More On Object-Oriented Philosophy

The other day I said I keep finding myself frustrated in my attempts to engage Object-Oriented Philosophy as a philosophy, rather than as an interesting blogsopheric phenomenon. In explaining why, I linked to a post by Levi Bryant titled "Mereological Considerations in Object-Oriented Ontology." In this post, Levi makes what I consider to be a very strange argument. He starts it off with this:

Now one of the criticisms that commonly emerges in response to object-oriented ontology is the critical question of why claims such as these are not dogmatic. What is it that authorizes these claims? Here my response to this challenge is not to adopt the hat of realist epistemology and make the case that we can represent the black boxes of other objects besides humans, but to show that arguments based on human black boxes are themselves speculative. First, the very fact that we have a debate as to what human black boxes contain (categories and forms of intuition, difference, power, etc), shows that we have no direct access to our own black boxes, but rather only arrive at claims about the black boxes presiding over the production of our outputs through indirect inferences. The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves. Second, by way of analogy we can make the point that speculation about what our black boxes contain are, as speculations, deeply prone to error. Take the example of computer black boxes. If I examine the output of a computer alone I might be led to make all sorts of erroneous influences. For example, when I notice that a blog contains italic and bold faced fonts I might be led to think there is a category in the programming that produces this output. However, the actual computer code that produces italics shares very little resemblance to a category or the font. The point here is that we can’t hit on accurate inferences about what black boxes contain, but that these black boxes are themselves objects of speculation and indirect inference that are not immanently or immediately accessible.

I'm sympathetic to much of this. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the "anti-realist epistemology" part of it, and the talk of "black boxes." His computer example is a good one, because it demonstrates why introspection is problematic as a science of the mind or a science at all. All we have access to, introspectively, is output data, and even with some knowledge of the input data (though that knowledge is actually in the form of output data), there are an infinite number of ways that the black box could be configured to get from a particular input to a particular output. Or if not an infinite number, at least a whole lot, too many to place any confidence in introspective inference.

In this sense, then, I suppose it makes sense to say that our black boxes are "withdrawn." Of course, this makes for a very strange relationship: our black boxes are what we're using to understand/interpret black boxes, and therefore our black boxes withdraw from themselves. I don't know about you, but this would make me consider our black boxes as poor starting points for an analogy to other black boxes, but Levi does just that in the previous paragraph:

Apart from the thesis that the world is composed of objects– a thesis common to Harman, myself, Whitehead, and Latour –this anti-realist thesis about black boxes is at the heart of all genuinely object-oriented ontologies. Where object-oriented ontologies differ from anti-realist epistemologies is that where anti-realist epistemologies sees this input/output structure as unique to the human-world gap, object-oriented ontologies hold that this input/output relation is true of any and all relations between objects. The relation between a leaf and photons of sunlight is not structurally different than the relationship between humans and objects. Just as humans translate the world around them through their various black boxes, the leaf translates photons of sunlight, turning them into complex sugars.

If this input-output relationship is the same throughout the universe of objects, and not exclusive to human-world relations, whether the leaf's black box withdraws from itself too. And what would it mean to say that it does? Is not this difference between the black boxes of humans (and other animals) a difference that makes a difference, as Levi might say? And what about the "black boxes" that are involved in the relationship between heat energy and a compressed gas? Does the gas's black box withdraw from itself?

There seems to be something very different about the black boxes of humans and the black boxes of leaves and compressed gases, one that might actually underlie the withdrawing of our own black boxes and the other things that withdraw from us (which is to say, everything). Our black boxes reach out to other objects, and even, in a sense, to itself as an object, and it is in this reaching out that objects withdraw from us. It seems pretty clear that the black boxes of all animals reach out to some extent. Does the plants? It may be arguable, though I'm certainly not convinced. The same goes for single-celled organisms. But it seems well nigh nonsensical to say that the gas reaches out to the heat, and that the heat withdraws from the gas, or the gas's black box, or whatever it is that it withdraws from. What would this mean? I have no idea.

Which brings me to Levi's next paragraph:

So what is my argument here? My argument is that all things being equal, if we are speculating about our black boxes, if our claims about our black boxes are not “critical” claims but speculative claims, then there is no reason not to open the door to a generalized speculation that allows us to freely hypothesize about objects independent of humans and how their black boxes function. Notice the strategy of argument here. My move is not to argue, contra the last 200+ years of sophisticated anti-realist epistemology that somehow we have a mysterious immediate access to objects, but rather to show how the anti-realist position contains a speculative core at the heart of its thought.

Here is a leap from epistemology to metaphysics, and one that is difficult (in this case) to justify on its own, but is even more difficult to justify when the leap begins from an obviously flawed analogy. In addition to the problems above, the analogy seems to make all inquiry (save perhaps strictly analytic, in the "relation of ideas" sense, inquiry). It certainly makes science a "speculative" sort of inquiry. My initial reaction to Levi's reference to only Continental scholars was to point out that there is actually a science of our black box, one that uses a lot of different tools to open the black box up. Naturally, it doesn't get the whole black box, but it does illustrate a very fruitful reaction to withdrawn objects: science. That's how we understand what we understand about the leaf's "black box," the "black boxes" of compressed gases, and much of what we know about our own black box. Because our black boxes are withdrawn, we take a third-person perspective much as we would with the objects of the natural sciences. But with Levi's analogy, the sciences are now speculative in a way that is usually used precisely to contrast with empirical science.

I don't mean to imply that science is the only possible or only justified reaction to withdrawal. I'm merely suggesting that if science is speculative, what isn't? And if everything is speculative, is anything? What would non-speculative inquiry look like? And what's more, if we can actually access our black boxes by taking a third-person perspective, doesn't this again call the analogy, and therefore the argument and the leap, into question? A leaf can't pull back from a photon and take a third person perspective to see other aspects of it (and what would those aspects be, anyway? what about a photon is withdrawn from the leaf?). Again, this is because our black boxes reach out, whereas a leaf's probably doesn't.

As an aside, it might be productive in certain contexts to say that the leaf interprets the photon (though it's stretching the definition of interpretation to say so), but at that point, one has to ask what isn't interpretation, and if, as it seems this implies, everything is interpretation, why talk of objects at all?

Anyway, back to the analogy, and the argument: unless Levi can show that the black boxes of leaves and the black boxes of humans are qualitatively the same in a way that causes or invites withdrawal, his analogy fails completely. And I obviously think it does, because I think it is the qualitative difference between our black boxes and those of leaves, or at least gases --namely, the fact that our black boxes are projected into the world -- that underlies withdrawal.

Sartre and the Meaning of Life

Bill Vallicella of "Maverick Philosopher" has two posts purporting to critique Sartre's existentialism, titled "Sartre's Existentialism and the Meaning of Life" (Part 1, Part 2). They both contain quick summaries of Sartre's main ideas, and thus might be interesting to someone who's never encountered Sartre (and doesn't want to read the Wikipedia article on him), but they don't really contain a critique.

Why I say this will become clear in a moment, but first let me make a general point: disagreeing with someone is not the same as critiquing them. Students often have a difficult time grasping this point, believing that if they write why they disagree with position X, they've critiqued position X, but that's not how critique works. I can say, "I think abortion should be legal because women should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies," but in doing so I haven't critiqued any arguments for the pro-life position, or even the pro-life position itself. I've simply set up my own position in contrast to it.

OK, on to Vallicella's posts, specifically the second one. After describing Sartre's distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-itself, and what this means for humanity, he writes (under the heading "critique"):

One problem, though, is that one cannot give the very fact that one exists in the first place a purpose. A healthy, well-situated adult can assign purpose to his waking life, but that he exists at all is not within the scope of his 'purposing.' I can no more 'purpose' my existence as a whole than I can cause my existence as a whole. I can do various things to maintain my existence. But I couldn't do these things if I didn't already (both logically and temporally) exist. The same goes for 'purposing': I cannot give my existence as a whole a purpose. I remain on Sartre's scheme a fundamentally purposeless purpose-positer. I cannot 'retroactively' give my life as a whole a purpose. At best I can give my lucid hours a purpose, albeit a merely subjective one. I cannot 'recuperate' my entire existence from purposelessness by assigning myself tasks in the present. For example, if I just now 'wake up' in authenticity to my radical freedom and assume the burden of making myself, this does nothing to rescue my past, all the way back to infancy, from purposelessness.

Thus my Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making. And if there is no God, then it is beyond the scope of any divine making as well. Thus the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless, purposeless, absurd. Sartre might say that this is just the way things are. But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning? At most, we give our lucid hours meaning. But the vast backdrop of our lucidity is darkness and absurdity

If Vallicella were offering an actual critique of Sartre, this would be a weird place to start, considering the fact that, for Sartre, this meaningless of life itself is precisely the point. If life itself, independent of my choosing, has meaning, then my choosing is not (absolutely) free. Therefore, while "Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making," and "the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless" is true, in that meaning only comes about through choice. For Sartre, this is a necessary condition of the freedom that is at the center of his thought. So instead of actually critiquing this position, Vallicella is simply disagreeing with it. As he puts it:

But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning?

In other words, he just doesn't find Sartre's position personally satisfying, which is hardly a critique. Vallicella wants meaning in the substratum, and Sartre can't allow it. We have two opposed positions, but nothing approaching critique.

Vallicella next tackles Sartre's position that when one chooses for oneself, one chooses for all men. As Sartre puts it:

I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

Vallicella writes:

A second problem concerns whether the central organizing purpose I choose is worthwhile. Whatever one chooses is open to doubt, and will be doubted by many. The choices I make are merely my choices and there is nothing to validate them objectively. We invent values and in so doing we invent the sense of our lives. We are creative like artists. (364) Aware of this, I must admit in all honesty that none of my choices can lay claim to being objectively worthwhile. Uncomfortable with this upshot, Sartre says repeatedly (e.g. 350) that when one chooses for oneself one chooses for all men. But he never, as far as I can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all. He remains stuck in value subjectivism.

Vallicella's contention that Sartre, "never, as far as [he] can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all" is odd since Vallicella cites Being and Nothingness and "Existentialism is a Humanism," in both of which Sartre gives this position and justifies it (extensively in the former). For example, Sartre writes in "Existentialism is a Humanism":

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.

In other words, we choose for all when we choose for ourselves because, by choosing, we indicate that we've decided the choice we've made is the best available one in that context. This necessarily implies that, for someone else in that context, it would also be the best available choice. Therefore, by choosing for ourselves, we choose for all. Sartre goes into much more detail in Being and Nothingness. In essence, if I'm acting in good faith, then I recognize that I'm responsible for the choices which make up my life, and therefore my life. If I were to make choices only for myself, and not for others, then one of two things would be true: either I am acting in bad faith, and therefore don't recognize that I am responsible for my choice, or I recognize that I am responsible for my choices, but don't feel that others should be able to choose as I do in the given context. Take stealing for example. If I choose to steal (for fun, say, not out of necessity), then presumably if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't want someone to steal from me. So, either I fail to recognize that I'm responsible for my choice to steal (i.e., I'm acting in bad fath), or I don't feel that others should be able to choose what I have chosen because even though I've decided it's what's best for me in this context.

This is a pretty ingenious route out of "value subjectivism" into the sort of subjectivism that Sartre attributes to his existentialism, namely "that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity." If I am responsible for choosing not merely for myself but for all, then my values are not subjective in the pejorative sense, but only in the sense that there is no other way to get values but through choosing. I suspect that Vallicella would not be happy with that type of subjectivism either, as his distaste for the meaninglessness of life itself in Sartre suggests, but again, disagreeing with it is not critiquing it.

Time Square

Last night I went to see Time Square at the Alamo downtown for "Music Monday." It was definitely fun, and the movie is as good as I remembered it being. Unfortunately, next week's "Music Monday" showing of Time Square will be the last, possibly ever, in 35 mm, as the Universal Studios fire last year destroyed all but one copy of the film. So Universal Studios let the Alamo use the film for a set number of dates, and after that, it goes back into storage will it will likely remain forever. So, if you're a fan of the movie, and you're in the Austin area, I definitely recommend checking it out next Monday. And if you've never seen the movie, you're missing out, because it's awesome, and it has one of the best soundtracks of any movie in the 80s.

Banging Against the Window

OK, so I've really been trying to engage the object-oriented ontology (OOO, God) lately, partly because the OOOers and I share some affinities -- mostly Husserl, though, I get the impression they dig Bergson too; wonder if they read James much? -- and because I have a soft spot for speculative, well, anything (when speculative and systematic philosophy became taboo, philosophy lost much of its vitality, its life and connection there to), but mostly because I'm fascinated by the internet's role in its development, and I want to see what a set of serious philosophical ideas (or a set of sets of ideas) that has in large part come out of the blogosphere ends up looking like.

The problem is that, each time I start to engage the OOOers ideas, I quickly become frustrated. You know that scene in Bee Movie in which Seinfeld's bee keeps banging up against the window and saying, "This time! This time! This time!"? That's how I feel. I can see what's on the other side of the pane, but every time I try to get there I run into something that's difficult to see, but that completely impedes my progress. I've been struggling to figure out exactly why this is. The most obvious reason, I think, is that I don't really know why anyone should care about OOO. It's in its infancy, to say the least, and the more I read of Harman, the more I feel like his monadology for the 21st century is pretty arbitrary (it's as though he just digs Leibniz more than, say, Spinoza), and seems to create more problems that it solves, particularly with causation, which for Harman, like for Leibniz, doesn't involve objects (or individual substances, or whatever) interacting, because they never actually interact. It seems to just push causation back a step. Or as one blogger put it:

[Graham's theory of vicarious causation] not only possesses almost no explanatory value of what causation might be, but actually invents in perhaps a non-Occamian profusion, a host of objects imagined to interact in ways that are yet revealed by their author.

But to ask of a philosophy in its infancy that it solve big problems seems a bit much, and maybe I'm just missing the positive motivations (the negative ones, like doing away with anthropomorphism, are clear, even if it's not clear why the things OOO rejects are bad), so I don't think this is the reason I feel like I'm banging into a window. I think it's something else: the OOOers and I seem to speak a different literary language. I find it striking that someone like Levi Bryant can write about the "black boxes" through which we interpret the input of experience, and mention only Continental thinkers (plus Kant, a pre-empirical science of the mind thinker):

The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves.

If this were the only example, it would seem odd, but not, for someone whose education slices through Continental and analytic philosophy, frustrating. But it's a pretty common phenomenon for many OOOers: they will say "everyone" or "no one," but what they mean is "everyone/no one in the Continental tradition." I can't help but feel like it limits the problems they address and the potential solutions they consider. But maybe that's just me.

Austin Coffee Houses

One of the things I like about Austin (there aren't many, to be sure) is the large number of non-Starbucks coffee shops and coffee bars throughout the city. The coffee's rarely all that good, but again, it's not Starbucks coffee, so you could do worse. I spent way too much time at four different coffee shops: JP's Java, because it's right on campus, Music Cafe, because it's near my apartment, Halcyon, because it's good for people watching and open late, and Hideout (pictured above), for reasons that I can't entirely explain.

I have a terrible habit of showing up at coffee houses when there's an event of some sort. Last week, there was a gallery opening when I decided to do some work at Music Cafe, so there I was dressed like, well, me, typing away on my laptop while everyone else was in their hyper-trendy best listening to an equally hyper-trendy guy do ironic renditions of 60s country songs. I also frequently forget that Mondays are open-mic poetry nights at Hideout, and end up half-listening to (mostly bad) poetry for an hour because I'm too lazy to get up and leave, and I'm afraid that if I leave during someone's poem they'll take it as a rejection, as though my obviously not paying attention isn't one.

There's no real point to this, other than to say that I obviously have a problem with coffee, and that for some reason, I like the atmosphere of coffee houses, even though there's no one coffee house atmosphere. Anyone in Austin who's been to the four coffee houses I listed above will know that they couldn't be more different from each other: JP's is intellectual to the point of being snobby, filled with faculty and grad students often having heady discussions about whatever it is they're studying; Music Cafe is South Austin chic; Halcyon is all about the Warehouse District nightlife, and being across from several trendy gay clubs, it's all about a very well-dressed nightlife at that; and Hideout is pseudo-Bohemian with its open-mic nights, its underground (though above the shop) improv theater in the back, and it's dirty couches. So I'm not really sure what I mean when I say that I like the "atmosphere" of coffee houses. I just can't think of any better way to explain it.

Forgetting Music

How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines that even God sings songs. - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I've struggled with depression for most of my adulthood. I've had three major depressive episodes since I was 19, and in dysthymia for much of the time in between (my "depressive" days outnumber my non-depressive days, as an adult). Like anyone who's suffered from a debilitating disease for an extended period of time, I've developed coping mechanisms to make myself more productive. For example, I go for long walks by myself in the city, or alternatively, I find a wooded area, preferably one near a creek or small stream, with few signs of civilization, and sit beneath a tree for hours, sometimes with a book, sometimes just listening to the water flow. Usually if I do something like this, I will be more productive for a while afterward. It's something akin to rebooting, I think.

But the simplest and often the most effective coping mechanism I've found is listening to music. Putting on headphones and going about my day with rock, jazz, hip hop, and occasionally "roots" music, is incredibly helpful. Yet, for some reason, one of the symptoms of my depression seems to be forgetting about music. I will go months without listening to anything except when I'm in a store or restaurant with music playing. When I finally "remember" music, I'm always surprised at how it makes me feel. I don't mean "how it makes me feel" in the usual sense, but that it makes me feel. One of the persistent symptoms of depression is a lack of feeling, and music suddenly infuses my entire body with emotion, mostly positive, and it's a revelation. Why then, I wonder, do I always seem to forget music when I'm depressed?

How to Deal With New Atheists, or What's the Difference Between Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand? The Accent

Last year I visited my parents for Christmas, and while I was there, my Italian mother (gifted with the Italian ability to guilt just about anyone into doing just about anything) talked me into going to church with her and my father. I hadn’t been in a church of any sort in more than a decade, and I’d never been in the sort of church they attend, a small, non-denominational church attended mostly by ex-Presbyterians, so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. And nothing in my Catholic background could have prepared me for what I witnessed that Sunday morning: the service was basically a conversation, with the pastor talking to us like we were children (even speaking in that voice that most adults reserve for toddlers when explaining something difficult about the adult world); during musical interludes, the musicians (both of them) gave us mini-sermons on the meanings of the songs they were about to sing, using language that, to me at least, was only slightly distinguishable from Jabberwockian nonsense; and either before or after the service, almost ever person in attendance came up to me and offered to pray either for or with me.

What struck me the most about the experience, though, was not the service itself, but the “class” that took place before the service. This “class,” attended by most of the adults in the congregation, was supposed to be a sort of Bible study, headed by the pastor, but since it was the end of the year, the pastor spent most of the class issuing a challenge for the new year, and then opening the floor for discussion of the challenge. The challenge he gave them was to bring one person into the fold in the year to come. It wasn’t clear to me whether he meant one non-Christian or one non-believer, but it quickly became clear how the members of the congregation interpreted the challenge. Those who spoke up during the discussion all said they knew exactly who they were going to target, and not one of them mentioned a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or otherwise non-Christian but religious acquaintance. They all spoke of atheists. So the discussion was almost entirely about how to speak to atheists about Christ.

During this discussion it became obvious that these people had little or no experience talking to atheists, about religion or anything else. A few days later, I mentioned this to my mother, and she suggested that I write an email to the pastor giving him ideas about how to speak to non-believers. For some reason, I took this quite seriously, and started thinking about what to include in the email. I knew up front that there is no one way to talk to atheists, because there is no one sort of atheist, so I decided focused my efforts on explaining how to talk to the most visible sort of atheist, the sort that most Christians now seem to associate with atheism in general, the “New Atheists.” The only problem was, in trying to explain how to talk to this sort of atheist, I came to the realization that I myself have no idea how to talk to them.

I had tried talking to new atheists in the past. My first instinct, as is often the case, was to try to talk to them philosophically. That is, I would want to talk about epistemology and metaphysics, pointing out that the “vulgar positivism,” as someone recently referred to it, that they espouse was deeply problematic philosophically, and that while they frequently claim to believe in nothing that is not verifiable by science, in doing so they were committing themselves to epistemological and metaphysical positions that are, by their very nature, not verifiable by science. What’s more, without at least some of those assumptions, nothing at all would be verifiable by science. In other words, the science upon which they are grounding all belief was itself grounded on metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that they were, if not simply ignorant of, then at least eliding entirely.

The philosophical approach, however, had been worse than fruitless. In fact, I had usually been met with ridicule, with the new atheists telling me that I was trying to sell them quasi-religious nonsense. When I was engaged, it was usually with platitudes and silly clichés about how there is no evidence for theism, therefore atheism is one of if not the most proven positions in the history of science, nay, in the history of the world! How does one answer that claim? Other than shaking one’s head in disbelief, I have no idea. So instead I abandoned philosophical approaches, and I tried to discuss with them the psychology of religious (or at least theistic) belief, the social and cultural aspects of religion, the history of religion, the primacy of morality over metaphysics in religion, etc., but again, to no avail. Intellectual arguments were obviously pointless. The atheists of my youth, who were intellectually curious and open-minded to a fault, were nowhere to be found among these new atheists.

It was clear that I needed a different approach, then, so next I tried practical arguments. I pointed out that new atheism, with its focus on attacking religion and its strong association between science and atheism, was doing a disservice both to atheism and to science. New atheists were playing right into the hands of the American Religious Right by confirming widely held stereotypes of atheists and deeply felt mistrust of them among many evangelicals and fundamentalists (see e.g. this video). If atheists are seen as arrogant, elitist, and out to get Christians and Christianity, as many Christians believe they are, then having someone like Dawkins, who is nothing if not arrogant and elitist, and whose rhetoric can easily be interpreted as showing that he and those who follow him really are out to get Christianity and Christians (whether they are or not), can only aid those leaders on the Religious Right who seek to exploit fear of atheism and secularism to further their agenda of intolerance and anti-science. Myers, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens are little better, and in some cases, even worse. What’s more, by turning science into a religious issue, they are providing fuel for the creationists in their Intelligent Design disguise. How can those fighting against attempts to put creationism in the science classroom argue that it should be excluded on religious ground when Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, and their many, many followers are arguing that evolution leads directly to atheism (without passing Go or collecting $200)? How can we hope to educate those who have been duped by creationist “intellectuals” and public figures, if we begin by attacking their most cherished beliefs? We can’t, and we won’t, and it’s not a coincidence that the Intelligent Design movement has gained momentum, and followers, as new atheists have become more and more the public face of atheism.

Again I was met with nothing but ridicule. I was labeled a “Neville Chamberlain” atheist, an appeaser on par with the appeasers of Hitler, and told that I was more concerned about the feelings of the religious majority than I was about the Truth. During one encounter with a Dawkins/Myers acolyte (at Netroots Nation '08), I was told, after stating my position that Dawkins and Myers were harmful to atheists, that my appeasing of the religious made him sick, and that he couldn't even look at me, much less discuss the issue any further. And at that point I was out of ideas. If neither intellectual nor practical arguments cant even spark discussion with, much less reflection in, new atheists, then my arsenal is bare.

Then a thought struck me: where had I seen something like this before? Where had I seen a complete lack of intellectual curiosity coupled with a blind certainty and hostility to even the slightest dissent? Among the Randians, of course! For a Randian, there is only one correct conclusion, only one correct world-view, and any other possible viewpoint is to be ridiculed or ignored. Dissent, even among those who hold similar viewpoints (not simply other libertarians, but even Randians who dare to question one or more aspect of the Objectivist orthodoxy), cannot be tolerated. And there are deeper similarities between the Randians and the new atheists. They also share a seemingly willful philosophical naiveté, a distrust of anything even remotely speculative, a blind commitment to Reason (as embodied in the scientific method, for the new atheists) and objectivism broadly construed (in both cases, in the form of a strange rationalist-empiricist admixture), and a complete disinterest in history, either intellectual or cultural, except to the extent that it confirms their prejudices (e.g. there have been religious wars, therefore religion kills people). And I should have seen these similarities before, too, because there are more than a few fans of Rand among the new atheists.

Once I saw this obvious analogy between the New Atheists and Randians, I knew exactly how to deal with the New Atheists: ignore them. You can’t talk to a Randian. Talking to a Randian is like talking to a brick wall, only brick walls can produce an echo so that you at least know that it received the sound of your voice. When talking to a Randian, even that is too much to ask. And you certainly can’t convince him (they’re almost all male) that anything he believes is wrong, so the best way to deal with him is to simply ignore what him. This, then, is the best way to deal with the new atheists as well: ignore them. Granted, individually ignoring them doesn’t solve the problem of them being in the public eye. That is a different sort of problem. As long as their message is one designed to be maximally controversial, they will get media attention, their books will sell, they will attract followers among the Randian-type social and cultural malcontents, and they will be seen as the spokespeople for atheism, regardless of whether they are being engaged directly. This means that we, those atheists who find their message as appalling as those of the most intolerant religious zealots, shouldn’t stop publicly engaging their message -- it’s up to us to counteract its influence, and to clean up its mess -- but we should engage the ideas, not the people, because engaging the purveyors of the ideas is pointless, utterly so. They will simply shout us down with insults and frame us as traitors to our own cause. Pithy insults and fiery rhetoric will always beat out careful reasoning and thoughtful discussion in a world of sound-bites and short attention spans. So we should create an atmosphere in which the new atheists are essentially talking to themselves, either in the form of other new atheists, or in the form of the fundamentalists on the other side of the religious spectrum.

And this goes for those among the religious whose reaction to the new atheists is not simply a knee-jerk “Ooh, atheists are evil!” as well. They should feel, for the sake of dialogue between the religious and the a-religious, and for the sake of the promotion of science and science education, that the new atheists’ message must be engaged. But they shouldn’t feel the least bit compelled to engage it by engaging new atheists themselves, because doing so is as pointless for them as it is for us.

So when I finally wrote that letter to my parents’ pastor, it was short and sweet. I told him that he must recognize that “atheist” is not a homogenous category, and that there is therefore no one way to talk to us about religion or any other topic. I told him that he and his congregation should treat us like adult human beings, respecting us by engaging us in dialogue, rather than preaching or lecturing us about the wonders of Christ. Who knows, in actually discussing religion with us, they might learn something, and their minds might be changed too. But, I warned, if you or one of your parishioners should come across an atheist who answers anything you say with ridicule, the best thing you can do is move on to the next one, because with this sort of person, no meaningful dialogue is possible, no learning will take place on either side, and everyone’s time will be wasted.

A Few Only Slightly Connected Thoughts on Rand

1a.) This New York Times review of a new Ayn Rand biography has been getting pretty harsh treatment in the blogosphere. Most of the criticism is over this passage:

Brandon of Siris, D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty, Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy, and several other conservative and libertarian bloggers have pointed out that nothing in this passage implies a contradiction. Brandon’s is the most thorough of these rebuttals.

1b.)Brian Leiter has also criticized Kirsch, the author of the review, for claiming that there is an affinity between the thought of Rand and Nietzsche. He writes:

I’ve always found the positive comparison of Rand to Nietzsche by Randians frustrating, because I’ve never seen any affinity between the two thinkers (they seem completely incompatible, in fact, as Leiter points out), but the comparison is so common that it’s not surprising to see Kirsch invoke it. Still, I’d love to see Rand-Nietzsche meme die, and articles like this in major publications do nothing to hasten that death.

2.) I last read Rand almost 12 years ago. I read The Fountainhead in high school, and found it boring, so I had no intention of reading anything else by Rand. But when I went off to college, I met a bunch of young Randians, and people were frequently suggesting, even demanding, that I read her books. My uncle, for example, upon hearing that I was majoring in philosophy, insisted that I would love Rand (I haven‘t read any of his book suggestions since!). Others thought I would love Rand because of my affinity for Nietzsche. So, I broke down and read Atlas Shrugged.

At the time, I was working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab during the summer, and was in charge of running one of the lab’s many experiments. The experiment had to be run at the same time every day, and the cruel graduate student I was working under chose to run it at 7 am, so every morning I woke up way too early, showered, and then walked over to the lab armed only with my copy of Atlas Shrugged. I would start the experiment, and then sit and read for the 90 minutes the experiment ran. Reading for 90 minutes a day, it still took me an entire month to get through the book (Galt’s long speech was particularly slow going). That experiment and that book will forever be united in my memory as wholly unpleasant experiences.

I found the book to be worse than awful as a novel, and the philosophy it presented to be even worse than that, but thought that Rand’s obvious lack of talent as a novelist might get in the way of her presenting her philosophy, so I went to the library and checked out some of her philosophical works, The Virtue of Selfishness, i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I forced myself to read through all three, and came away even less impressed with her philosophy (if that was possible). My impressions of her philosophy ranged from finding it thoroughly uninteresting to being offended by it and horrified that she was so widely read. I sometimes wonder if, now that I’m older, my impression of her would be different were I to revisit her books, but my impression was so bad then that I don’t think it’s worth my time to find out.

3.) Anyway, since I haven’t read her or even thought about her work seriously in so long, I can’t really speak intelligently about her philosophy, but the much maligned passage in Kirsch’s review got me thinking about the issue of living the philosophical life that I wrote about last week. Did Rand live a life consistent with her philosophy? Kirsch was obviously trying to imply that she didn’t, but those more familiar with Rand’s work than I have been pretty vehement in insisting that he was wrong in the particular case he chose as an example. Still, Rand’s biographers often highlight the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her close followers, and that she herself promoted. Part of this cultish atmosphere was a complete lack of tolerance for dissent. It was Rand’s way or the highway, with she and her closest followers excommunicating even mildly dissenting members of her sect, and demanding that the remaining members cut off all contact with the excommunicated (even when they were close family members, or spouses!). As a philosopher whose most popular teaching is one of radical individualism, this does seem problematic, does it not?

Or maybe not. I wonder if the perception of Rand as a promoter of individualism is a mistaken one, and that her stifling of individual thought is therefore perfectly consistent with her philosophy. If I remember correctly, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes, Dagny Taggert, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, all thought alike, and Taggert’s affinity for Rearden was largely due to the fact that their world-views were identical. What’s more, anyone who didn’t share that world view was treated quite harshly in the novel. So maybe Rand’s individualism has less to do with thought than with action: it is about the virtue of selfishness, and acting on one’s own behalf, rather than making up one’s own mind, because for Rand, when one uses reason properly, there is only one set of conclusions that one can possibly come to. If that’s the case, to the extent that Rand’s individualism has to do with thinking for oneself, it is not thinking originally, but coming to the right conclusions independent of the destructive ideas that dominate our culture.

Rural Post

I love this image from Old Picture of the Day (click for a larger view):

I'm not sure why I love it so much. It could be the details: the mud splatter on the coach, the fact that the coach has a front window (presumably because of the mud spatter; I can't imagine he drives fast enough to get bugs in his teeth), the curious look on the children, the leafless trees, etc. Or it could be that the whole scene reminds me a lot of what my hometown looked like when I was a young child, when many of the roads were still unpaved, and trees like the ones in the picture still dominated the landscape. Granted, the mail man wasn't driving around in a horse and buggy, but the picture still induces a distinct feeling of nostalgia in me, particularly since my hometown doesn't look anything like this picture anymore. You'd be hard pressed to find a dirt road, and the city has become incredibly overdeveloped, so that you have to go out of the city limits to find that many trees of that age in the same place (I'd guess those trees are 50-70 years old; they don't look like old growth).

Leiter on Romano on Heidegger; And the Philosopher Who Lives Philosophy

Leiter weighs in, in his usual acerbic fashion. He adds little to the discussion, but as usual, his vitriol makes his efforts amusing.

The discussion that has resulted from Romano's article reminded me of something Nietzsche once wrote in "Schopenhauer as Educator" (Dan Brezeale's translation; emphasis mine):

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. That he is capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example is beyond doubt; the history of Indian, which is almost the history of Indian philosophy, proves it. But this example must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books--in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through their bearing, what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than by what they said, let alone what they wrote. how completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany!

Writing this in an essay on Schopenhauer seems appropriate, since, as a rabid misogynist, he had no problem throwing his landlady down the stairs. When she died, and he no longer had to pay her restitution, he famously wrote in his account book, "Obit anus, abit onus," the pretentious 19th century equivalent of saying, "The bitch is dead, the I don't have to pay anymore" (literally more like, "The asshole is dead, the burden departed"). So he was certainly living that aspect of his philosophy.

More to the point, this sentiment seems somewhat strange in 2009, when the vast majority of professional philosophers are working on issues that would be difficult to reflect in their outward lives--in the way that they carry themselves, in what they wear, eat, etc. How, for example, might one wear clothes reflective of one's position on whether the denotation of a predicate is its extension or its intension? What should predicate dualists or eliminative materialists eat? In a time when philosophy has become an increasingly specialized discipline, and increasingly removed from life, it has become increasingly difficult to know what living a philosophy would entail, to say nothing of actually doing so.

Still, I think there's something important in the sentiment that a philosopher should live his or her philosophy, to the extent that a philosopher's philosophy is relevant to living. If nothing else, a philosopher living in a way that is not only consistent with, but actually reflects his or her philosophy shows that he or she takes it quite seriously, and suggests that we, as their readers, should take it seriously as well.

One can apply this maxim to much of systematic philosophy, and to much of the generally asystematic Continental tradition. Heidegger's philosophy, which both systematic and as part of that tradition, is certainly is relevant to living, and thus it's not inappropriate to ask whether he lived in a way that reflected it. We might, for example, explore how well Heidegger's life reflected one of the central ideas in his philosophy, the concept of authenticity (eigentlich), and one of its primary components, "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), in his siding with the Nazi's largely for reasons of personal and professional gain, his efforts to get us to ignore this episode in his life while refusing to apologize for it, his treatment of his friends Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuese, and Karl Jaspers (during the Nazi years, treating them rather poorly, even insulting them, but afterward, when his reputation was in need of repair, calling on them to come to his aid), etc.

Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that resoluteness, again part of authenticity, is "letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty." He had in mind a sort of existential guilt (not unlike original sin, I suppose), in this part of Being and Time, but sees this existential guilt as the ground for all feelings of responsibility and guilt. Yet Heidegger refused to admit responsibility, or show any form of guilt, when it came to his Nazism and other blatantly immoral personal and professional behavior. His refusal to apologize to the very people he'd most directly harmed, his friends and students like Arendt, Jaspers, and Marcuse, shows this quite clearly. Is this Heidegger failing to live his philosophy, or at least an important aspect of it? It's difficult to draw any other conclusion.

How much, then, can we profit from him as a philosopher? How seriously should we take his philosophy in light of the fact that he so blatantly failed to live in accordance with it? I assume we could forgive small indiscretions. Philosophers are no more perfect than any other human beings. But Heidegger's indiscretions were anything but small. At this point, the fact that Heidegger's thought has been so influential probably renders his living of it irrelevant from a historical perspective. We can profit greatly from it in understanding the work of those who came after him. But I am interested in philosophy first and foremost from an individual perspective: what does it tell me about the world, myself, and life in general that I can use in my own life? There is no doubt in my mind that I can take bits and pieces from Heidegger to inform my own thinking (I frequently use his lectures on the Principle of Sufficient Reason in my own thinking on science and ontology, e.g.), but Heidegger's own failure to live his philosophy makes me skeptical of his project as a whole. I don't think his personal failures constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting his philosophy, of course, but it is certainly one rather large quarrel in the critic's quiver.

What do you think?

Added (Slightly) Later: The example I gave is not meant to be the only one in which Heidegger's life is relevant to his philosophy. Nor is "seriousness" meant to be the only reason why living a philosophy is relevant to what we take away from it. Nietzsche himself gives us more reasons in Beyond Good and Evil when he talks of the prejudices of philosophers. A philosophers personality will inevitably be reflected in his or her philosophy, but sometimes indirectly: a philosophy, for example, may be designed to make a philosopher seem like an extremely moral, erudite, or principled person, when in fact he or she is an unprincipled, immoral jerk. In Heidegger's case, his borrowing of terminology from the Nazis (mentioned in the Romano comment thread) show quite clearly how his life affected his books, and therefore how his life is relevant to how we read them, and how much we will profit from them.

A Little Rant About Racism in Austin

I grew up in a small town in the Old South in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. During my early, formative years, open, public racism abounded. It was not uncommon to hear the n-word spoken in public, or to hear horribly racist jokes told loudly in a restaurant. Many of the white people in town (about 60% of the town's population) genuinely considered black people (most of the other 40%) to be inferior, and would tell this to anyone who'd listen. Their children sopped up their racism, of course, and when I was in elementary school it was not uncommon for their to be fights caused by racism. The Confederate battle flag was everywhere, and I mean everywhere. My schools mascot, from middle school on, was a Rebel, and in both my junior high and high school gyms (where I played on the basketball teams), rebel flags were painted on the walls. By the time I got to high school, though, things had changed dramatically. GM's Saturn plant had opened nearby, resulting in an influx of new residents mostly from northern states, who were less tolerant of explicit racism. Even before that, a change in attitude had been slowly occurring, and by 11th grade in high school, a petition circulated, and was ultimately signed by about 2/3s of the students, the change the mascot (the school's administration, and then the school board, ultimately rejected the change, and the school's mascot is still a Rebel). There was a bit of a countermovement -- my senior year, a group of white students produced "senior" shirts that displayed the rebel flag with a message about being proud of our southern heritage -- but for the most part, by the mid-90s, explicit racism was no longer tolerated. It has been years since I heard the sorts of things I used to hear regularly in the 80s.

Now I live in Austin, TX, an ostensibly liberal city that certainly isn't known for its racism. It should be, because institutional racism is a big problem here, but it isn't. To see this one need only look at the police shootings of the last several years, Austin's nearly complete racial segregation, or the fact that the police presence is fairly small at the mostly white SxSW music and film festival, while the police presence is mind-bogglingly large during the mostly black Texas Relays, which is considerably smaller than SxSW, that takes place a week or two after SxSW. This year, several businesses even chose to close their doors during the Relays, including a reggae club (saying that, in essence, black people don't like reggae) and an entire friggin' mall, citing security concerns, despite the fact that statistically the SxSW crowd produces much more crime than the Relays crowd. But Austin's racism is 21st century racism: it's acted on, often very subtly, but it's rarely if ever openly voiced, and therefore if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

Today, however, I ran into one man who proudly wears his racism, on his jacket. He was riding the 1L bus from South Park Meadows (in the far south of Austin) wearing a jacket on which he and, if I were guessing, his friends had penned several symbols and phrases, including "White Warriors," "Aryan Knight," and the SS lightning bolt symbol (in several places), along with several anarchy symbols (because nothing is more compatible with the most fervently loyal military wing, the SS, of one of history's worst authoritarian regimes, the Nazis, than anarchy!). I honestly hadn't seen anything like this in years. I had seen KKK and skinheads at rallies, but not just walking around in public, proudly displaying their racism. I found it both disturbing and incredibly offensive. It's upsetting that in 2009, more than 50 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's just mind-boggling.


The picture was taken without his permission, but fuck the racist bastard, I don't care. I know it's kind of hard to read, because my camera phone sucks, but the word after "White" is "Warriors," and underneath that it says, "King of Kings," and then, "Aryan Knight." The "A" in "Aryan" has been turned into the anarchy symbol. Just above the word "knight" is one of several SS lightning bolt symbols. If you're in Austin, and ride the 1L, be sure to let this guy know what you think of his white supremacist views if you see him.

A friend of mine told me that she prefers that racists be open, because at least then you know what you're getting. But I had always thought the fact that racism had become so shameful that the vast majority of racists were afraid to show their, shall we say, true colors in public, was a good thing. But this guy shows that not everyone has gotten that message, and thus reminds me of just how far we have to go in this country before we can say we're living in a "post-racial" society. Ugh. And I'm afraid that this is the sort of thing that Austin's city government, police force, and many of its businesses, encourage when they tacitly approve of racism through their actions and inaction.

Interesting Comment From a Mormon Opponent of Intelligent Design

From a post (via) on Michael Behe's talk at BYU:

So called, Intelligent Design is not just the idea that there is a Creator. I think Mormons look at the label “Intelligent Design” created by the evangelical Discovery Institute and think, “Hey we think God was Intelligent! We must believe in Intelligent Design too!!” No. Their intelligent designer has nothing to do with the glory and beauty of our conception of God. Thiers is a bit of a hack who couldn’t get creation right the first time and has to keep dabbling with the process to get it right.

I've never heard that take on Intelligent Design before. Definitely an interesting way to look at it.

Two Kinds of Books on Nietzsche

Do you seek warmth of me? Come not too close, I counsel, or your hands may burn. For look! My ardor exceeds the limit, and I barely restrain the flames from leaping from my body!

I've spent a lot of time reading the secondary literature on Nietzsche, and I keep coming away with the impression that there are two types of books on Nietzsche. I write that sentence with trepidation, because when someone begins a statement with, "There are two types of..." you can be fairly certain that whatever follows is false. So I don't really mean that there are only two types of books on Nietzsche, just that I tend to classify books on his work into two types.

OK, even that's not true. There are at least three types: really, really bad books on Nietzsche, and OK to good books on Nietzsche that can be classified into two types. The really, really bad books on Nietzsche are the most common type. For example, I just finished reading Prophets of Extremity by Allan Megill. It's an interesting book in its own way, I suppose, but as a book on Nietzsche (or a book with chapters on Nietzsche), it's awful. It's one of those frequent attempts to "postmodernize" Nietzsche, by focusing entirely on his immature aestheticism, and to make that aestheticism into some strange ontology that seems wholly alien both to Nietzsche and to anyone else writing before 1970. For anyone who's actually read Nietzsche, this sort of book is frustratingly bad. Then there's Heidegger's multi-volume series on Nietzsche, which again tries to turn him into a metaphysician, but this time relying almost exclusively on a book that Nietzsche didn't even publish (or write, even) himself: The Will to Power. For Heidegger, this Will to Power is the core of Nietzsche's metaphysics (volume III of the series is even titled "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics"). When you make a concept that appears only rarely in a thinker's published writings the central component of his or her philosophy, you've If you read all four volumes, you will come away asking yourself, "Did Heidegger and I read the same Nietzsche, or was he reading some Bizarro Nietzsche who'd never written The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil?"

So when I say that there are two types of books on Nietzsche, I mean there are two types of books on Nietzsche that have some redeeming value as Nietzsche scholarship or independent philosophy. The first type is exemplified by Walter Kauffmann's dry, plodding, and conservative, but excellent and indespensible Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist. This was the first book on Nietzsche that I read, and I've gone back to it repeatedly over the years. It is thorough, it is accurate if at times controversial, and it provides an excellent companion to Nietzsche's own writings, as well as providing excellent pieces of biographical information. This category thus includes books that are fairly straightforward attempts to interpret and situate Nietzsche as a philosopher (or a psychologist, or an Antichrist). They can be relatively dull, particularly when compared to Nietzsche's writings, but they're informative, and reading them can help you a great deal in making your way through an incredibly complex thinker's writings. In this category I would also include most of the more recent books by English-speaking philosophers, like Brian Leiter's book on Nietzsche and morality, the Richardson and Leiter edited volume on Nietzsche, Rudiger Safranski's "philosophical biography," and Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (I'd include Nehemas' book, but it's a sort of tweener).

The second category has fewer members, but I tend to enjoy them much, much more. These books generally don't get all, or even most of the details about Nietzsche right, or they focus exclusively on one aspect of his writing and therefore provide a highly incomplete picture. So they shouldn't be read in order to understand the content of Nietzsche's thought. What these books do, instead, is capture the spirit of Nietzsche, the spirit of the "gay science," of the eternal return, Nietzsche as Antichrist, of giving birth to a dancing star. The book I place most firmly in this category is Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche (which begins with the quote above, from Nietzsche's unpublished notes). In the preface, Bataille openly admits that his book is not an attempt at formal exegesis, but an attempt "to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light." It is written in his own blood, he says, as Nietzsche's works were. It is not merely a critical reading of Nietzsche, but an "experiencing" of Nietzsche, in an effort to work out what Nietzsche has wrought inside Bataille, and which is driving him to insanity. And it is absolutely wonderful to read. I discovered it in a library, years ago. I started reading it early in the afternoon, and became so engrossed that I read it from start to finish, leaving late in the evening. The next day, I went out and bought a copy of my own, which I go back to as often as I go back to Kauffmann.

Another book that I would place firmly in this category is Graham Parkes' Composing the Soul which, while fairly accurate in its description of Nietzsche's writings, is also extremely limited in that description. It focuses entirely on the psychological dimension in Nietzsche, arguing, to some extent accurately and to some extent futilely, that this is the fundamental dimension of his work. But more than an attempt at exegesis, it is a wonderful exploration of both Nietzsche's mind and the mind in general, and a joy to read. It is even moving, at times, as when it discusses Nietzsche's post-insanity letters. You wouldn't recommend this book to anyone starting out with Nietzsche, because it would certainly steer them in the wrong direction, but for those who like to read, and who are very familiar with Nietzsche, it's a must read. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy is another example of this type of book, though Deleuze is hardly the writer that Battaile was or Parkes is. Reading Deleuze is a usually struggle (Difference and Repetition has to be the most frustrating book I've ever read), and this book is no exception, but it's still inspiring, if not entirely accurate.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

I have been trying to write a post about object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and speculative realism (SR), but have found it difficult to do so, in part because I keep coming off somewhat mean, and in part because I keep writing way, way too much for a blog post. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of OOP and SR, if only because I'm very sympathetic to speculative philosophy, and I have a soft spot for new ideas (even if they aren't yet so radically new). Plus, I consider myself a realist, though of an somewhat different sort, I think I (I'm a direct realist). But I'm firmly wedded to my anthropocentrism, and I'm not totally averse to what speculative realists call "correlationalism" (see the link above for their definition of this term), so my sympathy only goes so far. Whatever my level of sympathy, I did really enjoy at least the first part^* of Graham Harman's essay on Husserl and Lovecraft (scroll down to page 332), which I definitely recommend reading. Like I said, I dig speculative philosophy.

But what I find truly fascinating of OOP, regardless of what I think of it as a philosophy, is the role that the internet has played in its development. So before I say anything about OOP as a philosophy, I point you to this summary of that role. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in the possibilities that the blogosphere has to offer to serious scholarship.

*Towards the end, he starts criticizing Husserl for not being enough of a realist, which is where my interest started to wane. I recall Camus saying just the opposite: that Husserl was too much of a realist. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't, eh?

Does Martin Heidegger's Nazism Mean We Should Exclude Him From Philosophy?

This is a question I pose to the couple of people who seem to be repeat visitors, and to anyone who happens by via Google: Does Heidegger's enthusiasm Nazism mean he shouldn't be considered a philosopher? This is the position taken by a recent article by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and in a book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger's Nazism. From the article:

"We must acknowledge," Faye says in one fierce conclusion, "that an author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered a philosopher." Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger Industry: "If his writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?"

To me, this seems like an dangerous position to take. I have no patience with those, including Heidegger himself, who would attempt to explain away or dismiss his Nazism of the 1930s. It is simply inexcusable, and to ignore it is to act as though it has already been excused. What's more, to ignore it is to fail to fully engage some of his most important philosophical works, including Being and Time and his Introduction to Metaphysics. One can be influenced by Heidegger without being influenced by his Nazism, but one can't read Heidegger without reading his Nazism. To do so would be the like reading only the pages of Heart of Darkness that have beautiful descriptions of nature, because all that stuff about the psychology of evil is too depressing. You couldn't then say, "I've read Heart of Darkness," because you haven't.

That said, when Faye writes, "If his writings continue to proliferate... how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?", he is being either obtuse or absurd, or both. I'm quite sure Faye's aware that Heidegger's writings played little or no role in the actual rise of Nazism. Heidegger was, if anything, following on the heels of that rise in a blatantly self-serving manor. It's despicable, and shows Heidegger to be a horrible human being, but it doesn't make him responsible for Nazism. Yet when Faye states that we can expect, if his writings are allowed to be read, "yet another translation into facts and acts," the words "yet another translation" seems to imply that the first instance was also a translation of Heidegger's writings into facts and acts.

There's also something disturbing about his suggestion that we should hide Heidegger away, because he wrote about Nazism in the 1930s, as though we're not strong enough to read those passages and not immediately, or at least over time, gravitate towards National Socialism. But it is not the job philosophers, or librarians, or even publishers, to hide away ideas that we don't like, even if those ideas celebrate obvious evils. Those are the ideas in most need of engagement, and refutation. Hiding them away is more of an invitation for someone to develop them again than reading and openly criticizing them ever will be.

The history of philosophy is replete with justifications and endorsements of evil: Plato advocated infanticide in the Republic, Hume was openly racist (see here for a good discussion), and Schopenhauer wrote the mindbogglingly misogynist essay "On Women" (and he pushed his landlady down the stairs!), yet few would advocate that we should stop reading Plato, Hume, or Schopenhauer because they thought infanticide was a good idea, were racists, or were misogynists, and only slightly more would advocate that they are bad philosophers for these reasons. These things shouldn't be ignored, and should certainly figure into an evaluation of their work, but they shouldn't be the only factors considered. Yet because of his celebration of Nazism, Romano and Faye believe not simply that Heidegger should be considered a bad philosopher, but that he shouldn't be considered a philosopher at all.

I can't close out this post without noting one thing. If you're going to label someone a bad philosopher, you should probably have at least a rudimentary understanding of their core ideas and concepts. Ramono apparently doesn't believe this, as in his article, while discussing the various ways in which Heidegger's philosophy has been praised, he writes:

Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.)

Anyone who's ever read Being and Time, or even the Cliff Notes, will know that "Dasein" does not mean "Human Being." "Dasein" literally means "being there." It's true that "Dasein" refers to the exclusively human mode of being, but referring to human being as Dasein, and describing it as such, is what people are praising in Heidegger's thought, because they see it as opening up new philosophical avenues in the study of being in general and human being in particular. You might think it's not a very productive way of talking about the being of human beings, but simply dismissing it as a fancy way of saying "human being" is no way to address even a bad philosophy.

Sports Prescience

Sports predicting is notoriously difficult, and baseball is probably the most difficult sport to predict. That's what makes what Seattle Mariners' announcer Mike Blowers did in the pregame show for a game between the Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays on September 27 of this year so amazing. He predicted that the Mariners' rookie third baseman Matt Tuiasosopo would get his first Major League home run in the game. He didn't stop there, though. He predicted in what at bat he would get it (his second), on what count (3-1, or 1-3 for you Koreans), on what kind of pitch (fastball), and where the home run would go (left field, maybe the second deck).

When Tuiasosopo came up to bat for the second time, in the 5th inning, he took the count to 3-1, and Blowers' co-announcer Dave Niehaus began joking about the prediction. Then Tuiasosopo hit the ball hard to left field, and Niehaus went crazy, yelling "I don't believe it. I see the light!" The ball ended up just short of the second deck.

You can listen to the audio of both the pregame show and the 5th inning at bat here.

There Is Nothing Here Which Is Not Zeus

Here's another translation of that final passage from Women of Trachis, by Michael Jameson, and this time in verse (and I like it much better that way), which I found in an article (JSTOR) on "The Euthyphro Dilemma":

You see how little compassion the Gods
have shown in all that's happened; they
who are called our fathers, who begot us,
can look upon such suffering.
No one can foresee what is to come.
What is here now is pitiful for us
and shameful for the Gods;
but of all men it is hardest for him
who is the victim of this disaster.
Maiden, come from the house with us.
You have seen a terrible death
and agonies, many and strange, and there is
nothing here wish is not Zeus.

What I've learned between writing the previous post yesterday and writing this one today is that there has been a great deal of discussion for some time (like, centuries worth) about whether these last lines (spoken by Heracles' son Hyllus) are meant as an indictment of the gods, or whether Hyllus (and Sophocles) believed that Heracles deserved his fate, and that the gods were acting justly in punishing him so harshly. Since I don't read Greek, I'm hesitant to say which side I fall on. The differences in the two translations show how difficult it is for someone who doesn't read Greek to determine how this passage should be interpreted. One calls the gods' actions "shameful," the other refers to their "cruelty." "Shameful" certainly implies that the gods weren't acting justly; "cruelty" is more ambiguous, though it certainly implies a displeasure with what the gods have done, possibly because it's unjust, or maybe just because it's happening to Hyllus' own family. But these translations are themselves interpretations of Sophocles, so you can't put too much stock in them when trying to figure out what Sophocles himself was trying to say.

Even so, these lines in English, and the play itself, are still interesting in light of the Problem of Evil, and, as the article in which I found this translation suggests, may have contained just the sort of "conception of the divine" that Plato/Socrates was considering in the Euthyphro, from which the Euthyphro Dilemma (which is, it should be noted, not entirely true to the dialogue itself) is taken. What's more, since the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Problem of Evil are not entirely unrelated, Sophocles' play might serve as a useful stimulant for thought on the issues they raise.

Yea, For Thou Art Breaking the Slumber of My Plague

Women of Trachis (The Trachiniae) is by no means Sophocles' most famous tragedy today (Antigone and the two Oedipus plays, particularly Oedipus Rex, are much more widely read), but it's my favorite for some reason. And not just because Ezra Pound published a, shall we say "creative" translation of it, and I happen to be a Pound fan. It really is an amazing play, full of great lines like the one I used for the title of the post. But at the end of the post I'll get to something I'd never really thought about the play until now. First, a short summary.

The story is pretty simple. Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans) is always out fighting and conquering people, and his wife Deïanira isn't happy about it. One day, while Heracles is still out doing his fighting thing, one of his servants brings home several women as slaves that Heracles had captured in his last conquest. One of the women, Iole, is strikingly beautiful, and is "conspicuous among" the others. Deïanira soon learns that the whole reason Heracles had conquered the women's land was to obtain Iole. This of course makes Deïanira jealous, and she decides to use a love spell that had been given to her by a centaur who had, as she was going to marry Heracles, captured her. Heracles heard her cry when the centaur grabbed her, and killed the centaur with an arrow. The centaur then said:

If thou gatherest with thy hands the blood clotted round my wound, at the place where the Hydra, Lerna's monstrous growth, hath tinged the arrow with black gall,- this shall be to thee a charm for the soul of Heracles, so that he shall never look upon any woman to love her more than thee.

He tells her exactly what she has to do, and so when she finds out about Iole, she makes a robe from the blood, and then sends it to Heracles with the instructions that the robe shouldn't be in sunlight, and only Heracles can wear it.

Soon after sending the robe, Deïanira starts to feel guilty, and throws the remaining centaur blood away, out into the sun, where it immediately begins to boil. She realizes the centaur tricked her, but it's too late, Heracles put the robe on, and was badly burned. Deïanira kills herself out of guilt, and Heracles' suffering is so great that he ends up having himself burned to death. Not a happy ending, but then again, it is a tragedy.

I told you all of that, to tell you this. The last lines of Women of Trachis seems like an ancient Greek version of the "Problem of Evil." Here are the lines (from R.C. Jebb's prose translation, which you can read here, and from which I took the above quote as well; emphasis is mine):

Lift him, followers! And grant me full forgiveness for this; but mark the great cruelty of the gods in the deeds that are being done. They beget children, they are hailed as fathers, and yet they can look upon such sufferings. No man foresees the future; but the present is fraught with mourning for us, and with shame for the powers above, and verily with anguish beyond compare for him who endures this doom.

Maidens, come ye also, nor linger at the house; ye who have lately seen a dread death, with sorrows manifold and strange: and in all this there is nought but Zeus.

Apparently even the Greeks were in need of theodicy.

And the Most Despicable Person On the Planet Is...

Bill Donohue. Apparently, if you're not zealously anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-creativity, anti-Democratic Party, anti-religious freedom, and anti-diversity, you hate America, its culture, Christians, and most importantly, Catholics. I hope most Catholics feel nothing but contempt for this man who wants us to believe he speaks for them.

If you read that article, you're going to feel very dirty, so in order to make you feel better, I give you this man, who is Donohue's opposite, and his better, in every way:

Ye are many—they are few

From Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

I've always loved that stanza, and the whole poem. My favorite part of the poem, though, is the last two stanzas:

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again—again—again—

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.'

A 21st Century Investigation of the Conditions of All Possible Experience?

I remember reading some research on creativity a several years ago, a topic I'm interested in and fascinated by for a variety of reasons, and being struck by one of the claims. Repeatedly, researchers discussed and empirically studied the representations of aliens and mythical creatures by writers and artists in a variety of genres (science fiction, fantasy, comic books, etc.). They concluded that these representations shared several features, one of which was bilateral symmetry, and argued that this is because our creativity is limited by our experience.

After spending some time with the creativity literature and feeling like I had a good grasp of it, I brought it up at a party attended by several biologists. A couple overheard what I was saying, and took issue with it. Specifically, when I brought up the point about bilateral symmetry, they both began to vehemently disagree with me.. They went on and on about how what I was describing wasn't a limit of creativity, it was a limit of biology, and provided me with a laundry list of reasons why extraterrestrial creatures were likely to exhibit bilateral symmetry. At the time I thought they had simply missed the point, but I'm no longer so sure.

In my perhaps warped mind, this discussion got me thinking about Kant. Ever since I had taken a course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I had been skeptical of Kant's stated goal of providing the necessary conditions for all possible experience. I, influenced heavily by the professor of course, had interpreted this to mean not simply human experience, but the experience of any experiencing being, which would include extraterrestrial beings. How could it be possible, I thought, to make an argument which, though transcendental, must be based on at least introspective evaluations of human (or a human's) experience, and have it apply to all possible experiencing beings? This seemed to me patently absurd.

My skepticism of Kant's project was bolstered by my affinity with the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both thinkers were Kantians of sorts, as is just about anyone who studies the mind in the 20th or 21st century, but where they differed from Kant, or at least, where I saw them differing from Kant, was in the role that our own concerns, needs, or goals, and bodies played in determining the nature of our experience, or our experience of nature. For them, as well as the psychologists and philosophers who were influenced by them (and many of their predecessors as well), we are embodied, situated creatures, and the conditions of our experience are necessarily wrapped up in that embodiment and situatedness.

To me, this seemed like a direct challenge to the Kantian project. If our experience is embodied and situated, how can we possibly extract anything universal from it? Wouldn't the conditions of possible experience for differently embodied and situated creatures necessarily be different? The two exceptions, of course, would be embodiment and situatedness. In a way, these are the Gibsonian and Merleau-Pontyan universal conditions for all experience. But any transcendental argument about the conditions of all possible experience beyond that would be impossible, right?

This is where my myopia took me, until that conversation with the two biologists. After that conversation, I realized that something like the Kantian project might be possible if nature limits the possibilities of embodiment and situatedness. That is, with a firm grasp of the ways in which the facts of the physical universe limit our embodiment (e.g., biasing our body plans towards bilateral symmetry, particularly as organisms become more complex), we might be able to suss out a basic set of necessary conditions for possible experience that would apply to all possible experiencing beings in the physical universe.

At the very least, this seems like an interesting line of research, and one that, in true Merleau-Pontyan fashion, would have to rely heavily on philosophical reasoning and empirical science. What would be needed would be a Kantian transcendental argument for the 21st century, utilizing biology, physics, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This would, of course, be a massive undertaking, a sort of science (in the old sense of Wissenschaft) in and of itself, rather than the grand system-making of one person, but it seems possible. Or does it? What do you think?

Did You Mean Intolerant Atheists?

Someone arrived at this blog earlier from Google, using the search terms "tolerant atheists." So I figured I'd try the search myself, and when I did, something both funny and sad happened. Here's a screen shot:


Don't believe me? Try the search yourself. Clearly atheists have a public perception problem, or at least a Google perception problem.

Leiter on Limbaugh on Swine Flu

Is it just me, or is a post like this disturbing? Brian Leiter in full:

I realize eugenics is politically and morally incorrect, but I can not say that I am upset that followers of Rush Limbaugh will not get the swine flu vaccine.

At least he acknowledges that it is, in fact, "morally incorrect," which is a pleasant way of saying immoral. I prefer immorality when it's fully self-conscious. Still, even though Leiter was probably making a really, really tasteless joke, I feel like pointing out that if Limbaugh's listeners don't get vaccines, and get swine flu, then others who, say, can't afford the vaccines or otherwise don't have access or knowledge of them, and who are exposed to Limbaugh's listeners might also get swine flu. I know that H1N1 isn't as deadly as was at first believed (I had it 2 weeks ago, and survived, and I have to say it was the worst bout of flu I've ever had, and I'm still weak as a result of it), but joking about anyone getting a highly communicable and potentially deadly disease because you disagree with their politics is just plain tasteless. It's Limbaughian, even.

On Dawkins, Myers, Philosophy, Science, Theories, Facts, etc.

I just finished reading this post by Mike Flynn (via Siris), cleverly titled "The Imperial March." The post, inspired by the PZ Myers post I linked earlier, takes Myers and Richard Dawkins to task for their ignorance of philosophy (something I've also noted before). My favorite part of Flynn's post:

Consider Dawkins' comment in the first quote: Questions about the existence of the supernatural are actually scientific questions. And then we can ask by what scientific principle this is known? Perhaps the philosopher running beside the locomotive can tell the engineer who, by all appearances has never given this question a moment's thought. No body of knowledge has within itself the competency to examine its own foundations -- although only Mathematics has a rigorous proof that this is so. Physics, which in the original meaning was any knowledge (scientia) of physical bodies, and so includes biology and all the rest, is grounded in metaphysics, which simply means "behind the physics." And that is right where The Metaphysics appears in compilations of Aristotle's works, right after The Physics. It deals with those ontological and epitemological preconditions.

Science as we know it measures things. Some folks think that because they can measure Stuff really really accurately that they are therefore Experts on Everything from theology to barbeque sauce or even in other branches of science. But to measure is to quantify, and quantification belongs to matter (rather than to form, agency, or finality). Therefore, if you focus exclusively on that-which-can-be-measured, you focus exclusively on that which is matter. Like anyone whose only tool is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail. But in what way does Dawkins suppose that the "supernatural" (whatever he means by that) is a measurable, material body? Heck. Forget about the existence of the supernatural. The existence of an empirical universe is not a scientific question. It is an a priori assumption necessary if one is to do science in the first place. Even the existence of natural laws is not a scientific question, but an assumption scientists must make before they will look for them.

This is a point I've often tried to make to the Dawkinsians I know in person (Dawkins, when he comes here, spends a good deal of time with people I know, because they're kindreds or something). Dawkins wants science to replace religion, because he believes that all religious questions are scientific questions, and science has shown itself to be better at answering scientific questions than religion. The latter part of that statement is obviously true: science is better at what it does than any other institution or system we humans have previously invented. That's why we've been able to go to the moon, wipe small pox off the face of the Earth, and talk to each other on the internet, or in our darker hours, flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first part of the statement, that all religious questions are scientific questions, is where Dawkins goes wrong in big way. Science isn't built to answer metaphysical questions. That's not what science does. One of the worst (intellectual) things a scientist (or anyone for that matter) can do with science is conclude that it proves the truth of materialism. That's equivalent to saying that linguistics proves that all there is to existence is language, because all linguistics studies is language. There's no way to avoid the circularity of this argument, and it's one that Dawkins and his fans make all of the time.

Now, I don't think anything Flynn says in his post suggests that philosophy of science itself is important to science. Where Dawkins, Myers, and others go wrong is not in their science, to the extent that any of these self-appointed spokespeople for atheism are doing actual science anymore. They go wrong when they try to do philosophy based on what they know about science. It is undoubtedly true that in 2009, science is much more relevant to the doing of philosophy than philosophy is to the doing of science, but science can only answer certain kinds of questions, and can only inform philosophy on those types of questions. Where science leaves off, philosophy is often the best vehicle for continuing on.

I do have to say that I think Flynn is wrong in saying that evolution is not a fact, and thus that Dawkins and Myers are right when they say that it is (even if they don't know why it is, as Myers' quoting of Gould seems to suggest). "Evolution," in its barest biological sense, refers to a set of observable events. Now, I haven't read The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory since I took a philosophy of science course in grad school (and from what I understand, there's a fairly large literature, with which I'm not at all familiar, on how to interpret his philosophy of science anyway), but I'm pretty sure that for Duhem there were different kinds of facts (concrete facts, theoretical facts, practical facts, maybe some others¹). It seems reasonable to consider evolution a concrete fact in the Duhemian sense. But Duhem was talking about physics, as the title of the book suggests, so maybe that's not the case. However, in say, a Wittgensteinian sense, evolution is, as a set of observable events, a fact of the world. Theories of evolution are not facts; natural selection is not a fact. These are explanations of facts. Evolution itself, that is the physical, and more specifically genetic, change of organisms and their offspring over time is the set of facts being explained. At the very least, I think this is an arguable position, and it therefore behooves philosophers not to dismiss it out of hand simply because Dawkins is so ignorant of philosophy in general.

1 If I remember correctly, this distinction, specifically the one between theoretical (which are mathematical) facts and practical facts, is very important in his overall discussion of theories and what they do in physics. For example, I'm pretty sure I remember him arguing that there are always a whole bunch of theoretical facts that correspond to a single practical fact, which would have all sorts of implications for how you test theories.