Harming Stupidity?

When you reach a decision, close your ears to even the best objections: this is a sign of a strong character. Which means: an occasional will to stupidity. -- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. 

To harm stupidity.- Surely, the faith preached so stubbornly and with so much conviction, that egoism is reprehensible, has on the whole harmed egoism (while benefiting, as I shall repeat a hundred times, the herd instincts!) -above all, by depriving egoism of its good conscience and bidding us to find in it the true source of all unhappiness. "Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life"-that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit. much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.
The ancient philosophers taught that the main source of misfortune was something very different. Beginning with Socrates, these thinkers never wearied of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor's opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest of all."
Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than did the sermon against selfishness. What is certain. however, is that it deprived stupidity of its good conscience; these philosophers harmed stupidity. --Nietzsche, The Gay Science. 

Deleuze, echoing Nietzsche, wrote that philosophy "is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought." (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106).  Deleuze formulates the problem of stupidity most strongly in chapter three of Difference and Repetition, "The Image of Thought." There are, recently, some very strong resources charting Deleuze's argument on stupidity (see Jason Wirth's recent Schelling's Practice of the Wild, and Nobutaka Otobe's amazing dissertation, Stupidity in Politics), so I won't go over the argument here in detail. However, this is the space that Deleuze wishes the problem to be heard, "Philosophy could have taken up the problem with its own means and with the necessary modesty, by considering the fact that stupidity is never that of others but the object of a properly transcendental question: how is stupidity (not error) possible?" (D&R, 151). Deleuze wishes to distinguish stupidity from error, from nonsense, and from idiocy. Indeed, the idiot will be an important conceptual persona that allows for the production of concepts in What is Philosophy?. Stupidity has nothing to do with being bright, or the ability to reason logically, rationally, or rigorously. It might be a kind of gullibility, but not in the traditional sense of the term. For Deleuze, stupidity is, as Nietzsche tells us, "submission to your neighbor's opinion." It is a sort of incuriosity, a kind refusing to think. We substitute thinking with cliches, with "everybody knows..." and "no one can deny..." (D&R 130). Stupidity is then a kind of disavowal. It is not a lack or a passivity, but rather an active force, a will to stupidity. Stupidity takes place in the epistemic register that Donald Rumsfield infamously called "known unknowns." These are things we could know, that on some level we do know, but that we refuse to know. Like all forms of disavowal, stupidity is a kind of psychic self-defense against facing our existence.

When talking about stupidity and cliches, we are reminded of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (Otobe is excellent on the differences and similarities of Arendt and Deleuze).   She quotes Eichmann as saying, "Officialese [Amtsprache] is my only language." She would then explain:

But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché…Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what [Eichmann] said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. (48-49). 

Stupidity's safeguard and protection against reality should remind us of the distinction between the skeptic and the empiricist in William James' essay "The Will to Believe." Remember, the skeptic is the one who would prefer to not know the truth, as long as they will never be wrong. The empiricist is one who does mind being wrong, mind being made to seem stupid, if that means they will be more likely to know the truth. This brings me, I guess, to the point.

I worry that we thinkers, we knowers, believe we are in the business of harming stupidity. I worry because I assume we are all very, very stupid. In Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche, he challenges us to read Nietzsche as losers. To read Nietzsche as the herd animal, as the slave, as one of the many instead of the few. I think we should read Nietzsche as one of the stupid ones. Does our seeking out to harm the stupidity of others make us more or less likely to see the stupidity in ourselves (like when Derrida critiques Deleuze for being stupid on animals being unable to be stupid). Nietzsche says that we submit to our neighbors' opinion. But also, perhaps, it isn't always submission, but inhabiting the world our neighbor, of, as Arendt put it, "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." This is the tension of stupidity, it both disavows reality, but also forms the ground for a kind of empiricism. It both allows us to reject the world of the other, while forming the very common space and language of inhabiting the worlds of others. Deleuze warns us of a stupidity of cliches, while at the same time yearns after a kind of pop philosophy, and challenges us to write in slogans.

In one of Judith Butler's essays on Arendt, she writes:

But more than this, [Arendt] faults [Eichmann] as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.

Perhaps the point of philosophy is not to harm stupidity at all. Perhaps its goal is to push stupidity farther still. To take stupidity to the point that it fosters pluralism. To take it to the point it stops protecting the self against reality, and instead opens the self up to the outside. Maybe we must get to the place where we stop thinking we are harming stupidity, but instead understand ourselves as profoundly stupid. Huh, maybe I am wrong. Everybody knows I don't know everything.

Forthcoming titles in Italian Philosophy (plus a French one)

First the French:

Grégoire Chamayou -- A Theory of the Drone.
Grégoire Chamayou, who we have talked about before, has a book coming out January, 2015.

Drone warfare has raised profound ethical and constitutional questions both in the halls of Congress and among the U.S. public. Not since debates over nuclear warfare has American military strategy been the subject of discussion in living rooms, classrooms, and houses of worship. Yet as this groundbreaking new work shows, the full implications of drones have barely been addressed in the recent media storm.
In a unique take on a subject that has grabbed headlines and is consuming billions of taxpayer dollars each year, philosopher Grégoire Chamayou applies the lens of philosophy to our understanding of how drones are changing our world. For the first time in history, a state has claimed the right to wage war across a mobile battlefield that potentially spans the globe. Remote-control flying weapons, he argues, take us well beyond even George W. Bush’s justification for the war on terror.
What we are seeing is a fundamental transformation of the laws of war that have defined military conflict as between combatants. As more and more drones are launched into battle, war now has the potential to transform into a realm of secretive, targeted assassinations of individuals—beyond the view and control not only of potential enemies but also of citizens of democracies themselves. Far more than a simple technology, Chamayou shows, drones are profoundly influencing what it means for a democracy to wage war. A Theory of the Drone will be essential reading for all who care about this important question.

Now the Italians:

Maurizio Lazzarato -- Governing by Debt, due out February, 2015.

Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a "new State capitalism," which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology.
In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers -- from Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt -- and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.

Maurizio Ferraris -- Manifesto of New Realism, due out December, 2014.

Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses.
Philosophical realism has taken a number of different forms, each applied to different topics and set against different forms of idealism and subjectivism. Maurizio Ferraris’s Manifesto of New Realism takes aim at postmodernism and hermeneutics, arguing against their emphasis on reality as constructed and interpreted. While acknowledging the value of these criticisms of traditional, dogmatic realism, Ferraris insists that the insights of postmodernism have reached a dead end. Calling for the discipline to turn its focus back to truth and the external world, Ferraris’s manifesto—which sparked lively debate in Italy and beyond—offers a wiser realism with social and political relevance.

Paolo Virno -- Deja Vu and the End of History, due out February, 2015.

This book places two key notions up against each other to imagine a new way of conceptualizing historical time. How do the experience of déjà vu and the idea of the “End of History” relate to one another? Through thinkers like Bergson, Kojève and Nietzsche, Virno explores these constructs of memory and the passage of time. In showing how the experience of time becomes historical, Virno considers two fundamental concepts from Western philosophy: Power and The Act. Through these, he elegantly constructs a radical new theory of historical temporality.

Paolo Virno -- When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, due out May, 2015.

Originally published in Italian in 2002, When the Word Becomes Flesh provides a compelling contribution to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and social relationships. Adopting Aristotle's definition of the human being as a linguistic and political animal, Paolo Virno frames the act of speech as a foundational philosophical issue -- an act that in its purely performative essence ultimately determines our ability to pass from the state of possibility to one of actuality: that is, from the power to act to action itself. As the ultimate public act, speech reveals itself to be an intrinsically political practice mediating between biological invariants and changing historical determinations. In his most complete reflection on the topic to date, Virno shows how language directly expresses the conditions of possibility for our experience, from both a transcendental and a biological point of view.
Drawing on the work of such twentieth-century giants as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege, Virno constructs a powerful linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. It is in language that human nature and our historical potentialities are fully revealed, and it is language that can guide us toward a more aware and purposeful realization of them.

Whose Joy? Whose Sadness? Building Livable Communities

How do we build inclusive, joyful communities? I believe that building communities where flourishing, livable lives are possible are important projects for us to undertake. But the ideas of joy and sadness are not given terms.

* * *

Todd May recently weighed in on L'Affaire Cogburn.  In his comments, Todd May wrote:

As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

Sure, I remember that, from his preface to the english edition of Anti-Oedipus. But May's interpretation here (and perhaps in Foucault's original stance), this assumes we know what joy and sadness are, and that they might be the same thing for the same people.

Let's look at two quick footnotes from Steven Shaviro's excellent book, Without Criteria:

This implies that Whitehead rejects Spinoza’s basic principle of conatus, the claim that “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being,” and that this striving is “the actual essence of the thing itself” (de Spinoza 1991, 108: Ethics, Part III, propositions 6 and 7). For Whitehead, things strive not to persist in their own being, but rather to become other than they were, to make some alteration in the “data” that they receive. An entity’s “satisfaction” consists not in persisting in its own being, but in achieving difference and novelty, in introducing something new into the world. (p. 19, n3)

And:

Whitehead’s rejection of Spinoza’s monism in favor of William James’s pluralism goes along with his rejection of Spinoza’s conatus in favor of James’s (and Bergson’s) sense of continual change, becoming or process, or what he also calls creativity. (p. 22, n6)

We could potentially affirm that both are true, that for some joy consists in preservation of the self, and for others joy (or satisfaction) consists in difference and becoming otherwise. And all of this, of course, will change what you see as sad, or joyful, militancy. If you see joy as persisting in your being, than anything that seeks to change how that being interacts and relates, and anyone who seeks to create new relationships, can only be perceived as killjoys.

* * * 

I have written before about Sara Ahmed's provocative and compelling essay, "Feminist Killjoys and other Willful Subjects" (the essay was expanded in The Promise of Happiness, and, Ahmed has just published a new book entitled Willful Subjects).  Ahmed wishes to "take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously." She goes on to argue:

The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]." [...] To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. [...] We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous."

You can see two currents here. The first is that the feminist killjoy, or more generally the activist killjoy, is the one who is constantly struggling against situations that are declared to be happy. The second current is that oppression often demands that the oppressed declare their happiness in their own oppression (we will return to this second current later). The first current allows us to examine May's original quotation in greater context. It comes as part of this whole paragraph:

To add another example, I know people whose general commitments I would call feminist reject that label because they see feminists as angry man-hating types who just want to make men feel bad. Now, of course, I don't lay all that at the doorstep of feminists. The right does an excellent job of slurring feminism. But I have had the experience of being language-policed when it seems to me inappropriate (ex. by people who would never have escorted women into abortion clinics, as I have). And I think this does not do us credit. As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

The rather odd thing is the lack of transition that takes us from the discussion of feminism to the discussion of sad militants. He does not do the work to posit why someone challenging his discourse (even someone who lacks May's ethos), leads to sadness. But someone is sad here. Is it May? It is the feminist who "language-policed" him? There exists an ambiguity of where the sadness comes from, and who it is affecting. This leads us to this great blog post by Ahmed. In it, Ahmed argues that when someone points out a problem, it is often the person who perceives the problem who is then perceived by others as the problem. Another long quotation:

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. 

This last point from Ahmed is interesting and useful. Namely, there is something strangely perverse about the demand that people be joyful in intolerable situations. Of course, such demands for resilience are rather commonplace these days.

* * *

Resilience is rapidly becoming one of the key ways of understanding present ways of governing the world. Robin James has taken up the concept of resilience in understanding how feminism and anti-racism on social media is seen as 'toxic' and 'vampiric.'

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.)

This narrative of overcoming can be seen in the way that those who are concerned with inclusive language are labeled as policing language, engaging in newspeak, score-keeping, and political correctness. This posits those who are attacking inclusive language as being rebels, truth tellers, concerned about the issues and philosophy. And the failure of social justice movements get laid at the feet of those who want inclusivity. Yet, I really do believe both groups want to create joyful communities.

* * *

The struggle to build communities that create livable lives is not an easy one. And I do believe that many complicated questions about how to go about building such communities are ahead of us. But, a lot of this discussion is centered around the notion of calling out. Let us look at Todd May's last paragraph:

This last bit should not be taken to mean that we should never confront people on their language. My point is rather that in the question of whether to confront, a little judgment is called for, and perhaps a little fellow feeling for people whose behavior actually puts them in the right (i.e. left) camp. It's one thing to call out a racist who uses an offensive racial stereotype. It's quite another to call out someone who aligns her behavior with a sensitivity to LGBT issues and, among a set of like-minded friends, calls something "gay." We are none of us moral saints (thank goodness), and, if our politics are in the right place, I think we can afford to let some things go. (To be sure, language can shape perception. But not all instances of it do.) And alternatively, we need to be aware that not letting certain things go is no substitute for committed political work.

I want to address the last point, first. I am not sure how many people confine their only work to not letting things go on the internet. I am sure there are some. But because many of us primarily only meet each other in our words (I have only briefly met in person only one person I have cited or talked about in this post), it can seem like all we do is reflect on language. Building communities can never be about just getting the language right. I agree with May on this point. But I do believe if we are going to create the sort of inclusive and joyful communities we want, we have to affirm the right to be to those we include. And for people that society has systemically learned to unhear, unsee, and unknow (or to only hear, see, and know in particular pregiven narratives), creating spaces where different narratives can be understood is not a given. And sometimes it is going to require getting the language right. But let us look at May's other point, that we shouldn't call out people whose politics are in the right place, maybe the dialectic is not one of either calling people out or letting things go.

A comment on the original blog post by Cogburn written by "anonladygrad" suggested an article, "Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable," written by Ngọc Loan Trần and published on Black Girl Dangerous. They write:

Because when I see problematic behavior from someone who is connected to me, who is committed to some of the things I am, I want to believe that it’s possible for us to move through and beyond whatever mistake was committed. I picture “calling in” as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. And yes, we have been configured to believe it’s normal to punish each other and ourselves without a way to reconcile hurt. We support this belief by shutting each other out, partly through justified anger and often because some parts of us believe that we can do this without people who fuck up. But, holy shit! We fuck up. All of us. 

I fully admit to having been called out (and called in) on all sorts of statements, beliefs, and behaviors in my life. Sometimes it has been over stuff that I still passionately think I was right on. Sometimes it has been stuff that was incredibly awful for to have said or done, and I have mumbled excuses and apologies, and felt more than a little shame. And sometimes, I have been called out on stuff, and been sure of my rightness, that I got very defensive. And it wasn't until later that I realized I was in the wrong. In general, I have been gifted with friends, colleagues, and mentors who have been incredibly generous to me. They have understood my mistakes, and have often called me in. They have put up with my bullshit, or confusion, or the sort of epistemic parallax that does not let me understand the weight and scars of certain histories, words, and knowledges. And because they are truly generous, they didn't just put up with, but worked to change me, and in so doing gave me the sort of joy and satisfaction that comes from difference and becoming otherwise. They didn't have to do that. Far too often we expect the most marginalized members of our society to have to constantly explain and justify the necessity of their existence. And I hope we can fumble together, to build different worlds, different futures, and different narratives.

The burden of canons & the freedom of philistines: Undoing Eurocentric civilization

"Go out upon the street; choose ten white men and ten colored men. Which can carry on and preserve American civilization?"
The whites.
"Well, then."
You evidently consider that a compliment.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146.  

I am teaching two sections of Intro to Philosophy this semester. I recently sat and figured out that half of the days I am teaching material written by women and/or philosophers of color. I was kinda proud of myself. But, you know, it is not like white men make up anything close to 50 percent of the global population, nor have they produced half of the world's philosophy. The only way one could feel proud of producing a syllabus with 50% non-white men is by adopting the worse standards of what should be included. That is to say, the standards of including what everyone else includes, which got us here in the first place. And yet, I will admit, it was kinda hard to get to even 50%. I feel constrained by what I feel I should be teaching my students, and feeling like everyone expects them to have read things that other people will recognize as important texts in intro. I feel sometimes like I would be letting down my students if they left my class, and couldn't at least talk about some of the stuff everyone would expect them to have read. They should be able to have at least something in common with everyone else in philosophy. At least a few things--a little Plato and a little Descartes, spiced with Nietzsche.

As a matter of fact, it becomes really hard to imagine a course that reduces white men (and white people in general, and men in general) to something resembling demographics of the world. Or perhaps harder still, it is hard to imagine the sort of person who would design such a course. What person could get rid of all the beautiful texts that inform the culture around us?

* * *

I have increasing become interested in what could be called negative conceptual personas. These are ways of understanding the world that consist of figures and attitudes that have normally been abjected; seen as beings who must be repressed, resisted, and preferably destroyed. To cite at least a few examples there is the clown of Adorno, the idiot of Deleuze and Guattari and furthered in Isabelle Stengers, the concept of stupidity in Avital Ronell and furthered in Jacques Derrida. These are figures that can serve to slow everything down, that can ask questions whose answers everyone knows and that goes without saying. The idiot, for example, might be resistant to the urgent syllogism of the national security state. You know the one, "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done."  But there is more that such negative conceptual personas might allow.

Often, when I am telling colleagues that we need to include less eurocentric work in our introduction to philosophy classes, and undergraduate classes in general, I am often told things like, "No one here knows how to teach outside of the Western tradition." Or I am told things like, "It is great that you are bringing in all of those different traditions, but I am not trained in that." They say it like it is destiny, like a law of nature. They say these excuses like there is no way to change. I am not asking them to do scholarship in those areas (though, it would be nice), or to provide graduate courses on these areas (though, again). All I am saying is to incorporate diverse thinkers and texts in your undergraduate courses. But I realize that for many of these people, what they are afraid of is transforming from the sage on the stage into the fool on the hill. That is, they are not just saying they don't really think those areas and thinkers matter, and that they are unwilling to spend even a little bit of extra time to make a more pluralistic syllabus. They are also deeply afraid of appearing stupid in front of their students. Sometimes things don't change without a bit of a stupidity and an army of fools.

One of the works that I have been obsessed with since it came out, is Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche. This is a book in which the main protagonists are all negative conceptual personas. The heroes of the book are the losers. Indeed, Bull challenges us to read like losers. He explains, "In order to read like a loser, you have to accept the argument, but to turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche’s extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable" (p. 36). Another hero of Bull's book is the philistine. As Bull reminds us, the anarchist and atheist were originally created by others as terms to attack their enemies. Originally, no one self-styled themselves anarchists or atheists. "In the sixteenth century, therefore, atheism, like philistinism today, was everywhere condemned but nowhere to be found. Yet by denouncing atheism, theologians mapped out an intellectual position for their phantom adversaries that was eventually filled by people who actually espoused the arguments the theologians had given them" (p. 8). The philistine, for those of you who remember your Nietzsche, "is the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture" (Untimely Meditations).   But I want to follow up the question that Bull asks later (though our answers will be different from his), "Could something as inherently unpromising as philistinism be an opening to anything at all? And if so, where are philistinism's new seas?" (p. 26).

* * *

Back in February (I know in blogging time that is the dark ages), Jon Cogburn at NewApps asked for reading suggestions for trying to get analytically trained philosophers to understand some of the stakes of what is going on in continental philosophy. Here is the original thread, and here is the follow-up thread.  A somewhat sad and predictable pattern occurs at first, with almost exclusively male and white names being suggested for being read. However, this changes as Robin James, Peter Gratton, Ed Kazarian, and whole host of excellent anonymous commentators suggest a variety of readings, and make a strong case for prioritizing diversity in readings, rather than reducing the analytic and continental divide as the only one in philosophy, and a debate that is principally between white dudes. Jon Cogburn explains that he is "Let me reiterate that in the extended sense of 'pluralist' I think that a pluralist reading group would not be nearly as helpful. Since we're all busy, we don't have time to study everything under the sun. Given these strong constraints it makes sense to read books that will help analytics best understand the maximum number of talks at SPEP that they would otherwise not understand given their poor training in so many important areas of philosophy. Philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, American Pragmatism, feminism, or the new pluralist philosophy of mind (all things suggested above) in general would be poor subject matters with a group with this as an end-goal. German Idealism and Phenomenology are very good subject matters for this end-goal." I know, right? But, at the same time, I recognize here the very same arguments that constrain my own syllabus designs. The desire to create philosophical commons, the belief that teaching too much stuff outside of the canon is to do a disservice to your students (or colleagues). It is to open up your students to ridicule for not really understanding the stakes of most philosophical discussions. This is why I wanted to include a discussion of the very possibility of syllabuses for Ferguson.

There were many smart responses to this, and I suggest reading the comments. However, here is part of one of my comments from those threads: "This goes back to the post here on New APPS about citation practices, as well. The names that we immediately think of, and think of as important, are bound up with a whole history that ignores why we cite some names instead of others. I agree with Robin James, sometimes we got to knock 'em down and rebuild. [...] And maybe Fanon or Arendt or whomever are not as canonical (maybe?), but how cool would it be if your reading group just pretended they were? What if one of the analytic folks were talking to a SPEPer one day and said, "Well, I haven't really read Husserl, but I read this great book on Fanon, and I was wondering...", or "you mention Derrida on play and difference, and I haven't read him, but Maria Lugones argues..." that would be a better philosophical world. And if the SPEPer hadn't read seriously Fanon or Lugones as important intellectual figures, it would be a great kick in the rear." It is a bit of a utopian impulse, but it is also one that requires a type of philistinism. It requires someone who honestly does not understand what the culture is suppose to be, what is normally counted as great, or foundational, or enduring. In the mixed up world of the philistine, the ephemeral becomes the lasting and the marginal becomes the central. The philistine designing her syllabus is not interested in preserving and carrying on the civilization around. Perhaps because she knows that is not a compliment.

A syllabus on the very possibility of #FergusonSyllabus

Recently, Leigh Johnson has started putting together a draft of "Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers." I highly suggest going, looking, and commentating. It was inspired by the rather compelling "Ferguson Syllabus" created by Sociologists for Justice.   I think this is important work, and I am glad to see it being done. I hope this, at the very least, gets philosophers reading important work in the philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, and africana philosophy (especially considering the numbers of black philosophers in the profession). However, with all of that said, there is an interesting and important literature base about the role of philosophy to think race, the problems and challenges of multiculturalism, and the way diversity and institutional life can intersect. I think some of these questions are just as important for us to understand. So, in that vein, here are some texts that are important on these issues. This is just a small list. Like Leigh, I would ask for any suggestions, additions, corrections, or general comments.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.

Meditations on Second Philosophies: Comments on Anthony Paul Smith's A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

What’s in a prefix? The non- of non-philosophy, as Anthony frequently reminds us, is the same as the non- of non-Euclidean geometry or the non- of non-standard physics. Indeed, Laruelle, it seems, has taken to referring to this as non-standard philosophy rather than simply non-philosophy. The non- is not, therefore, an anti- or an un-, it does not signify either an oppositional discourse, or a mark of being outside and other. In the same way that non-Euclidean geometry is still geometry, or that people working on non-standard physics still see themselves as physicists. What does the non- of non-Euclidean geometry and non-standard physics have in common? Well, both are moves that question the defining axioms of their respective fields. In both cases they argue that the axioms that geometry and physics use to describe the world are not always sufficient for the task. Furthermore, these non-s are not primarily critical projects. They simply indicate a field in which there exist several positive projects (such as hyperbolic geometry, or string theory and M-theory). The non-, then, is fundamentally a marker of an immanent relation. It does not come from outside as a master discourse to finally tell philosophy what it is, but rather comes from within philosophy (or physics, or geometry) in order to re-examine its fundamental axioms in order for its intellectual projects to continue. Or at least I think so. This is probably a good as time as any to point out that I don’t know anything about Laruelle (and I know roughly the same amount about theology), but here I am anyway. But, if non-standard philosophy wishes to change or adapt axioms or principles of philosophy, what axioms and principles are under consideration?


Read the rest over at AUFS. 

Pluralism and Realism: a Jamesian rejoinder

Following up on a short, but interesting post by Jeremy Trombley, Levi Bryant bring up his hesitancy at the ontologically rich work in anthropology. Anyone who has read the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Kohn, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold know that there is a strain within anthropology that is (and has been for quite some time) producing ontologically and metaphysically rich accounts of the world that refuses any easy anthropocentrism (and I am not an anthropologist, so forgive me if that list is particularly partial or idiosyncratic). The hesistancy of Levi comes from the tension he perceives between realism and pluralism. As he explains:

I want to be pluralist and recognize that different groups of people have/propose different ontologies or different “theories of the world”.  I think it’s deeply important to recognize this for a variety of reasons.  However, as a realist and advocate of some version of the Enlightenment, I can’t, of course, believe that all of these ontologies are true depictions of being.  I can appreciate the ethical and political commitments of my good friend, a liberal catholic Bishop (unaffiliated with Rome); however, I can’t share his views that God exists, that we have souls (or are anything more than some form of embodiment), that there’s an efficacy to pray beyond psychological benefits it might have, etc.  The universe that I think is real and that can be argued for is just not a universe that contains these things. 

Also, I appreciate how, a little later in the post, Levi makes sure to include animals as part of the pluralism we need. True enough.
Of course there is a philosopher for whom answering this question might be, as Kennan Ferguson has suggested, his most important legacy. Obviously, I mean William James.
James strived to think the meaning of truth alongside his understanding of a pluriverse or multiverse (he might have been the one to coin multiverse). For Jamesian pragmatism, we all know the formula for understanding what is true. "Grant an idea or belief to be true...what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? ... True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify" (Pragmatism, p. 97). He goes on: "This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation."(p. 97) Pragmatism does not give us access to realism (or at least the realism that Levi seems to mean), because it is fundamentally uninterested in such questions as a priori questions. Does this mean that pragmatism is open to charges of correlationism? Different language, but a common and old attack on pragmatism. James again (long quotation, sorry):

What our critics most persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth, yet they do not constitute it. It is numerically additional to them, prior to them, explanatory of them, and in no wise to be explained by them, we are incessantly told. The first point for our enemies to establish, therefore, is that something numerically additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since the object is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists plead it, and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the bystanders the impression -- since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the object -- that our account of truth breaks down, and that our critics have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it ' truly,' is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully, if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse of language, to say the least, to transfer the word 'truth-' from the idea to the object's existence, when the falsehood of ideas that won't work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of those that will.
I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries. But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word ' truth' represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens fair and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism on its merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its workings, or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings; it will mean neither the idea's object, nor anything 'saltatory' inside the idea, that terms drawn from experience cannot describe. (p. 174)

The question of truth is not, then, if that object exists really. The cat sitting in my lap, refusing to move as I type with my laptop resting against him, is utterly real (other philosophers use desks and coffee mugs in their discussions. For me, the object par excellence is always the cat, always trying to interfere with my working). Truth describes the relation between knower and known, between idea and object. Therefore, not all real things are equally true. Again, James:

It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what o'clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you don't see why it is my duty to give it. A false address would be as much to the purpose.
With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract imperative, the pragmatistic treatment of truth sweeps back upon us in its fulness. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies. (p. 111)

Perhaps, then, we are not talking of speculative realism, but rather what Brian Massumi has called speculative pragmatism. Or just the plain old adventures in radical empiricism.
What pragmatism does, however, is entirely devalue the project of first philosophy. If truth, pragmatically speaking, is unconcerned with questions of ultimate reality. Thinking proceeds without ground (perhaps, as Schelling put it, Ungrund. Perhaps not). And therefore truth, as relation, does not privilege the grounding of metaphysics, or ethics, or epistemology, or logic, or the political, or aesthetics, or what have you. Rather, thinking proceeds ungrounded among the constant pullings and tensions of a pluralistic world of second philosophies. Perhaps even of the non-philosophical, as Laruelle has put it (see APS' book, chapter five). Thinking in pragmatism takes on the character of ecology.
"The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader's attention." (p. 71). The truth of pragmatism does not just allow pluralism, but in many ways must take the side of pluralism. And the tension will not end up not just between realism and pluralism, but also between monism and pluralism (and thus to some degree between Spinoza and James. Steven Shaviro manages to capture this tension in a few sentences and footnotes of chapter two of Without Criteria).
Empricism, as James understands it, begins with understanding the parts and working to the whole. Rationalism begins with the whole, and works to the parts. Kennan Ferguson follows James' arguments, explaining that "James censured 'our' (philosophers' and others') tendency to fall into what he called 'idealistic monism': that is, to hierarchize entirety over partiality, to think of the whole as the natural, highest conception" (Ferguson, William James, pp. 2-3. Btw, if you are concerned at all with this issue, you absolutely must read Kennan's book. You.Must.Do.It). Pragmatism, in this way, is deeply discomforting. No ground to think from, and a pluralistic world that necessarily means partial stories, unfinished questions, threads of work lost and, perhaps, never found. Oh, but the joy as well. The ability to shrug off certain annoying debates with, "Well, I'm basically a pragmatist," and then move on with your work.

EDIT: Also read this post at Circling Squares.

How to teach intro to philosophy

A better title might be how I teach intro to philosophy. In general, I see the intro to philosophy course as a way of teaching students how to engage primary sources of philosophy in reading, writing, and talking. As such, I don't see the principle purpose of the course is to introduce students to the various subfields within philosophy. So, in terms of syllabus design, I usually pair a reading from the canonical tradition with a text that is usually at least a little outside of the canonical tradition. This has two important consequences: (1) It really helps to get the students in the work of comparing and contrasting works we read. In an intro class, that sort of work could be something that needs scaffolding, and starting with the syllabus really helps. (2) It gives the students a large breadth in philosophy. So they see that philosophy can be produced outside of the 1.5 million or so square miles that usually comprise the production of most texts read in intro classes. So, if I was to teach an intro class tomorrow, it would probably look something like this (excluding departmental demands):

Block One:
Plato's Crito and Apology. These are both fairly classical texts in intro to philosophy.
We move from the Apology of Plato's Socrates, to the apology, the closing statements, of the Russian punk feminist band Pussy Riot (their closing statements can be found here). These statements, which are explicitly philosophical, also help contemporize Plato's own work. From Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement: "We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk."
We move from Pussy Riot, to Henry Oruka "Sage Philosophy" and "Philosophical Sagacity in African Philosophy" (h/t to Peter Gratton for the Oruka suggestion). Oruka's work on Sage Philosophy is obviously contrasted to the the punk sensibilities of Plato's Socrates and Pussy Riot.

Block Two:
We read Plato's The Symposium. Again, a traditional reading in intro to philosophy classes.
We move from that text to John Cameron Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The film obviously references Aristophanes' talk in "The Origin of Love", and in general you can read the film as commentary on The Symposium.
However, both of those texts focus on gay male or heterosexual love. So we move to Maria Lugones' essay "Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception". While not an necessarily a contrast with the previous texts, Lugones provides us with another iteration, in a different direction, on the thematic of love.

Block Three:
We start with Descartes' Mediations, again a traditional text in intro to philo courses.
(Depending on the time, we might watch The Matrix).
We then pair Descartes with Shankara's The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (h/t to Jason Wirth for this suggestion). Shankara is a nondualist Indian philosopher, and his views of reality and nondualism contrast with Descartes. His views of students and teachers is also a good place to revisit the question of the practice of being a philosopher that we had explored in block one, this time adding the ideas of Descartes' methodologies and Shankara's notions of discipleship.

Block Four
These three texts probably get taught equally in intro classes, but they work so well together.
(1) Nietzsche's The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.
(2) Simone de Beauvoir's introduction and conclusion to The Second Sex.
(3) William James' The Will to Believe.

So, a few questions for you, dear readers. (1) How do you approach your intro to philo courses? (2) What texts do you find pair well? Are there obvious pairing that I am missing? (3) Any major criticisms here?

Inappropriate environments is bad for female students (The no duh edition)

One of the links I posted yesterday was to an excellent post by Samir Chopra. There was a comment on that post, that she has responded to today here. I suggest reading them all in full, but I just wanted to add an additional point.

The original comment suggested:

Since that time, I’ve considered ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible. I certainly kept my office door open during consultation and only met with female students during office hours. I was a little more casual with male students, sometimes meeting them at a campus coffee shop if, for example, they had class during my office hours. Ironically, then, I suspect that ‘male anxiety’ does not foster more equality, but is more likely to result in preferential treatment of male students by male professors. I still consider my policy a prudent one, but it’s unfortunate that female students had less access to my time than did male students. Sadly, however, the practical effect of male anxiety might be that female students don’t get the best out of male professors which may contribute to an already existing problem: the dearth of women in the discipline.

Okay, let's give all of that the benefit of the doubt (I plan to come back to it shortly). Let's add another point. Say there is a male professor who is known to engage in inappropriate 'banter' in the classroom (maybe often repeating the same middle school jokes about manicures). Say there is a male professor who is known to hit on students at parties, or has been known to have sex with female students. Would a female student feel more or less comfortable having these out of classroom experiences with such a professor? I don't want to generalize this, but I have known female students were downright afraid of going to open-door office hours with a professor because he had a reputation for sleeping with other students in the department. I have known female students who had a male professor crack an inappropriate 'joke' while making a point about her paper. That student froze, never went to see the professor for help again, and was worried she seemed unintelligent to the professor after freezing. I am sure that I can give other examples. Even if things are as bad as the original commentator suggests, having male students enjoy extra coffee shop time with the professor just is not as bad as female students being unable to access the professor during office hours. This is a really simple and obvious point, but inappropriate environments are far worse for the outcomes of female students than the world where you have a slightly more informal relationship with your male students. This is where the arguments made by Louise Anthony and Samir Chopra are completely on point, such objections are just ways of re-centering male anxiety.

Now, none of this to say things have to be as bad as the original commentator suggested.  I think being conscious of the ways we treat male and female students differently is a really good start. Then, the next step, is try to figure out how to confront those realizations in ways that promote and produce a good environment for all of your students.

Women in philosophy: The Hannah Arendt edition

Recently, The Stone at The New York Times has published five female philosophers--Sally Haslanger,  Linda Martín Alcoff, Rae Langton, Louise Antony, and Peg O’Connor--on issues and conditions of being a woman in philosophy. There has been some excellent discussion over at Feminist Philosophers, see here, here, here, here, here, and here (also see this post by Samir Chopra). Also, a while back, Jennifer Saul had a piece in Salon on the topic, and she and Helen Beebee discussed this on the BBC show Women's Hour. Okay, I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I want to add some earlier comments from Hannah Arendt. These comments might not have much to do with the current conditions and issues, but I happen to be reading this as all of this was going on, and just thought it was worth sharing. This comes from the interview that was conducted by Gunter Gaus, and I am citing from Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945.

"Gaus begins the conversation by saying that Arendt is the first woman to take part in the series of interviews he is conducting; then he immediately qualifies that statement by noting that she has a 'very masculine occupation,' namely, that of a philosopher. This leads him to his first question: in spite of the recognition and respect she has received, does she perceive 'her role in the circle of philosophers' as unusual or peculiar because she is a woman?
Arendt replies: I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose. But to speak of the other question that you raised in your opening remarks: you say that philosophy is generally thought to be a masculine occupation. It does not have to remain a masculine occupation! it is entirely possible that a woman will one day be a philosopher....
GAUS: I consider you to be a philosopher....
ARENDT: Well, I can't help that, but in my opinion I am not. In my opinion I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean that I stayed with it.
(pp. 1-2, emphasis added, ellipses in the original).

The whole interview is here, German with English subtitles:


So, not only does she disavow the role of philosopher (and she spends a bit of time explaining why she doesn't), but also, she argues that philosophers as such would not accept her! Moreover, that there is not yet a woman philosopher (and again, one wonders if she means that a woman philosopher accepted by men philosophers).

On this very interview, there is an interesting EGS discussion between Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, and Larry Rickels. You can find the videos here (though, NB: some of the videos seem to be missing. If someone knows of a more full version, I would love the links).

One of the more interesting times that there is this discussion of why Hannah Arendt might not feel accepted into the circle of philosophers begins at the beginning of the sixth video with Judith Butler, but that is not the first or last instance of discussion of this issue. You can see the sixth video below.

Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference CFP

OOO/SR

I am going to talk about a weird little conceptual pet peeve I have been having. There is a tendency to write and talk about something called, strangely now, OOO/SR, which obviously stands for Object-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. Which is odd, if you think about it, because those terms are not synonyms. Historically, Speculative Realism referred to a group of four thinkers, of which Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy was one strand. So, whenever someone talks about OOO/SR, it is the same as if they were writing deconstruction/poststructuralism. Poststructuralism is obviously something much larger than deconstruction (and it would include several people who rejected or had issues with the term poststructuralism, just as speculative realism includes people like Ray Brassier, who has rejected the term). So, the phrase OOO/SR is really odd. More importantly, it often gets used in strange, univocal ways. In other words, it is often used to talk about the field as a whole, like "OOO/SR doesn't..." or "What OOO/SR allows us to do...", which is all very strange. We are talking about a lot of thinkers, many of whom disagree with each other to various degrees. Again, it is somewhat analogous to people writing "what deconstruction/poststructuralism doesn't do...".  (Btw, I am tempted to always write, after I say object-oriented ontology, if such a thing exists! like Derrida always did with deconstruction)

There exists a conceptual murkiness here I don't really understand. If you want to talk about object-oriented ontology, talk about OOO. If you want to talk about speculative materialism, talk about speculative materialism. If you want to talk about correlationism, talk about correlationism. If you want to talk about speculative realism as a poorly suited grab bag term for a cluster of thinkers working on projects both very dissimilar but also very close, do that (in this sense, speculative realism is a lot like poststructuralism. An evocative term for grouping, heuristically useful, but not really conceptually specific). But please, spare me the weirdness of  the extended and confusing acronym that is "OOO/SR".

Really? (UPDATED)

So, it's Saturday. I went to a recruitment fair. I am alternating working on changing the debate budget in response to across the board budget cuts here, and at the same time editing a chapter. Frustrated with both, I made the mistake to check my google reader.

The SPEP resolution passed. Jon Cogburn, in response to Peter, had this to say:

[...]will prove to be concretely harmful [...] to graduates of SPEP programs trying to get jobs in non SPEP dominated departments (do not underestimate how destructive this will be). [...] And now they have sacrificed job prospects of their own students.

Really? Really? (side note, I am not reading this as Professor Cogburn as advocating such a position as a good idea. I know from reading his blog is that he wouldn't adopt such a position personally).

Now, I can't say exactly what Professor Cogburn means here, but I really cannot understand it outside of some of the claims of some outrageous behavior (again, not on Professor Cogburn's part). Namely, that schools will decide to blacklist graduates from certain schools, for things these students/graduates probably had nothing to do with. Can we all slow down a bit and recognize how anti-intellectual, insulting, and plain stupid such a response would be? Can we also admit that such a reaction really only goes to further a view that a certain strand of analytic philosophers (as opposed to analytic philosophy) uses their clear and obvious institutional strength to act as childish bullies? Can we all take a deep breath, and admit all of that?

Look, most of this blew up over the summer, when I was on my honeymoon, or moving, or whatever. So, I have never followed this issue to the degree I feel I have a good sense of what is going on. But even if the Pluralist Guide is the Devil herself, a blacklisting on hiring from people not involved is absurd, more than absurd.

Okay?

UPDATE: I somehow missed this post by Jon Cogburn over at the APPS. He clarifies his position, somewhat. I have very little doubt he is right that this will make people getting hired from so-called SPEP affiliated institutions at other places harder. Of course, it is already pretty hard. And despite the truth of this that anyone who engages in such blacklisting (either overtly or covertly), is simply engaging in anti-philosophical practices.

Philosophers who have become famous after their deaths?

Still following the situation in Egypt closely (probably too closely, as I have a public talk to give this Friday that needs to be finished). But I don't have much coherent to say at this point, so a thought I have been mulling over.

Are there philosophers that were not considered important in their own lifetime, that have become major sometime after they died?

In art to become famous after you have died is almost a cliche, the most famous example being, of course, Van Gogh. In literature there are any number of examples. Emily Dickinson, for one. Or Franz Kafka, whose obituary referenced him as a writer of the Max Brod school. In math, I can think of at least one major example, Georg Cantor.

In philosophy I haven't been able to come up with any examples. I have come up with plenty that have become more famous, they were already pretty well-known in their lifetime. I can come up with any number who were famous in their lifetime, but fairly ignored now. I am sure there is probably some obvious example that I will feel like an idiot when someone points it out to me.

Some Thoughts on Ontology

Recently, there was another throw down between the relationists and the OOO. And almost predictably, it also became annoyingly personal between many of the participants. For various reasons (including that I had too much to do this weekend to actually keep up), I'm not going to respond to any of it. Instead, it merely encouraged me to make a rare post on ontology proper. What is going to follow are a series of relatively unsupported theses on ontology that I sometimes, on occasion, subscribe to. I welcome responses, but I have no real desire to defend current thoughts. So, feel free to disagree. I'll read and think about it. I probably won't defend anything. Though I might, if the spirit moves me.


(1) I don't believe in first philosophy. Instead, philosophy is filled with semi-discreet, enmeshing sub-disciplines. Ethics and ontology are two different things, but not wholly different. And more importantly, one doesn't come before the other. (And of course, it could also be aesthetics, epistemology, etc.).

(2) Obviously, I am anti-anthropocentric. In ethics and other things this might be a weak anti-anthropocentrism. I am convinced that we need to extend our ethical duties and obligations to other animals, I am not convinced we do so to my desk. I am, however, completely convinced that my desk is a full ontological being. That is to say, I am a strong anti-anthropocentrist in ontology. For example, in order to open up the desk, I have to first open up the drawer above my lap, and only then am I allowed to open up the drawers to my side. That seems to me that I am dealing with a real ontological interaction. Meanwhile, the conductive elements in the microchips in my computer interact with electricity, and random bits of information occasionally get lost or moved around without my ever telling my computer to do those things. In other words, it is obvious to me that things interact with each other, and humans never have to be on site for this to happen (this is so obvious to me, I wonder how anyone can disagree with it).

(3) I'm not sure about withdrawal. I am sure about opacity. Any system of relation (both internal systems and external systems) has to deal with opacity. This is basically an anti-anthropocentric reading of Glissant's brilliant text, Poetics of Relation. I highly suggest it for anyone who hasn't read it. Opacity means that beings are never given over to another being. This is both true for beings outside of my self, but also beings internal to my self. Now, opacity is not an empirical part of relations to be overcome, but a constitutive part of relations that is both essential and important. As Wittgenstein famously put it, "We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!"

There are a lot more, but I suddenly have to run. If I don't hit the publish button, I know I won't come back to this post anytime soon.

Does the philosophical divide really need to be deepened?

Michael Marder has a new post on the weird brush up that occured over at the Leiter blog a while back. A couple of quick thoughts:

(1) It is kinda weird how he makes a whole post about the Leiter situation without mentioning Leiter once. On the one hand, I guess I understand that impulse. On the other hand, the desire to read the situation as being somehow deeply symptomatic of philosophy as a whole seems fairly problematic.
(2) Most of my interactions with younger academics (the recently tenured, junior faculty, and everyone below that) seem relatively uninterested in continuing any sort of active hostilities. Now, I am sure there is a major sampling bias going on in those experiences, but I've never felt that what I need is less interactions with my brethren on the analytic side of things. Even with that said, it is true that a good number of biases and prejudices continue on both sides of the fence. As usual, I am not sure more segregation is the best way of getting rid of those biases and prejudices. Marder solution seems to not be a solution at all, and more of a way of just not having to deal with each other. Coming out of an institution with two philosophy programs (probably one of the few in the States that has more than one), I'm not sure it is best solution to the situation, either. Though the divide between PIC and SPEL is hardly a simple one of between Continental and Analytic, considering neither program offers a lot in traditional analytical philosophy.
(3) I guess this gets me into another problem with Marder's post, which is the way the whole conflict seems constituted around one linear divide in philosophy. I almost want to say something like there are more philosophies in heaven and earth, Marder, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. My training in non-western and decolonial philosophy is as likely to make me seem like a stranger among readers of Deleuze and Agamben, as my training in Deleuze and Agamben is to make me seem like a stranger among those who were trained in Russell and Quine. Moreover, if you spend some time talking to people who practice ethics in the Analytic tradition, more than a few of them will regale you with stories about they way they are often treated as ugly step children among their cohort in Analytic philosophy. Meanwhile, while I often engage in a history of philosophy, I don't tend to think of what I do as a history of philosophy. And I am somewhat unsettled by Marder's elision between Continental philosophy and a history of philosophy. I know plenty historians of philosophy who are not Continentalists, and I know plenty of Continentalists who are not primarily historians of philosophy. I know in some way in seems I am picking on Marder for engaging in simple heuristics necessary for a blog post, but I am trying to highlight one of things that makes me most uneasy with his solution of deepening the divide. I don't think there is the divide, and if we seek to deepen along the fault lines of only a linear and singular divide than those of us who have so many other differences is going to find it all the harder to find their places. With a little recourse to Ranciere, the problem with a place for everyone and everyone in their place is you are always going to have a remainder, a part that has no part.


Anyway, I am feeling fairly sympathetic to Marder in all of this. And it is true that Leiter et al seem to have fairly strong unofficial institutional influence, and that the tendency of many of them to act in such a strongly and absurdly anachronistic fashion, tilting at the 'postmodernists' and feeling superior over groups they clearly know little to nothing about is disturbing. But with all of that, I have no desire to confuse what is going on over there with philosophy in general. Or, maybe I just hope it doesn't reflect philosophy in general.

Some thoughts on Polemics

Levi has linked to an old review of DeLanda by Shaviro, and both of them agree that DeLanda's hostility toward Marx and Marxism seems rather odd. And I agree with that, but it opens up a moment to talk about polemics.

I think that polemics can be very important. In particular, I think that thinkers, in order to try and think something new, has to clear the way for those thoughts. They have to manage to create some fresh air for themselves, and that breathing room usually comes from taking on one of the master's, one of the great thinkers that help define an intellectual milieu. For DeLanda, that is obviously Marx. For Levi, it is Derrida. For Deleuze, it was Hegel. I could go on (for me, it's Heidegger). Now, these thinkers are obviously to an extent conceptual personae, that is, they refer less to exactly just these thinkers texts, but to an entire relationship, an entire assemblage that goes by the proper name Marx, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, etc. All of us think in a field saturated by proper names, even those that refer the most specifically to actual people still refer to an entire assemblage, to an entire conceptual machinery. Their texts, their lectures, their actual students and virtual students, their enemies and teachers, all of these things go into the making of a thinker. The more famous the thinker, the bigger (more powerful, more vital) the assemblage. Sometimes we have to push hard against one of these assemblages, to think or speak something that exists in tension with a localized part of the assemblage. So, I we talk against Heidegger, Derrida, Hegel, Marx, etc. The polemic is necessary for breathing and thinking. That doesn't always mean the polemic is true, at least true against the texts and ideas of a certain thinker whose proper name also names a certain assemblage. I don't agree with DeLanda about Marx, and I don't agree with Levi about Derrida. But I also have little doubt that if they didn't feel the way they did about these conceptual personae, then their work would be very different. And maybe it should be, those are always fine criticisms (fine as in useful or productive). But there is a reason I don't spend a lot of time trying to convince someone they have misread such and such a thinker, unless I think that misreading has come at a cost of thinking something interesting or useful (ultimately this was what Matt was on about in his disagreement with Levi during the so-called Derrida wars. It wasn't primarily about Derrida, but instead about issues of humanism and anthropocentrism).
In the case of DeLanda and Marx, it makes a lot of sense to me even though I find Marx incredibly useful for my work. First, it is clear that many Marxists are far more interested in centralization than DeLanda feels is healthy and useful (think here of Zizek for just a major current example). And I also can't help but share impatience at many Marxists hatred of markets.
While there is no singular entity called The Market, much less The Free Market, markets exist. And markets are powerful tools for decentralized organization. Many on the left oppose cap and trade because it creates a market, and many on the left opposed health care exchanges because it again functioned as a market. I'm not sure how much Marx is to blame for the anti-markets bias, but for DeLanda (following Braudel), markets are powerful and useful tools, and at their heart are opposed to centralization and totalization.

More on Intro to Philosophy

After talking to several people and thinking about it, here are the texts I believe I am going to teach (ordered here by alpha, if you want to suggest the order feel free). There will probably still be some changes, and so anyone who wants to get their 0.02 in still have time. I also want to give a special thanks to Peter Gratton, Jason Wirth, and the people who posted suggestions in the last post (namely Izak, Simon, Captain Furious, and Craig). Feel free to argue for a text you already suggested if you think it is important and silly I left it off.

Aristotle, De Anima
Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh Critic"
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (film)
Holder (editor/translator), Early Buddhist Discourses
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Lugones, selected essays (aka, not entirely selected yet. Almost certainly "Playfulness, World-Traveling, and Loving Perception").
Oruka, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy
Plato, The Apology
Plato, The Symposium
Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination

Intro to Philosophy

In the spring it looks like I will be able to teach Intro to Philosophy. I am pretty excited about it, and have several ideas about what to put in the course (particularly expanding it outside of its traditional Western comportment). However, I was curious if anyone had suggestions. If anyone wanted to send me their syllabus, suggest preferred texts and textbooks, particularly awesome or smart assignments. I think Adam once said he didn't know why we didn't spend more time talking about teaching on these things, and I agree with him. Crowdsourcing classes makes a lot of sense, so please, would love any suggestions.

Oh, I am also probably going to be teaching argumentation in the spring. Most of you probably have never taught or taken that course, but any suggestions on that front would also be appreciated.

Go crowdsourcing, go crowdsourcing, go!

How do you organize your books?

So, I've recently been organizing my books into my new office at mercer, which has been really exciting. As comes with such moves, I am left wondering what are the best way to organize my books, and what are the ways other people organize them.

Currently, my books are divided into the following sections:

• Animal & Food books.
• Art and Oversized books
  
• Classical Western Philosophy
• French Philosophy
• German Philosophy
• Italian Philosophy
• Literature
• Other Philosophy & Theory books
• Vicissitudes of Identity

Now, these book sections are listed by alpha, but are somewhat more haphazardly thrown together. Within each section they are organized alpha by author, and then by original publication date as much as possible (I really enjoy this, because for many authors it gives me a quick visual sense of when a work lines up with other works in that author's career). Now, I am beginning to question these categories. First of all, talk about eurocentric. I could try to organize my Vicissitudes of Identity books by a nation, but for good reason they are a lot harder to organize by geography than the Europeans (and the Europeans are hard enough, and often pretty random). But, for example, where do you put someone like Frantz Fanon? Does he belong with French philosophy, Caribbean philosophy, African philosophy? And notice how quickly we go from European nation, to a whole region, to a whole continent.

Anyway, looking for suggestions, but also just curious how other people organize their books.