so, i will try to suggest the strengths of the waterway version of the ttc by giving some versions of chapter 11, which is quite a key one and very lovely. i want to say, these are versions i respect and consulted, not at all the ones i think are bad.
i think the the paperback of waterway came out great. i'm getting a bit better at making books online. there's more to come, and i'll get there on design etc eventually! we don't actually need the gatekeepers anymore.
8
If there were a god,
he'd be like water
that brings life to things
without trying.
Water seeks the lowest place
and cleanses what it touches.
It is as satisfied with the humble
as with the exalted.
Still, deep, clear,
true, kind, useful,
generous, prompt.
This is also the true man,
liquid, and at ease.
you know, i hadn't looked at the thing in years, and it took years for it to come together with many collaborators and commentators. i remember being dissatisfied with when i left off. but when i dug it up again, i was quite surprised: i do think it is the best translation of the tao te ching into english, and i don't have the sense that i could have done it at all.
i've published a book called 'waterway' on kindle and paper.
it includes my translation of the tao te ching, which i've worked on for twenty-five years or so. it started with chinese-reading grad students at vanderbilt, and underwent many phases; sometimes i taught it along with mitchell or red pine's translations. a version published on my web site in the early 2000s got a little bit of a following on new-agey websites and such.
it presents a very distinctive translation into what i hope is notably unstilted english; it is as different from stephen mitchell's (which i love) as mitchell's is from, say, witter bynner's (which i like). i think you will understand the text differently when you read it.
1
This book can tell you nothing;
the Tao leaves you where you began.
A maiden can leave things nameless;
a mother must name her children.
Perfectly empty or carrying ten thousand words, you still return,
and return, and return.
Naming things loses what unites them.
Failing to name things loses them into what unites them.
Words are limits that make experience possible.
But form and formlessness are the same.
Tao and the world are the same,
though we call them by different names.
This unity is dark and deep, but on the other hand it is deep and dark.
It opens into the center of everything.
the second part of waterway is what i hope will be a fundamentally new classical taoist text. i've dubbed it the wu wei ching or book of non-action; it is drawn from kuo hsiang's commentary on the chuang tzu. i really think that kuo hsiang's version of taoism gives the deepest statement of taoist metaphysics and of wu wei as a guide to practical action.
61
Not only is it impossible for not-being to become being, it is impossible for being to become not-being. So from where and how do things and for that matter the absence of things arise? What came first?
If we say yin and yang came first, how did they come? From where; from what?
Maybe nature came first. But nature is only another name for beings.
Suppose I say the Tao came first. But the Tao is only another name for not-being, so how can it arise? There must be another thing or not-thing and so on infinitely.
When you get down to it, we cannot say anything except that things just are, that they arise spontaneously and spontaneously disappear.
This is how my students appropriate, when they do: they cut and paste off Wikipedia (or whatever it may be), then replace a few synonyms with synonyms, recast slightly, etc. Both Jones and Zagzebski do that with my discussion.
But I call Zagzebski's plagiarism and not Jones's. Jones does introduce the argument with a quote from me, and I feel he does enough to avoid plagiarism. For one thing, someone interested in this argument or this question would naturally be directed to my papers by Jones's discussion.
Now it is just possible that Zagzebski cribbed the discussion from Jones. But then, she does not footnote Jones at all, so that would also be misconduct. And I will say again that though Zagzebski does give a reference to my papers, it is just a wave that indicates no connection at all to the relevant argument. I feel she does directly misuse the material, either mine (pretty obviously, I think) or Jones's. Either way...
In Marian David's "Truth as the Epistemic Goal" (which is in a collection of papers on normative epistemology and truth, wherein the swamping problem is already central, or in some sense gives rise to the questions [Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue (Oxford 2001)]), she formulates the swamping problem:
Given the truth-goal-oriented approach to justification with justification understood as a means to that goal . . . it is now hard to see how justification could be anything but a constitutive means to that goal, which will make justification collapse into truth. (161)
footnote: More or less related argument are found in Sartwell (1992) (although he handles these issues rather oddly, by my lights); Depaul (1993), chap. 2.4; and Maitzen (1995).
So again, I seem first here, odd though I am. I'm going to have a look at Depaul. Also she discusses Richard Foley around these issues, and if I recall correctly Foley and I corresponded some about this in the early '90s. So I'll have a look there too. I am telling you that all roads lead back, though.
Just for the hell of it: David's wedge is to assert that it's not plausible that truth is always the ultimate goal in believing. My answer to that was in the first chapter of my unpublished book (written in '91 as I was also writing the papers). Truth as a goal is built into the nature of belief. You believe p iff you take p to be true. That's why epistemology is fundamentally 'teleological' or 'instrumentalist.'
So as I catch up, a couple of bald assertions: (1) Anything that could plausibly count as an epistemic virtue will have be truth-conducive; (2) Social factors such as being authorized within a community or engaging its consensus are neither here nor there: irrelevant to truth and to knowledge. Here's my paper "Anti-Social Epistemology" (2015).
Responding to the idea that God the Father demands capital punishment, Rogers writes as follows.
What would one of these fathers, here on earth, think of his family of children, who should set up such an institution, out of his door-yard where they go to play, and should string up little Charley or Anna or whoever by the neck, for some childish misdemeanor, done without permission of the majority of them? How would he feel - the depraved old gentleman - coming out, some time, to enjoy the glee of the young ones, to find one of them dangling by the neck, and older brother Sam, or Jim, standing dismally by, as Chaplain? And then Jim or Sam roll up the white of their eyes, and charge him with having ordained what they had been about.
If the family are of a gibbety temper and character, why let them have gibbets and be hanged to them. And if they don't hate one another quite bad enough for that, and do, for shutting up in dungeons for life or for years - let them have dungeons. Or fine or whip or crop ears, or whatever the family are malignant and hateful enough, to do. When they come to love one another, they will leave it off. Cross children will snap at each other and quarrel. Deprave them sufficiently, make them bad enough, and they will strangle one another.
i wrote three completely separate book-length manuscripts under rorty. it took awhile, though i am the fastest, easiest writer you ever saw. overall comment on my first draft (i've got em all with his comments of course): 'notably well written.' that was definitely the high point, though he was generous and fast getting stuff back with elaborate comments; he did it on the plane as he went to debate his old buddy, jurgen haberas; right when i knew him he was at his most meteoric rise. and he was always a deeply sweet man, which you might not know. richard rorty was a pretty damn good writer for a philosopher. (egads i have spent my whole life reading literally some of the worst writing our species has every produced: both the classics and, most excruciatingly, the average release from oxford. then you get to the end and it does not amount to a hill of beans.) anyway, that was enough to keep me going through the next draft; i might have cared more about that than anything.
let's say he brought more critical acuity to attacks on than to defenses of him. although most of the attacks were silly, or just rage or envy or 'you said the wrong thing'. swear to god he loved them. he was on contingency, irony, and solidarity when i was working with him. one day in the middle of lunch in his office the phone rang and he said 'hold on a second.' then he launched into an elaborate description of the project and a lovely assessment of where his work was at and how wildly it was changing, and how he was so far beyond mirror of nature, ready to kill the world. i did not know what he was actually working on at the time. it took me literally 15 minutes to spin out that it was richard bernstein. ok, not a lot of grad students get that experience! then he's off and i started arguing with him about this 'literary turn' nonsense. he did not respond to my attacks except to give me the in-process bibliography. i read it all. i can't find that one! i must have chucked it when i was done.
one thing he did: read aloud a couple of the most vicious criticisms of himself, which were on his desk, as he and bernstein cackled.
anyway, lord the rort had some critical acuity when he wasn't just shrugging at an auditorium full of people. he kicked my ass all day every day for what? like six years. in doing that, he showed me exactly what the highest level really was, what you had to know to toss off apparently casual provocations, how much machinery was underneath his performance art. i had been reading harder than anyone i ever knew since i started. i didn't hardly see how knowing what he knew was even possible. but i knew it would take me a long time. he actually hated academic philosophy.
'yo dick, i found something we agree on! carnap was totally wrong!' a: 'yup and he was kind of seeing that partly when i studied with him.' heavens! i have never even told some of these stories, because at meetings people only wanted to confront me about rorty and how stupid he was. then they didn't hear it when i said: stupid? whatever, dude. definitely wrong though. ok you can be in our group! but you make no sense. yes i do, man, i am a disciple of richard rorty.
my best friend was a junior prof, and on my committee (well, i was 30). rorty: 'if we don't let this one go, he'll just write another.' that, i am told, was more or less the entirety of the meeting after my defense. and that assessment, i'm also told, was reflected in his letter for me, long since abandoned on the road by pointed advice, never seen. i never wanted to publish anything from my dissertation or see it again. i swore i would, if nothing else, write the way i wanted for the rest of my life. i have come pretty close. but i have paid a hideous price.
i thought he'd kind of despise the followers who were trying to get him on their committee. but i thought i was emulating him: bold provocateur, bad boy of philosophy. i thought he'd see himself in me as soon as i started disagreeing with him; just the right person to carry on. but at least i did really disagree with him: each iteration was an attempt to subtilize, deepen, make irrefutable the critique. all indirectly, of course. i didn't mention him except in the effusive acknowledgements. i did try to destroy some of his heroes - gadamer, for instance - on aesthetic matters: the image, representation, realism in the visual arts. i was not ready to do that with any effectiveness.
while i was doing that, hans-georg gadamer puts in a surprise appearance in rorty's seminar. we watched as rorty and gadamer sparred with absolute pleasure over rorty's interpretation of gadamer. it started 'dick! sounds great! makes sense! you've got me completely wrong!' rorty laughed until i thought he'd cry, maybe a high point of his life, come to think of it. then he said 'yes, hans, but that's what you should have said." then gadamer started guffawing.
now i am richard rorty. man you definitely don't know what that takes. and you definitely don't know what that takes when you're working at six different schools with no sabbaticals, not a single person who agrees with you about anything, and no support or social back-up at all. i hit it between 52 and 54, while in the middle of the most absurd meaningless academic nightmare of my career, during which i got tenure somehow. big new theories of all sorts of things were falling into my hands like plums from the tree i'd planted. it was an excruciating period, and an ecstatic one, the first attributable only to them, the second only to me.
anyway, he's dead; it was oedipal; ok we heard a grad student say that one time as we walked around cabell hall! rorty punched me in the ribs. who cares? well i still do. i knew i could get where i am now as a philosopher if i never stopped writing, reading, working. (i am actually not a particularly fast reader.)
i thought he'd be delighted by my disagreement. he was, intermittently; we ended up having the best philosophical debates i ever had, through seminars, convention appearances, dozens of one-on-one hours. one thing he did clearly let me know: i was no robert brandom. my first vague hint was sitting at the big meeting with the pile of paper = second dissertation. he looked up at me with his oddly shy smile and said 'well, you're no robert brandom.' ok just going to admit it, i've been reading robert brandom enviously ever since. i think i've never footnoted him? vengeance is mine! i'll give him that. but who is an rb? and rorty one way or another taught me an incredible amount. you might not know this but he was incredibly learned. how many times are you going to make me say it? in so many things. i was not going to win the argument when i was 25! and boy he killed that continental-analytic thing completely. i thought he'd also admire my wide-openness. i was really seriously trying to read everything as i worked on drafts, so i could kick his ass next time. i found all sorts of stuff to love on both sides.
if you read my books with that in mind, you'll see that i probably turned that corner in end of story. it was really quickly written and kind of disintegrated at the end. but i definitely wasn't worried about actually refuting the view after that. or macintyre's, or ricouer's. they were, i thought, baldly false views, not seriously entertainable ( i had been killing them in my head for years; i wasn't really going to try the full 400 pager. no one was listening anyway.)
since dick's death there has been a reassesment of the man who came to be called both the best-known philosopher of the late twentieth century, and the person i fucking never heard anything positive said about until the tribute at the apa. but man, i will not hear reverence either. that is a deep betrayal. i have never heard anyone say anything positive about rorty (or not till whenever that was); i have never known how to talk to philosophy people about him or my relation to him. i told my non-philosophical romantic partners or whatever. there was no way i could talk about him honestly and make sense to philosophers. but i have sat through three-hour banquets where people were ranting about how wrong he had dewey. the next morning, it's at the coffee table. how did i just not run or attack? after that gadamer thing, how do you take that? what if the senior person in what you take to be your field (mcdermott, to be precise) does that specifically in your face for years because...you were a student or rorty's? what is the response? all those years i tried a knowing smile. it was like i didn't even know rorty. and then i forgot some of these stories or repressed them because survival.
so say you were listening to people spit the worst sort of bile at your mentor/greatest enemy, and the most they got to was the first couple of things that had occurred to you that were too lame to even try on him? right on, brother? or do you expect me to sit here and engage in a defense? i have actually been caught in the vice at damn near every conference i have gone to since 1984 or whatever it was.
but whatever the joys and burdens of being dick rorty's student, i'll always be incredibly grateful to the man for myriad dimensions of my development. i think he was wrong about everything. but at least he was wrong in an interesting, provocative, fun way. that's better than being right in a laborious monotone.
[this is pulled from out, the entry that got this whole ball of craziness rolling.]
just to begin the re-defense of 'knowledge is merely true belief': say you had some commitment to economy, ockham's razor, the simplest law-like explanation for apparently disparate phenomena. (that's supposedly stephen hawking's first criterion of theory choice, e.g.) don't you think you should see how far you can get with k=tb? not going to find a simpler among the proposed theories of knowledge, i believe (truly).
Again, I want to say that I haven't accused anyone except Zagzebski of plagiarism. Another person mentioned by Pritchard as a source of the swamping problem is Wayne Riggs, the chair at Oklahoma who according to Zagzebski said that I sent him a threatening email, which is demonstrably false. That got me threatened with arrest and held to be insane. That Riggs shows up again here as someone who's fundamental to the swamping problem is really quite the little coincidence.
At any rate, in Reliability and the Value of Knowledge (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, January 2002), he attributes the problem to Ward Jones, who certainly got it from me, and to Zagzebski (however, to an earlier book [Virtues of the Mind] and paper ['From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology']), and to Kvanvig (see note, p. 80). Like everyone else, starting with me, he saw that it was a fundamental challenge to reliabilism.
But obviously Riggs could really have gotten it from Jones and Zagzebski, and I don't see any cut-and-paste, etc. Still there too it derives from me, I believe, because at a minimum it derives from Jones and Zagzebski, who got it from me.
One thing about the swamping problem: whatever you may think of the thesis that knowledge is merely true belief, I don't think that anyone could have come up with the problem unless they had been focused very critically on the function of justification, someone who was skeptical about regarding justification as necessary for knowledge. And I think that perverse as the position was, it has turned out to be of use to the profession!
That is what I do, I feel, better than anyone working, more or less. I'm not necessarily smarter than the average analytic epistemologist, and i do make mistakes. But I focus on counter-consensus moves kind of automatically. So, if you want to remake part of a discipline or a topic, try this: what are the first few ground-clearing intuitions/assumptions that make everything else possible? These are often inadequately or not even argued for, and often I find when I think about it a little, I don't think they're obvious or even true at all.
That's how I did the swamping problem in Cargile's seminar at UVA, probably '87. I was probing for the assumption that would give a lever (and show my cleverness and profundity, etc). So we did Alvin Goldman's reliabilism, and something just seemed sort of off to me, like that's really just redundant: knowledge is a true belief that is reached by a reliable method for reaching...true belief. Well, what are we after then? What's our goal? Obviously or explicitly just true belief, so the method is merely instrumental to the real admitted telos. Then I started trying to generalize it and that's how I found all those quotes from Bonjour, Moser, Armstrong that Zagzebski and Jones recycled. Without that sort of reasoning, or to save some pet version of justification, no one would ever have generated the swamping problem.
Also I would say you better get out of a narrow frame. Actually, what was driving me was Kierkegaard; I thought that analytic epistemology just deployed definitionally a cult of reason that was really impoverishing and unrealistic. That's why I wanted to delete the justification condition in the first place. No one conducts their epistemic lives in the way the analytic trad suggests we all ought to; and anyone who did would just be gross and inhuman. So that's what made me probe for weaknesses. Ask any of these other alleged originators how and why they thought of this...
So a more recent version of this move is that I assert that free will is not required for moral responsibility. I submitted it here and there with no luck; still getting the 'that's ridiculous' response. But it will be in the ethics chapter of Entanglements. If nothing else, it will really press people in the free will problem to think hard about the initial assumptions. I think it could make a positive difference and I think again that it will be vindicated.
Another locus classicus of the swamping problem is Jonathan Kvanvig's The Value of Knowledge and The Pursuit of Understanding (2003) (here it is on amazon). Kvanvig does much better: he sets the whole thing up as an attempt to deal with the problem I raised (i.e. the swamping problem). Man, I really should have been paying attention! But then by the time you get to Pritchard and Turri's Stanford Encyclopedia article, I've dropped out of the bibliographies. I'll have a look at some of Kvanvig's earlier papers.
When I finally get back up to speed, I'll make this sucker stick against virtue epistemology and all the other alleged answers. K=TB, baby.
One way this happened, I think, was that everyone agreed that my position was ridiculous (and like I say many of the eminences of epistemology gathered at at APA in '92 or '93 and tried to crush it). One problem was that if I was right, the whole of analytic epistemology after Gettier was kind of a waste of time; I thought my position was a fun and useful provocation, but I can see how people might not want that, and the book was never published (originally I submitted it to the same Cambridge series that eventually did Kvanvig).
But then again, my argument did present one fundamental challenge: the 'swamping problem' or 'the problem of the value of knowledge.' For one thing, it just destroyed reliabilism. So people managed to absorb that, then maybe thought they'd be discredited by association with my insane conclusion? Everyone who tried to answer the problem or build on it, including Kvanvig, Jones, and Zagzebski, answered it on behalf of JTB or used it to build toward relatively fresh but not apparently bizarre conclusions (the way it drove virtue epistemology as a theory of justification). So that was a lot more palatable to everyone, and they wanted to forget where I drove it, so they wanted to forget where it came from.
Anyway, I am going to arm up (as it were) and reassert that (propositional) knowledge is merely true belief against all comers, virtuous, social, and whatnot. Then you can repress it again, so it might take another century or so, but finally people will capitulate to the obvious, no matter whom they attribute it to. One remark: the reason people have such strong 'intuitions' that knowledge requires more than truth and belief is because for a philosophy prof, whatever they said in intro when you were 18 is a baseline truth you remember from before birth. Guess what? There is no such intuition.
I do want to establish that I invented the swamping problem, and I really am just returning to the discourse in epistemology, so I've had to try to catch up. Meanwhile yet another revision of the charge sheet on Zagzebski; I will get this exactly right eventually. (Replaced in timeline as well.)
This difficulty is the so-called ‘swamping problem’, as defended most prominently by Jonathan Kvanvig (e.g., 2003), but also put forward in various forms by Ward Jones (1997), Richard Swinburne (1999; 2000), Wayne Riggs (2002), Linda Zagzebski (2003) and John Greco (forthcominga).
I am going to try to go at these in order, one at a time. Ward Jones' paper (American Philosophical Quarterly, October 1997), early on sets up the question with a quotation from me (page 424), and section 2 is a remarkably close recapitulation of section 3 of my journal of philosophy paper.
He formulates the problem in just my terms, attacks reliabilism with it as I did, then actually brings the same quotations to bear as I did, and Zagzebski.
Jones p. 427:
I have been discussing the reliabilist in particular, but I should reemphasize that I consider the relibilist to be representative of epistemic instrumentalists. Laurence Bonjour, a coherentist, writes:
If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. . . . Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.
And Paul Moser, a foundationalist, writes:
Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately directed toward the goal of truth.
And me, p. 172-73:
Indeed, proponents of all the major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example, the foundationalist Paul Moser writes:
Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately related toward the goal of truth. More specifically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true.
The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that a condition on an account of justification is that beliefs justified on the account be likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception of justification will be “truth-linked” ( op. cit. 116-21) . And the coherentist Luaurence Bonjour puts it even more strongly. p. 173
If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.
The quotes are obvious, but the whole discussion is a very close recapitulation of me. And of course, both these discussions are also identical to Zagzebski's. I will say that Jones also did a cut and paste from my paper, but at least he quoted me in proximity, and he comes closer to crediting me with the argument. But we will see that by every route that this argument entered the discourse, it derived from me.
as i've often said, i think that american transcendentalism is ineptly named; i'd prefer an antonym, actually, such as 'immanentalism.' now i think the canon needs expanding, and i think the narrative according to which transcendentalism was superseded by pragmatism is simplistic.
so, if i were assembling a set of transcendentalist essays, i might start with rogers. i would certainly include essays by voltairine de cleyre, perhaps 'the dominant idea' and 'crime and punishment.' and i might fetch up with zora neale hurston: i am straight up asserting that zora is an american transcendentalist in the thoreau mould. a volume focusing exclusively on her essays is long overdue.
in the hands of lit and phil profs, the transcendentalists have sunk into quaint american fossils, groovy proto-hippie nature children, with an embarrassing political individualism that no one can believe anymore, or that must be attenuated or vitiated under interpretation. but a good part of the whole thrust is political from the outset in rogers, emerson, thoreau: a radical anti-authoritarianism. and they have a beautiful individualism that is also not at all about economic self-seeking, but derives from protestant notions like the quaker inner light of god in each person. also, this individualism is a radical egalitarianism, as you see in rogers, in voltairine, in hurston. and it is an individualism that connects with the natural world in much the way many had previously connected to god, and then seeks to place us each as an individuals - not as races, not genders, not parties, not classes, not general wills - into the same shared world.
herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel rogers, american transcendentalist and radical abolitionist (with an essay by thoreau)is available in the following formats:
19th-century whiteness studies, from 'rhose island meeting':
rhode island was proposing a new constitution with a color qualification for voting.
To make it go down with the people, the pitiful creatures inserted a color qualification. They must put in white - the color of the gulls you see winging their uncouth flight up and down the harbor - to shut out three or four hundred colored people, who otherwise might, - when they get money enough, go to the free and equal polls, to choose their masters. The patron of the new Constitution had assumed the name of the "Free Suffrage party."
Their freedom showed itself in making a man's hue the test of his rights. They felt free to enslave a man if he was not white as a diaper. One or two of their demagogues came into the meeting. One was a Dr. Brown, a steam doctor, whose political morality seemed about as high as that of a railroad engine with a Jim Crow car to it; or a church with a "nigger pew." The Doctor gave us an exposè of his white ethics. It seemed he wanted to get suffrage for the white folks, in order, by and by to extend it to the black. [But getting the vote] would not have any tendency to help the colored people out. It would prove a worthless boon in their hands. The white folks would not acknowledge them as equals if they were nominally voters. They never would consent to their being candidates for any thing. They would treat them as "niggers" still.
A man has rights, and they are important to him because their observance is necessary to his happiness, and their violation hurts him. He has a right to personal liberty. It is pleasant to him: permanently pleasant and good. It is therefore his right. And every creature, or I will call it, rather, every existence, (for whether created or not, they certainly exist, they are) every existence that is capable of enjoying or suffering, has its rights, and just mankind will regard them. And regard them as rights. The horse has rights. The dog. The cat, and the rat even. Real rights.
i'm going to start giving you bits of the rogers book. first off, here's a blurb from henry david thoreau. my editor said it was a big get.
But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine Yankee style, without fiction — real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. . . . We deem such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expressions of a public sentiment, such publicity of genuine indignation and humanity, as abound everywhere in [The Herald of Freedom], the most generous gifts a man can make, and should be glad to see the scraps from which we have quoted, and the others which we have not seen, collected into a volume.
i'm telling you this is a discovery: someone's going to have to convince me that a more important straight-to-e book has been published.
A great and almost unknown American writer from New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) was the most radical American political voice of the antebellum period. He is also an undiscovered American Transcendentalist, at his best comparable to Emerson and Thoreau. Both men acknowledged Rogers' influence on them, and Thoreau published one of his first essays - collected here - on Rogers' work, recognizing his excellence as both a political and a nature writer. Anti-slavery drove all his thought, and as an abolitionist writer, only Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips are his rivals. Rogers was an anarchist, a pacifist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious heretic, an individualist, an anti-capitalist and an advocate of animal rights.
His writings are collected here for the first time since 1849, along with Thoreau's essay "Herald of Freedom" and other materials about Rogers and American radicalism of the early 19th century.
nathaniel rogers was an amazing radical and an amazing writer, and if you want to see someone in 1840 who speaks up for animal rights, against capital punishment, against slavery, against the state, for environmentalism as that came much later to be understood, for indian rights, and so on, and did so with extreme clarity, creativity and vigor, you've got to check this out. he was a decade emerson's senior, and he is a fundamental american transcendentalist.
i never lost a job, i believe, except because i wouldn't join a party, or i said something a feminist might construe as objectifying or something. they leave you speculating at the time, but sometimes you learn what happened. i believe i lost the job i really wanted at vanderbilt, because of my crazed, palpable anti-semitism. idit dobbs-weinstein and julie klein - real pc killers - did not give me a chance to say meet my great grandfather. on my mother's side. they missed my daughter's bat mitzvah. somewhere in the process i picked up the outlines. i hope i managed to convey that i was jewish.
then it was sort of: we learn to hate ourselves in our oppression; sometimes jews are the biggest anti-semites! not talking about you, of course...but they did hear one of the counter-examples i used in my job talk, and were retraumatized from the holocaust. that's 1992, y'all. much worse now. the next month, the same paper appeared in the journal of philosophy, merely despised until zagzebski found it. i was also doing some politically suspect columns for the nashville banner, like the one where i argued in favor of school vouchers. that sort of thing will garner you some pointed silence, though no arguments.
i'll throw a paragraph at mica, a place that was beloved to me before i ever got there, having lived around the corner and fantasized the whole time about teaching philosophy to art students. they don't have tenure. they brought me in with the understanding that i was permanent and there were no issues, they were lucky to get me, they said. i gave up my tenure track job teaching journalism and media studies and advising the school paper at penn state harrisburg. this is what i'd always wanted.
i was on campus a couple of days after 9.11, and i had already recorded a spot for all things considered. they were looking for someone who would express any sort of anger, could not find one among their staff or usual contributors, i gather. i had been talking to my (now-deceased) brother jim, who was an unbelievable cynic, raconteur, and artist of the hyperbole. 'i want to fly over the middle east and see nothing but piles of smoking rubble.' i started there. you know, i too want vengeance. in fact this distinction between justice and vengeance is complete jive, just a way of pretending you don't want revenge, or collectivizing responsibility, effectively offloading it from everyone entirely. i had three minutes, years of argument behind it. then i said: but even if it is legitimate to take vengeance, you are morally obliged to take your vengeance only precisely on the perpetrators. no burning rubble, my brother, without osama & co inside it. only them.
next day, robert merrill (a senior colleague), confronted me in the hall and said "that was disgusting!" the next words out his mouth were 'osama is a freedom fighter!' i felt a marked cooling toward me and rallying around him after that.
then for whatever political reason, they put my job to a national search. i did 'six names of beauty' as the talk, just or soon-to-published by routledge. anyway, it defines beauty' as 'the object of longing.' then i put up my childhood crush emma peel. then i went on to buntings and roses and the universe as a whole. a lit prof, soheila ghaussy, hopped up and started saying my whole thing was just (paraphrasing) coming from the dick, and weren't millennia of oppression enough? they hired someone else, who did not work out at all.
what i have found over and over again is that teaching, research, and service are irrelevant in an academic career (research, for sure). the only real criterion of advancement is conformity. that's why you have all these mediocrities at the very upper reaches: mere careerists. that's why the senior level of the profession now is lilliputian compared to the last cohort. i think the last actually interesting or sincere president of the apa was stanley cavell. if stanley was starting out now, he'd be drummed out of the profession for even mentioning greer garson, or because of that weird beret.
to clarify, i am definitely not a progressive. but i am definitely not a reactionary. i think the whole thing makes no sense, which is why it's enforced with insane social sanctions. i define my position as anti-hierarchical: i am opposed to both state and economic hierarchies and think they go together. this position is incomprehensible to academics because it is internally consistent.
one conclusion i'd draw is that anything besides the noodly socialism that is unanimous in academia is incomprehensible to the people there. another is that in the long run it is impossible to be both a professor and any kind of honest opinion journalist.
my case should unite anarchists and tea partiers. they always should have been united. so perhaps, left anarchists, you think the advocacy of gun rights in country music is disgusting. well, over and over, the gun is wielded in country music and elsewhere in rural rightwingy culture, as a symbol of resistance to state power. maybe you favor black brigades rolling with rocks and molotov cocktail, but the damn impulse is the same, and even the motivation: the way people are being dominated and impoverished. so get over your little demographic fealty and reach across.
blake shelton is in trouble, i feel, when that new album comes out. perhaps he can call the campus police at the university of oklahoma and beg for protection.
[From the Herald of Freedom of Dec. 30, 1842: Miscellaneous Writings, 247]
We speak of the "freedom" of it, and of "liberty of Speech," as though it were even to be claimed that the human voice should not be regulated at all times and under all circumstances, by the arbitrary caprice of tyrants. The human voice is free of course. It is as naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase freedom of God than by such expressions as Liberty of Speech. Who should think of regulating a man's speech but himself? What has he got it for, but to use at his discretion, and what has he discretion for, if not to govern himself with, in speech and thought. If a man has not discretion enough to govern his own utterance, how can he govern his neighbor's? How can any number of men, each and all incompetent to regulate themselves, regulate others? Those others meantime competent to regulate them, though incapable of bridling their own tongues - or rather of guiding them without bridle, as the Parthian manages his unreigned steed. Human speech is sovereign. Nobody can govern it but the individual it belongs to. Nobody ought to think of it. Every body has his hands full with his own, which he can manage and ought to, and which he cannot innocently commit to the manage of another. It can be done. Speech is good for nothing unless it be done. Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals. How it must look to spectator eyes - tenanted by hampered immortality, with clipped wings and hand-cuffed wrists and fettered spirits. What angel would ever light upon it but that dragon-pinioned one who as John Milton has poeticized - lighted once from Hell on its "bare outside." Better have them kept bare to this day, than peopled by a tongue-tied race of men.
Rogers was a radical abolitionist/pacifist/feminist who edited the New Hampshire paper Herald of Freedom. I've done a lot of work on him; I'm gathering it up into an e-book which I'll put up in the next few days on amazon and googledocs.
zora neale hurston's essays are still radically undervalued. she is one of the great american essayists. in the canon of great expressions of american individualism i would place seeing the world as it is alongside emerson's self-reliance and thoreau's walking.
from the film american philosopher by phil mcreynolds. also has great footage of hilary putnam (as well as dick rorty, joe margolis, my old buddy doug anderson (moose), etc).
oh dang, so long to hilary putnam. down to the last few members of a great cohort of philosophers. also, a remarkably sweet man, in my experience. he and rorty were great frenemies.
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