36 Esau associates his brother’s name with the connotations ‘to assail a person deceitfully, to overreach, to supplant.’”
“vulgar: Of an ordinary unartificial type; not refined or advanced; having a common and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or taste; uncultured, ill-bred. ‘That word means the mind of the herd, and specifically the herd in the city, the gutter, and the tavern.’—Guy Davenport, 1987”
“Glossary: Democracy,” - laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/glossary-democracy.
On Eliminative Materialism
“If you chop my head off, my career as a moral agent will come to an abrupt end. And frontal lobe injury may turn an upright citizen into a psychopath. This demonstrates only that my brain is a necessary condition of my conscience not that my conscience is identical with brain activity. To put this another way, while it is necessary to have a brain in some kind of working order to live a morally upright human life, it does not follow that living such a life is just being a brain in some kind of working order. To insist on this distinction is not to claim that conscience is ‘a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine being’ but rather to make the more modest point that people are not reducible to what can be seen by brain scanners and the like. Looking for the theatre of our lives – society – and the nature, origin and even validity, of our moral discourse by peering into the brain is like trying to hear the whispering of the woods by applying a stethoscope to an individual acorn. As social beings, we transcend our individual brains which, being material objects, are confined to their own boundaries. Eliminative materialism cannot accommodate this transcendence. Without propositional attitudes, Churchland’s brain would be able to interact causally with other brains but would hardly inhabit social spaces in the way that people do: it would be windowless.”
Raymond Tallis, “Conscience by Patricia Churchland Book Review,” the-tls.co.uk/articles/conscience-patricia-churchland-book-review/
