Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Interview with Cumhuriyet

[To be published, likely in an edited version, in the Turkish national newspaper, Cumhuriyet]

1. What is the current most important debate in the philosophy of science for you, philosophically and methodologically?

Only speaking for myself, and not for academic philosophy in general, I would say that the most important debate concerns the nature of scientific reasoning itself, what it has in common with other forms of human thought (e.g., ideology, mythology, morality, 'common-sense', etc.), and also how it is distinct from them. The prevailing idea of science for a long time had it that scientific reasoning makes a radical break with these other forms in that it gives us an impartial view of the world. While this is certainly to some extent true, more sophisticated reflection on science reveals that it is also deeply culture-bound, not just in the sense that cultural values play a role in the interpretation of data, but also in the very choice of programs of research. The sciences that deal with the distant, experimentally unrepeatable past, such as paleontology and cosmology, are particularly susceptible to influence by elements of pre-scientific thinking.  I've often thought, for example, that one would learn a good deal by doing a comparative study of Big Bang cosmology with creation myths from around the world. This is not to say that moden cosmology does not have a unique relation to the truth among all the different ways human beings have accounted for their origins, but only that it would be surprising if no pre-scientific, mythological tropes made their way into the way in which scientists talk about this highly speculative question. 

2. Did Harun Yahya send you his book of creation? What do you think about it? (Maybe you know that the magazine of the Turkish Academy of Science and Technology censored the February issue, which was about Darwin's theory. It was a big scandal here.)

No, and I'm offended that he left me out! I would have liked to pore over all the beautiful images, particularly the one of a caddis fly that turned out to be a fishing lure Harun Yahya had copied and pasted from the internet (to see the work of the talented artist who created it, go here: http://www.grahamowengallery.com/fishing/more-fly-tying.html). I have tremendous respect for traditional belief systems --I've already said I think we should study the way scientific thinking overlaps with them-- but there's nothing 'traditional' about a politically driven mass media campaign to deny the best available theory of the origins of life on earth. Real traditionalists are not worried about that theory. I think the content of the claims of creationists, whether of the Old Testament literalist school or of the intelligent-design school, are entirely without interest. To the extent that their movement is interesting, it is so as a social and political phenomenon.  One interesting question is why it only gains traction in certain societies, e.g., Turkey and the United States, and not so much in others, such as Saudi Arabia and Sweden.  It seems to me that in the Saudi Arabian case we are looking at a society in which what the individual citizen thinks about matters such as this is of no consequence, as long as the citizen behaves in the way that the state dictates.  In the case of Sweden there is a high degree of freedom of expression, coupled with high science literacy and a general lack of interest in fundamentalist or revivalist religious movements.  But in the US and Turkey both there is robust and chaotic democracy, with different factions competing to have their vision of the social good predominate. Couple these with mediocre science education, a proneness towards populist suspicion of elite expertise, and a religious tradition that cannot easily accommodate the thought that humans are a particular kind of animal, and what do you have? The spurious pseudoscience of people like Henry M. Morris and Harun Yahya.

Thomas Friedman Clogged My Toilet

Justin E. H. Smith

A few nights ago I hosted a reception for an old friend, a respected scholar and most recently the author of Citation Techniques in Duns Scotus. We were celebrating the sale of the 100th copy of his book.

Now ordinarily this sort of event is attended by only the dustiest of academics, so you can easily imagine my surprise when a former colleague of mine --a newly minted global-justice theorist who left academic philosophy in order, as she put it, to 'work the Davos circuit'--  showed up accompanied by the prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

The two of them had just come from the opening session of the ‘Mini Davos’ forum, which this year my adoptive city had the honor of hosting. My former colleague (let us call her ‘Juliette’) had just led a session on ‘The Universal Right to Clean Water’, in which her performance was judged by Stephen Harper, Desmond Tutu, and Bono alike to be of ‘Oscar calibre’.
“Water,” exclaimed Bill Gates, “now there's something people can get excited about.”
“She's gonna take this act all the way to Switzerland,” Bill Clinton himself was heard to say.

I had already known Friedman to be a small and twitchy man, and was now able to confirm that this is at best a mild understatement. Yet almost immediately I sensed that there was something unusual, that this man, however awkward he may ordinarily be, was at this very moment in a tremendous amount of discomfort. “It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Friedman,” I said smoothly and, I hoped, with just the right amount of ambiguous sarcasm. “I'm a big fan of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It really captured the moment. When I read it I was like: forget about On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, it's Friedman who's really got his finger on the pulse.”
“Thanks,” Friedman groaned. “Call me Tom.”

This was all he managed to say, after which he just kept standing there, sweating and wincing. I imagined Juliette might be able to bring him back to life if I were to disappear, so I excused myself and went to mingle among the other guests. Things were proceeding as usual. Reginald, it seems, had read Gunther’s new book, Kenelm Digby’s Qualitative Corpuscularianism. The babysitter-deprived and therefore absent Gunther, Reginald reported to the crowd’s amusement and surprise, had based his study almost entirely upon The Nature of Bodies of 1644 while completely ignoring the Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants of 1661.

Thirty minutes in or so, when I simply could not stand to see my most distinguished guest suffering anymore, and when conversation with the others had weakened from Digby to dental insurance to daycare, I leaned in and, in a whispered tone, asked Juliette what was wrong. She knew the man better than I did, after all, and I had long known her to be what Nietzsche would call a penetrating 'psychologist'. Was she ever! Thomas Friedman, Juliette whispered to me discreetly in the elegant Ciceronian Latin she still retained from her years as a scholar of Imperial Stoicism, was in the throes of a fluxus ventris.

More Early Modern Primitives

"The Virginian women pounce and rase their Faces and whole Bodies with a sharp iron, which makes a stampe in curious knots, and drawes the proportions of Fowles, Fishes, or Beasts; then with painting of sundry live colours they rub it into the stamp, which will never be taken away, because it is dried into the flesh."

“Our Ladies here have lately entertained a vaine Custome of spotting their Faces, out of an affectation of a Mole to setoff their beauty, such as Venus had, and it is well if one black patch will serve to make their Faces remarkable; for some fill their Visages full of them, varied into all manner of shapes and figures.”

*

“What strange kind of Butchery do these Nations exercise, and what needlesse paine they put themselves unto to maintaine their cruell bravery! Nay, which is yet stranger, they seeme to love this unnaturall and bloudy Gallantry so well, that they hate their own flesh and bloud, whereof they freely sacrifice to their fantasticall imaginations.”

On Criticizing Israel

Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to lead my life, with Spinoza, sub specie aeternitatis. I truly would. But every now and then my fellow men show themselves to be so brutish that I have no choice but to come back down to earthly reality and cry shame. Such a moment was the Israeli siege on Gaza that began at the end of last year, which prompted me to try to do what I could, with the low-grade weaponry of rhetoric, to convince the unconvinced that this was a thing to be harshly denounced. What did I do? Well, I wrote up my case, and I made it known through various low-voltage electronic media. Why did I not do more, like Jeff Halper? As I've said, I am hardly a philosophe engagé. I confess to doing as little as possible.

In any case, my minor foray into activism was also a learning experience. What did I learn? Among other things, I learned that, as one might fear, criticism of Israel really does draw the creeps out of the woodwork: there are indeed many out there who are far too eager to see in Israel's aggression the confirmation of their own fantastical, alternative accounts of the secret forces guiding world history. I also learned that there are many out there who take the opinions of these alienated, ill-informed bigots far too seriously, and who mistakenly suppose that any and all criticism of Israel must come from, or lead to, that same dark place.

Should one then refrain from criticizing Israel altogether? This is a privilege no one would dream of granting to any other state in the world, and one I certainly don't grant to my native country or to my adoptive one. Or should one instead insist that such delicacy around the question, such special treatment, is itself a manifestation of the same sort of unhistorical, unscientific Sonderweg-thinking that, under other circumstances, has been used not to hold Israel above all criticism, but rather to blame Jews for whatever goes wrong with the world? I know which of these two approaches I choose, and I insist that to say this is also a choice to stoke antisemitism is not only a fallacy, but also a smear.

Some who have written in response to my intervention have expressed concern that critics of Israel's aggression do not take sufficient pains to distance themselves from those who use this aggression opportunistically to advance their troglodytic world-view and their --how shall I put it?-- unscholarly conspiracy theories. Well, let us consider a parallel example. I for one would not think to preface the (patently true) observation that Robert Mugabe is a brute with the assurance, "I have nothing against black people, but..."

Now it is certain that there are some out there who believe that Mugabe's mess stems from an inherent incapacity among Africans for self-government, and who might mistake any criticism of an African dictator for agreement with their own view. But these are not my conversation partners, and I don't care what they think. The way to deal with these people is not to try to convince them of anything, but only to ensure that they remain estranged from any serious decision-making process. Let them have their AM talk radio and their barber-shop mutterings; we on the other hand have serious work to do. Similarly, antisemites who shroud their bigotry in criticism of Israeli policy are not of particular concern to me, and I don't see why I should be compelled to account for their presence among the critics of Israeli policy simply because I myself am a critic. Again, racists, for their own reasons, don't like Mugabe either, but that's not my business.

A Note on the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment

You are God’s, yes,
but what are you?

A water balloon launched with a grunt.
A storm, violent and passing.

Articulation makes a snowflake proud,
but this is not the work of soul:

There’s no ghost in nature’s art,
and no death in melting.

It’s summer now, my love.
Woe unto solids.

God loves you too. You’re his.
But we’ll defy him a while yet.

We’ll hold together.

(Originally published in Pod znamenem radosti, 2005).

No New Republic of Letters

Dear Readers,

Ever since I set up this site in 2005, I have been adamant that it is no blog, but an archive, and that I am no blogger, but an essayist, critic, commentator, &c. It can't be a blog, I've explained, because I only make available here writing that originates elsewhere. It is thus, I've insisted, an electronic archive. A compendium. A resource even.

My insistence has come to naught. Friends and strangers alike continue to proclaim: "Great blog!" "Justin here's a blogger." "Keep posting your blogs. Their [sic] so funny."

Fine, I now wish to tell them. Have it your way. This is a blog, and I am a blogger. I am not a venerated member of some imagined Republic of Letters, but only another private in that vast army of men who believe, against all evidence, that they've something important to tell the world, donning the uniform of undies, stubble, and an oversized coffee mug, insignificantly tapping out my billionth part of this great, meaningless epic.

In view of my slow and painful acceptance of reality, I have been forced to adapt myself to the rules of the game by opening up my 'posts' to subliterate and incoherent comments from anonymous aggressors, who will swiftly blight my lovingly crafted pages with scattershot ejaculations about chemtrails, Kurt Vonnegut's wisdom, things that make them 'lol', and things that remind them of Hitler.

I hope, however, that from among the simple life forms known to inhabit the comments zone of the blogosphere, that stinking swamp of tired commonplaces, evanescent unfit memes, and adolescent texting argot, a few might be discovered with backbones and brains, ready to enrich this, um, blog, with sequences of letters composed into words that in turn make up sentences reflective of some degree of mental complexity. We'll see. 

In keeping with my newly acknowledged calling, I will also be providing exclusive content on this blog, not reposted from elsewhere, at least once a week. I envision a series of vignettes somewhat modelled after Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story," had Paul Harvey been a blogger, and had he been interested in early modern Wunderkammer, Chukchi oral epics, or the history of trepanning. Please do check back in soon for more.

--Justin Smith

Imaginary Tribes #6

The Middle Managers

Justin E. H. Smith

It's the 105th annual meeting of the American Society for Anthropology. Dr. Ken Vonderwelt is late to his own talk. He is rushing from door to door in the massive foyer of the Minneapolis Sheraton, looking for the appointed venue, from the Lake Superior Banquet Hall to the Madison Ballroom to the 10,000 Lakes Business Solutions Headquarters. He can't find a soul he knows, not even in the Twins Sports Bar. 

Vonderwelt spots an employee and asks him where the anthropologists are. The employee's nametag says 'Jimmy'. Jimmy asks him if he means the convention. He says there was a convention on the mezzanine level, but that the mezzanine conventioneers were all carrying tote bags advertising some new hip-replacement device.
"I think they're like doctors," Jimmy says. "Are you a doctor?"
"Not really," Vonderwelt replies.
"Maybe your group is meeting in the basement rooms. They're along the hall next to the fitness center. They're named after cities from around here. You know like Brainerd and Duluth."

Vonderwelt takes the elevator down two flights below the ground floor. In the Bemidji Room there's a man wearing a turquoise bolo tie. He has a long grey goatee and is talking to an audience of a dozen people or so about a recent summer spent arrowhead collecting with his wife. "We took the camper out near Flagstaff," he recounts. "Great arrowhead country out there. Mitzi and I were in heaven." Alas, Vonderwelt says to himself, I'm with my people.

But this is not quite the group he's looking for so he moves on, further down the hall. In the St. Cloud Room there are two men, one of them Native American, sitting in front of microphones and unopened bottles of water. The latter is wearing a flanel shirt and a cap that says 'Buffalo Bills' on it. The man next to him is talking about resource conservation in the Finger Lakes area. "Otherwise," he says, concluding some line of reasoning Vonderwelt had missed, "pretty soon the bass fishing won't be so good for the region's original inhabitants." He turns to his neighbor and says: "You wouldn't like that, would you Jerry?" Jerry grunts 'no', and the dozen or so people in the audience emit a borderline-laugh of condescending agreement.

Vonderwelt goes out and opens the next door along the hallway, entering the Mankato Room. It's a younger crowd, and a larger one. A young woman, her face cluttered with eyebrow rings and horn-rimmed glasses, is talking about the teenaged 'cosplayers' of Harajuku. She maintains that Lolita goths need to be seen as a separate species from, rather than a variety of, the vampire goths. Vonderwelt hears the word 'intermediality' and quickly makes his exit. What the hell kind of profession is this? he wonders. What do any of these people have to do with one another? 

The Fundamentals of Gelastics

Justin E. H. Smith

We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects. 

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art.  One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty.  Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

Sea Slugs

Charlotte Roche. Feuchtgebiete. DuMont Buchverlag, 2008. 219 pgs.

Justin E. H. Smith

(from N+1)

Many native English speakers will report a great ease in using German profanities, in contrast with those of other languages they may have attempted to master and to swear in. When it comes to these words, English remains pre-Norman, pre-Christian: our words and the Germans' words both reach back to a time when it would have been clear that the island and the continent were both inhabited by different branches of the same Germanic tribe, who in their blissful illiteracy happened upon some powerful, almost onomatopoeic grunts to denote the things we aren't ordinarily supposed to talk about: ficken, pissen, furzen, Scheisse, Arsch, etc. In most cases, these are just a phoneme and a dropped consonant away from our own words, and in any case should feel to any Anglophone much more natural than, e.g., baiser, faire pipi, péter, merde, cul. For the most part, the reptilian, id-driven region of our English, American, Canadian, and Australian brains still thinks in proto-Germanic.

Even when it is not slumming in the dark back rooms of obscenity, German is remarkably graphic and to-the-point. English has euphemized, by way of Latinate borrowings, what has remained Germanic, which is to say explicit, in modern German: thus "mucous membrane" in German is Schleimhaut, which translates literally as "slimeskin."

Ficken and Pissen are part of our ancient Germanic patrimony, while Schleimhaut is a product of German's Latin-resistant modernity. There are still other words for describing the body and its functions that have been invented by German youth, who care nothing about patrimony, and know nothing about modernity. Muschi is a term of endearment for a cat, but it is also, as various electronic sources will tell you, a German slang term for "vagina," as well as a main-belt asteroid. In spite of its proximity to that adjective that English-speaking children use to describe the principle property of peas and mashed potatoes, this is a word that does not speak to me, that it does not feel natural to say, that leaves me with that same sense of having spoken against my very personality as when I utter a profanity in French. Charlotte Roche's debut novel, Feuchtgebiete—which would best be rendered as "moist regions," but was recently published in English translation under the approximating title Wetlands—is filled with words I could never utter, and Muschi is the queen of them. This, I insist, is not at all because I am a prude.  

Birobidzhan!

Justin E. H. Smith

It is well known among historians of the Soviet Union that, early in his reign, Joseph Stalin rejected Marx and Lenin's strongly internationalist variety of socialism, in favor of the more limited project of building real socialism within one state, while at the same time promoting the distinct national identities of all the ethnic groups within that state. Stalin wrote as early as 1913: "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."  He bemoaned the fact that "among the Jews there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together."

When he came to power, Stalin sought to do something for the Jews that would, for the first time in modern history, rivet the nation together. Some Jews weren't sure they liked the sound of that, but sensed that it was probably better than anything they could expect if they were to remain the neighbors of Cossacks and Belorussians.  So they packed their bags and headed for the Far East to start a new life in the newly established capital of Jewish culture, the city of Birobidzhan.

There was just one small obstacle: a local population, correctly referred to as the 'Amuryak', but called by the Russians 'Birobidzhanis' ever since the rails for the Chita-Vladivostok train were first laid across the region.  From the very first encounters in the 17th-century, no one knew what to make of them: they were not quite Asian, but not really anything else either. They were hairy like Ainu Men, but extremely small.  A surveying team sent by Peter the Great in 1713 included a certain Nehemiah Butts, member of the Royal Society of London, who wrote to Johann Gabriel Sparwenfeld, the Swedish lexicographer and early pioneer of Slavic studies: "This Region is quite overrun by Conies, Tit-mice, and all the rudest Sortes of bird. As to the people, they are but half the Size of one Englishman, and twice, nay thrice as hirsute. The little men flee when they see such a Giant as I approaching towards them, whence I have not yet been able to ascertain, whether they are wanting of Language, or whether yet they have it, but daren't use it." 

Everything Flows

Towards a Philosophical History of Emetics

Justin E. H. Smith

 *

Books discussed in this essay:

Mirko Grmek, La première révolution biologique (Payot-Rivages, 1990).

Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press, to appear, 2009).

John O. Wisdom, The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley's Philosophy (London, 1953).

Richard Wollheim, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (Waywiser Press, 2004).

*

1. The Limits and Temptations of Psychobiography

There was once a prominent mid-century British philosopher, bearing the auspicious family name 'Wisdom', who at a certain point in his career, perhaps in a spell of depression, when logical analysis came to seem empty to him, discovered psychoanalysis. Professor Wisdom wrote a book about the 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley, a psychobiography of sorts, in which he made the case that the Irish idealist's rejection of matter is best understood (if I recall correctly) as a vestige of his passage through the anal phase, as a sort of delayed grappling with the 'non-being' of that dark mass that came out of him in the form of feces. 

Now this is just the sort of theory one is trained as an academic philosopher not to propose. It is the sort of theory, one is given to know, that will swiftly land one on one's ear outside any respectable philosophy department in the English-speaking world. The French, in contrast, are rather more permissive of this sort of unfalsifiable belle-lettrification of the genesis of the dead masters' ideas. Putting the finishing touches on my book on G. W. Leibniz, on a topic for which most of the secondary literature is, for better or worse, in French, I was delighted recently to come across this gem of Francophone scholarship, which I translate verbatim: "By invoking Leibniz's meticulousness," the scholar writes, "his scrupulous character, his tiny handwriting, his taste for endless accumulation of information and of other more tangible goods and, finally, his certain sexual frigidity, an orthodox psychoanalyst would without doubt have made the diagnosis of a fixation or a regresssion of the libido with the anal phase predominating." The author adds that "the retrospective psychoanalysis of a person who has been dead for so long amounts to an extremely hazardous enterprise," but this disclaimer is not enough to prevent the picture the imagined psychoanalyst paints from sticking in our heads: Leibniz, the picture reports, was in his own way perverted, as is anyone who ever accomplishes anything of note.

I am professionally obligated to erase that picture. Yet the longer I dwell with Leibniz, the more his cramped, obsessive handwriting enters into my dreams, the more my wife has to insist on quotas for the number of times per day I'm permitted to mention his name, the more I find myself entertaining psychogenetic theories of my own. Much of Leibniz's philosophy, I have come to believe, is motivated by a preoccupation with the simultaneous instability and inescapability of the body, or, more to the point, of his body. His body is in constant flux, like a river or a fountain, yet he has no choice but to flow along with it. 

Those in the know will recognize in the image of the fountain an allusion to Leibniz's metaphysics of corporeal substance: every monad is the active, perceiving center of an infinitely complex organic body, and no monad can be entirely disembodied, since embodiment is in metaphysical rigor nothing but the phenomenal consequence of the monad's confused perception. No monad, moreover can ever come into or go out of existence except by God's miraculous intervention, since, though always embodied, in itself it is perfectly simple, and therefore logically insusceptible to dismantling. So monads exist eternally in a bodily form, yet not, as certain mystical traditions had supposed, eternally attached to some particular chunk of matter. Rather, they change their matter constantly, just as a wave travelling over the surface of the ocean is constantly in the process of changing the water that constitutes it. The monad that is the soul is always embodied, yet its body is always slipping away from it.  Leibniz's soul is embodied, yet he doesn't have the comfort of having a body.

Maureen Dowd Is in My Bed

Justin E. H. Smith

Maureen Dowd is in my bed. I can tell it's her. That shock of red hair spilling across the pillow, those red high heels kicked haphazardly onto the floor.

What is she doing in there?

I'm going to have to wake her up and ask her to leave. She'll think I'm afraid of intelligent women, but that's not true. My wife is very intelligent. In fact, that's just the problem: Maureen Dowd is not my wife.

Come to think of it, where is my wife? Did I shift possible worlds, into one in which I --or should I say my counterpart-me?-- am married not to my wife, but to Maureen Dowd? Did my wife somehow metamorphose into Maureen Dowd while I was out getting her more flu capsules, like some Gregor Samsa, though facing an infinitely more gruesome fate?

I suppose the only question that really matters is: am I now married to Maureen Dowd? Whether this marriage was sealed through world-shifting or through metamorphosis is of little interest, except perhaps to the metaphysicians. Perhaps they would tell me that in the latter case we're basically looking at a cosmic annulment by reason of change of substance. I married my wife after all, not my wife-or-whomever-my-wife-might-turn-into.

I'm just going to have to wake her up and get to the bottom of this. I hope she doesn't talk like she writes. That would be unbearable, especially if, metaphysically and legally, she is in fact my wife. Then I would have to put up with it. I would say: "I seem to have shifted possible worlds or something, for I don't recall ever marrying you, Ms. Dowd." And she would reply: "What a pretty pickle," or: "So, darling, is it going to be Taming of the Shrew, or more Mister Magoo?" or some other rhymed literary reference that I'll feel I ought to understand, yet won't.

The thought of it sickens me. I don't dare wake her up. Maybe I should go back to the pharmacy, buy some lip balm or something, and when I come back everything will have returned to normal. I probably triggered this with something I did, some minor twitch or gesture that set the universe on a different course. Could it have been the flu capsules? Is this some red pill/blue pill thing? Wait. These pills are red and blue. What would set things right again? Burt's Bees? Gold Bond? Vapo-Rub?

Spirit Is a Bone

[Originally published in Duchamp Magazine]

The Jews say spirit is a bone,
a solid part, as hard as stone.

Others think it’s like the gas
that glows and hovers o’er the grass
in graveyards hosting dead ancestors,
who go a-ghosting, when methane festers.

Some fancy it a subtle vapor
binding body and mind without any tape or
glue or velcro or rubber cement,
or artisan’s mucilage, handcrafted in Ghent.   

Some say it grows like a sac ‘neath the gullet,
trapping gristle and bone of carp, catfish, and mullet,
and gum, and all that you oughtn’t to swallow:
in bad boys it’s full, but in good girls it’s hollow.   

Or is it oil?  Or is it steam?
Or the residue of last night’s dream?   
Is it in the phlegm ducts?  Is it in the bile?
Does it grow like a frog from the slime of the Nile?   

Or is it chyle, or pus, or some other juice?
Does it grow on a tree in a pod like a goose,
and drop off when the branch can not manage its weight?
Does the hour of dropping determine its fate?

Would it be more like Roquefort or Brie, were it cheese?
Or more like the Swiss through which bloweth a breeze?
And where does it go for la petite mort (when I sneeze)?
And don’t answer: it goeth wherever it please.

Is it just something bloated that floated downriver?
Or something that's noted for the quirk of its quiver?
Or something that hides in a shell like a clam?
Or something repulsively pinkish like ham?

I know I have it,
though I’ve never seen it.
There’s always something lodged between it
and me, its presumed possessor.
Or is it only on lease,
and if so, who’s the lessor?

Could I find it with a tongue depressor?
Is it the dentures upon the dresser,
in a glass of tepid water?
Does it need to be fed,
and if so, what’s its fodder?

Methinks it deprived of all figure and form,
something that’s neither translucent nor warm,
nor opaque, nor cool, nor even, nor odd,
nor like, nor unlike, some posited God
to whom it would cling as its Maker and King.

Nor, for that matter, like anything.

--November, 2003

(for Henry More and Theodore Geisel)

Ex Africa Aliquid Novi

Justin E. H. Smith

I.

Perhaps it was the flood of reggae and calypso and Afrobeat videos cheering Obama on in the final weeks. Or perhaps it was the Haitian man I saw in October at the Lake Champlain border crossing just north of Plattsburgh, waiting to have his digital fingerprints taken, along with those of his wife and two small children, by some DHS agents who seemed right at home under the portraits of Bush and Cheney still hanging in that dreary, fluorescently lit place. The Haitian was wearing a brightly colored shirt with an oversized image of Obama's face on it. The Americans made a point of taking their sweet time.

I could hear them talking about their fishing boats, and could easily imagine eight of them getting together and painting the letters m-a-v-e-r-i-c-k on their flabby bellies, displaying them proudly while shouting at a Palin rally as though it were some kind of sports event. The era of their proud dominance was drawing to a close, and the downtrodden Haitian family appeared to be being punished for it, if only in a mild, bureaucratic way. The Obama t-shirt signalled: however much we depend on you to let us cross the border, however little we fit with your image of America, we, Caribbean blacks, have a shared history with you former colonies, and it's about to be recognized. 

Obama was just trying to get elected president, but knowingly or not he was making pan-African history.

Haiti was the first black republic, founded in 1804 through the audacious struggle of former slaves, led by François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, against the British who had brought them there as free labor.  Toussaint's revolution was both an extension and an inversion of the French and American revolutions that immediately preceded it. An extension, insofar as it clearly appropriated the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and fraternity in rallying the slaves against injustice; an inversion to the extent that no theorist of political equality, not Rousseau, not Kant, not Jefferson, had ever said that equality must needs be extended to unequals.

The Enlightenment was understood to be local, and presupposed a vast surrounding globe of perpetual and unchanging darkness. Thus Kant, once hearing the report of something seemingly reasonable uttered by an African, entertained that possibility for a moment and quickly concluded that the man "was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid." In metaphysics Kant was able to produce an a priori deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, but confronted with a potential sign of the intellectual equality of blacks and whites he was unable to avoid a simple non sequitur.

Pascal's Wager and the Religious Right

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal's wager --that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it-- should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

There is, we must concede, a non-zero, if vanishingly tiny, possibility that the message of Yoke-Up Ministries is correct, that you, as the woman says, will go to hell.

Pascal had supposed that the persuasiveness of his argument to any rational thinker would result in submission to the long-standing authority of the Catholic church.  But the problem is that the argument is no more, and no less, compelling coming from a 17th-century Catholic philosopher defending traditional faith than coming from a couple of rough and unwashed rednecks in Louisiana in defense of a strain of enthusiastic neo-Protestantism that Pascal himself would have deemed diabolical.

Quaeries Electoral and Political

For those America-Bound

Justin E. H. Smith

Hi-ho, brave trail-cutters! Won't you please tell us whether it is true what the French explorers say, that America is "une nation avec quantitez de beuffles," so many buffaloos in fact that one can scarce walk from door to street without risking a sharp poke in the rump? Is it true they have descended upon the great cities, and greedily muzzled the garbage there, as in New-Jersey's Camden, and the Dutch strong-hold of Coxsackie?

Can you please tell us also, whence comes this place-name, Coxsackie? Does it have to do with cocks? With sacs? Why does it reduce even learned men to puerile snickering? (Why, even as I dictate this, my loyal old secretary, Isaac, appears on the verge of an infarctus!)

But let us come to the pressing matter of that land's electoral politics. We have heard that all men in America have "the vote," and that this was the result of a tragic twist of fate some years ago in which "the vote" was rudely and unexpectedly "rock'd." Won't you please tell us wherein this rocking consisted, how many were injured, what was the role of the Red Indians, what the Negroe's, &c.?

A Comment on Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, The Very Idea"

Justin E. H. Smith

Akeel Bilgrami has so decisively exposed the weaknesses of the recent attempt to invert the argument of Said's Orientalism that I do not see much point here in weighing the virtues of his essay against those of Buruma and Margalit's book.  I would like to focus instead on his essay as a self-standing argument, and to pursue a few problems I see arising from it.  In broad outline, these problems stem from two very large aims of the essay: to describe the way things are today, and to account for how they got to be that way. 

Bilgrami's broad historical thesis concerning a dissenting indigenous tradition in the West is intriguing but debatable.  He does not focus on Spinoza explicitly, but on the notion of a "Radical Enlightenment" that, since the publication of Jonathan Israel's tome of that name, has been primarily associated with the impact of Spinoza on modern history.  Now, Spinoza has been recruited of late to do all sorts of things for all sorts of factions.  He has become the great hope of some segments of the post-Marxist Left, yet the uses to which he has been posthumously put are part of Spinoza's reception history, not part of Spinoza.  The 17th-century philosopher was not a post-Marxist, and was no more sympathetic to Giorgio Agamben than to Paul Wolfowitz.

Bilgrami's Reply

Justin Smith writes about Spinoza rather than the seventeenth century English dissenters I wrote about. He says that, if Jonathan Israel on Spinoza is anything to go by (and apparently he must be something to go by because his book has the title “Radical Enlightenment” which figures prominently in my essay), the sorts of things I say about my dissenters must be less about their philosophical ideas and more about the reception of those ideas. He is pushing at an open door. He must have skipped the part of my essay where I say, at some length, that the ideal of rationality that was ‘thickened’ in that period was a product of various worldly alliances formed between groups of interests that exploited certain metaphysical ideas, and equally the dissenters exploited opposing metaphysical ideas. It was avowedly, therefore, all about the reception of ideas, about how ideas are used by certain forces that are emerging in a period of history and other opposing ideas that are used by the resistance to this. (Boyle’s case is especially interesting because, if intellectual historians such as J. R Jacob and Margaret Jacob are right, in his case the propounder of the ideas may himself have been involved fairly explicitly in the alliances that I had mentioned. Interesting, though that is, it still does not mean that the point is not a point about reception. After all when one participates in the use of one’s own philosophical ideas for some extra-philosophical purposes, one participates in the reception of one’s own ideas.)

Reply to Bilgrami

Justin E. H. Smith

Many thanks to Abbas and Robin for organizing such a lively seminar. Let us do more of this sort of thing in the future, and in no time we will grow into a web-only rival to the LRB.

I am a bit surprised by Bilgrami's impatient reply to my comment, since what I saw myself as doing was affirming his general argument against the Buruma-Margalit thesis, and then making some additional observations that might enrich the discussion: I was offering new food for thought, not sending back an unwanted dish.

Bilgrami's principle complaint about my comment is that I seem to have skipped over large parts of his argument in order to write about my own thing. I acknowledge that, anticipating that most of the other comments would focus exclusively on the recent global events that triggered Buruma and Margalit's reflections, I decided the best way I could contribute something new to the discussion would be by focusing principally on the debates in the early modern period that were purported to bring us, in part, to our current historical predicament. I remain convinced that what I wrote is of interest in this connection.

Bilgrami maintains that I have misunderstood his taxonomy of early modern thinkers, since "the dispute was not about a methodological and scientific commitment to evidence nor to any scientific laws but rather about a very basic metaphysical assumption." But my point had precisely to do with the range of metaphysical assumptions available in the decades following the Scientific Revolution, and with the immense difficulty involved in moving from these to any direct consequences for the stability of the political order. On my reading, metaphysical assumptions had mostly do with working out the nature and source of scientific laws (again, as in the case of Malebranche, whose theory of causality, and consequently of the order of nature, is at once a theory of the relationship between God and the world), and not with the justification of a new extractive economy through a revision of some ancient, received notion of nature that had it making normative demands on us.

Imaginary Tribes #5

The Vendyak

Justin E. H. Smith

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamo of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy. The crunchy stands as the ‘in-between’ class, what cannot be subsumed, what remains forever outside of Aristotelian dualistic logic. It is neither crispy (which is to say, brittle throughout) nor chewy (soft throughout), but manifests something of both of these opposites. (To the criticism that, in everyday speech, what is crunchy is not at all chewy, Pombo responded that these are technical terms we are dealing with, and we should not try too hard to make them match up with our quotidian usages.) The crunchy, she maintained in a Hegelian vein, is nothing less than the Aufhebung or sublation of the crispy and the chewy: a category that simultaneously overcomes and preserves these lower-order concepts.

Philosophy in the Barnyard

What's Really Wrong With Bestiality

Justin E. H. Smith

--

Books and articles discussed in this essay:

John Corvino, "Homosexuality and the PIB Argument," Ethics 115 (2005): 501-34

Cora Diamond, "Eating Animals and Eating People," Philosophy 53 (1978): 465-79.

Lawrence Krader, Social Organization of the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads (The Hague: Mouton, 1963).

Ruwen Ogien, L'éthique minimale (Bayard, 2006) (contains a fascinating treatment of Kant on masturbation).

Peter Singer, "Heavy Petting" (2001), posted at www.nerve.com. Available here.

Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Cornell University Press, 1995).

Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford, 2004) (contains the essays by Catharine MacKinnon and Richard Posner cited below).

--

I.

It’s exceedingly difficult to know how to broach this interest of mine: if I don’t explain why it interests me, my readers will assume that I have a personal stake in the matter; if I insist that it interests me only as an intellectual challenge, I will no doubt hear that I protest too much. So let me confess at the outset that I am indeed a zoophile, but only in the English sense that I love animals, and not in the French sense that I really, you know, love animals. I believe, much more importantly, that crucial lessons about our conceptualization of animals, and the moral stance we take towards them as a result of the way we conceptualize them, may be learned by an unflinching examination of the supposed moral obstacles to having sex with them. 

Elsewhere, I have argued that most of what we think we may and may not do to or with animals is a result of pre-moral concept formation, and that the subsequent moral explanations we give for why we do x to one species and not another are only ad hoc attempts at rationalizing in moral terms a code of conduct that lies much more deeply in us than any of our commitments to Christian ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, ‘inalienable rights’, or what have you. Clearly, for example, there can be no account in terms of a consistent ethical theory of why one would placidly accept the factory-farming and brutal slaughter of billions of cattle per year, but then find eating dog meat or rat meat morally abhorrent (the fact that we in turn find dog meat and rat meat abhorrent for very different reasons is a problem we’ll get back to soon enough). Similarly, there is no ethical theory (at least not one that takes animals themselves as morally relevant subjects) on which one could consistently hold that it is a moral transgression against an animal to use it for one’s own sexual gratification, but that it is at the same time morally permissible to slaughter that animal and eat it. 

Orang Outang

Man of the woods,
nearest cousin.
Pliny’s satyr:
Hands off our women.

Dame of the woods,
in blooming estrus.
Thy forest-flower
sets the troupe a-howling.

Mimetic brute,
counterfeit human.
Nature’s bidding
fouls thy bedding.

Quimpanze, Pygmie,
Jocko, Pongo.
Homo sylvestris
aus dem Königreich Kongo.

Clasp my bosom, babe.
Look in the mirror.
Do that trick, now:
Go with fire.

(For Olfert Dapper)

Serbian Collective Guilt and the Fate of Kosovo

Justin E. H. Smith

In "Rape, Genocide, and Women's Human Rights," a 1994 essay in the Harvard Women's Law Journal, the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon takes sides in the Bosnian war on squarely gender-based grounds: Serbia is a man, and Bosnia and Croatia are getting raped. 

Over the course of many years MacKinnon has developed a forceful argument that human rights, as commonly understood, are not women's rights. "Rights that human beings have by virtue of being human have not been rights to which women have had access." What happens to men also happens to women, but the fact it happens to women "is not registered in the record of human atrocity."  Victims of atrocities are Argentine or Rwandan, not male or female. When, correlatively, 'human' atrocities are not underway, women are still victims of 'normal', sub rosa hostility from the men in their lives; they are "the desapericidos of everyday life."  Thus "[w]hat is done to women is either too specific to women to be seen as human or too generic to human beings to be seen as specific to women." 

Who'll Help Me out of this Skin?!

Justin E. H. Smith

There is a scene from Jean Renoir's magnificient 1939 film, La regle du jeu, in which the members of a decadent French nobility, looking for ways to pass the time at a country estate, decide to put on a little play.  There is a man in a bear costume played by Jean Renoir himself, the son of the great painter Auguste, and the self-declared enemy of all reigning values and of the class that enforces them. Renoir fils seems like such a good sport: the French communist intellectual, the genius artist, up there on stage, dressed up like a bear. The whimsical scene in which he plays is followed by a skeleton dance, to the tune of Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre. As the music plays Renoir's character, Octave, rushes through the mansion looking for someone to help him remove his costume. Qui va tirer cette peau d'ours?! he moans. And the English subtitles would have him saying: For Christ's sake, who'll help me out of this skin?!

The Invention of Race

Justin E. H. Smith

We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into 'Caucasoid', 'Negroid', etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions.

In an important sense it is the 17th-century French writer François Bernier who may be considered the founder of the modern science of race.  He is the first to use the term ‘race’ to designate different groups of humans with shared, distinguishing traits.  He describes his innovation in the Journal des Sçavans of 1684 as follows: “So far, Geographers did not use any other criterion when mapping out the earth but that of the different countries or regions to be found on it.  What I noticed in men in the course of my long and frequent travels gave me the idea to divide the Earth otherwise.”