eye of the storm

seems like nietzsche and hitler is a question, so let me have a crack at that too. if it gets really hairy, i will start posting quotes.

i actually love nietzsche and he got me into philosophy. but i think if you make him into some mellow democrat, you certainly have him all wrong. he loves hierarchies, and thinks they are natural. he condemns egalitarianism in all forms as resentment that hates the world. he celebrates raw power, and admires people who wield it without shame. he praises war. there are many passages where he attacks democracy, socialism, etc. he certainly toys with various general characterizations of races/nations and their characters, including "the jews." he ridicules charity and praises cruelty. he proposes that we are on the edge of the next stage in evolution, which he calls "superman." he talks about how superior and inferior people get bred. etc etc etc.

you can't tell me that all that has nothing to do with fascism. or that it's all elizabeth's doing.

now the defense rests largely on this: he's even more brutal to anti-semites (surely he has his sister's husband in mind, e.g.) than he is to the jews. there are various ironies and reversals in his statements on all these matters to which you've got to be constantly alert. nevertheless, the last thing you want to do is actually live in a nietzschean polity.

it's heidegger was a nazi! time again. and let me say: heidegger was a nazi. the times piece quotes carlin romano (whom i know a bit) from the chronicle of higher education, who calls Heidegger a “Black Forest babbler” and fraud who was “overrated in his prime” and “bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now.”

ok let me have a quick go. i actually think heidegger is a profound and important thinker, though i would also say there is an element of hoohah: a mystical obcurantism.well that's true of all german systematic philosophers, and heidegger was the best the twentieth century had to offer in that vein. even if he kind of encouraged a cult of himself, he's not responsible for the shocking submissiveness and credulity of his followers, whom i've had to live with in philosophy departments now and then.

now let me say that we live inside two centuries of totalitarianism and many philosophers are tainted. hegel is an inyourface state worshiper: he flatly asserts that the state is god. or consider schelling. marx is, i believe, an utterly totalitarian thinker who had a far more direct influence on actual totalitarian regimes and their genocides than did heidegger, who was too obscure to really wield any direct influence on practical politics. there are reasons that hitler loved nietzsche; a fascist reading of nietzsche is not entirely disconnected from what he actually said. well, you might also grab folks like hobbes or rousseau.

and we are, right now, still in the middle of the cult of the state as represented by all these people: essentially no one does not advocate total state power: it taints everyone from rawls to habermas to zizek etc. and in a way this is just the reflection of the reality of our amazing progress. so i more or less hate the political philosophies of all these people. it's a harder question on heidegger than most, because even more than most he does not say: here's my totalitarian system; there is no clear advocacy of any particular politics in heidegger, though it's not wrong to keep feeling a fascist undertow. 

but our intellectual life is unimaginable without hegel, marx, nietzsche. nor would we want to imagine that even if we could. many of the ideas are compelling, and you can't think completely outside them. now you had better keep your critical faculties about you at all times. if you start accepting stuff because marx said it or because hardt and negri said marx said it etc you are not only going to end up accepting totalitarian premises; you are actually enacting the submission that makes totalitarianism possible. most intellectuals do exactly that.

but i think that marx and nietzsche and hedegger, e.g., also can be wielded in a liberatory vein: the ideas are extremely rich, complicated, equivocal. someone like foucault  shows the kind of thing i mean. he's inconceivable without marx and nietzsche and hegel and heidegger. but he also exposes our totalitarian situation profoundly.

heidegger is not going to imperceptibly make you a nazi through some kind of secret mesmeric power in the text. read. read hard. read carefully. stay free in relation to the text. take what you can use and leave the rest. read...as an anarchist, or a radical advocate of direct democracy. read and never knuckle under to what you read. the question really isn't about the dictatorial power of the author; it's about the free resistance of the reader.

how am i ever going to deal with my envy of slavoj zizek? christ now he's writing for the nytimes. well, maybe like this: for all of zizek's super-bold rhetoric etc - admittedly toned down here - the position is an extremely conventional statist leftism; really he just wants us all to be swedes. the great imagination of the prose is matched by the utter dullness of the actual positions. it's cool that he loves utopian thinking: a kind of nice reversal. but what does he actually want? "socialism with a human face." gee whiz.

just to give the capsule refutation: once you've constituted a state sufficient to give you your socialism, then whether it retains a human face is entirely at the whim of those who operate the power you've constituted.

of late, i've been paddling in quite the lovely little philosophical backwater, which i might term "post-idealist british metaphysics." in the late nineteenth century, british philosophy was dominated by folks who were in some sense and in some degree hegelians: t.h. green, bernard bosanquet, and f.h. bradley. "analytic" philosophy arose, in my view, as a rebellion against idealism, not only against its grand and basically non-empirical system-construction, but against its turgid, obscure, profound prose. (in fact, the british guys even at their worst wrote much more clearly than hegel, e.g., or than germans in general: a basic aspect of british thought beginning to end.)

so, bertrand russell, g.e. moore and co started ripping idealism apart and going for certain, clear results under the auspices of fregean logic. they more or less proclaimed all metaphysics, by which they meant really the philosophies of their own teachers, to be doa: actually meaningless and pointless. they tried to achieve (and succeeded to an amazing extent in achieving) extreme clarity and precision and certainty. after that, wittgenstein, logical positivism, etc. analytic philosophy dominated the whole field in the uk and us and australia for the whole century, and it retained its anti-hegel rage: really there were and even are purges, where we declare that you people who read hegel or heidegger aren't philosophers, are spouting nonsense, and must not be hired, granted tenure, allowed to work with grad students, etc.

big fun! but one thing that happened is that through the 1920s and 30s there were a whole bunch of "systematic" philosophers in british universities who were still basically working in the green/bradley framework, while also grappling with russell and moore. these guys were still building systems at the same time as they were trying to hold to or re-develop an empiricist-clear style.

so anyway, i'm sort of thinking i'm going to write a "system" of philosophy, running through epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics etc in a "bone-head" or "direct" realist vein. in trying to see what's out there i got hold of a book called a theory of direct realism, by j.e. turner (1925). well, from here it looks bizarrely incoherent methodologically, lurching from russell to hegel, from super-precise logic to hyper-woolly idealism, from rank scientism to rank speculation. that's a product of a professional dilemma at a certain moment. but it also in a way suggests that these strands could have been synthesized in various ways had the analytic folks not been in their own way stalinists.

but exploring the footnotes etc i touched on a literature with which i was unfamiliar except as names or except for their translations or commentaries on kant, etc: people like robert stout, or norman kemp-smith, c.d. broad, pringle-pattison, etc. one of the interesting things about this lit is that most of these folks were trying actually to crush hegel in a realist vein. but their style was still essentially the grand metaphysical manner, which they did not know was already unreadable when they wrote, and which essentialy has not been read since.

the great find in this world of funk is, for my money, the astonishing genius samuel alexander, whose work, including the massive slab of systematic metaphysics space, time, and deity (1920), is entirely anti-idealist and pointedly clear, indeed almost painfully lucid. but it is also in its way squarely in the speculative, here's my system-of-everything style. what is says, beautifully, is that believe it or not space and time and even we are actual material objects in a reality independent of our consciousness. and then he makes the next move: consciousness itself is a real thing in a real world. now that for my money is the real problem with the idealist tradition: that it denies that, which is...ridiculous. alexander is, in fact, far less idealist in such matters than are russell or wittgenstein or carnap. stylistically, he's closer to german idealism. doctrinally, he's a much more thorough critic and opponent of it than the heroes of the analytic tradition.

indeed, that tradition at least started out as "phenomenalist": it has us building reality out of sense data: all we knew was our own mental images, tactile sensations, etc. this is exactly how british empiricism ended up devouring the world in the first place, why it had to eventuate in kant and hegel. it's understandable that the analytic dudes loved hume and hated hegel, wanted to re-institute pre-idealist empiricism, or didn't really know where else to start. but really that was not the best move. start with a world constructed out of sensations and you end up a solipsist or a transcendental or absolute idealist, and analytic empiricism had to be saved from this fate again, for example by austin. well, alexander just rips phenomenalism apart. he notes dryly that it is incompatible with our own experience of the world and status as natural creatures.

space, time, and deity was welcomed as a classic at the time, and then fell off the cliff when the analytic style became entirely hegemonic. it's a model of what i want to do, though i doubt that anyone i've ever met has ever read it. it indicates a counter-factual history in which anti-speculative philosophy took a different mode, where plain-speaking realism replied to hegelianism in its own terms and killed it. whether we'd be better off in that history than this one is a hard but cool question.

as i've often indicated, i like david brooks. he's a more thoughtful person than the average columnist (more thoughtful than me, for example); he reads and thinks more than most columnists; he writes better than most columnists. sometimes, however, like today, you'd have to say that he's a bit out of his element. few columnists would go anywhere near the question of different conceptions of the human self, so points for that. but when he sets this up as philosophers vs psychologists, he just has no idea what he's talking about.

perhaps aristotle had some kind of unitary or atomic conception of the self (though that's a hard and interesting question). but no major philosopher who i can think of in the twentieth century who considered the matter at all didn't see that there was a problem, and whole movements of philosophy have shattered that sucker more thoroughly than any psychologist could.

for example, hume totally ripped up the cartesian self in the mid-eighteenth century. hegel socialized, historicalized, and smacked the self in 1810. multiple complex selves were flying all around the philosophy of nietzsche. you know, dewey, gilbert ryle, wittgenstein, foucault, derrida, deleuze etc etc: not a single single self to be found anywhere. 

"philosophy says x" is never a good idea. but here it's just completely uninformed.

indian philosophy strikes me as if (in fact, quite as if) the whole of the western tradition consisted of three millennia of german idealism (when a half century was plenty), and your biggest decision is: schelling or hegel? (wait. fichte!) you get to choose between slightly different visions of the absolute. but where's the moment where someone says, "the absolute? what the fuck?" no sooner do you have a hegel in the west than you get a kierkegaard: subjecting the whole thing to ridicule, taking up a very opposed position. or a nietzsche, a foucault.

my guy j.l austin thought that philosophy could be more collaborative, more cumulative, that we could work together through the meaning of terms etc. that's a nice vision in many ways, and the "individualism" of the west can seem peverse or obnoxious: each figure bolstering his ego by rejecting the one before. on the other hand, this has its dangers. you could get off on the wrong foot and spend the rest of history hopping.

i'm gearing up to teach asian philosophy  next semester. what i'm going to say is the kind of thing one just shouldn't say, and i would like to be instructed otherwise, but i sort of hate the philosophy of india, which for one thing i might compare unfavorably to the philosophy of china. indian thought has some very problematic (from my point of view) general aspects. it is not or is virtually not for a moment, distinct from religion. now it might actually be pretty hard to distinguish these things in any tradition in a principled way, but a lot of indian philosophy seems to me to massively import dogmatic assumptions that it doesn't bother to defend, and i'm realizing that i like that independent edge, you know, in aristotle, or hume: it's why aquinas - important though he is - has to look a little fantastic to someone outside the religious orientation.

 but indian philosophy appears to me almost wholly "scholastic," unbelievably elaborate ramifying of almost arbitrarily generated and venerated ideas. and you get what you'd expect to get in rampant scholasticism: extreme refinement over millennia of a set of basic concepts, to the edge of complete incomprehensibility.

and then i might say most of indian philosophy occurs within a basic set of presuppositions. reincarnation in some form is agreed on by almost everyone. almost everyone in one way or another views time and indeed the world in time as an illusion, a veil we have to see through. now in the west at least since...i don't know, 1450, and also 550 bc to 400 AD, if someone said stuff like that, someone else would say: what? that's completely wrong. but no one in india really seems to. it's like i want to grab some arhat by the lapels (if any) and go: ok. why do you believe in reincarnation? what if you're wrong? 

it's a bit hard for me to believe that no one in ancient india was actually doing that: these are, it seems, rather fantastic or certainly kind of evidently optional approaches to accounting for our experiences. so then i begin to wonder: why does it seem so slavish? or: what forms of censorship or repression kept people from asking, or kept the askers' questions from being represented in the tradition, etc? but at any rate, i can at least say that i myself find no plausibility in the basic doctrines of indian philosophy.

i think there's a good contrast with chinese thought. often chinese thinkers are brutally clear, almost unbelievably straightforward, even when paradoxical etc. the analects of confucius, or the chuang tzu or even their later elaborations are difficult in their way, but not because the thinkers were lost in an infinite glob of verbal gobbledygook. they want you to understand what they're saying. buddhism it seems to me, was extremely well-served by being yanked into an east asian context: sharpened, clarified, brought to its essence. certainly it often lost even the veneer of orthodoxy. no indian is going to say "kill the buddha; that's the essence of buddhism." but indian thought is way too reverent to be tasteful; the boldest move is the introduction of a refinement; this is true even with regard to the jaina or buddhist 'attack' on or mild refinements of  the vedic or 'hindu' tradition; it's not nearly thorough enough to really support the conventional term for them: 'heterodox.' 

y'all: let me show you heterodoxy.

this is an interesting piece. but it contains a colossal assumption=mistake. that is, that the basic function of absurdity is to make us better at reason, or that we love nonsense because it helps us make sense, feeds into our logic machine. the piece mentions kierkegaard, and if this approach was represented as kierkegaard's position it would be...nonsense. let's say the world was full of arbtrary or teemingly incomprehensible facts. then the continual project of making sense would be incapable of adequately representing the world: the drive for sense would embroil you in falsehood. in some cases on some occasions, sense, pattern, logic, etc is a trap, an oppression. we need it, and we also need...release from it. which is not to say, however, that you could understand order without chaos. that's only one of the purposes of our chaos and nonsense, which is intrinsically as well as instrumentally needful.

just to throw down the metaphysics for a moment: in my view time is not an artifact of consciousness, a pure form of perception, a phenomenological whatzit, a veil of maya, etc etc: it is a perfectly real objective fact or element or dimension in which we are embedded. sometimes it seems faster or slower, but of course that doesn't even make sense except on a background of constancy. the tick tick of the clock does not constitute but tracks the external reality of time. in short: we do not fabricate, we are fabricated by, the world as it actually is.

oh just for the hell of it, i'm going to explain to you where western philosophy went horribly, irremediably wrong. let's place it simplistically at the dawn of modern philosophy: descartes. now descartes' view was that what we directly experience is only our own ideas, essentially conceived of as mental images. that is, we directly experience only our own semiotic entities: symbols for things in the external world. of course, this raises an insoluble scepticism: how do we know our images match up to reality? we can't, since all we have is ideas. the empiricists exacerbated this disease: our experience consists of "impressions" and "ideas": again, mental semiotic phenomena. only through these do we know anything else. kant tried to deal with the myriad problems that arise, and everyone saw immediately that even though kant still had a world outside consciousness (the thing in itself) it wasn't doing any work and that all you needed was consciousness and its semiotic materials.

one problem is that you get absolutely nowhere in explaining perception by mental images: an image requires an eye to be seen no less than does a boulder. start this way and all you get is an infinite procession of humuncular eyes. that's one reason we switch from the image to language starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing through postmodern philosophy, e.g. rorty. all we have access to is language, and we can lose the world etc. this gives you a nice way out in terms of social practices and conventions as well.

but it is more or less the same thing: lock us in a world of symbols, then notice that once you have you ain't got no world.

this is a disastrous, empty dead end. not only is it false, but i think that if descartes or kant or hegel or wittgenstein or rorty had kept faith with their own actual experience for a moment, they'd have realized that they don't believe that we only have truck with symbol systems, which at any rate are roughly as mysterious as worlds. that is, retreating to semiotics doesn't even improve the explanatory situation. the view is arid, and profoundly anti-naturalistic: given a basically darwinian picture of who we are, the idea that we are only acquainted with our own symbols and not with our environment is incompatible with the fact that the human species exists at all, or survived its first crawl into the world.

sometimes, i must say, you hit a little scholarly felicity. off abebooks i ordered a used copy of an extremely obscure book: "The Meaning of Words: Analysed into words and unverbal things, and unverbal things classified into intellections, sensations and emotions." this was a 1948 edition of a work from 1854, by the brilliant and prescient and entirely unknown philosopher/banker alexander bryan johnson. the book, which just arrived, is inscribed on the inside cover "max black," and it struck me that this might be the property of the famous (at least in his time) philosopher of language max black. this rather excellent piece of news was confirmed by the fact that the volume came from a store in ithaca; black spent his career at cornell.

anyway, i've now got a copy of johnson (an important influence on josiah warren) signed and more importantly underlined and annotated by max black.alexander bryan johnson is a freakish philosophical talent developing in the wilderness (utica, to be exact, early-to-mid nineteenth-century). roughly, no one ever read his books. but he more than strikingly, richly and in detail, anticipates twentieth-century analytic philosophy. he more or less just takes the position of the positivists: that a sentence means the conditions under which it could be verified. this is close to peirce, as well, though in some ways, believe it or not, johnson's formulations are superior to either in clarity and plausibility.

believe it or not, there is a full-blown truth-conditional semantics, and this was stated perfectly clearly in the 1820s. "the meaning of words" recapitualtes but clarifies and qualifies the "treatise on language" (1828/1836). it says that metaphysical disputes about soul, spirit, matter, etc, are merely verbal, that the terms are unmeaning and the key to "solving" these "problems" is to see that. and "the meaning of words" is pretty much organized like wittgenstein's tractatus. johnson is a radical and technical empiricist/scottish common sense person (moving the other way into his origins), but i'm going to develop him sideways into a radical particularist and realist.

you know, thoreau, emerson, garrison, warren - the great american individualists from the period of johnson's life - did not have a systematic metaphysics (or anti-metphysics). even coleridge or carlyle - who directly influenced thoreau and emerson's philosophy - are pretty sketchy with the fundamental onology and epistemology. they were poets or polemicists, not system-builders at a fundamental level. but as warren realized, johnson provides a beautiful way to start with a world of incomparable individuals, a world bristling only with particularities. this can connect what emerson was saying, for example, to contemporary science and the history of empiricism. then you can build your poetry or your politics on that.

anyway...

meanwhile i'm working completely through the josiah warren project again, re-writing and correcting everything. fordham has accepted it as a book. there'll be more and more stuff on the warren website, too.

i'm a person or possibly philosopher who doesn't really want to have heroes, and i usually really haven't. you know, i loved nietzsche, kierkegaard, or chuang tzu at different times, but i also saw the drawbacks: like that kierkegaard is interminable and unbelievably repetitive and that nietzsche is...fucking crazy. so it is with some trepidation that i say that henry david thoreau is my hero, especially because for someone soaking in derrida or quine, thoreau cannot but be regarded as a backwater, if a philosopher at all. but i've been reading everything this summer, and i can't help it: he just kills me.

joni and i did concord and walden this week. walden was lovely, actually: sprawled by boston, but the woods are growing back in, and the house-site is not overrun, and i liked the tattooed guy selling stuff in the little gift shop. there's a little public beach filled with moms and kids. there's a walden research center up on the hill, collecting everything written about thoreau. i don't know if that's a good idea or not, but it's a beautiful building (donated by...don henley? what would mojo nixon say?) we got up on the hill at sleepy hollow cemetery and saw the family plots of the emersons, thoreaus, hawthornes, and alcotts. we toured the old manse, where emerson grew up and where nathaniel and sophia hawthorne - the world's worst renters - scratched little notes on the windows with sophia's diamond ring. the first shot of the american revolution was fired in the back yard.

i love emerson, too, but i'm kind of seeing the differences. if i could put it in a nutshell: emerson is still somewhere in the notion that nature is a product of consciousness, which it makes sense to call 'transcendentalism.' thoreau is in no doubt that consciousness is a product of nature; he's the opposite of transcendentalist, an immanentalist if you will permit me. they both write beautifully, of course, but emerson delivers the single ringing sentence; thoreau lets observations accumulate into something. emerson is reticent on the political implications of his individualism; thoreau really is an inyourface religious skeptic and anarchist. and no doubt a very eccentric and prickly - though also beloved - personality.

i've come to see his time at walden as one of the utopian experiments of the time - like fruitlands down the road, or brook farm , etc. only the community that thoreau was building was pointedly not aimed primarily at joining together human beings, but joining a human being with a world: at once a wider and a narrower vision of community.

there's been a rejiggering of thoreau lately, represented for example in the new book the thoreau you don't know by robert sullivan. it is a terrible book, and really remarkably does not actually display a wide acquaintance with thoreau's writings, among many other problems. but the basic idea is right: thoreau is funny, radical, funky, actually fun. and his "environmentalism" is a lot more difficult than it seems, because it starts with the presumption that human life is completely inseparable from nature: that human destruction of nature is nature destroying itself, etc.

if you go to walden, you see how close it is to concord, and real isolation was definitely not hdt's point. he didnt live off the land or resolve on utter solitude. but he was seeking some kind of rite of passage, and an economy that expressed only fundamentals. joni was reading me walden while we drove and it struck me how great a book it is: as good a book as has ever been written: rich in direct or elusive ideas, emerging in a real way from real experience.

down at my ma's i finally read the book wittgenstein's poker, which is built around an incident at cambridge in which, more or less, the great philosopher ludwig wittgenstein menaced the great philosopher karl popper with a fireplace poker at a colloquium, during a dispute over the nature of philosophy. as an intellectual popularization, it is exemplary, and one thing i can say for it, the characterization of difficult philosophical positions - not only w's and p's but bertrand russell's and the logical positivists', and others - is amazingly clear and accurate and even readable by a lay audience: quite the accomplishment.

you may know that i have, in my time, reviled ludwig wittgenstein, and characterized him as the most overrated philosopher in history by a long way. this book confirms my diagnosis in a variety of ways. in particular, the cult of wittgenstein is displayed in all its glorious slavish stupidity: actual graduate students and philosophy professors dressing like him and talking like him, their ultimate question being "what would wittgenstein say?" in other words: not philosophers at all but acolytes in a messianic religious movement. i was taught, i must say, by a couple of these very people - cora diamond and renford bambrough, to name names - and as you might imagine, i went far out of my way to provoke and ridicule them - or rather, provoke them by ridiculing wittgenstein - though they were perfectly nice people. such is the origin of my wittgenstein loathing.

he had terrible effects on people, including his mentor russell. there are astonishing quotations in poker: russell - at the time the foremost logician in the world - said that after dealing with wittgenstein, he could no longer do logic. he felt too stupid. he thought that wittgenstein would re-articulate the bases of logic, for the first time on firm ground etc. the sort of thing he was talking about is embodied in the tractatus logico-philosophicus. but i think this was more about wittgenstein's mesmeric fu manchu superpowers - his gaze went through you like a bullet through a blancmange, changing you forever (for the worse) - than it was actually about his achievements. if you were enumerating the great advances of logic in the 19th and 20th centuries, you would talk about frege, and russell, tarski, godel, perhaps quine, and perhaps kripke on modal logic. but i think no particular solid fundamental result is associated with the tractatus, or indeed with wittgenstein at all. russell was deluded: he was easily the better and more important logician. the only actual achievement in this line that edmonds and eidinow can point to is truth tables. now these are useful, but they are useful only as a convenient way to represent the already-understood content of the logical connectives; they are definitely not a fundamental discovery.

but let me say that i have recovered from my brush with the wittgenstein cult. w died in 1951, and no one is going to be taught by his students any more, and even his students' students are fading. and i feel more distance. the ordinary-language style stuff of the "later w" - above all the philosophical investigations, is - if i want to be honest - very important. "meaning is use," "family resemblance," "language-games," "form of life," "the private language argument": these are important conceptions in philosophy that are still being played out. in my anxiety to destroy an irrational religion, i turned away from a set of important ideas.

now i will still say things like this: w's writings are extremely pretentious and obscurantist attempts to display his own genius. this is a complex matter; they're not obscurantist the way hegel or derrida is obscurantist, by just sinking into impenetrable jargon and extreme syntax. they are in a way deceptively simple. but that doesn't mean you can understand them, really, one factor in the never-ending industry of w-interpretation. as people keep saying in poker, they are "oracular." they're more like the tao te ching than phenomenology of spirit, but my own sense is that w is nowhere near as profound as lao tzu. they are elusive as a way to make you always think there's something you're not quite seeing, an egomaniacal strategy to persuade you that you are stupid in comparison to the author, which worked even on russell. but they are not merely that, and a little real genius shines through the "i-am-a-genius" persona. so i intend to go back and read again.

the debate between wittgenstein and popper was about whether there are any real philosophical problems, or only linguistic puzzles to be untangled (p held that there were philosophical problems). now i think that even an issue this fundamental to philosophy professors could be handled with a bit of a light touch. (certainly weapons won't help you win the argument, though they might help you win the argument, if you get me). in a way, i'm not horribly unhappy however it comes out, and if i could go back there and get a word or poker in edgewise, i would argue that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between genuine problems and linguistic puzzles. look. if you could elucidate the uses of the word 'true' in language-games, or whatever, that would be a way of addressing - a strategy for addressing - the classical problem of truth. i'd just say that the question is partly about language, or is profitably approached, or even ultimately can only be approached, from within language. that doesn't mean it's not a real problem, right?

i like j.l. austin's view: he makes no grand claims about what you can and cannot possibly do: he simply deploys an ordinary-language analysis strategically: it gives some leverage, gives you fresh insights and so on. is there a problem of truth outside language? it's not clear that's a sensible question, which means that you don't really have a position on it one way or another. you could tackle it head-on: here's my theory of truth. or you could tackle it by analyzing uses of words. these are less different than they might appear, and it's hard to tell what might help until you actually see the elucidation. on some construals "what is truth?" and "what is the meaning of the word 'truth'" are the very same question, but in any case they are inextricably intertwined.

as also i've said before, j.l. austin does very much what later w does: but he does it more clearly, and far more wittily. i just wish he'd finished more books.

been reading an obscure volume of thoreau's correspondence: familiar letters, a gift from the inimitable joan brown. there's plenty to enjoy. one passage i thought was interesting was the following, about an advertisement for firewood, which thoreau came across while he was living on staten island in 1843. the letter is to emerson:

But I am suspicious of the Brittonner, who advertises so many cords of good oak, chestnut, and maple wood for sale. Good! ay good for what? And there shall not be left a stone upon a stone. But no matter, - let them hack away. The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins, and pigs and children reveling in the Concord dirt; and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.

obviously, thoreau is a famous nature boy and environmental hero. but what i think we're still trying to catch up with is the idea that human beings are as natural as trees. thoreau's appreciation of nature extended to irishmen. indeed the idea is profound among other things in looking at the arms of an irishmen, and their children and pigs, as transformations of trees. now no doubt thoreau would have mourned the destriction of walden woods. but he also would have seen it as a continuation of the process of walden woods. we cannot destroy nature, are not destroying it. we are it. even the destruction of ourselves would be the destruction of it, by it, a continuing transformation and preservation of its energy.

one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.

then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.

i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.

identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.

i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.

but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.

as i don't blog, for example, about the "long-awaited address to the muslim world" (instead laboring on spyder's rebellion) i thought we might revisit mathematics is a pagan cult and the subsequent contest.

and the winning responses
and a bunch of the others

jane says 7 is 7 plus two minus two.

the paper i'll be delivering at the international country music conference on thursday: reactionary progressivism: bill monroe, political philosopher.

some thoughts in response to andrew on top philosophers of now. one thing i should say is that i read impressionistically and across disciplines, and people know more than i do. true that we have in the last few years lost a cohort: quine, nozick, rorty, rawls, baudrillard, derrida, etc. some of that generation, more or less, remain. i often introduce the work of arthur danto to my classes by saying he is the best and most eminent living philosopher of art, but he had tackled the whole range of issues in his time. is saul kripke still out there somewhere kicking analytic ass? robert brandom is an interesting example of developments in analytic philosophy toward something a bit more open. on the continental tip everyone has been reading slavoj zizek, a wildly creative and various figure who seems to take the provocative stance that marxism is beautiful. i saw him on c-span the other day. what an insane collection of unwatchable tics. but what really disturbs me about zizek is that his work has dramtically delayed the moment where we could just euthanize lacan. alain badiou, also a maoist or something? actually is one of the most interesting people writing today, has re-thought 'truth,' for example, profoundly. my friend karmen mackendrick is an eccentric american continentalist and genius.the world of political philosophy has seemed dominated by rawls v. nozick interpretations of classical liberalism vs. sandel/macintyre communitarianism. philip pettit has revised classical republicanism as an alternative, and his book republicanism is as big as (or, almost) a theory of justice or anarchy, state, and utopia, and maybe as important. more will occur!

in the context of teaching the philosophy of religion, i have been re-reading william james, and realizing again how extremely admirable and fundamental a thinker and writer he is: extremely clear, extremely smart, extremely reasonable, but extremely bold. one example: the lecture is life worth living?, which is partly a pre-capitulation of the fundamental defense of religious faith "the will to believe." (that and pieces of varieties of religious experience are on my syllabus, and are standard texts for such a course.)  but you know, how many contempoary philosophers would have a straight go at the question of whether one should, or should not, commit suicide? how many could actually fairly, squarely face the whole darkness, the whole of our suffering and death and so on, and then still find a real way to affirm life anyway? and even if there are some thinkers who would do such a thing, how many would do it as clearly, as straightforwardly, and as truly? well, my brief answer is 'none.' i don't actually accept james's particular answer in terms of religious faith in a supernatural plane or context of existence, but the whole is utterly admirable, indeed, i want to have a crack at the topic myself, and might hit you with that one day.

been reading the courtier and the heretic: leibniz, spinoza, and the fate of god in the modern world, by matthew stewart. now actually i think popularized or kind of novelistic presentations of intellectual history are in order: i might try my hand at such a thing, if i haven't already. also leibniz and spinoza are extremely interesting as characters as well as thinkers, and it's a good yarn. stewart has his moments as a writer, as in the very first sentence: "It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair."

on the other hand, the conventions of this genre and stewart's application of them are quite ridiculous and irritating. to jack up the significance or motivate people to read, he just gushes. "It is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought." wait. really? let's start with bacon, descartes, hobbes, locke, newton. leibniz and spinoza are important, also extremely idiosyncratic or in certain respects downright bizarre, and i think any of the thinkers i just mentioned has a much better claim on the titles stewart gives l and s. the latter were influential, also in important senses dead ends. they don't, in order to be worth writing about, have to turn out to be the two greatest thinkers ever. and what can it mean to say that they remain unsurpassed? that leibniz is more important or influential than hume or kant, or that he wasn't drilled a new one by voltaire? or that frege wasn't the better logician?

or how about this: "Not since the days when Socrates stalked the agora in order to alert his fellows that the unexamined life is not worth living...had the world seen a philosopher so dedicated to his quest as Spinoza." bitch please.