cheese it, the cops!

Parfit

Wellll, Reasons and Persons is quite brilliant and fun. But first of all, for me personally, the ethical orientation - recycling Sidgwick's utilitarianism, relentless and fantastical emphasis on rationality - is boring and really not actually about human beings. (I'm going to say the same about Christine Korsgaard, for example: ethics for aliens.) And I think that On What Matters is absurdly overrated: his reputation and personal interestingness kind of stupefied people. First of all, this thing where he sent the manuscript to a couple of hundred philosophers, then partially constructed the book as answers to off-text objections, makes for an extremely labored, interminable, and at times bewildering presentation.

Here's how I would state the conclusion: teleological and deontological ethics, Sidgwick and Kant, are not as different as you might think and often yield the same results, etc. It tells you a lot of what you need to know that that makes it a bold, original, epoch-making text in ethics. It's really a kind of unreadable adjustment of the going positions, best at solving little conceptual objections that are very inside baseball. He was a wildly fascinating person, but the reception ('most important book in ethics in a century,' etc) is both wrong and a pretty good sign of where we're at.

Another sign of where we're at is that you just can't say stuff like this, though I would suggest that a lot of people who tried to read On What Matters ended up secretly having these sort of misgivings. Academic philosophy now is characterized by an amazingly stultifying little pecking order; philosophy is thoroughly 'professionalized,' and deference to one's superiors is a condition for getting in the door. Philosophy now is above all careful: I'm sure you don't want to put forward a fallacy, but you really, really don't want to put forward something challenging or even odd, because that's liable to deep-six your career. Basically positions are taken on the basis of safety and expressed in a way that reflects that. I do think it was different in the generation before mine, and if you think Richard Rorty or Arthur Danto would have had trouble saying things like this about someone like Parfit had they thought it, you don't remember. That was fun.

A straightforward economic analysis gets some of the reasons. The academic job market has been so tight for so long that most people's question is just 'how do I have a career?' It takes you 8 years, you've got a shitload of loans, your in-laws still don't understand how you can be doing this. You've got to pay off, so you clutch on by your fingernails and dedicate yourself to cultivating useful mentors, displaying competence, not making a mistake. My feeling is that philosophy is incompatible with reverence or with this sort of professionalism. And I don't think we're in a good era for interesting or original work, with exceptions of course.

the most radical american

alright, i've done a much better version of herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel peabody rogers, american transcendentalist and american abolitionist.

here is the paper

and here is the kindle

this book was how i felt my way toward self-publishing, and i had a hell of a time with formatting and patience in the first two 'editions.' but i got it a lot righter this time. i added a number of essays by rogers, bringing the total to 33. (like previous versions it includes thoreau's essay on rogers, john pierpont's biographical essay, and other supplementay material.) i was both too-fast and incompetent in the first versions. rogers deserves better. if you bought a previous version, i would replace if you send me an address!

 

 

philosophy and insanity

many of you have expressed concern about my cognitive and emotional condition, on the grounds that i am reading alexandre kojeve's introduction to the reading of hegel. when they see you with that book, people interpret it as an act of desperation, a cry for help. (kojeve's lectures on hegel were fundamental for heidegger and sartre. the influence was not necessarily entirely salubrious, as benjamin fondane observed.) kojeve defines history as follows: "That universal process that conditioned the coming of Hegel." hegel thought so too! and actually, when i start claiming that i myself am the purpose and culmination of all human history, you can involuntarily commit me. hegel does really run deep. boy he also really really runs crazy, though. evil too.

iggy pop meets rene descartes

at various times on this blog, i've written about my experience studying with richard rorty. i've brought a bunch of the material together with some new stuff for splicetoday: richard rorty: an intellectual memoir. this here's a pretty good representation of the public rort:

 

i agree with what he says about the concept of 'objectivity' here.

if you want to see the opposition between rorty and sartwell encapsulated, these two shorts encapsulate it. already this was the shape of the debate in '85.

 

 

the one below includes a bunch of delighted richard bernstein on rorty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

look it up

i've finally indexed entanglements: a system of philosophy: the last phase of the author process. (due out from suny, march 2017). i have often enjoyed indexing my books, but i had never tackled something like this: 400 pp of extremely referenceful text. it took frigging weeks, and is still no doubt multiply flawed. quite the fucking slog by the end. the book is certainly about many things, ideas, people.

generating an index is a hermeneutical activity, creating an interpretation of a book, and some things surprised me actually, like the fact that the nature of the self, if any, is one of the dominant themes. i have found that looking at the index can be a good way to get a sense of an academic book, especially where it seems likely that author had a hand. anyway, here it is.

greetings from scrutopia

 

i feel a great affinity for the british philosopher roger scruton, whom i've been reading on and off for decades. he's a fine writer, and a political dissident with regard to academia. we've both written books about beauty. somehow we have both ended up spending a lot of time in rappahannock county, va. he's charmingly yet at times brutally contrarian and eccentric and distinctive, things i would quite like to be myself. on the other hand, he is a self-declared conservative, and i am a self-declared anarchist. 

for several years i've been planning a book called the tragedy of the left, which is to weave the tale of how the world left, and very particularly the academic left, spent a century endorsing totalitarianism, and still is. or putting it another way, the idea is to explain the interminable repetition of marxism in each generation: the political restriction, lack of imagination, and lack of self-reflection in, you know, sartre, adorno, althusser, foucault, zizek. (in cases such as sartre and foucault, the thing is in excruciating tension with their own basic orientation, i believe.) the amazing thing is that we're still here. but basically the theme is 'left: beautiful ideals, nightmare procedures, extremely confused or disingenuous thinking.'

so it pleased and yet displeased me when scruton came out last year with fools, frauds, and firebrands: thinkers of the new left, with a very similar project and a very overlapping list of people to be attacked. of course, the angle is very different, because i certainly do not consider myself a person of the right, and because i think of the left's goals - equality, justice, tolerance, etc. - as admirable. i will be writing in some ways from within, though still angrily, because i think these ideals have been sucked into nightmare statism due to extremely obvious empirical and theoretical and moral mistakes that could have been fixed for anyone who thought clearly or independently for a moment. they were too busy with solidarity and schism to do anything like that, and this includes some of the smartest people of the century, who made themselves evil idiots in the service of a politics of death, even as they flashed some brilliance on all sorts of things.

but there will also be a bunch of overlap. scruton is pretty hit-and-run, i must say, and the purpose is essentially polemical rather than theoretical; i hope to go a bit more carefully. also, i am flummoxed by some of the choices of figures, as scruton folds extremely mainstream liberals into the radical left just by moving from one to the next: why john kenneth galbraith and ronald dworkin, for god's sake? like, wrong context. habermas too, in a way. these are really not marxiists of any stripe, and yet they get kind of wrapped into that history here. at any rate, there are too many and too various figures treated too quickly. also, i would say that scruton's treatments are often incompatible with the screechingly condemnatory title. he has great respect for foucault as both a writer and a thinker, for example; the same is true for a number of the figures discussed, e.p. thompson, for example. 

all in all, the assessments, though presented quickly, are thoughtful and informed and relatively fair. if you just put the pictures of derrida, foucault, said, sartre on the cover of a book over the words 'fools' and 'frauds' you sound like a pretty primitive culture warrior, and whatever those people were, they were not fools. also, scruton does not end up treating them as fools either. he is a relatively careful and thoughtful interpreter, but also hits too much too fast. his sideswipe insults can be wonderful, though. chapter title: 'tedium in germany: downhill to habermas.' 

 

also, i feel that 'roger scruton' is an excellent name for a philosopher.

 

do check randy auxier, riffing on chapter 2 of 'six names.'

basically just needs indexing (yow!). suny press march 2017.

calling names

i'm hanging out in extremely underrated southern illinois, with musicians and philosophers. staying with the astonishing intellect/bass player randy auxier, who meanwhile is blogging pretty damn profoundly about six names of beauty.

willy wonka's proof that there are objects external to the mind

 

From G.E. Moore's 'Proof of an External World':

Consider any kind of thing, such that anything of that kind, if there is anything of it, must be 'to be met with in space': e.g. consider the kind 'soap-bubble.' If I say of anything which I am perceiving, 'That is a soap-bubble', I am, it seems to me, certainly implying that there would be no contradiction in asserting that it existed before I perceived it and that it will continue to exist, even if I cease to perceive it. This seems to me to be part of what is meant by saying that it is a real soap-bubble, as distinguished, for instance, from an hallucination of a soap-bubble. Of course, it by no means follows, that if it really is a soap-bubble, it did in fact exist before I perceived it or will continue to exist after I perceive it: soap-bubbles are an example of a kind of 'physical object' and 'thing to be met with in space,' in the case of which it is notorious that particular specimens of the kind often do exist only so long as they are perceived by a particular person. But a thing which I perceive would not be a soap-bubble unless its existence at any given time were logically independent of my perception of it at that time; unless, that is to say, from the proposition, with regard to a particular time, that it existed at that time, it never follows that I perceived it at that time. . . . That is to say, from the proposition with regard to anything which I am perceiving that it is a soap-bubble, there follows the proposition that it is external to my mind. But if, when I say that anything which I perceive is a soap-bubble, I am implying that it is external to my mind, I am, I think, certainly also implying that it is also external to all other minds. . . . I think, therefore, that from any proposition of the form "There's a soap-bubble!' there really does follow the proposition 'There's an external object!' 'There's an object external to all our minds!' (144-45)

new dimensions of political theory

i do think that my best book (well, until entanglements) is political aesthetics. here are a couple of reviews:

t.j. diffey in *mind*

paul voice in the *journal of aesthetics*

waterway

tao te ching 14:

You can't see the invisible.

You can't name the fugitive.

You can't hear what can't be heard.

You can't grasp what you can't touch.

Now can you?

You can't avoid these qualities,

but you can't comprehend them, either.

They make a universe.

Tonight the sky is dark and the earth glows

as with moonlight.

A cord stretches from it to it, and returns and returns.

What is the substance of emptiness,

the form of the shapeless?

Confront it and its face evades you.

Follow it and its back disappears.

But still the ancients moved with the Tao into presence.

Stay connected to the origin.

That's Tao's cord.

 

[vids]

my theme song:

 

try to do whatever happens

 

begin where you are

video on waterway, including a new translation of the tao te ching (dao de jing).

 

consume me

unaccountably, everyone (well, almost everyone) seems to have forgotten to buy my self-published thingummies, all of which have appeared since my fall from disgrace. in reverse order:

the ya novel i wrote my daughter emma: spyder's rebellion, or how to overthrow your school. "Like The Hunger Games without the hunger or the games. Like The Fault in our Stars with plenty of faults but zero stars." --Jex Wopley

the astonishing anthology of anti-authoritarianism: american defiance

a collection of essays by the most radical human being of the early 19th century: herald of freedom: essays of nathaniel rogers, american transcendentalist and radical abolitionist

waterway: a new translation of the tao te ching, and introducing the wu wei ching. "Dank as a motherfucker, motherfucker." --Xi Jinping

coming next will be a collection of black power scriptures, including the holy piby (robert athlyi rogers), the royal parchment scroll of black supremacy (fitz ballantine pettersborough), the promised key (leonard howell), the holy koran of moorish science temple (noble drew ali), and spiritual writings of marcus garvey.

institutionalizing the truth

i think it is fair to say that institutionalized or 'established' religion is destructive of spiritual truth or living in contact with god, if any, in particular with regard to its own priestly hierarchy. you're likely not there for god. you're there to rise in prestige and power and wealth, or to be regarded as in contact with god so you can lord it over people. that's what kierkegaard is saying in attack upon christendom.

this is even more true with regard to philosophy. that's precisely why we still tend to tell the story with a giant leap between the ancients and the 17th century: not that there's no philosophy in between, but it's polluted by the enforcement of dogma. in circumstances where you pay a terrible price for dissent - your works repressed, your person extruded or immolated - it is not even possible to tell whether the claims are sincere. likewise where the rewards of conformity are potentially great - rising in the hierarchy, social prestige, power over other people. the relation to truth which must be at the heart of philosophy is fundamentally compromised.

i say that is the position of philosophy in academia now: quite like medieval philosophy in relation to the catholic church. the reasons people assert what they do: they want tenure; they want status; they need to find a prestige group and conform to their dogmas. to some extent there are multiple dogmas or churches, but you have to find one that can carry you along in the hierarchy. but in the matter of politics, the dogma is pure and total: you must agree or pay the hideous price that heretics pay.

that is anathema to the quest for truth; it is incompatible with philosophy. academic philosophy today is not philosophy, and if there is a future of philosophy, the people building it will skim over this period as offering almost nothing, as polluted fundamentally by power relations and social slavishness.

not that there have never been good philosophers who were professors. but the dogmatism of the institutions and the hierarchy, the mood of desperate conformity and resolution to rise to professional respect of this moment are extreme. try to imagine your tenured professors - today's little priesthood - or the endowed chairs in their bishoprics, paying the sort of price for speaking their truth that socrates paid, or spinoza, or nietzsche. people think they can do both. i don't think they are, though, and i think many have lost track of the fact even that they are not seeking the truth. that condition is fatal to a thinker, and there can be no resurrection from it; it is soul-annihilating, as ole sk might put it, or emerson.

you might think about what happened to platonism, to confucianism, to christianity when they were institutionalized. they became boring, repetitive, immune to truth. any moment of innovation or originality emerged at a moment of institutional crisis. hold on to your smugness and mediocrity while you can. clutch hard onto such prestige as you have achieved. actually, i think you'll be fine, for i don't see any crisis looming. hold on long enough, and you can really be safe, and put this philosophy thing to rest forever.

decline and fall

i would be interested in what other phil-heads think about this. as hinted in my nytimes piece on arthur danto, my sense is that philosophy is in a period of decline, at least in terms of generating transformative or fundamental figures. the generations leading to today's oldsters and the people who have died in the last fifteen years or so - analytic and continental - have not, overall, been succeeded by their equals.

so i might say: cavell, davidson, kripke, kuhn, rorty, rawls, nozick, quine, rorty, gadamer, danto, deleuze, walzer, nelson goodman, baudrillard, derrida, foucault (early death of course), nagel, macintyre, etc. who, like in their 50s and 60s, is really doing work on that level? i don't just mean good work that makes a contribution to a sub-field, but work that constitutes a fundamental re-thinking and a fundamental challenge.

now, if that's true, how might one explain it? i would focus on the nature of academic training and institutions, where there is much less tolerance for eccentrics and oddballs than there once was and much less relish for disagreement. basically these are bureaucracies now of a very similar sort as the dmv or microsoft in which you rise by representing or embodying the regulations and norms. if some of the people i've listed were starting out now, they'd find a much less receptive atmosphere in academia for their intellectual ambition and distinctiveness. and then the social interpretation of 'the professor' has shifted a bit: a professor is a professional: similar to dentists, lawyers, and such. a new 'legitimacy.'

 

well some candidates: timothy williamson (60), judith butler (60), peter singer (69), bruno latour (68), robert brandom (66). still.

throwing down

alright alright it's true! soren kierkegaard is my favorite philosopher. i guess my various screeds against academic philosophy, academia in general and so on are my attack upon christendom. admittedly i've been more melancholy than scathing of late, but lord that sk could rip you a new one - all in the name of universal love, of course. same grounds, by the way: philosophy these days still pretends to love of wisdom, or witness to truth, but it's going to get there through rampant careerism and obsession with social prestige and rising through the institutional hierarchy and suchlike. your theory of truth depends on what'll generate recommendations or tenure or the endowed chair. either/or, baby. anyway, this is very beautiful, if - as often in k - too intense not also to be disturbing.

no that wasn't me with the suicide vest, panda suit, and new theory of the sun. thanks for your concern!

both sides now

[cloud suiseki, adams county pa]

 

alright let's try tao te ching 40.

waterway:

 Back here.

That's where the path always leads you.

That's where these wings will always bring you.

All things that are

come from the one that is not.

 

stephen addis and stanley lombardo:

Reversal is TAO's movement.

Yielding is TAO's practice.

All things originate from being.

Being originates from non-being.

 

robert henricks:

"Reversal" is the movement of the Tao;

"Weakness" is the function of the Tao.

The things of the world originate in being.

And being originates in non-being.

 

 

 

crispy press rocks on

[joana vasconcelos:  varina]

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.

 

 

Marian and Me

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.'

I've put Knowledge Without Justification up as a pdf.

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).

 

 

rorty: the portrait

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.] 

american immanentalism

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. 

it is my philosophy.

 

american radical

i've just published a new book to kindle:

Herald of Freedom: Essays of Nathaniel Rogers, American Transcendentalist and Radical Abolitionist

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.

boy kindle does still mangle a word document. here is a clean, free pdf

 

Contents

Preface, 3

Introduction by John Pierpont, 7

 

Writings

I. Manifestos of Liberty and Infidelity, 20

Speech, 21

Authority, 22

Church and State, 26

Infidelity, 27

Politics, 28

The Great Question of the Age, 29

Rhode Island Meeting, 31

War, 38

Reply to a Correspondent, 41

 

II. Anti-Slavery, 46

Constitutionality of Slavery, 47

The Amistad Case, 52

 

III. Against Hierarchy, 56

Osceola, 57

Color-Phobia, 60

The Rights of Animals, 62

Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 63

Aristocracy, 65

Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, 67

Address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 69

 

IV. Capitalism, 72

Labor, 73

Against Property, 76

Anti-Slavery and Capital, 79

 

V. Nature Writing and Personal Essays, 81

It Rains, 82

Bell-Ringing, 83

The Ground Bird, 85

Cobbett's American Gardener, 87

Tilling the Ground, 89

Trees, 91

"Herald of Freedom," by Henry David Thoreau, 99

Appendix A: William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Society, 108

Appendix B: American Radical Anti-Authoritarians of the of the Early Nineteenth Century, 113

 

 

american philosopher

 

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).

here is the truth chapter from entanglements: a system of philosophy (suny: forthcoming). i feel there's a lot of original work in it. feel free to build on it, with attribution!

hilary, not hillary

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.

time to get a hand-held missile launcher

 

 

i reviewed a couple of fred eaglesmith's albums when i was doing a country music column for the nypress, early 2000s. like a doink, i sort of forgot him after that. i assumed without checking and maybe even said, that miranda lambert wrote it. man she owned it like she wrote it, and she is a fine songwriter. someone reminded me about eaglesmith somewhere; man i appreciate that, on many grounds, because the man is frigging beautiful.

 

shit! i also forgot that i already have a couple of hand-held missile launchers in my basement. calling all janes! load up the trunk with the mawfuckin arsenal, sweeties! (i hurt my back.) we goin skank hunting!

Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, editors

The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments

724 pp. Liveright

 

Peter Catapano, on the first page of this volume, canvasses some of the things philosophers have been thought to be, or have declared themselves to be: "Truth Seeker. Rationalist. Logician. Metaphysician. Troublemaker. Tenured professor. Scholar. Visionary. Madperson. Gadfly. Seer."

    As I suppose will be the case with many of my fellow Rationalists and Madmen, my initial response to this collection of essays from the New York Times' philosophy blog was: where's my damned essay? How come they're not calling me to do that piece on the Hillary Clinton campaign as seen through the lens of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Why would they run Freddy? Christ, he wasn't even that good in grad school.

    This review requires a disclaimer. I've been pitching the New York Times op-ed page for thirty years. I've hit a few times, missed dozens. I have written many essays intended for the Stone and tossed them at Catapano, the editor of the blog and co-editor of the book. Sometimes I don't even get a response, though they've taken a few. The first thing I looked for in the table of contents was my own name, for that is what a true Metaphysician does; I got stuck part way through Descartes' Meditations, and concluded that I am the only person of whose existence I can be objectively certain. But I do want confirmation of that in a by-line.

    Failing to find it, I am justifiably resentful, for I am an exquisitely beautiful writer as well as a slash-and-burn logic-chopping machine who can destroy anyone, including the editorial staff at the New York Times. Also, if there's one thing we Logicians can agree on, it's that I'm right and the mediocrities they are running are wrong.

      On the other hand, it may well be that if I write an extremely positive review, praising Catapano and Critchley's amazing acuity, they will view my next submission with more sympathy.

     Writing this review, then, is a complex and difficult negotiation between my envy and my ambition, a kind of psychological and ethical crossroads, a dilemma fit for a Tenured Professor such as myself. I have arrived at a solution: I will scrupulously conceal all these factors as I write; that is, I will approach the task with unimpeachable objectivity.

    Alright, I do think the Stone is one of the best things to happen to philosophy in some time. If you are yourself a professor or author of philosophy texts, you may have noticed that no one reads philosophy. Well, this may well have something to do with the way we're writing. But the Stone is not only a useful forum and provocation among philosophy professors; it is one of the few places that 'the ordinary reader' might run into the ideas of Thomas Nagel or Slavoj Zizek, Linda Martin Alcoff or Avitall Ronell.

      (Nevertheless, the thing is white-male-dominated, which is perhaps reflective of the composition of academic philosophy, but for all that impoverishing. In general, the female philosophers address issues of gender, the black philosophers those of race. I was struck, looking at the table of contents, by the fact that my profession looks a little like American television in 1965.)

    In addition, the Stone has noticeably increased the ideological, intellectual, and stylistic range of the Times's opinion section as a whole, which I regard as gratuitously narrow. It has made philosophers regularly part of the public discourse in a way we rarely have been in recent decades. It is a contribution both to philosophy and to opinion journalism.

      Some of these people (Nagel, for example) are both extremely impressive Scholars and good prose stylists. But I picture Catapano's struggles with many others and the process by which clotted academese, presupposing that its audience knows dozens of relatively obscure books, becomes something that the readership of the New York Times could want to read and could get something definite from.

    In this the Stone is succeeding, I believe. I would hardly have believed it possible. I read most of these essays as they came out, but seeing them all together in this big cube of a book impresses me again with the range of issues addressed, the approaches taken, the variety of voices (albeit a bit toned down by the thorough and extremely competent editorial process).

    There are continentals and analytics. There are discussions of the classics and direct addresses to contemporary issues. These essays constitute relatively accessible, relatively clear, relatively well-written ways to introduce students, for example, or my Mom (a faithful reader of the Stone), to the ideas of Peter Singer, Phil Kitcher, or Roger Scruton.  

     Perhaps a prof here and there regards some or even all of these essays as mere popularizations, or simplistic presentations of complex ideas. Indeed, Truth Seeker Brad Leiter often digresses from such declarations as that Thomas Nagel is the 14th most important philosopher since 1945 to describe the Stone as "an embarrassment" and likes to put scare quotes around its self-description as a 'philosophy' blog. I think he's missing some excellent material, as well as the point of the thing.

     We Seers are going to have to come down to earth a little if we want any sort of cultural influence, or if we think that philosophical ways of thinking could be of use in the public sphere or of interest to the general literate population. The Stone, I believe, makes this difficult negotiation extremely well, encourages philosophers to make it themselves, and edits them toward it in a constructive way. Even the length of the essays (1200-1700 words on average, perhaps) makes them relatively inviting to someone who does not want to spend a month or two struggling through Kitcher's last book.

   Even for philosophy professors, often specialized in one sub-discipline or even in a single issue or figure, this book may yield a better sense of how philosophy is being pursued in corners of the profession other than the ones they inhabit.

   It also yields a responsible vision of the terrain of philosophy today insofar as this can possibly be mapped in relatively ordinary language.  Speaking of Logicians, I recently tried to read Timothy Williamson's book Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Now, I was trained in analytic philosophy for a decade, can read a modal logic formula, and am familiar with the basic approaches in the literature to the semantics of modal expressions. That book was too hard for me.

    I do not believe Williamson could compress that book into a Stone. But here he is, writing lucidly and accessibly about naturalism, scientism, and the scientific method. Then Alex Rosenberg gives a reply. Then Williamson fires back, quite getting the better of the exchange.

     It is a good model of philosophical argumentation, one I intend to try on my introductory students next Fall. I don't think I would build an intro course around this book: the overall effect is too scattershot, the voices and positions too various. But I think it could be an extremely useful supplement to such a course. Have you ever tried to run through Kant's Prolegomena with undergraduates? Sometimes you have to, but I do not recommend it overall. After I did, I'd want to give them something in a contemporary voice that shows that some of these questions are still vital and even applicable. There are a number of essays here that might help me do that.

    The Stone Reader includes 133 contributions arranged topically into such clusters as "Rethinking Thinkers" (including Spinoza, Kant, and Kierkegaard), "Old Problems, New Spins" (hence my Hillary/Ludwig pitch), evolutionary ethics (contributors include Edward O. Wilson and Huw Price), "What is Faith?" (where one finds Samuel Scheffler and the flamboyantly brilliant Tim Crane, to whom I'm always pitching reviews), "Black, White or Other" (including Robert Gooding-Williams and George Yancy), and the meaning of America (if any). We will all have our favorites and our whipping boys (again, they're mostly boys), whether we went to grad school with them or not. I find Gary Gutting's contributions rather plodding, but then I already know a lot of what he's trying to explain to a wide readership. His contributions are often solid reformulations of, excellent introductions to, the areas they discuss. Some of his essays might be among the first I'd try on students, or send as a link to non-philosophy-professor friends and colleagues interested in the issues in philosophy of religion to which Gutting gravitates.

     As well, there are some lovely curiosities here that made me more optimistic about the current range of what philosophers are doing and the directions we might head from here. For example, a personal essay by Ronell brings together Jacques Derrida and seasonal affective disorder. For another, Lisa Guenther describes her own testimony to a U.S. Senate committee on the effects of solitary confinement. The philosophical frame around the issue is relatively light-handed; the emphasis is on the real horror. But philosophical ethics informs her discussion in a way that I think intrinsically illuminates the issue and also shows the relevance of ethics to urgent contemporary questions.

    The Stone began in 2010, and already many excellent pieces have appeared in it that might have come too late to make the volume, for example George Yancy's long series of interviews with various thinkers on race, and his own "Dear White America." I hope that the thing persists long enough to produce a series of volumes, perhaps focusing on sub-disciplines or particular issues in philosophy. Such a thing might indeed by an extremely useful text for a course on ethics, or philosophy of religion, or critical race theory. Given the blog's relative popularity, that is likely.

   It's a hard thing they're doing at the Stone, and I think they are doing it about as well as it could be done, except for one embarrassing symptom of ineptitude: like so many prestigious venues today, they desperately need more me: Crispin Sartwell, Visionary.

----------------------------

 

tim crane's response at the times literary supplement, more or less: we love it! masterful! could you delete the jokes?