Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Moral Status of Rocks

A student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn't yet have a guard. She didn't know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she had to get across to foreigners, or to this foreigner, who showed an interest in her country. She said, in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks. 

In recent years something called 'environmental ethics' is moving into the mainstream, finding space alongside the Kantian, the utilitarian, and so on, which for their part suppose that an ethical relation can only be had toward an ethical subject, and that such subjects are found only among human or at most animal beings. Even environmental ethics tends to imagine the environment with a thick arboreal canopy, with lush grass, and lillypads covering seething green ponds. But in the Arctic and sub-Arctic the 'environment' is mostly a geological rather than a biological phenomenon, and it is not altogether surprising that in such a setting rocks come forward as phenomenally salient, as creatures, as others, more readily than in the Amazon. And still less do the rocks come forward as our petrous co-beings in the big cities of the world, where they only appear ground down and formed into angular artifacts of human ingenuity, which in turn you are not supposed to smash, since in the process of their transformation they have become 'property'. 

I was conveyed back from rural Iceland to Keflavik and was flown from there to JFK, AirTrain to the subway to Manhattan, where the next day I gave a talk for a crowd of people who, I sensed, did not grow up on sheep farms. After the formal talk, the informal talk drifted to the matter of moral status, or, more precisely, of what species of animal we may appropriately eat. There was broad interest in episodic memory as marking a cut-off point on the scale of being: animals that have a conception of self, and of having a past that is their own, are not to be eaten, whereas the others may be eaten. A cow is not really an individual cow with a memory of its own cow youth (let alone an idea of its own impending cow doom), but rather is only a series of succinct time intervals of cowhood. Thus to kill it is not to deprive some particular integral cow of its life, but only to terminate one series of five-minute-long-or-so cow intervals. Or so goes the prevailing theory, the theory that is most in keeping with what we know about nervous systems.

Should I bring up the Icelandic student with the rocks?, I wondered. Jesus I move through worlds too quickly. I paused, stuttered. Yes, I said, nervous systems and episodic memories, fine. But don't we also see, in the world, evidence for something that our predecessors might have called 'conatus'? The tendency of all things to hold together? Is it really such a stretch to suppose that this tendency reveals to us a sort of integrity in things that need not be justified in terms of neurophysiological structure or of the conscious states that are thought to be uniquely grounded in this structure? And isn't it a transgression to violate this integrity?

Or maybe I didn't get that far. Maybe I held back. I know the usual replies too well. But that would mean we'd have to stop eating plants too. We'd all die. That's extreme. That sounds like Buddhism. It also sounds like 12th-century compassion theology, and, I suspect, like what pretty much everyone understood about the world for the vastly greater part of human life on earth, but 'Buddhism' is invoked here as a rhetorical strategy to cause one's deepest truest commitments to come out smelling like a mere dusting of Oriental spice. 

Somewhere Liz Harman gives an argument about abortion in which early-stage fetuses are shown to be no more morally relevant than are plants. But that hardly settles the matter, if you are not starting out from the premise that moral relevance flows from what is going on 'in there', let alone that what is going on in there can be simply and uncontroversially read off of physical structure. Plants are morally relevant, and to deprive them of their integrity and their thriving is not a morally insignificant matter. What gets eaten, what gets aborted, what gets smashed, will never be decisively resolved by an inspection of internal structures and capacities of a given candidate for destruction. Even smashing a mere chunk of solidified lava --evidently purely passive, and homoeomerous from one end to the other-- can be experienced as a  transgression by the person who is properly sensitized, for whom the chunk shows up as salient within her ethically charged environment. Are fetuses morally relevant? Yes, they are. So are chunks of lava. Does that mean you mustn't destroy them? Not necessarily, but you shouldn't suppose that the way to gain license to destroy them, whether this license is conceived cosmically, socially, or individually, is to produce arguments that cut them off from the sphere of moral relevance. 

The prevailing ethical theories suppose that there must be an ethical subject in some bit of matter in order for ethical commitments toward that bit to properly obtain. Parallel to the partial rise of environmental ethics, there is a metaphysical view that is perhaps slowly recrudescing, pananimism, which holds that all of nature is imbued with mind or mind-like powers. There are variations on this; Galen Strawson for example argues that some form of panpsychism is entailed by any realistic physicalism, and in this he is restyling an old argument of the 18th-century materialists, such as Diderot, to the effect that even marble can think-- it simply has to be ground up and sprinkled on grass that is eaten by a cow that is in turn eaten by a thinking human. Many philosophers have understood that to attribute mind-like powers to all of nature logically compels one to adopt the view that every bit of nature harbors an actual subject-- thus we find Ralph Cudworth arguing in 1678 that hylozoism (the view that all matter is alive) entails the 'clubbing together' of infinite minds everywhere (Cudworth saw this as a reductio ad absurdum of hylozoism, just as more recently John Searle has argued against pananimism on the grounds that there must be an individual mental subject wherever there is mental activity). A few years after Cudworth, we find G. W. Leibniz working out the elements of his own theory of monads, which holds precisely that the world is entirely constituted from the activity of infinitely many nodes of perception.

Such theories strike us as outlandish, and indeed as outliers in the modern conceptual landscape. But one thing of which I am growing increasingly convinced as I attempt to broaden my reading from philosophy to anthropology, Religionswissenschaft, and related fields, is that from the perspective of the longue durée something like what the theory of monads articulates has been the default human understanding of nature all along. It is what Heraclitus has in mind when he says that gods dwell in his stove; it is what preoccupies the Inuit when they suppose that in eating walrus meat they are eating the souls of ancestors; and it is the way of thinking that informs Virgil's poetic account of the Zephyr's power to impregnate mares. There are souls, gods, ancestors (whatever!) all around us; they are in evidence in the structure and cohesion of nature; and it is a transgression against them to needlessly violate this structure and cohesion.

This is the sort of thinking in which ethics originates. The ontology of philosophers has changed, and sent us scrambling for a new ethics, on which some things make the cut as relevant targets of ethical concern and others don't. But the old folk-ontology is not entirely extinct, and I suspect that there is much in folk-ethics, in the actual ways people form their ethical commitments (to icons, rocks, fetuses, etc.), that will escape the comprehension of philosophers so long as we continue to dismiss as backward or primitive or unscientific the idea that gods, or something like them, dwell here, for any here, too.

Why Is Iceland a Portal to the Moon?

There is a trite and obvious thing to say about Iceland, and that is that it looks like the moon. Descending into the Keflavik lava fields the other day, on an Icelandair flight from Paris, I was permitted to feel annoyed and a bit superior when I overheard the virgin French tourists behind me exclaiming as they gawked at the land below: Mais il n'y a rien là! By 'nothing' I thought perhaps they had meant 'no Michelin stars', but then one of them added, as if on cue: C'est comme la lune! Yet if there is an association between the earth's only satellite and this basalt outcropping of the mid-Atlantic range that is too obvious to mention, there is another that remains to this day far too occult, and that is as deserving of notice as the other is of suppression. 

The great German astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler, most famous for defending the Copernican system and for establishing the elliptical orbit of planets, began his 1634 Somnium (sometimes subtitled A Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy) as follows:

My name is Duracotus. My country is Iceland, which the ancients called Thule. My mother was Fiolxhilde. Her recent death freed me to write, as I had long wished to do. While she lived, she carefully kept me from writing. For, she said, the arts are loathed by many vicious people who malign what their dull minds fail to understand, and make laws harmful to mankind. Condemned by these laws, not a few persons have perished in the chasms of Hekla. 

 The narrator goes on to describe his mother's commercial undertakings in what might be euphemistically called 'folk medicine', or, slightly more bluntly, 'natural magic':

In the earliest years of my boyhood my mother, leading me by the hand and sometimes hoisting me up on her shoulders, often used to take me up to the lower slopes of Mt. Hekla. These excursions were made especially around St. John's Day, when the sun is visible all twenty-four hours, and there is no night. Gathering some herbs with many rites, she cooked them at home. She made little bags out of goatskin, which she filled and carried to a nearby port to sell to the ship captains. This is how she earned her living.

That Kepler decides to preface what turns out to be a fairly serious work of lunar astronomy --to wit, a theoretical reflection upon the conditions on the still-mythical dark side of the moon-- with this narrative set-up is peculiar, not least because we know, and his contemporaries knew, that it reflects Kepler's own life in significant ways. Kepler's own mother, Katharina Kepler, née Guldenmann (1546-1622), was in the years leading up to the Somnium's composition being held in prison in Stuttgart on suspicion of witchcraft, under threat of imminent torture and execution. The son fought for years for his mother's release, and eventually won it, but much of their life was spent in the frenetic uncertainty of the Hexenjagd. Kepler was concerned with witchcraft not only as a source of fanciful characters for his thin fictions.

And yet, this bit of biography in no way helps us to answer the question: Why Iceland?

Duracotus cuts open one of his mother's little bags, and the herbs and runes come falling out. In a rage, she sells the little boy to a ship captain, and he sails off to the Danish island of Hven, where he eventually falls into an apprenticeship under the great Tycho Brahe, who instructs Duracotus first in Danish, then in astronomy. From the beginning, the displaced Icelander notices the similarity between his new learning and the traditions embodied by his own mother:

I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous instruments. This practice reminded me of my mother, because she, too, used to commune with the moon constantly. 

Duracotus eventually returns to Iceland and is reunited with Fiolxhilde. Upon reuniting, they engage in an exhaustive exchange of information about their respective traditions. The Icelandic witch is happy to learn the latest science from the continent, and her son, in turn, is just as pleased to finally be indoctrinated into native secrets, "those arts among a people so remote from all the others." Fiolxhilde relates her wisdom as follows:

Advantages have been conferred, Duracotus my son, not only on all those other regions to which you went but also on our country, too. To be sure, we are burdened with cold and darkness and other discomforts, which I feel only now, after I have learned from you about the salubriousness of other lands. But we have plenty of clever persons. At our service are very wise spirits, who detest the bright light of the other lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us intimately. Among them there are nine chief spirits. Of these, one is especially known to me. The very gentlest and most innocuous of all, he is evoked by one and twenty characters. By his help I am not infrequently whisked in an instant to other shores, whichever I mention to him... Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me just as you did. 

This spirit, it turns out, specializes in organizing trips to 'the island of Levania', which lies 'fifty thousand German miles up in the ether', and which is, evidently, nothing other than the moon. Fiolxhilde goes on, channeling the spirit, to explain how the lunar voyage unfolds:

The road to it from here or from it to this earth is seldom open. When it is open, it is easy for our kind, but for transporting men it is assuredly most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life... Great as the distance is, the entire trip is consummated in four hours at the most... Because the opportunity is so fleeting, we take few human beings along, and only those who are most devoted to us. Some man of this kind, then, we seize as a group and all of us, pushing from underneath, lift him up into the heavens. In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils. After the first stage of the trip is finished, the passage becomes easier. At that time we expose their bodies to the open air and remove our hands. Their bodies roll themselves up, like spiders, into balls which we carry along most entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord. But this onward drive is of very little use to us, because it is too late. Hence it is by our will, as I said, that we move the body swiftly along, and we forge ahead of it from now on lest it suffer any harm by colliding very hard with the moon When the humans wake up, they usually complain about an indescribable weariness of all their limbs, from which they later recover well enough to walk. 

Fortunately, like some Laurence Sterne or DFW who can never be happy or finished with his work, Kepler provides us with his own explanatory notes on the Somnium, which are significantly more lengthy than the work itself. And he does not shy away from the question we've been circling around, Why Iceland? He begins by noting that "in our German language," 'Island' means 'Ice Land'." But, he continues, the real reason for choosing it is the power it seems to hold of inducing a state of rêverie:

In this remote island I perceived a place where I might fall asleep and dream, in imitation of the philosophers in this branch of literature. For Cicero crossed over into Africa when he was getting ready to dream. Moreover, in the same western ocean Plato fashioned Atlantis, whence he summoned imaginary aids to military valor. 

But still, why Iceland in particular, rather than the distant lands selected by his classical predecessors? Kepler supposes Plutarch had already discussed Iceland in his On the Face of the Moon from the 1st century CE, though he insists that this had nothing to do with his own choice. This choice, if we are to take Kepler at his word, turns out to be fairly uninteresting, a contingent result of a contingent choice of an obscure publisher to collate the plots of unrelated stories into a single volume. He writes of his sojourn in Bohemia:

At that time there was for sale in Prague Lucian's book about the trip to the moon, as translated into the German language by Rollenhagen's son; bound with it were the stories of St. Brendan and St. Patrick's Purgatory in the earth beneath Mt. Hekla, the Icelandic volcano. Moreover, since Plutarch, in accordance with the belief of pagan theology, located the purgatory of souls on the moon, I decided that when I set out for the moon I would most prefer to take off from Iceland.

My thesis here, if I must have one, is that there is more to the story than this. The association between Iceland and lunar voyages runs deeper than some editorial caprice of Georg Rollenhagen fils. For one thing, we know that Kepler was reading other books, which can be shown to have had a significant influence on the content of the Somnium. In particular, the 16th-century Swedish minister and polymath Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) seems to have been particularly important. Magnus refers to the "artem magicam apud septentrionales populos" (Bk. 3, Ch. 15, 117), a phrase which Kepler subsequently picks up virtually unaltered. According to Edward Rosen, "Kepler's use of the words montis... ignivomi to describe Mt. Hekla as the site of Purgatory strikingly echo" the terminology of the 1599 abridgement of Magnus's Historia. 

In fact, when we look at the entire passage on Iceland to which Rosen refers, we can plainly see that Kepler is relying on Magnus not just for his picture of Mt. Hekla, but also for much of Fiolxhilde's later account of the Icelandic spirits that, as she puts it, 'love the shadows'. Allow me to cite the passage at some length: 

Islandia terra est subiecta polo Arctico, vento praesertim Circio opposita, ac mari Glaciali propinqua: atque ob id dici meretur terra glacialis, seu ultimum Tyle, nulli veterum non celebrata... Pro maiori parte montosa, & inculta, praesertim versus plagam Septentrionalem, ob austera spiracula praedicti venti Circii, qui nec frutices elevare permittit. Insula est insolitis miraculis praedicanda. Rupes etenim, sive promontorium in ea est... quod instar Aetnae perpetuis ignibus aestuat. Ibique locus esse creditur poenae, expiationisque sordidarum animarum. Illic nempe spiritus, seu umbrae, comperiuntur se exhibentes manifestos humanis ministeriis submersorum, sive alio violento casu enectorum. Spectra sese offerunt congressibus notorum hominum tam manifesta, ut tanquam viventes accipiantur ab ignaris mortis illorum, data dextra. Nec deprehenditur error prisquam disparuerint umbrae. Incolae plurimum praesagiunt fata principum, quiduc remotius in orbe peragitur, revelationibus apparentium spectrorum non ignorant, prout inserius cap. de magicis praestigiis lucidius aperietur. 

The land of Iceland is situated beneath the Arctic pole, oriented principally toward the northwest, and close to the glacial sea: and this is why it merits the name of 'Ice Land', or 'Ultima Thule', celebrated among the ancients... For the greater part it is mountainous and wild, above all towards the northern coast, for nor does the austere vent of the aforementioned northwesterly wind permit anythng to grow. The island is known for its unheard-of wonders. And indeed the rocks, or the promontory in them, ... are seething with a perpetual fire like Mt. Etna. And it is in that place that the punishment and expiation of besmirched souls is believed to occur. One finds there spirits, or shadows, that are manifested through the conjurations of men. The specters of drowned men or of men who died a violent death appear so real that, like living men, they shake hands with men who don't know they are dead, and the error does not reveal itself until the moment when the specters have disappeared ('De apparentibus umbris submersorum', Bk. II, ch. 3, 62).

It is, in short, even more clear than it had been for Rosen, when we look at this entire passage, that Kepler is greatly indebted to Magnus, and not just for his appreciation of Hekla as a point of entry to a nether-realm, but also as an inspiration for the idea that Iceland is a place of commerce with spirits. 

But we are still missing something very important: the sort of transit Kepler describes as happening from Iceland is not a descent into a dark nether world. Iceland as a point of entry to the center of the world is of course a familiar trope, as for instance in Jules Verne, whose 1864 Voyage au centre de la Terre begins with the deciphering of a supposed runic manuscript that describes where the volcanic points of entry lie. The idea that Iceland possesses such points of entry appears to be rooted both in the geology of the mid-Atlantic range, as well as in Norse mythology itself. Thus in the Gylfaginning, which makes up the first part of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda, there is mention of the Gjallarbrú, a bridge across the River Gjöll into Hel (a place that is what it sounds like). But the Gjallarbrú has its symbolic inversion in the Asbrú, or Æsir Bridge, which does not descend into the bowels of the earth, but rather extends from this world into Asgard, the realm of the gods. An alternative term for 'Asbrú' is 'Bifröst' (as found in the Prose Edda) or 'Bilröst' (as found in the Poetic Edda). These terms can all serve, even in contemporary Icelandic, as poetic or elevated ways of saying 'rainbow': a bridge that leads to the æsir, the gods. Thus in the Grímnismál, a component of the Poetic Edda, we find a concealed Odin revealing cosmological knowledge to Agnarr, who learns that the Asbrú is the best of all bridges, even if it is constantly burning up those who cross it:

Ka/rmt oc Avrmt 
oc Kerla/gar tver, 
þer scal Þorr vaða 
dag hvern, 
er hann doma ferr 
at asci Yggdrasils; 
þviat asbrv 
brenn a/ll loga, 
heilog votn hlóa.

Or, in Benjamin Thorpe's 19th-century translation: "Körmt and Ormt, and the Kerlaugs twain: / these Thor must wade each day, / when he to council goes / at Yggdrasil's ash / for as the As-bridge is all on fire, / the holy waters boil."  

There is no sign in Magnus, or any of Kepler's known sources, of an understanding of the commerce wth spirits in Iceland as initiating a flight rather than a descent. There is little indication of any interest in the Historia in the arcana of Norse mythology, and if it is to this latter that we ultimately wish to trace Kepler's Somnium, from the lunar voyage back to the burning bridge of the Æsir, scholarly prudence requires us to concede that we have yet to discover the path by which this trope was transmitted from medieval Iceland to early modern Germany. 

What can be established is that in Iceland, as a result of the coincidence of its geological features with its geographical situation, we find the confluence of two widespread and ancient mythological tropes. Its vulcanism marks it out as a site of access to Hades or Hel, while its Arctic location causes it to be associated with another world not beneath but above or beyond this one-- we see the Arctic being used for exactly this purpose in, e.g., Margaret Cavendish's conception of a 'blazing world' that attaches to this one at the North Pole, and in the many subsequent iterations of the idea that 'Nova Zembla', as it was long called in quaint misunderstanding (and where, good maps show, there is a river called 'Nabokov'), is a site where the ordinary laws of nature break down. Remarkably, both of these tropes are found already in the medieval Eddas, narratively represented by the two bridges, Asbrú and Gjallarbrú, burning and scintillating, dissuading the common lot of men from crossing them. 

Lux and Luchre: A Funding Drive

Samuel Clemens, the world's first Mark Twain impersonator, once said that if you wish to write, you should start writing for free. If no one is paying you to write after three years of effort, you should give up and try something else, like shoeing horses. But those were different times. Today, there is no Sacramento Union to take one on in recognition of one's wit and pith, and by now even the Sacramento Bee can probably only pay sub-living wages to its few remaining full-time staffers: brave Dan Walters, comforting Anita Creamer (pronounced 'Kramer', she claims).

As many of you know, I have been writing prolifically and uninterruptedly here at jehsmith.com since 2005, for free. As a result of this activity, I have indeed been paid by a number of different publications, both newfangled digital and primitive print, to reproduce under their banner the sort of writing that impressed them here. I do not know whether the amount of money I've brought in in this way would impress Clemens enough to keep me out of the stables, but anyhow it's been a nice way of supplementing my admittedly first-world monthly salary. However, I find that the sort of writing I enjoy most is the spontaneous effusion you find here, the 'blog posts', as they're called. When I write for publications, editors tend to want not an entirely veracious reproduction of the sort of work they find at jehsmith.com, but only a semblance of it, an approximation sufficiently deformed to fit with their own commercial or ideological motives.

Generally, and not surprisingly, the higher-paying the project, the more the editors presume to have the right to dictate what I say. The editor's job, I have learned, can basically be summed up by the commandment: Instead of saying this thing you wanted to say, why don't you say this other thing you didn't want to say? And I say, OK, I receive my check a few weeks later, and for some complicated reasons I really don't understand I continue to be credited as the author. Often I'm contacted to write things, for surprisingly significant sums of money, for venues where I know in advance I will not be read, obscure art publications, in particular. I gather they have funding from some wealthy benefactors that they need to disburse by a certain date for tax purposes. And so I crank out a few thousand words about some art I don't care about, some poetry injected into the DNA of a microbe in a petri dish or something; or, what's worse, I'm asked to address issues from the world of academe, as if these were the sort of things I care about, the sort of things that make life interesting. As if I were a mere 'philosophy blogger', a lesser Leiter.

Anyhow, I'm trying to find new ways to cut out these superfluous characters, and focus on writing just those sorts of things I want to write, while still enjoying a nice stream of revenue à côté. And this is why I'm reaching out to you, faithful readers, and, after eight prolific years of writing simply for the love of it, am asking you to help sustain this project with a donation (the PayPal 'donate' button is on the upper right-hand side of the page). 

There are a number of reasons why writing has grown less remunerative in the present era. We are by now all too familiar with the indignation of accomplished journalists who are asked to contribute to adolescent e-venues 'for exposure'. I recently read a fiery tirade (or what in blogging parlance is uniformly and monotonously called a 'rant') from the fellow who tracked down and interviewed Pol Pot, only to be asked by the now fully neoliberalized Atlantic to share some of his work at no charge. None of this is the Atlantic's fault, or anyone else's either. It has to do with profound changes in the social meaning of literacy, changes that are millennia in the making, and that have seen two moments of rapid and punctuated transformation, one at the end of the 15th century, and one since 1997 or so.

It has sometimes been noted that if the Gutenberg revolution heralded a new age of universal literacy, the subsequent revolution in electronic social media has brought us an era of universal authorship. Why pay certain people to write and publish, when anyone who wants to 'publish' is free to do so? Authors, in such an environment, can only go the way of village scribes, who once were charged with the task of composing official attestations and solemn declarations that their illiterate neighbors could then sign as their own with a clumsy x. It's hard for me to even say what my relationship to writing would have been like had these my most productive years not coincided with the era of social media and blogging. I read far less of other people than I used to, and my craving to read is often filled by the near-instantaneous self-authorship of a new text custom-designed for my own enjoyment. I don't know how many other people are doing the same thing, but I presume that this new habit of mine is a symptom of the very same transformations that are depriving journalists of their living wages, obliterating august periodicals, and rendering Mark Twain's advice irrelevant.

But all of this means that if an individual believes in the value (and by value I mean something that is intrinsically not intrinsic) of what he has to write, he must adapt to the new reality and find new ways of making words into money. I admit that when the institutions that once served as intermediaries --or, perhaps better, money launderers-- drop out of the picture, the whole endeavor can easily come to seem fraudulent. I am telling you outright that I am looking for new ways to perfect a sort of chrysopoietic art, whereby intellectual capital is transformed into plain old capital, and the bluntness of this avowal somehow seems a betrayal of the craft one claims to love, as it supposes that the words with which one begins are analogous to the base metals of alchemy, rather than being themselves the gold one is after.

And yet there is no reason in principle why what is luciferous should not also be lucriferous, or, to use a more recent century's argot (without going so far as to deploy the suffixual -z): there is no reason why these skills should not pay the bills. The soupçon of alchemical charlatanism arises, one supposes, from the fact that these are not just any skills, but rather the sort that involve the apparent production of something from nothing. These are not 'skills' in the sense of being able to shoe a horse, but rather those of a conjurer. And if I had hoped to mean 'luciferous' only in the sense of 'light-bearing', inevitably that other sense, current among phobic Catholics and grubby metalheads, imposes itself and reminds us of the dark and deceitful side of this activity for which I am now demanding recompense.

It is not, I mean to say, much of a skill. In a lovely essay entitled 'On Literature', Karel Čapek spends two-and-a-half pages or so recounting how, when he was a lad, he and his little friends would run around their Czech village, clamoring on top of one another to look through the blacksmith's window and catch a sight of him at work with his red-hot irons. Then they would run to the leathersmith's, and then the cooper's, and they would dream of themselves, someday, as men, making things. I have been writing for half a century now, Čapek tells us at the very end, and never once has a little boy spied on me through my study's window.

And yet, I'd like to think I am producing something of value here, something it might not be at all interesting to watch in the making, but still worth assessing once made. I'd like to think that what I have created here is not really a blog at all, but rather a veritable online feuilleton of arts and culture and history, which just happens to have an editor-in-chief with a particularly pronounced way of doing and seeing things, and indeed an editor-in-chief who is the sole writer and who has therefore given his own proper name to the entire operation.

I'd also like to think that love, skills, and bills can be brought together in a way that is not unseemly. You might be wondering why I am so concerned about the last of these, when, as I've already acknowledged, I have a steady salary in a profession that, unlike journalism, has not (yet) gone down the tubes. The answer is complex, and I have already admitted that it is a decidedly first-world problem. Yet it is my first-world problem, and I own it: I have decided, somewhat recklessly, in the middle of a comfortable North American academic career, to up and move to Paris, to pursue the same career here, but on terms that are materially less advantageous, and that require me to explore creative ways to supplement my salary. My particular first-world problem then is to find a way to meet my first-world responsibilities: for example, to fund the several transoceanic voyages I am fairly required to take over the next year, and to produce the obscenely elevated caution required simply to get in the door of a Parisian apartment. You might say that this is all the high-brow equivalent of the street punk who scrawls on his cardboad sign: Not gonna lie. Need pot. But does the street punk give you year after year of challenging and unpredictable prose? I am not begging for change. I am proposing an exchange. I am not exactly curing muscular dystrophy here, but --admit it-- I am bringing a bit more light into this chiaroscuro world. 

There you have it: I am asking you, generous reader, to fund my romantic escapade. I could keep seeking my supplements by writing for publications whose vision I do not fully share, and no doubt I will continue to do this as necessary. But I'd so much rather keep producing unadulterated prose, prose I can be happy to call my own. This is why I have come up with the present scheme, to whose details I now turn. I have resolved to only write new pieces when new contributions come in. Rather than letting dollar amounts determine length, I have decided to fix the price list in accordance with the different discursive registers. Thus, a contribution of $100 will get you a brand-new 1000-word essay written in a cool, analytic tone. A contribution of $250 will get you a new bit of ribald satire (another genre in which I specialize, but which takes considerably more inventive effort). For $1000, you will get a rapturous ode. A contribution of $10,000, finally, will be considered as a commision for a major new undertaking, the details of which will be explained in private correspondence with the donor. No contribution, finally, is too small, even if anything less than $100 is insufficient, by itself, to send us over the threshold and motivate the creation of a new essay.

The present essay was itself composed in acknowledgment of an initial $100 donation from one of my benefactors of long standing, for which I am most grateful. I see now that I am already 754 words over the promised count, but what the hell. There is a reason why 'free' as in gratuit and 'free' as in libre are the same. 

Interpreting Tino Sehgal

I recently worked as an 'interpreter', to use the term of art, in This Situation, a work by Tino Sehgal on exhibit at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal throughout most of March and April, 2013. My reasons for signing on to this project are several, including some having to do with the commitments that ensue from friendship, and some, I'll confess, with my seemingly constitutional inability to get my financial situation in order (peers in a similar stage of their careers are using words like 'refinance' and 'diversify'; I'm out in the moonlight scraping together a security deposit for a short-term sublet in Paris). More importantly, I went into it in the hope that I would come out the other end with a properly informed critical judgment about the work and about the state of contemporary art. When I was a lad I enthused about every new thing that came along. I would shell out for CDs with recordings of HVAC sounds in office buildings, and would go to the Pompidou and look at Joseph Beuys' rolled-up carpets or whatever and think some inarticulate thought along the lines of: Fuck you, stuffy old people. In more recent years I have come to feel that modernity was already bad enough, let alone whatever is supposed to have come after it, and I spend most of my time thinking about things one could just as easily have thought about when Oedipus Rex first realized what he'd done. I'm not nearly as contemporary as this thing I've just been involved in, I mean to say, and this necessarily constrains what sort of things I shall be able to say about it.

This Situation is not, as might appear to a visitor after a few minutes, or even after a few hours, a free-wheeling conversation. There are rules governing what happens when, who moves when, and who says what when. It is in this respect nothing like the experimental improvisational theater of Jerzy Grotowski's legendary 'Beehive', where the experimental thespians enter some Polish forest, or an abandoned church, and start doing stuff, "and whatever happens, that's The Beehive" (quoting André Gregory). This is not, in fact, conceived as theater at all, experimental or otherwise (though there is at least one quotation in the work that anticipates a future Situationist theater in which the theatrical and the everyday blend into one), and this is why it is essential to stress that those involved are interpreters, and not actors, and still less a merry band of roving avant-garde thespians. The key difference, which I'm trying to work out here in writing, is ontological: This Situation is an object, not a performance.

The rules established by Sehgal function as parameters within which there is a great deal of freedom and indeterminacy; like certain genres of music, the work has its character from the way in which improvisations arise within formal constraints. Very summarily: there are six interpreters, each of whom has memorized between 20 and 40 quotations from philosophers (broadly conceived), the earliest dating to 1588 and the most recent to 2005. The six arrange themselves in a series of six different tableaux vivants in a hall of the museum, a hall with entirely white walls and no sign indicating who or what is in it. When a new visitor comes in, the six look at him or her and say, in unison, "Welcome to this situation" (always in English). They then take a deep, loud breath, again in unison, and walk backwards, slowly, to the next in the series of tableaux. They hold the position for anywhere from five seconds to a minute, until one of them (no one knows in advance which one) decides to rehearse one of the memorized citations, beginning with the fixed phrase, "In 1674 [or whatever the year happens to be], somebody said..." (always in English). There is no mention of the author's name, and the interpreter is not expected even to know the name. After the citation is finished, there is another, short silence, the interpreters slowly come out of the tableaux, and they begin, from whatever angle they choose, to discuss the citation (in either French or English). This goes on for a few minutes, until finally someone asks the visitor: "Or, what do you think?" (always in French). The interpreters are compelled to move to a new tableau either when a new visitor arrives, or when one of the interpreters decides to initiate a move by beginning a new, loud inhalation, which all of the other interpreters must join before beginning to walk backwards together, toward the next position. When there is no visitor in the room, the interpreters talk about how hungry they are, or how badly they have to pee, or, if the previous conversation about Situationist theater or the aesthetics of existence has proven interesting enough, they continue to talk about that. 

Many of the quotations come from the Situationists, others from Montaigne, Nietzsche, Veblen, Keynes, Foucault. In suppressing the name of the author, the idea is that the interpreters will focus on the content of the quotation. What generally happens is a sort of split between two possible approaches among the interpreters. One is to riff, to recount impressions of whatever the quotation might induce one to think (or even to feel). The other is to try, within the constraints imposed by the work, to be as scholarly as possible and to get at what the author might in fact have meant. I belong squarely in the latter camp; I don't really know how to approach, say, a claim from an author in 1862 purporting to explain the nature of ennui without attempting to root it in its time and place. But there are endless ways to approach any given quotation, and after one has heard a certain one numerous times, there is a natural wish to try to approach it from some new direction. Thus, to cite just one example, a quotation from Thorstein Veblen might be spontaneously declaimed by one of the six interpreters:

In 1899 somebody said: "Aucun article ne sera passable qui se prévaudra seulement d'être de bon service matériel. Pour être pleinement acceptable, il lui faudra exhiber l'élément honorifique. Un consommateur qui voudrait à toute force, tel Diogène, éliminer de sa consommation tous les éléments d'honorabilité ou de gaspillage, serait dans l'incapacité de fournir à ses besoins les plus insignifiants sur le marché moderne  [No article will be viable that pretends only to being of good material service. In order to be fully acceptable, it must exhibit an honorific element. A consumer who would wish at all costs, such as Diogenes, to eliminate from his consumption all elements of honorability or of waste would be unable to provide for his needs, be they ever so insignificant, on the modern market]."

The first ten times or so that I heard this quotation, knowing that it was from Veblen but also knowing that it would be too bluntly scholarly to begin talking about fin-de-siècle American social theory right off the bat, I would instead try to work in some observations about this Diogenes mentioned in passing, whom I knew to be Diogenes the Cynic. I enjoyed bringing up the anecdote about him (where it first arises I don't know, but in that exhibition hall there was never any need to cite one's sources), which tells us that he was once discovered struggling to eat a live octopus, since, he explained, cooking is a mere social convention and a hassle. Before long, however, my mention of this case grew predictable and scripted, my fellow interpreters grew tired of it, I grew tired of it. I came to dislike this quotation exceedingly, and grimaced inwardly whenever it would come up (though none pained me nearly as much as Félix Guattari's pompous wank, from 1993, about global warming). 

The most difficult quotation for me, in this connection, was the one that started, "In 1710 somebody said...," and continued with the famous dictum, "To be is to be perceived." Much of my scholarly career is devoted to studying the cluster of metaphysical issues surrounding the initial enunciation of that sentence by the idealist philosopher George Berkeley. The dictum has to do with the non-existence of matter, understood as a metaphysical substratum in which properties inhere, yet as a stand-alone quotation in Sehgal's work, it was almost invariably understood as of a pair with the quotations from Veblen about conspicuous consumption: To be (socially) is to be perceived (as having some sort of social distinction). I often found it painful to have to go along with the riffing on quotations I in fact knew to have a very concrete meaning, and one that it would be very interesting and worthwhile to draw out. And yet, my frustration waned as time went by. I became convinced of the worthwhileness of the exercise. 

Early on, beyond the frustration with some of the formal parameters of the work, I was also consistently frustrated at Sehgal's choice of content. I wanted more quotations from antiquity; I wanted quotations with more humour to them; I wanted more stuff I care about, like animals and nature and God, and not all this stuff I don't care about, like salon culture and economics. But the work is not a conversation about 'philosophical ideas' in general, as I've heard said many times by people who have seen the work or even by those who have interpreted it. Rather, it is a conversation driven by quotations that all, as far as I can tell, have to do with the conditions of possibility of the work itself: the nature of conversation, the ontology of the work of art, the question whether life itself could be aesthetic or artistic, the problem of freedom and the constraints of our social roles, the economic substratum of social interaction.

These are what the work is about, yet one of the formal constraints under which the interpreters operate is that they must never address the work itself explicitly. If visitors ask whether the interpreters are reciting memorized lines, or whether they get paid for their work, or whether they personally consider Tino Sehgal a full-fledged artist or not, the interpreters are required to subvert that line of interaction, by moving to another tableau vivant, or by 'doing a caption' (where each interpreter enunciates one-sixth of the phrase 'Tino Sehgal, This Situation, 2007'), or by going silent. One visitor, who turned out to be a local artist of some repute, attempted to induce us to break out of character by dropping a five-dollar bill (five dollars!) in the middle of the exhibition hall, apparently to see if we would leap on it hungrily, and also, one infers, to make a statement about the tawdry relationship between conceptual art and Mammon. (No one paid it any mind, and he finished his visit by scooping it back up on the way out.) The rule of the game, anyhow, what I take to be the supreme directive that gives the work its character and tone, is that we are constantly orbiting around the questions that have to be addressed in order to talk about the work, yet we are never able to talk about the work. We are thus pushing up against the boundary between talking about the external world on the one hand and self-referentiality on the other, always in danger of crossing the boundary, but always also, insofar as we manage to respect the boundary, only representing a peculiar portion of life, to wit, those dimensions of it that start to become particularly interesting when things like This Situation become possible. 

But the work is 'about itself' in another sense as well. It is well known that an important motivation for Sehgal's work is the exploration of immateriality, and of what I take ultimately to be a serious philosophical question: whether there can be such things as immaterial art objects at all (from which it would follow that there can be such things as immaterial objects, which is another, perhaps even more interesting question). More precisely, the question seems to be whether there can be immaterial art objects that are treated in every way like material ones. Thus the ontological issue is not illuminated by pointing to dance or symphonic performances, which Monroe Beardsley would explain in terms of the token/type distinction: these are art forms where inherently the object itself, to the extent that we may speak of such a thing, only exists through its instantiation in repeated and dispersed tokens. There is no single thing that is expected to be, e.g., Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder. The sort of art that is displayed in museums, by contrast, is expected to be such that in principle one can always say precisely where the art is, at which museum, in what condition, etc. Sehgal seems to have wanted to see whether there could be an art object that is dematerialized like a dance, yet held and displayed and treated according to all the same museological conventions as a sculpture or painting. I don't know what hangs on this, and I don't think that in the end, if such an innovation succeeds, anything new about the ontology of art will have been discovered; I don't think art has an ontology independent of the social and institutional framework that determines what can or can't be passed off as a work of art, and of course this framework is constantly being readjusted. But still, it is a compelling exercise to explore as Sehgal does, intelligently and respectfully, the current limits of readjustment.  

The concern for immateriality extends to --or perhaps better, begins with-- the very business transacted with the museums that purchase the work. As is often noted, Sehgal refuses to allow the business of purchasing the works to be grounded in written contracts and records. There is, rumour has it, no paper trail. This makes the trustees of museums uncomfortable, and compels the directors of the museums to attempt to convince the trustees that it's only by adapting to such unconventional means of transaction that their museum (say, a museum in a second- or third-tier city with aspiration to being a serious global cultural player) can stay in the game. 

It is clear, anyhow, that the exploration of the boundary that one witnesses in the museum hall, between immaterial art forms on the one hand and displayable art objects, has its parallel in the museum office, or wherever this business transpires, in the exploration of the boundary between the permanent and the ephemeral. Sehgal is putting in place all sorts of conditions to ensure the ephemerality of the thing he has brought into existence (and here I'm defaulting to 'thing' as opposed to 'object', 'work', etc., as the most ontologically non-commital term I can find), and then trying to get the world --both institutions and the pubic-- to treat it as something permanent. Some immaterial things are not at all ephemeral (the soul, perhaps angels), but in Sehgal's work the two are constantly contrasted with materiality and permanence, and at the same time are made to occupy the roles of the latter, their opposites, to the extent possible.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that the real work that is called This Situation is the feat that is pulled off in the office, not the exhibition hall; that this pulling off is a sort of passing off; and that the main limit Sehgal is interested in exploring is not the one between the material and the immaterial, or even the one between the permanent and the ephemeral, but rather it is the limit of the flexibility of the museum as an institution. The idea seems to be to push and find out just how accommodating museums will be. From a certain point of view, this is disappointing: art, one might think, is supposed to be in museums, not about museums. But museums are institutions, and institutions function within economies, and so the museological experimentation can already claim to be a critical engagement with our social structure as a whole. Whether that in turn is what art ought to be doing, or not, is another question, but either way there is nothing trivial about doing it. In the actual performance of This Situation, anyhow, in the exhibition hall as opposed to the office, the work does not seem trivially or hermetically art-world-oriented. It balances on the ledge of self-referentiality, as I've said, but what one would get if it fell over that ledge would not be the sort of tedious insider chatter I can picture sleek collectors and lowly gossipy scenesters indulging in, but real philosophical questions about existence, illusion, freedom, and the ontology of art. 

Once the museum purchases the work, it 'owns' it, at least as long as everyone is willing to go along saying as much, as long as everyone is willing to honour, and able to remember, the handshake. They own a thing that is not stored anywhere, and for which there is no record of purchase. I would not wish to have to place a bet on the fate of this proprietary relation in 100 years' time. It will change, that is certain, and I think Sehgal is counting on that as well. Arguably, the difference between the proper care of this 'object' that comes into a museum's possession is not fundamentally different from the proper care of a painting, whose fate in 100 years depends both on things like temperature, humidity, exposure to sunlight; as well as on the changing circumstances of museums in society (for all we know, in 100 years paintings might be most valuable as fuel for bonfires to keep warm in former museum spaces converted to squats). Similarly, the museum will have to care for This Situation; new interpreters will have to be brought in for new iterations; they will have to be well trained and fairly remunerated; continuity with previous iterations will have to be ensured. As has been well said, buying This Situation is something like coming into ownership of a plant, which must be groomed and watered, kept alive. But in addition, the social circumstances that make this claim to ownership make sense must be preserved. And that is something quite beyond the power of a museum, or even of the entirety of people who claim to have a stake in the future of art, to control.  

The prohibition on documentation extends as well to filming, to audio-recording, and to the proliferation of official souvenirs. Here I must say it is wonderful to be involved in something that takes a principled stand against tchotchkes: no t-shirts, no mugs, no pens. Here, also, it may be that Sehgal is trying to push through to that other dimension of immateriality that is thought to obtain, e.g., in churches and other sites where filming is discouraged precisely because what is really going on in there cannot be captured by the documentation of any particular moment or sliver. The ban on permanent traces is perhaps not so much motivated by a respect for ephemerality, as by a concern for eternity. A thing that goes on forever (at least potentially) cannot be made to go on for two minutes.

There is also, I think, the concern to prevent any trace of the work from congealing into a paradigmatic instance of it, in the way that type fossils of paleontological species come to stand for the species itself, or studio recordings of pop songs come to be thought of as the works themselves rather than as instances of them. Such a development seems implausible however, and one imagines that scattered shoddy clips of This Situation on YouTube could at most have roughly the same relation to the work that, say, Grateful Dead bootlegs once had to the Deadhead phenomenon. The Dead famously delighted in the proliferation of these fan-made traces, and one gets the sense that in the end the prohibition on traces of Sehgal's work has more to do with a preoccupation with purity than with any necessary ontological stopgap. iPhones are tacky, and only yokels pull 'em out, in order to compensate for an inability to rigorously engage with the work. This goes for La Joconde no less than for This Situation, but the one big difference is that for Sehgal's work the yokel's appetite cannot be slaked afterwards by a trip to the gift shop.

But what, after all, is my critical judgment? Well, there were some moments of astounding perfection, where everything came together perfectly and made everyone in the hall think, together: My goodness, yes, there is something happening here. I do not think this something could be easily attained without the sum total of institutional circumstances of the work being just what they were. And I do not, moreover, think that this something could be attained without the particular talent of Tino Sehgal, which consisted in setting the formal parameters just right, and giving just the right sort of fuel in the form of the citations, which I now (unlike at the beginning) see were chosen with extreme care. The fact that so much depended on spontaneity within those formal parameters meant that inevitably the great majority of moments were not stunning; we had to work at getting to those moments, which came maybe once a day, or even less frequently. Because an individual interpreter could only ever be responsible for at most one-sixth of the meaning production, and because the visitors were so irreducibly unique and unpredictable, even if one were working hard at achieving a perfect moment, it could always slip away just as it was coming into reach. In this respect, it has rightly been said that the work functions much like humour, even though it is not intrinsically funny at all: it requires the rare and perfect confluence of individual inspiration with the sum total of extraneous circumstances. When these start to flow together in a perfect way, even for just a moment, it starts to feel like riding a wave; it starts to feel like the supreme manifestation of freedom. Until someone says something that falls flat, and the wave comes crashing down. 

I am skeptical of the idea, expressed so urgently by Denis Diderot, that il faut se hâter de rendre la philosophie populaire. But I don't think that philosophy for the masses is really what this work is about, and I don't think that when the question comes, Ou, que pensez vous?, it is a matter of turning the freedom to philosophize over to the proverbial man or woman in the museum. But I can say that the conversations that happened there were generally at least as interesting, and often as faithful to the intentions of the authors, as what I've seen in so many university classrooms. Universities, moreover, appear to be dying out, or at least transforming beyond recognition into the sort of places where, in the very near future, it is likely that one will not be able to investigate philosophical ideas in them at all. As the 'owners' and guardians of this sort of activity, I'm just as happy to invest my hope in museums as in universities. 

But again, it's not about philosophy in general. It's about limning, without tackling straight on, the conditions of possibility of a work such as this-- the economic and aesthetic conditions, in particular. It seems to me that even if you would lament these conditions, even if you would rather see contemporary-art museums filled with material objects showing the marks of technical precision in painting or sculpture, you can still agree that given that this is what the conditions in fact are, it is a worthwhile thing to come up with conceptual work that investigates these conditions, and indeed that in pushing at them can easily appear as wary as the most indignant classicist of the contemporary situation in art.

I find, in the end, that I do not really have a critical judgment to share about the artwork as such or about the current state of contemporary art: about This Situation or about this situation. My judgment, such as it is, is rooted more in my concern for philosophy and dialogue. Here I can only say that I am pleased to find someone coming up with new variations on these ancient activities, and enabling me and others to experience, on at least a few occasions, something close to perfect instances of them.

Some Remarks on Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov has done pretty much all a human can do, from within the pouch of corporeal experience and the tunnel of time, to trace out the boundaries of the absolute. He has done so entirely without positive beliefs, but armed only with a love of the names of things, and a superhuman power to combine these names according to the rules --which are his own rules-- of the art of description. This, from Speak, Memory: 

I have journeyed back in thought --with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went-- to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remember having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues-- and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, form their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

Vladimir Nabokov is not himself a bitter embryo, but he is a big baby, a spoiled child at his best when he is describing the years he spent as an actual spoiled child, in sailor's costume, coddled by nurses, fondled by uncles, plied with sweets. He has trouble comprehending the Bolshevik revolution beyond what it means for his own plight, which is to say the practice of his lepidoptery, of being bathed by servants, and other mischief. It is this same indifference to politics, which is to say also this conservatism by default, that makes Nabokov a transnational, and translinguistic author, which in turn are the very things that make him a great author. He can readjust even to America, and become great there while other emigrés flap and fizzle, because there are butterflies in Colorado too. And in this way the whole world is his home, even as his indifference to his fellow human beings seethes from nearly every page. 

Vladimir Nabokov had moreover been transnational from the beginning, and never had to convert or adapt. As he put it, by the time he arrived in America he was too old anyway to be 'Conradically transformed'. His English came before his Russian, though both seem to have been preceded by an innate or congenital mépris:

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar-- Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts-- 'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan,' 'Sam is in bed,' and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ --for the initial lessons, at least-- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory.

Already on the manor outside pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, though, traces of America, and not just of the English language, seem to have had a particularly strong hold on his imagination. Thus the same uncle who fondled him (about which fondling Nabokov, the anti-Freudian, makes little),

would solemnly bring me from America the Foxy Grandpa series, and Buster Brown-- a forgotten boy in a reddish suit: if one looked closely, one could see that the color was really a mass of dense red dots. Every episode ended in a tremendous spanking for Buster, which was administered by his wasp -waisted but powerful Ma, who used a slipper, a hairbrush, a brittle umbrella, anything --even the bludgeon of a helpful policeman-- and drew puffs of dust from the seat of Buster's pants.

What is going on here? There is genius, for one thing, but whose is it? Nabokov is simply relating to us the trifling comics he recalls having read decades before. He has at the very least had the talent to remember them, and to preserve and eventually reveal their own inborn genius. Buster Brown is a work of genius, as Nancy and Sluggo might be, as Archie or Garfield might be, but it takes a genius to draw it out, and it is a mark of Nabokov's genius that it can be drawn out by being described simply, by being barely described at all, but almost only mentioned. Buster Brown, from whose pants puffs of dust rise when he is spanked. Genius! 

And when he is observing his fellow men, is it not just as if Vladimir Nabokov is delighting in Buster Brown's spanking? Here, I think, is the very cruelest and most delightful passage in all of Speak, Memory, which brings together anti-unionism, anti-collectivism, Nabokov's sense of his own singular specialness, and, finally, his unmistakable power to convey through the art of description that he is, just as he senses, special: 

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing.

It was only when I read Ada, or Ardor two years ago or so that I became convinced of Nabokov's greatness. I hesitated for a long time after that to read his memoir, since memoirs have a way for me of overexposing their subject, and in the case of novelists of depriving me of the precious illusion of novels as autonomous works of art. In this case the memoir has had the effect of revealing to me the way in which Vladimir Nabokov's greatness as an author is fundamentally rooted in his limitations as a human, in particular in his lack of fellow-feeling with other humans, his constitutional indifference to matters of solidarity. What he finds when all of this is stripped away are nature, and freedom, and humor and amazement.

Whether you take this as a 'positive' assessment of Nabokov or not will depend on whether you see inculcation of virtue as one of the functions of literature. 

My Own Shining Path; Or, A Failed Attempt at Pseudonymy

I had the peculiar timing, a decade ago, to go to teach at a university in Istanbul at the very height of my country's idiotic shock-and-awe campaign against neighboring Iraq. The students associated with the hard-left PKK party, an outlawed revolutionary movement of Kurdish peasants in spirit very close to the Peruvian Sendero luminoso, had been slipping leaflets under my office door depicting Saddam Hussein in classic socialist-realist iconography, with a thick moustache, a sharp uniform, and some sort of light glowing from behind his head. I didn't know what to make of these, but reassured myself that communists are internationalists, and so will know better than to take me for a representative of the state that happened to issue my passport.

I was also, at the time, being plied with all sorts of gifts from my students, a gesture that is neither Islamist nor communist in motivation, but, I take it, an expression of a general Byzantine culture of corruption, which in former Ottoman vassal states such as Romania is described as 'Oriental', like sitting on the ground, going barefoot, or spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds, and which effectively holds society together by ensuring that everyone remain perpetually in debt or in credit to everyone else. I usually just accepted the gifts with an ignorant smile, but one of them in particular made me far more uneasy than the propaganda with the haloed Saddam. It was a decorative plate, showing a whirling dervish, with a quote from Rumi that read in Turkish: Either be as you appear, or appear as you are. What did this student have on me? I wondered. Was I dissimulating in some way of which I was unaware? 

Recently I have been thinking about a cluster of words, mostly from the Germanic languages, that have to do with the distinction between being and appearance. In German itself this distinction comes in the form of a rhyme, as between Sein and Schein. The latter of these gives us our own word 'shine', and in this way the etymology of the Germanic term for appearance as contrasted with reality is the same as that for phenomenon, which ultimately reaches back to the Greek root phos, whence phosphorus, phosphorescent, and other words associated with light. In the Latinate rubric there are a few clear traces of this root, as in scintillate, but for the most part its boldest representatives tend to cluster in Northern Europe, and include not just words the shining of light and the appearances to which this gives rise, but also words for the filtering of light, as through a screen, including the Icelandic skjáinn, and less obviously the German Schirm, as well as the word screen itself. The kind of screens with which we are most familiar today do in fact shine, and in so doing give us access to a world of appearances.

These reflections, and memories, have in turn intermingled with my on-again-off-again plans to move this website in a new direction, one that better fits my current position in the world as a full-time professional career-person who is expected, in view of the nature of his career, to be an embodiment of seriousness. Those who read me regularly will know that I am uncomforable about having ended up with this lot in life, and that in truth I would like to be doing something more playful, leading a life in which it is expected and understood, in my most central and self-defining undertakings, that I am joking around. This is the meaning behind my adopted motto, Difficile est saturam non scribere; whatever Juvenal may have meant by it, what I mean is that it is difficult for me to write anything other than satire. I start composing something serious, and if I'm not careful, if I don't stand over myself, so to speak, with a disciplinarian's gaze, my rigorous, on-the-level prose can be knocked by the slightest stray thought, as if guided by its own smart-ass muse, down the path of Juvenalia. 

Anyhow one possibility I have been considering, in view of my burdensome social distinction, is to experiment with pseudonymy, which is to say the project of very intentionally and systematically appearing otherwise than I am. In order to maintain some continuity with the new pseudonymous identity, I had even come up with the idea of claiming that the old identity, which is to say the person who has been writing these past several years under the name 'Justin E. H. Smith', was in fact himself the fiction, while the new character, who would come along under a different name, would claim to be setting things right by declaring that he, or more precisely she, was the true and authentic author of everything written here since the very beginning.

I even went so far as to draft a short text explaining the whole situation. I was pleased with the text, and if you were reading me this afternoon you may have even caught a glimpse of it during the five minutes or so between my hasty publishing of it and my ultimate decision that I could not, in fact, appear other than as I am, at least not in this way.

Here is the text, in full:

I have a confession to make. For a number of years, I have been using 'Justin E. H. Smith' as my nom de plume. My real name is Catherine Astrid Walker. I was born on Cape Cod in 1974, and grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and, later, in a suburb of Sacramento, California.

It is not quite correct to say that 'Justin E. H. Smith' is my pen name, since this suggests that he is my own authorial creation, whereas the truth is he also exists in reality. In fact, he and I were once the closest of friends, and what happened is that some years ago I borrowed a portion of his identity, but only a portion, in order, like Isak Dinesen and George Eliot before me, to advance my career as a writer from behind a masculine avatar.

When I say that Smith and I were 'friends', this doesn't really convey the depth of the prehistory that led to our eventual onomastic intertwining. For a few years after my arrival in Sacramento, where my father had been transferred much to his disappointment in 1979, Smith and I were bound together in that special way only prepubescents can be: in eternal, transcendent, unconsummated child-marriage, a relation belittled by oblivious, forgetful adults as obtaining between mere 'best friends'.

We were best friends, yes, if you insist on putting it that way. We would explore drainage ditches together, crawling through the narrow underground pipes that connect the ditches on both sides of Manzanita Avenue, thrusting eucalyptus branches in front of us to clear away imagined rats, grinding over Coors cans, rubber slippers, and condoms, our love deepening the further we pushed through. We discovered satanic graffiti and evidence of black sabbaths (more Coors cans, mostly), which only emboldened us in our explorations. We were this-close to carrying out our own dark secret ritual, the day we happened upon the pentagram, an initiation into mystery that had just begun with the quid-pro-quo invocation, 'I'll show you mine if...', when José, the gardener at the Catholic elementary school through which the ditch passed, spotted us and sprayed us with his high-powered gardening hose. But all for the better, I suppose, because as I said our love was transcendent, and didn't need to 'go further' because it ultimately resided in a realm of no distances.

I ended up at the Catholic high school, and then at Wellesley, whereas Smith ended up at the public high school, then at the public remedial high school, then nowhere, and finally, after some delay, at the community college. Our differential early success, or lack of it, could not but pull us apart, though I suppose that rupture first began a few years earlier with our first fall, which came at more or less the same time for both of us, when we grew far more ugly than we had been before, oleaginous and hairy, and these new excretions were as if paralleled by their equivalents in the realm of the heart: new desires, desires for others, desires that were decidedly not transcendental, but had urgently to be fulfilled.

So, yeah, we were childhood sweethearts, growing up pulled us apart, &c. This is a familiar enough story, but what is somewhat less usual about our love is that it was able to resume, altered but still true and pure, when a reunion of cosmically negligible probability in a call center in Montpellier brought us together in 2004. Desperate men were yelling in Arabic in the telephone cabins around us about commercial matters, import-export, the stuff that makes the world move. The walls were plastered with those gaudy international calling-card posters showing the supposed rates to different countries, a barrage of meretricious numbers unsuccessfully beautified with African spears and baobab trees. There was no love in there, I mean to say, except that we both nonetheless grasped in an instant that our love was as strong as ever.

We walked through the medieval city center, read plaques commemorating the motions of François Rabelais, ate some sad salads. Justin was a junior professor at the time, having thoroughly overcome the obstacles he had created for himself by dropping out of high school back in 1988, the year I met my first serious boyfriend, Brad (who is currently doing nothing at all in Yuba City or somewhere like that). I mentioned that I had been struggling to break through as a writer, but that it had been hard after daddy passed away and I had foolishly attempted to set myself up, with a trust fund and no fixed schedule, in French expatriation.

I told Justin that I had written a collection of short stories, mostly narrated from the point of view of burrowing animals nervously clinging to their own obscure little existences, but that the only reaction I could elicit from even the most undistinguished of editors was, basically, 'Your name is Catherine, not Franz'. I hate to come to this conclusion, I told him, but I'm starting to get a distinct whiff of sexism. And that's when he said to me: forget the editors, the future's in blogging. You can write whatever you want.

I insisted that even on the Internet, or perhaps a fortiori on the Internet, one is not free of the same prejudices that dictate the rules of the publishing game. And that's when my childhood love, whom I had just met again for the first time in years, found a new way to blend our lives together. He said he had registered a website, www.jehsmith.com, but that he had had no time to develop it. Why don't you pretend you're me? he asked. We can think of it as an experiment. 

That was almost a decade ago now, and of course our lives have continued to unfold and to transform, even as they barrel relentlessly towards death. My dear Justin, that lower-middle-class drainage-ditch dweller and high-school dropout formerly of Sacramento, California, has recently become some big-wig in the French university system. They say he's some sort of high-ranking functionary, an haut fonctionnaire of the French civil service. I don't really understand these distinctions, but the important part is that all of a sudden he's worried about reputational matters in a way he never was before, he feels he has to watch what he says, to 'manage' his name and the ideas to which it gets associated (he has been particularly displeased by the stuff I have been writing about religious faith recently, as he feels that this in particular positions him poorly to make a grand entry onto the Parisian scene). In consequence, he has asked me to stop blogging under his name.

I was a little bit hurt, I admit, but also immediately understood that it was time, not just for him, but also for me: it was time for me to come out and start writing under my own name. In any case, it is not exactly as if I have been able to reproduce the successes of Dinesen and Eliot. It turns out that it may not have just been the fact that I am a woman that was holding me back, for even as a man, as Justin E. H. Smith, I have managed to generate precious little interest in my prose.  

Justin was wrong about one thing: the future is not in blogging. The future is almost certainly not in writing at all. I don't know what the future is in. I do know, however, that the time has come for a new era of truthfulness, of calling ourselves by our true names. So, greetings, readers. My name, as I've said, is Catherine Astrid Walker. I hope you will continue to enjoy reading me, and I assure you that very little will change under this new regime of honesty.

In future posts I will tell you more about myself, about my hopes and fears, as well as divulging the bare biodata of my origins, my relations, my comings-and-goings, and my labors. For now, I wish simply to say hello. 

I could not go through with it. I want to be Justin E. H. Smith and not Catherine Astrid Walker. The reasons for this are complex, and have much to do with the rise of individualism at the beginning of the modern period, the parallel emergence of the desire for a new sort of glory that comes from being able to put one's signature on the product of one's labors. I want to shine, in other words, out of a paradoxical mixture of motivations rooted both in utter vanity and in a true yearning for authenticity (whatever that turns out to be).

I have difficulty determining whether or not this yearning is ultimately harming my career, by which I mean that portion of my activity for which I receive a regular salary. I know these days everyone is Googling everyone on the slightest pretext, and there may very well be selection committees out there who find this great proliferation of extracurricular words of mine, and balk. Oh well. I can only conjure that immortal Popeyean tautology in response, and conclude, after having seriously contemplated the pseudonymous path of shining-as-seeming, that I would much rather take the autographic path of shining-as-glowing, and to soak up whatever glory or censure comes my way as a result.

I Support Marriage Equality

Over the past several years, I have written a number of articles, in Lapham's Quarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere, in which I have questioned some of the features of the emerging mainstream consensus about gay marriage. I have consistently affirmed my support for it, and have at the same time insisted that in the fight to achieve marriage equality, internal critique should be welcomed as having a strengthening effect. I have been interested in questioning what I take to be a too facile distinction on the part of defenders of same-sex marriage between this new modification of the kinship system and other possible modifications; and I have asked whether real progress, indeed liberation, might not in fact lie in the decoupling of matters of sexual identity both from the social system of kinship as well as from the interests of states that presume the authority to regulate this system. I do not regret asking these questions, and intend to continue asking them. In doing so, I am drawing inspiration most of all from Michel Foucault, who in 1981 said:

Nous vivons dans un monde légal, social, institutionnel où les seules relations possibles sont extrêmement peu nombreuses, extrêmement schematisées, extrêmement pauvres. Il y a évidemment la relation de marriage et les relations de famille, mais combien d’autres relations devraient pouvoir exister, pouvoir trouver leur codes, ce qui n’est pas du tout le cas (Dits et Écrits, Vol. IV, No. 313).

We live in a legal, social, and institutional world where the only possible relations are extremely limited in number, extremely schematised, extremely poor. There are of course the relations of marriage and of family, but how many other relations might be able to exist, might be able to find their codes-- which is not at all the case [today].

As I see it, the recent emergence of a new consensus in support of same-sex marriage has not been so much the discovery of a new code as it has been the successful absorption of a social force, one that may once have been vested with the greatest promise of making such a discovery, into a preexisting code. I believe this has been better than nothing, and under the circumstances may have been all the change our rigid society could allow, but I do not think it is in itself particularly progressive.

What other sorts of code do I think might emerge? New forms of friendship, for starters. Imagine a world in which we could gain inheritance rights, or hospital-visitation rights, on the basis of philia with no need to prove the presence of eros. Why not? Why should the one variety of love be more fundamental in the structuring of human affairs than the other? Why should the state be involved in recognizing or sanctioning varieties of love that involve an erotic component, but not in any other kind? This concern of course extends to heterosexual bonds as well; what the hell are immigration authorities doing when they demand to see photographic evidence of hugging-and-kissing in order to assure themselves that a marriage is not a sham? Stay the fuck out of my private life, state. Who are you to say there should not be real marriages based on intellectual esteem and reciprocal admiration of each other's character? This sounds absurd, to you and to the state, but only because we live in a culture in which it is romantic and erotic love that enjoy pride of place in our fantasies and our conversations. Things might have looked different if we had been the heirs to several centuries of neo-Ciceronians writing their own versions of the De Amicitia. Instead, we are the heirs to several centuries of conservative 'Christian' family values, and it is only against this background that the current mainstream defenses of same-sex marriage make complete sense.

I do not regret, as I've said, pursuing questions such as these. But I am saddened --deeply, personally, saddened-- when I see that I am being misunderstood. This happened this morning, when I received the following comment on a blog post I wrote a while back about my Christian faith (for the record, I am a Christian pacifist anarchist, though other than perhaps the 'anarchist' part this is entirely irrelevant to the present discussion). "Well," the commenter writes in response to my admission that I am a Christian, 

this finally explains your homophobic rants over the last few years - only a theist would invest so much work in some bizarre pseudo-anthropological against gay marriage and then the pen some broadside against Martha Nussbaum about the value of disgust of gay sex (Leon Kass was much better). I guess God is your exemption from the naturalistic fallacy - how convenient. I just assumed you were some leftist concern troll with the digs about rich white elitist western gays mocking the third world polygamous families and our class bias against poor cousin marriages, etc. I first read you in Counterpunch years ago sneering about Canadian liberals "gloating" about gay marriage but I just chalked it up to Cockburn's weird prolife/ anti-gay phase. You should write for spiked online - you'd fit right in with those former RCP trots turned right wing libertarians. Enjoy your pomo mysticism.

Where to begin? I guess I could start by saying that I don't know what a 'concern troll' is, I don't know what 'spiked online' is, and I don't know what an 'RCP trot' is. And I could also say that I never thought when I was writing for Counterpunch about how my own views matched up with Alexander Cockburn's, and I seriously doubt he gave it much consideration either; anyhow I haven't looked at that site since I went there some time back and saw they were featuring some idiot denying the Khmer Rouge genocide. I could also say, finally, how much I am troubled by the tendency I've been seeing online to dismiss perspectives one does not support as being the work of 'trolls', and to describe any effort to spell out a point of view in a digital medium as a 'rant' (couldn't we at least diversify our vocabulary? Are there not also philippics and harangues and jeremiads?). The culture that speaks like this is a culture I do not understand, and in which I want no part.

It's true that I did not like Nussbaum's book about same-sex marriage and US constitutional law, but as I explained this was not because she supports gay marriage --I support it too-- but because she purports to be giving a philosophical account of the moral significance of disgust, and I believe that there are many important considerations that she left out of this account. As I made very clear in the review, I find Kass's view both loathsome and fallacious. He is guilty of the naturalistic fallacy for believing that his disgust at homosexuality is meaningful evidence that homosexuality is wrong. I am saying, contra Nussbaum and Kass at once, that disgust can neither function as a reliable weathervane for the determination of objective rights and wrongs, but nor can it be eliminated from the complicated way in which we become constituted as moral subjects. But I suppose from this reader's perspective, to find fault with Nussbaum's line is ipso facto to fall in with Kass. One fears that in the United States the religious right is just so powerful, and so effective in defining the parameters of discourse, that defenders of marriage equality are simply afraid to venture into the realm of subtlety, or to ask questions that betray complexity and diversity within their ranks. 

The reader may be right that I have, in my writing on the subject, been drawing on anthropology in at least an idiosyncratic, if not sometimes misguided, way. I am not an anthropologist, but I take anthropology very seriously and I try to keep up with the discipline as much as I can. It seems to me clear that some of the best arguments in favor of same-sex marriage are the empirical ones coming from anthropologists that reveal the seemingly infinite diversity and malleability of kinship structures, and the simple falsehood of the belief that marriage is, always and everywhere, a reproductive union between one man and one woman. Indeed, the recent emphasis in both anthropology and animal ethology on alloparenting as a key feature of the lives of intelligent social animals strongly speaks in favor of the essential humanness of adoption and of child-rearing outside the confines of binary heterosexual reproductive units. I also think, however, that along with the empirical buttressing that anthropology provides comes another unmistakable lesson that the mainstream consensus has so far failed to appreciate: namely, that the modification of marriage in our society from a system built from gender-opposed adult pairs to one built from adult pairs regardless of their gender must not be seen as a final correction to an otherwise stable and 'natural' institution, but instead must be seen as only one possible permutation among many, and indeed as a permutation that might not last, and that we are freely choosing now because it is what we want, not because it is what has always been needed. 

I would really like to think these reflections are welcome within the context of the movement for marriage equality, that they should not be received as 'trolling', and certainly not as providing ammunition to the religious right (if you are worried about that, perhaps you should transmit this post to a religious-right acquaintance of yours, and just see what she or he makes of it; I strongly suspect that your acquaintance will not find much to latch onto). If I might dwell a moment longer on the problem of the impoverishment of discourse in our age, I fear however that the problem my attempt at a public intervention in this issue poses is that I am not respecting the role that has been prescribed to me as an 'ally'. Allies, on the current understanding, are not supposed to presume to have insights concerning the issues that are supposedly 'owned' by the people of whom they are allies, but are instead supposed to let these people find their way, and meanwhile simply 'to be there for them'. I reject this.

For one thing, I feel like saying: how do you know I'm an ally, and not a secret agent? How do you know who I am? The heart is a dark forest, as Chekhov said, but in the current climate it is damned difficult to have a social identity that does not match up with one of just a few very simple and schematic profiles. It may be true that some people can say of themselves, 'I was born this way', but many others --trust me-- do not feel they were born any one way at all, and feel that it is the project of a lifetime to figure out who they are, and also to create themselves little by little, in an undertaking that is a matter of both discovery and invention. As the poet Mark Wunderlich has written in a recent stunning essay, an untimely Whitmanian cri-de-coeur: "I was not born this way, but built my queerness like a soul." Some people cannot come out, in spite of Rachel Maddow's claim that there is an ethical imperative to do so, because some people do not know quite what the message to be delivered upon coming out ought to be. Some people spend their lives trying to formulate the message, trying to find some way to tell the truth about themselves. That this is hard for some people and not others has not to do with unequally allotted portions of honesty or bravery, but with different understandings of what exactly is at stake. 

The heart is a dark forest, but I'd rather struggle to make out what I can by the dim light that shines from within, than to allow my era, with its jabbering Rachel Maddows and Pat Robertsons, to cast the glaring floodlight of their childish pre-set categories on it from without. I support marriage equality, but have a lot more to say besides. 

Phyllis Rides Aristotle

The apocryphal story of Phyllis and Aristotle is captivating for a number of reasons. For one thing, it recalls for us a period in the history of culture in which philosophy, and philosophers, were implicated not just in elite disputation, but also in popular lore and moral instruction. The tale of Phyllis and Aristotle is an exemplum, that is, a stock lesson telling you --and here, 'you' is not a subtle follower of philosophical arguments, but a simple fellow influenced by memorable stories accompanied by vivid images-- what you ought not to do. The fact that it was the greatest philosopher in Western history who provided the exemplum is worthy of pause, but we'll get back to that in a second.

Phyllis was the preferred consort, perhaps the wife, of Alexander the Great, who in turn was a disciple of the philosopher. This much is historical fact. A legend arose over the course of the late middle ages according to which Aristotle grew enamored of Alexander's favorite, who for her part consented to give the philosopher what he wanted, but only as his dominatrix. In particular, she wished to ride on the his back, with the peripatetic down on his hands and knees like a beast. 

An anonymous Latin text relates that Aristotle had initially instructed his disciple to abstain from amorous relations with his own wife, since this diverted him from the manly projects in which he was engaged (empire-building, philosophy, e.g.). Phyllis was therefore spurned, and to get revenge she decided to seduce not her own husband, but the old philosopher who had drawn her husband away from her. This proved not so difficult, and soon enough Aristotle began to solicit her carnally. To which solicitations Phyllis responded: 

This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I'll know that you aren't deluding me. 

Hans Baldung's 1503 pen-and-ink drawing (to the right), as well as his 1513 woodcut (above), are some of the most vivid representations of the ensuing ride.  In 1512 Lucas van Leyden gives us a depiction of the same scene in which Aristotle is wearing unmistakably Moorish or Islamic gear (below). My favorite rendering of this subject is the 14th-century French bronze aquamanile that shows Phyllis plainly slapping Aristotle's rear, just like she might a horse, in full three-dimensional splendor (final image below). 

What exactly is going on here? It should be pointed out that there is a long tradition of associating Aristotle with the bawdy that, as far as I know, goes back to the mid-16th-century Latin translation, by Theodor Gaza, of the Greek author's biological works treating, most relevantly, the reproduction of animals, and therefore also the cosmic significance of sexual difference, copulation, etc. From this association there arose the countless editions of works bearing the title Aristotle's Masterpiece, which were essentially manuals of advice for midwives, plus a diverse selection of 'secrets' about the feminine sex. I have been told that in Australia one could receive late editions of the Masterpiece, in a plain brown wrapper and by mail order, into the 1930s. 

Even before the Gaza edition, Aristotle's name would have been loosely associated with the topic of animals via Albertus Magnus, the 13th-century teacher of Thomas Aquinas who wrote, among many other works, a treatise De animalibus. Though it might be hard for us to see today, to the extent that animals owe their very existence to copulation, from a certain medieval point of view there is already something bawdy in the very undertaking of zoology. 

I do not know to what extent these associations influenced the rise of the legend of Phyllis and Aristotle, and this present post is really more a query than a report. It seems to me quite likely that in addition to Aristotle the advisor of midwives, another aspect of his legacy that could be playing a role in this legend is that of Aristotle the happily married father and family man. We know in fact that Aristotle went to Macedonia as Alexander's tutor shortly after the death of his wife, Pythias, with whom he had had a daughter; he would later have another female lover who would bear him a son, Nicomachus, for whom he would eventually write one of his two major works on ethics. It is also likely that he had a male lover, but whether he did or not it remains the case that Aristotle was far more active in all that stuff that has to do with social reproduction through opposite-gender pairing than great philosophers have typically been held to be. Nietzsche famously noted that all the great philosophers have been unmarried and non-reproductive-- except for Socrates, who was however married to a shrew, as if to demonstrate precisely the lesson that philosophers ought not to marry. Strangely, Nietzsche does not even mention Aristotle in this connection, but if he had he would have had to acknowledge that the Stagirite is both an exception to the rule as well as an exception to Socrates's exception that supposedly proves the rule. 

The figure of Phyllis riding Aristotle begins to appear at the moment when Aristotle is beginning his slow decline as the preeminent representative of philosophy, as 'the Philosopher'. Several more centuries would follow in which celibacy would function as the norm and implicit ideal among philosophers. Against this background, it seems to me that much of the trouble philosophy as an academic discipline is currently having in the matter of gender equity has to do not just with its legacy of macho grandstanding, the old-boys'-club sense of entitlement that so many of its cocky male practitioners have, etc., but also, at least in part, with the fact that the discipline has its deep historical roots in something akin to monasticism, a commitment whose demise Nietzsche seems to be bemoaning, where the boys' club is constituted not on the basis of a shared commitment to prowling, lecherous domination of women, but rather to an ideal of separateness.

Aristotle betrayed philosophy, at least on a certain understanding, by allowing it to get mixed up with the sensual, corporeal realm. The exemplum thus works at two levels at once, for the initiates and the masses alike. Keep your wits by staying away from temptresses, it tells the masses, while to the philosophers, it says: maintain the standard of pure rationality by not getting mixed up with the natural world and its cycles of generation and corruption.

I don't mean to oversimplify, but my own take on the discipline's current wave of self-criticism is that its demographic problem flows directly and inescapably from the way philosophy continues to define itself as an intellectual project. This is not to say that reason is 'masculine' and the senses are 'feminine'; this is not at all what I think. But I do think that centuries-old associations have a way of insinuating themselves into the way we talk and act far more than most people, and certainly most non-historians, like to think. And I believe that within our supposedly intellectually grounded defense of philosophy as a largely a priori discipline separate from the natural and cultural worlds, there is an echo of that old exemplum, intended for simpletons, about staying pure and free of temptation. 

Paul Celan, Death Fugue (1948)

 

Black milk of dawn we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we're digging a grave in the airs where you won't lie too tight

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when Deutschland is darkened by your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and goes 'fore the house and the stars shine he calls for his hounds

he calls for his Jews a grave in the earth he leaves them to dig

he commands us now play for to dance

 

Black milk of dawn we drink it at night

we drink it at morning and midday we drink it at evening

we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when Deutschland is darkened by your golden hair Margarete

Your ashen hair Sulamith we're digging a grave in the airs where you won't lie too tight

 

He calls push deeper into the soil you and the others sing and you play

he grips at his belt for the iron his eyes are blue

push the spades deeper you and the others play on for to dance

 

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents

he calls play death sweeter death is a master from Deutschland

he calls stroke the violins more darkly for you'll rise like smoke in the air

for you'll have your grave in the clouds where you won't lie too tight

 

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at midday death is a master from Deutschland

we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink

death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue

he hits you with bullet of lead he hits you true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air

he plays with the serpents and dreameth death is a master from Deutschland

 

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith 

 

The Kelpies

Dear A****,

I'm sorry for disappearing so suddenly a few years back. One day I'm still there on the East Coast busily discharging the duties of my profession, while also, I'm sure you remember, circulating in something pretty close to what you could straight-facedly call a 'demimonde': publishing, blogging, tweeting and getting retweeted like a star. And then, the next day, silence. As you probably detected, it was a challenging time for me at many levels, personal, professional, etc. I've been meaning for a long time to write to fill you in on what's been going on, but I had to feel like I was starting to get back on my feet again before I even dared. 

I've got my own place now, in Sacramento. Not Sacramento exactly, but Carmichael. Which is basically Sacramento. My upstairs neighbors are a couple of skinheads. It's a good thing I'm white, I guess. They mostly keep to themselves, always loading asbestos-removal equipment into and out of their pick-up truck. It's not so bad. I was living with my mom for the first two years or so out in Fair Oaks (also basically Sac), but she eventually pushed me to get a job at Best Buy, drawing on some connections with the middle-manageriate at our local outlet, connections that also seem somehow to involve Timothy, her Vietnamese manicurist who always works with a parrot on his shoulder. I don't know all the behind-the-scenes machinations that went on, but somehow a job was procured for me, and I guess it's around that time that I started feeling like I'm my own person again. Actually that's a bit of an exaggeration: I'm still so steeped in debt I'm not anywhere near being my own person. I can't afford to be a person for anyone but the credit-card companies and their collectors. 

At least I've paid back everything I owed to Best Buy. That's right: for about 9 months I was basically an indentured servant, having ruined a few Bluetooth Cochlears the first week on the job while trying to show some customers how to insert them (I didn't know you had to have a wax-removal certificate from an ENT first). They docked the cost of them from my pay. That was only like half a paycheck, but the real problem started when some of my co-workers (half my age, of course) figured out how to hack the Acer Goggles we had on display in order to get high on the deep-brain-stimulator stuff they were emitting, before the FDA or ATF or whoever handles this sort of thing put a stop to it. 

What a crazy story that was! I couldn't believe it when the scandal broke, and Acer's CEO held a press conference to admit they had come up from behind and beat Google at the enhanced-reality-glasses game by including a little photon beam or whatever that travelled directly to the limbic system and induced a low-grade sense of bliss. My co-workers were a bunch of stoner idiots, but to their credit they were some of the first kids in the country not only to figure out what was going on, and why all of a sudden Acer's profits were going through the roof, but also how to up the photon dosage and stimulate the shit out of the hypothalamus. So picture me: a former philosophy professor, 42 years old, lying on the floor of the Best Buy break room wearing those stupid goggles, acering like a teenager, stoned out of my fucking mind, when the manager bursts in and yanks them off my face. All of a sudden, no more bliss. Damn. And he says to me: "Hey genius, I hope you know it breaks 'em when you unblock the photon dosage. You're gonna be paying that off for a long-ass time, professor."

I'm sure you can recall that I was not always like this. I used to freak out at exactly 2 1/4 glasses of wine, chattering anxiously about how 2 is the maximum doctor-recommended amount, and relating all the dark insomniac thoughts about my battered liver that I already knew would keep me up later that night. Yet here I was blasting my hypothalamus into the raisin state. (You saw that exposé where the kids were talking about their 'raisin brains', didn't you? You know, Alex Jones or one of those other CNN guys going to that glasses-withdrawal ward in Tulsa or some awful place? All those kids? How they wouldn't let them have any wires or straws or anything they could try to insert in order to rub their brains directly? Holy shit!) 

I guess you could say I kind of lost hope for the future. It has something to do with my precipitous loss of status, but it's not just that. It's also that I know what they said was not true, and that that doesn't matter to anyone. The truth doesn't matter! That's enough to make anyone lose hope.

Did you hear what happened? I usually just suppose people found out, what with the way information travels these days. But who knows? To put it succinctly: I was fired from my job for fabricating, so they said, a round-the-world voyage taken by Immanuel Kant. Can you imagine: Immanuel Kant? The philosopher most famous (i) for having a name that kind of sounds like 'cunt', which is the source of endless ribaldry from the Borscht Belt to the frat house; and (ii) as absolutely everyone in the world knows, for never once in his entire life having left his home town of Königsberg? They say I made up a bunch of fake sources to prove that Kant's mature critical philosophy was largely the product of his encounters with native peoples along his route. Well, guess what? Kant really did fucking go to Sumatra. I proved it before, and I'm not in the mood to do it again. I'm over that. 

But in any case the Kant part of it is just the tip of the iceberg, the bit that provides a nice satisfying story with a happy, or at least a poetically just, ending: professor makes stuff up, professor gets fired, professor moves in with mom and gets a job at Best Buy and turns into an Acer junkie. But you have to ask yourself: why would anyone care? Academics make false claims all the time, sometimes billions of dollars hang in the balance, and yet they almost never get punished for it. I made a few claims about some guy's travel plans in the 18th century, and I got fired for it. Don't you think that's a bit strange? Well let me fill you in: there are some people out there who really don't want certain facts to get out, and who have the power to shut you down if you start to let them out. I understand this now: I would never choose to re-fight this battle. It's just not worth it. But I'm telling it to you in private correspondence, only because I trust you and I trust that you understand how important discretion is in this case.

It's not the Sumatra part that gets to them. You might have read, in the original post in that one open-access journal (which was quickly taken down, but of course not until after they'd deposited my $300 publication fee), the part about Kant's sojourn on the Arctic coast of Russia, where he lived among the Tlängit people of the Taimyr Peninsula. This is all documented in Benno Klopp's 1873 book, Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants (which has disappeared from nearly all research libraries in the world, for reasons that will become clear). You might also recall the part about the Tlängit concept of nâk, how it means --or at least how Kant thought it meant-- something like 'necessity' or 'fate' or 'weather', and how Kant, d'après Klopp, had taken this concept and placed it at the very heart of one of the antinomies of pure reason in his first Critique. Are you still following? Good, because as I've said I really don't want to have to go over all this stuff again. It's still an open wound for me. 

Anyway it's not just about Kant and the Taimyr Tlängit. This is not some obscure question for Aral-Ultaicists and transcendental idealists. No, it is much, much bigger than that. 

Have you heard of the Kelpius Brotherhood? They are the followers of a certain Johannes Kelpius, a Bavarian mystic from the late 17th century who established a commune in Pennsylvania, which eventually grew into a whole community with its own private university called 'Wissahickon'. Kelpius was out of his gourd, a sort of L. Ron Hubbard of the Baroque. He combined the crudest understanding of Christianized Kabbalism with an eclectic hotch-potch of already outdated alchemy, astrology, and a fervent belief that Pennsylvania was destined, in the coming new age, to be a religious utopia. He is said to have been in possession of the philosopher's stone, as in, that object of the great alchemical quest for deep knowledge of the mysteries of nature and existence and God and stuff. Supposedly he threw it into the Schuylkill somewhere outside of Philly shortly before his death in 1708. Crackpots like Kelpius were a dime a dozen in colonial America, of course, but he managed to make his legacy endure by developing a tight organization, bound together by oral tradition, secret vows, oaths of loyalty. To this very day Wissahickon has something they call  the 'Sub-Brotherhood for the Enforcement of Kelpian Doctrine', also known as the 'Kelpies'.

This gang consists of 200 or so men, mostly local Wissahickon rabble, but also a few recent graduates of Wissahickon's philosophy department who find themselves as unemployable as the day they finished their K-through-12 Kelpian home-schooling and as a result become radicalized in their commitment to the Brotherhood. They have long beards, which is peculiar, since Kelpius himself was beardless and never said anything at all concerning facial hair. But on their understanding the hair 'emanates' from the face in the same way that the world emanates from Ein Sof, which is the Kabbalists' term for the divine. Not every man is expected to have a beard, but only every educated man, whose very face now symbolizes his knowledge of the relationship between God and world. It is for this reason that if a man shows himself to be foolish, or speaks against the officially sanctioned doctrine, the Kelpies will show up with a pair of scissors and exact their punishment.

Now you are about to become one of only two outsiders in the entire world, along with me, who knows this little secret (if you do not wish to be burdened by knowing too much, then stop reading now, my friend): there is a belief, passed down from Kelpius to successive generations of Wissahickon initiates, according to which the Hebrew יהוה‎ is just a ruse, a decoy that distracts the benighted from the true name of God, which is (and you can probably see this coming): נךּ. This is totally insane, of course. Technically the word transliterates as nk, and the suppressed vowel could in principle be an â, but this combination of letters doesn't even look remotely like an acceptable lexeme of ancient Hebrew; the kaph with the dagesh dot in it (indicating a voiceless velar) barely even occurs in the entire Old Testament. But whatever. Kelpius claims to have extracted this bit of knowledge from an esoteric reading of the extremely rare 2nd edition of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's book, Kabbala denudata, which appeared in Nürnberg in 1686. Now Knorr von Rosenroth was one of the more, shall we say, imaginative of the early modern Christian Hebraists, but he was not sloppy, and he knew not to make stuff up out of thin air. As I'm sure you're beginning to see, the same cannot be said of Herr Kelp.

So anyhow we've got this situation where the Brotherhood takes nâk, or nk, to be the true name of God, where they want to keep this information to themselves, and so really don't want outsiders holding forth with competing interpretations of their cherished little monosyllable. And again, you can probably already see what's coming next. At the time I published my piece, or posted my piece, or whatever, in Knowledge4U (now I remember the name of the online journal!) on Kant's Arctic sojourn and its relevance for Aral-Ultaic linguistics, I was teaching, as you probably recall, at Misericordia University up in Montreal. One night, about a week after the piece went up, Ayelet and I were sitting at home in our apartment on the Plateau, a quiet evening, watching videos on YouTube of animals doing things not usually associated with their species, having a good time. There was a knock on the door; I assumed it was some Canadian humanitarian thing, some campaign for the environment or recycling or something, and I begged her not to answer it. But Ayelet was always a better community member than I was, and she insisted. 

They say that the real art of fiction is knowing how to get your characters in and out of rooms, but this is fact so I'm just going to cut to the chase. The Kelpies pushed into the entryway and immediately started making snipping gestures with their scissors, right in Ayelet's face (as she told me, weeping, later that night).  I heard a tussle and for some reason imagined the notorious Mom Boucher and his band of Quebec Hell's Angels (les Hells, they call them). But these were no Hells. There were five of them, the oldest no more than 22, all with pathetic whiskers hanging in strands from their faces. Three of them had unusually severe acne. All were decked out in what I only know as 'urban wear' or 'street fashion': those oversized baseball caps with the stickers still on them, sweatshirts that say things like 'Zoo York', and other signifiers of utter cultural impoverishment. And yet, somehow, through these markers of entry-level social status, they also gave off the air of deeply religious, indeed fanatically religious, young men. It may have been that they were wearing their urban gear as disguises, that they had gone undercover to move inconspicuously in the big city. Underneath it they looked, mutatis mutandis, like the riff-raff who used to go around the streets of Riyadh calling themselves, as I recall, the 'Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice'. (Do you remember them? Before... Well, you know.) They looked like typical religious enforcer thugs from anywhere in the world, except with a distinctly blue-collar Pennsylvania air about them. In other words: terrifying. 

I had no idea who they were or what was going on. (I would only learn a few days later, when one of the five suffered a crisis of conscience, indeed of identity, and called me to explain the whole thing. It's only thanks to him, to little Gunther, that I was able to piece it all together.) You can imagine my confusion as I came running towards Ayelet and they began shouting, "Where's Bieber!? We're looking for Justin Bieber!" I'm Justin, I said, but this didn't silence them. "Hey Bieber," the one who was evidently their leader intoned, "do you know what 'Justin Bieber' means? It means 'Justin Beaver'." They were, evidently, making fun of my name by riffing on the name of that Canadian pop star. Do you remember him? The one they caught smuggling polar-bear claws for the Chinese mafia after his charity tour of Nunavut? That was weird.

Anyhow the Kelpies seem to have wanted to offend my dignity by associating my name with beavers, which would not in itself have been so bad, but then one of them, the smallest one with the worst acne, with a face that was nothing but pustules, really, started muttering something about how I didn't have a beard, how they had been told I had a beard, how all philosophers have beards. "We came to cut off his beard so he could no longer emanate the cosmos like the Godhead does," little Gunther said (though I did not yet think of him as little Gunther). "Well where's his dang beard, Eberhard?" The Kelpies, it would turn out, did not even know it was possible for a philosopher to not have a beard, so isolated were they at Wissahickon. As Gunther would later tell me, they were even taught there that the hairs of one's beard are a direct corporeal reflection of the ideas in one's mind, so that the longer and thicker one's beard is, the greater one's philosophical attainments are thought to be. The idea of a beardless philosopher, on this understanding, is simply a contradiction in terms. 

But the boys had come to cut something, and in the absence of that thing they were looking for, they cast their eyes around for something else. And this is the part where the story grows dark, and I don't think I have the stomach to retell it: the part where the Kelpies turned from merely rough, to simply evil. Their sights landed on Ayelet's beautiful black curls.

Naturally, in the weeks to follow she and I were hardly in good spirits. She insisted she didn't blame me, but I could tell deep down she would have liked for me to have kicked all five of their asses at once. She mostly stayed in the bedroom and read the Pravda archives online (you might recall she's an old-school Kremlinologist). I slept on the couch and let my hygiene lapse. This made her even more disappointed in me those few times a day we passed each other in the hallway, and out of some bizarre self-defeating stubbornness I can barely understand, her disappointment only exacerbated my neglect. For the first time since my undergrad days, I stopped shaving. To my great surprise, the sparsity that had tinged my twenty-year-old beard experiments with emasculating shame was no longer, at forty, a problem. All the empty spaces were filled, and within a few weeks I had a proper 'ensign of manhood about the face and neck', as someone once said. I could have applied for the job of ayatollah! "Well hello, Mr. Ein Sof," Ayelet hissed as we bumped into each other in the doorway of the bathroom one morning. "Isn't that a nice cosmos emanating out of your fucking face." 

Ayelet's mockery gave me an idea. As long as I was starting to look like a Kelpie, I thought, maybe I should take a little trip down to Wissahickon and see what I can find. In any case I had been placed on unpaid leave, and was being investigated by a disciplinary committee for fabrication of research evidence (the Brotherhood has friends in high places). Ayelet was treating me like a stranger. I figured I had nothing to lose. 

There followed a series of lengthy phone conversations with little Gunther, who explained everything I would need to know in order not to be found out. "Don't walk with your hands in your front pockets," he explained, for example. "Unless you want to have clumps of grass thrown at you by a bunch of guys shouting 'Onan!' 'Onan!'." Also: "If anyone asks you if you want a sip of their Red Bull, which they only drink out of straws, you have to say yes. It's considered impolite to use your own straw, but some people do it anyway." And: "Whenever anyone mentions the name of the great Johannes Kelpius, you have to pause, look toward the Schuylkill, and say, 'Quod erat demonstrandum'." That doesn't make any sense, I interrupted. Saying someone's name doesn't prove anything. "Don't ask," Gunther replied. 

I set out to Wissahickon by Greyhound, passing through Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and many other places that until then had been just names for me. While changing buses in Allentown the teenager at the snack bar handed back my change with a 'Happy travels, grampa', which ordinarily would have infuriated me, but under the circumstances made me feel old and wise. I had a bit of grey showing in my long beard, and I knew I would blend right in once I arrived among the Kelpies.

Wissahickon looked like any private liberal-arts college with a hefty endowment: lots of green space, distinguished red-brick buildings in the Georgian style, a few mistaken modernist complexes inserted here and there. The Kelpius Library was one such mistake, but it was at least, to its credit, unusually large for a campus such as this. The library was by far the largest building at Wissahickon, an irridescent flash-cube tower dwarfing the little brick schoolhouses around it. In front was a sort of cubist statue of Johannes Kelpius himself, holding his own head in his hands, a beaming smile on his face, with some sort of glistening silver garlands coming out of his mouth. 

I was nervous, and naturally worried I'd be turned away at the door, as I lacked a campus ID, indeed any plausible explanation of what I was doing there. But I kept little Gunther's advice in mind: always reply to salutations by simply echoing back the same words. The library was guarded by a beardless man wearing a jumpsuit, who hailed me with a loud, friendly 'Q.E.D.!' as I entered. Now this made no sense at all, as nothing had even been said, but I remembered Gunther's words and answered, 'Q.E.D.!' I passed through the turnstile without incident. 

Do you know how in some restrooms the spaces between the tiles are filled with grout-themed graffiti? Like, little plays on words about 'The Grout Gatsby' or 'The Grout Wall of China'? ('Groutfiti', I think it's called.) Well you can imagine my surprise when, staring at the cracks between the tiles in the bathroom of the Kelpius Library, I noticed that some Wissahickon smart-asses had filled them with nâk jokes, about seeing a red door and wanting it painted nâk, or about how white folks live in fear of a nâk planet. One clever nâk-fitist had even made oblique reference to the band responsable for the 1979 hit, 'My Sharona' (The Knack). 

I didn't make much of all this; bathroom walls are there to be written on, after all. And I had work to do: having formulated a precise reconnaissance mission during my conversations with Gunther, I had determined there were two things in particular I could learn there in the stacks. The first was to finally have a look at Klopp's book on Kant's voyage around Eurasia, which up until then I had only seen mentioned in one other place: Erkki Künnapu's History of the Printing Press in Estonia (Toronto, 2004). The Kelpies had eliminated all circulating copies of the work, but they could not possibly purge all bibliographical references.

They had, sure enough, just as Gunther promised, kept a copy for themselves at Wissahickon, right there with all the other Kant books, under that beautiful B2798 Library-of-Congress number I had come to know so well in grad school. It was everything I'd imagined it would be: an exhaustive, rigorously documented account of Kant's day-to-day doings over the entire five-year period of his voyage: the supplies he bought in Yokohama, the illness he contracted in Ceylon, the Indian he met in Surat who wondered how they get so much foam into beer bottles. It was all there! I photographed all 1200 pages with my iPhone, the whole time beaming with a feeling of elation I suspect only researchers can know. 

My next task was to move to the rare-books room to request to see what I believe is the only extant copy of the 1686 edition of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata. There, too, I met a beardless man in a jumpsuit, who greeted me with a hearty 'Q.E.D.!' And there, again, I answered in the same manner, and was waved in. I was made to deposit all my possessions in a locker, and was given a pair of gloves, but there was no more scrutiny or suspicion here than in any other rare-books collection I've visited anywhere in the world. I even managed to slip my iPhone into my front pocket and to pass into the reading room, with my hidden camera, undetected. 

I spent a good 4 hours with that book, poring through it for the slightest clue that might help to explain the peculiar Kelpian interpretation of the true meaning of nâk. I found nothing. Or, rather, I found almost nothing, yet way too much. Two of the pages of the book were thoroughly stuck together, the way I recall books checked out of the public library being, after some careless disgusting kid before me had eaten his apple sauce or wiped his nose while reading Shel Silverstein, say, and then closed the cover and thoughtlessly returned it. I pried the pages of the Kabbala apart, and to my revulsion I found that they had been sealed together by some unidentifiable gunk, some excretion or waste matter of human or animal, God only knows. And next to the horrible stain, a stain so revolting I could barely stand to look at it, someone, God only knows when or why, had written (you guessed it): NÂK! 

Was this whole thing a huge fucking joke? What the hell do the Kelpies think they're guarding there? Is the stain in the book supposed to be the secret name of God? Or was this just more graffiti? I had no answers, but nor, from the very second I pried those pages apart, did I any longer have a desire for answers. I snapped a quick photo, removed my gloves, and headed as fast as I possibly could back to the Wissahickon bus station. 

Ayelet, whose beauty had easily adapted itself to her new pixie cut, went back to Israel around the time I was slowly slinking home, via Pennsylvania, to California. This was of course before Damascus happened and there was as yet no radiation-zone map you had to check before making travel plans. Last I saw it had moved north pretty much all across Anatolia and up as far as Skopje and Tiranë. (Do you remember in like 1996 at Columbia when we were wondering whether there would be a nuclear attack within our lifetimes? You said yes and I said no. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyhow one of us was wrong.) Ayelet survived, I know that much. I saw on Donky that she went to Sochi with some guy, whom I of course picture as a beefy mafioso in one of those shiny track suits-- the Russians call them 'sportive costumes'. I noticed on Puckr they had kids (alright, I admit it: I even used an illegal Puckr Portal to get into her private feed). Am I jealous? Yes, but I wish them the best. I hope they didn't turn out like those kids in the orphanage in Oman with the polydactyly and the greenish-blonde hair (did you see them on that PBS infomercial for the new thyroid drug? Again: holy shit!)

I figure there's about a 50% chance by now that you believe all of this, and a 50% chance you're thinking: OMG, my old friend has completely lost it. You could well be thinking I sound like some goddamn birther-truther-Sandy-Hooker-CNN-reptilian type. But I only know what I know. I hate turning into a conspiracy theorist more than anyone. I especially hate that my particular tale involves Kabbalah, the secret name of God, etc., etc. As if I were a fan of that awful serial fiction the community-college kids read-- do you remember, that pulp about the Illuminati that the boys who are always speaking up in their philosophy classes like, the ones who are constantly invoking Schrödinger's Cat and 'quantum effects' even when these plainly have nothing to do with anything? But I'm not a community-college student. I'm a professor. Anyway I used to be a professor back before, well, you know the story. Like I said, it's an open wound. 

The world is a different place now. The uninhabitable part of it grows bigger every day, and the survivors have mostly just retreated behind their goggles to watch meta-porn and hyper-cat loops. I don't know why it should matter anymore who went where in the 18th century, and the truth is I don't even really see why it's so important to know the real name of God, let alone to guard it like some precious secret. To keep it secret only in order to make a big obscene joke out of it with the other secret-keepers: that really is too much. Again, I've kind of lost hope. But it's at least a small consolation to know that there's still such a thing as friendship.

Ever your,

J*****

Carmichael, California

11 March, 2018

--

Note: No rare books were damaged in the making of this story. Everything else, however, is entirely true.

George Saunders, Tenth of December

I've carried around with me for the past few years this idea that George Saunders discovered a new method for exploring the human soul at hitherto unimagined depths, that he was the culmination of what Nietzsche had in mind when he called Stendhal 'a great psychologist', etc. This is in part why I put up so much resistance when, reading Tenth of December last night, I felt a certain familiar feeling, and sensed that this feeling was not the one I had when I last read Saunders, and judged that he was plumbing the depths of the human soul, etc., but rather the one that I have had, on occasion, when, passing through one of those American cities where they still have local newspapers with 'funny pages', my eyes land upon that day's installment of Dilbert. Office memos from small-minded middle managers, meaningless tech speak, and the grinding debasement of wage labor: ha ha. 

But still, Saunders has discovered something new, and while this something is not a new method for excavating the human soul, quite, it is enough to merit quick praise from Thomas Pynchon, and long-winded, dorky praise from Dave Eggers. Saunders has discovered namely a system of punctuation that reproduces contemporary American diction and cadences with astounding accuracy. And this diction and these cadences are precisely the manner of speaking of people, contemporary Americans, who can barely speak: Saunders's most stunning literary achievement is to reproduce inarticulacy with unprecedented verisimilitude.

This is why the stories involving pharmaceutically induced eloquence are so funny: they put into such sharp relief what his characters cannot do, and would like to do with the strength of their feelings alone. Strikingly, those with medically enhanced speech are still not terribly eloquent: he tells us that the temporary lovers under the influence of Verbaluce have become veritable poets, but we do not see much poetry; and the amusement-park employee under the influence of KnightLyfe starts speaking in a courtly and medieval style, but still does not know that 'didst' cannot be used as the third-person past indicative of 'do'. Saunders himself is more like the characters who are not under the influence of Verbaluce, and his principle purpose is to convey their inner lives, lives of mostly prelinguistic feeling that, when forced into written words --since, after all, Saunders has chosen to convey their inner lives by writing stories-- can only give rise to a new system of punctuation, custom-made for a fragmentary syntax. The characters can barely make sense of their own feelings in utterances, yet Saunders is able to make them make sense in writing. That's something. 

A few years ago, when I was floored by Saunders, and thought he had found new methods for probing the depths of the soul, etc., I think I was in fact just floored by his punctuational innovations, as these, when applied to questions of life and fate, seem to cast life and fate in a new and strange light. I recall in particular a story he published in the New Yorker, which involved, among other things, a man who was really not all that bad, but was going through a difficult time because he had a mortally ill wife at home under his loving care. He was explaining to another man what mattered to him, and evoked his care for his wife, saying:

That, to me? Is real. 

When I read this, it seemed to say something about reality itself. When by contrast I read, in "Puppy," the line,

So what she'd love for tonight? Was getting the pup sold...

it didn't seem to reveal anything about love or desire or even puppies, but only something about a handy convention Saunders mastered some years ago and knows how to recycle for good effect.

Saunders is an American writer in the same way that Chingiz Aitmatov is a Kyrgyz writer or Robert Service is a Yukon poet. He speaks for the place. He especially speaks for the lower-class white part of the place. And if, like me, that is a part of America you know well, but from which you have become estranged in later life, then it can be particularly gratifying to see Saunders describing it with such great power of observation. The encounters in "Puppy" and in "Home", between the benighted, marginalized lower classes, on the one hand, and the equally benighted, but vastly more self-satisfied, so-called 'middle class' on the other, seem to tell the whole story of America, and a good part of my own life history in America. When the middle-class mom goes to pick up the puppy from the white-trash family, and sees "the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it," I swear I have known both sides of this encounter with equal intimacy, and love, and desire to get away.  

Certain other respects in which his stories are All-American, as one of his characters might say, interest me less. I don't know about Dilbert's America, and so satire of it falls as flat with me as earnest commitment to it. If we try to isolate particular complaints in Saunders's social critique, the two that come through most clearly have to do with the negligence of war veterans, and the cynical profit motive that lies behind the hypermedicalization of our emotional lives. I find the latter more compelling as an issue, and I think "Escape from Spiderhead" is a wonderful near-future-dystopian satire of the sort of society big pharma seems intent on bringing about (with the collusion of the profit-driven prison industry).

The dénouement of "Escape" looks a great deal like the story from the New Yorker that impressed me so much years ago, featuring a freshly dead man floating up toward the sky. Again, when I read that story I thought I was learning something new about death; this time, the effect is considerably reduced. I'm not sure what has changed in me, but I think at least part of the problem is that something has not changed in Saunders. He's found his formula and stuck with it. It's pretty good. But anyhow now that I've spent my $31.95 CAD and got my fix, I intend to return to my usual rule of not reading anything written after 1923, and sticking with the sort of authors who use 'didst' correctly because, when they're using it? They're using it for real. 

Immanuel Kant and his Man-Servant Lampe

I've been reading Thomas de Quincey's 1827 essay, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which is really little more than a massively long quotation, in English translation, of Ehregott Andreas Wasianski's 1804 work, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. In fact, Wasianski's entire work is cited, after a few paragraphs of framing from de Quincey, and with a few additional footnotes here and there. I am not really certain why this work is attributed to the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater at all. De Quincey is at most the editor. 

Wasianski had been Kant's friend of long standing, and the account he gives of the philosopher's life, and his ultimate decline, is precious. It is, I suppose, the source of many of the legends we hear about Kant the personality, as that he took a regular constitutional stroll at the same time every day. But many of the details offered by Wasianski never attained to the status of legend. This for example:

Kant never perspired, night or day. Yet it was astonishing how much heat he supported habitually in his study, and in fact was not easy if it wanted but one degree of this heat. Seventy-five degrees of Fahrenheit was the invariable temperature of this room in which he chiefly lived; and if it fell below that point, no matter at what season of the year, he had it raised artificially to the usual standard. In the heats of summer he went thinly dressed, and invariably in silk stockings; yet, as even this dress could not always secure him against perspiring when engaged in active exercise, he had a singular remedy in reserve. Retiring to some shady place, he stood still and motionless--with the air and attitude of a person listening, or in suspense-- until his usual aridity was restored. Even in the most sultry summer night, if the slightest trace of perspiration had sullied his night-dress, he spoke of it with emphasis, as of an accident that perfectly shocked him.

The most delightful scenes of Wasianski's work describe Kant's relationship with his manservant Martin Lampe (delightful to me anyway, who am perhaps overly fascinated by this particular sort of interpersonal relationship, enough so to have invented one from my very imagination. Kant's relationship to Lampe is different from that of Dr. Smith to Isaac --Isaac is smart but subversive, while Lampe is dumb and loyal--, but both strike me similarly as both unhealthy and singularly touching, and in these respects as very much like marriage). 

Here is how Wasianski first introduces Lampe:

Precisely at five minutes before five o'clock, winter or summer, Lampe, Kant's servant, who had formerly served in the army, marched into his master's room with the air of a sentinel on duty, and cried aloud in a military tone, -- 'Mr. Professor, the time is come.'

Wasianski pauses to describe the relationship between the two in some detail. He considers it important to do so, since Kant and Lampe had a falling out two years before the philosopher's death. The nature of the dispute is not entirely clear from what Wasianski is willing to report of it, but it leads to the servant's dismissal, in 1802, and inaugurates the period of Kant's decline and eventual death two years later: 

It was a great misfortune for Kant, in his old age and infirmities, that this man also became old, and subject to a different sort of infirmities. This Lampe had originally served in the Prussian army; on quitting which he entered the service of Kant. In this situation he had lived about forty years; and, though always dull and stupid, had, in the early part of this period, discharged his duties with tolerable fidelity. But latterly, presuming upon his own indispensableness, from his perfect knowledge of all the domestic arrangements, and upon his master's weakness, he had fallen into great irregularities and neglect of his duties. Kant had been obliged, therefore, of late, to threaten repeatedly that he would discharge him. I, who knew that Kant, though one of the kindest-hearted men, was also one of the firmest, foresaw that this discharge, once given, would be irrevocable: for the word of Kant was as sacred as other men's oaths. Consequently, upon every opportunity, I remonstrated with Lampe on the folly of his conduct, and his wife joined me on these occasions. Indeed, it was high time that a change should be made in some quarter; for it now became dangerous to leave Kant, who was constantly falling from weakness, to the care of an old ruffian, who was himself apt to fall from intoxication. The fact was, that from the moment I undertook the management of Kant's affairs, Lampe saw there was an end to his old system of abusing his master's confidence in pecuniary affairs, and the other advantages which he took of his helpless situation. This made him desperate, and he behaved worse and worse; until one morning, in January, 1802, Kant told me, that, humiliating as he felt such a confession, the fact was, that Lampe had just treated him in a way which he was ashamed to repeat.

We know that, in spite of the falling out, Kant felt obliged to include Lampe in his will, and as a result the former servant received a comfortable pension beginning the year Kant died. 

Elsewhere in his éloge, Wasianski describes the routines of the philosopher and his servant in comic detail, the one comically haughty and exigent, the other comically dim-witted and devoted:

For the space of more than thirty years, during which he had been in the habit of reading the newspaper published by Hartung, Lampe delivered it with the same identical blunder on every day of publication. -- 'Mr. Professor, here is Hartmann's journal.' Upon which Kant would reply -- 'Eh! what?-- What's that you say? Hartmann's journal? I tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me-- not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of -- Who goes there? would roar- - 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: on which again Lampe roared -- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now a third time,' cried Kant: on which for a third time the unhappy Lampe would howl out-- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' And this whimsical scene of parade duty was continually repeated: duly as the day of publication came, the irreclaimable old dunce was put through the same manoeuvres, which were as invariably followed by the same blunder on the next.

Towards the end of their decades together, Kant grew more irrascible, but Lampe continued to do what he could to placate him. And so, more comedy:

the expressions of his impatience, though from old habit still gentle, were so lively, and had so much of infantine naivete about them, that none of us could forbear smiling. Knowing what would happen, I had taken care that all the preparations should be made beforehand; the coffee was ground; the water was boiling; and the very moment the word was given, his servant shot in like an arrow, and plunged the coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to Kant. All consolations were thrown away upon him: vary the formula as we might, he was never at a loss for a reply. If it was said -- 'Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought up in a moment.' Will be!' he would say, 'but there's the rub, that it only will be: Man never is, but always to be blest.'

The most touching part of the essay comes when Wasianski describes his own effort to help maintain the daily routines around the Kant residence after Lampe's dismissal:

One part only there was of the daily ceremonial, where all of us were at a loss, as it was a part which no mortal eyes had ever witnessed but those of Lampe: this was breakfast. However, that we might do all in our power, I myself attended at four o'clock in the morning. The day happened, as I remember, to be the 1st of February, 1802. Precisely at five, Kant made his appearance; and nothing could equal his astonishment on finding me in the room. Fresh from the confusion of dreaming, and bewildered alike by the sight of his new servant, by Lampe's absence, and by my presence, he could with difficulty be made to comprehend the purpose of my visit. A friend in need is a friend indeed; and we would now have given any money to that learned person who could have instructed us in the arrangement of the breakfast table. But this was a mystery revealed to none but Lampe. 

Wasianski concludes his treatment of Lampe by mentioning "an affecting instance of Kant's yearning after his old good-for-nothing servant in his memorandum-book":

Other people record what they wish to remember; but Kant had here recorded what he was to forget. 'Mem.: February, 1802, the name of Lampe must now be remembered no more.'

Lampe is gone, and Kant will mention him no more. He is in decline, and more irrascible than before. He is an old, dying man, but one who can still be made to perk up, like most old men, by a good friend who knows how to coax out his old passions. In Kant's case, significantly, these are not, at the very brink of death, the deep questions of metaphysics and epistemology, but rather the trivia of geography:

[W]hen he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless, -- even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear).

Within the week, Kant would be dead, and he would die as he lived --as the ancients believed great men do--, which in his case means that he would die without sweating:

About ten o'clock in the forenoon he suffered a remarkable change; his eye was rigid and his face and lips became discolored by a cadaverous pallor. Still, such was the effect of his previous habits, that no trace appeared of the cold sweat which naturally accompanies the last mortal agony... Soon after his death the head of Kant was shaved; and, under the direction of Professor Knorr, a plaster cast was taken, not a masque merely, but a cast of the whole head, designed (I believe) to enrich the craniological collection of Dr. Gall. 

I also wanted to get, in this post, to the question that comes down to us from the ancients: why, namely, should we take an interest in the manners of the deaths of the philosophers? Of course today we suppose that we should not take an interest, that to do so is to do bad philosophy, or to lapse into mere 'philosophical biography' or 'philosophical journalism'. But from Diogenes Laërtius's point of view anyway, philosophical biography, the genre of the bios, was philosophy par excellence. To know a philosopher's views fully, and to grasp how successfully they were implemented, one had to wait to see how he died. This was a corollary to the adage that no man must be called happy until he dies, which held that a man's wisdom too can only be adequately judged post-mortem. Sometimes, of course, the manner of approaching death does indeed show something about character, and character may well be grounded in philosophical commitments. Yet death strikes in many ways, most of which signify nothing. And in any case Kant's not sweating at the time of death does not seem to reveal any more about his philosophy than Kant's not sweating during life.

Yet, contrary to what we usually suppose, Diogenes Laërtius's project died out much later than we tend to think. Leibniz's amanuensis Eckhart gives us a stunning account of his master's demise from gout in 1714, while Wasianski, seeing that his friend did not end his days with a servant up to the task, took it upon himself to document the medical condition of his equal. His presumption seems to have been that this work must be written, simply in view of who Kant had been in life, and in view of the greatness of his thought.

Wasianski included details about interpersonal relations that are missing in Eckhart's account of Leibniz, and in Diogenes Laërtius's summaries of sundry philosophical luminaries in antiquity. He thought it fitting to devote much of this short biography to the relationship between the philosopher and the manservant. Perhaps apart from his relationship to Wasianski himself, which remains surprisingly opaque in Wasianski's account, the relationship Kant had with Lampe appears to be the most significant and interesting one in his entire life, the one that tells us, much more than the manner of his death, who Kant was. 

Race and the Enlightenment: Some Replies to Critics

My piece in the New York Times Stone series on February 10 received an unusally large volume of responses, both in the comments section there as well as in the form of e-mails to me and posts on a number of blogs. Many commenters were generally supportive of my line of analysis, and many also raised legitimate points of criticism. Many others still raised illegitimate points of criticism. Let's get to those first.

Roughly 10% of the comments I received came from bona fide racists. Perhaps I should pause at this point to define my terms. By 'racist' I mean someone who (i) believes that racial categories map onto real, biologically significant subdivisions of the human species; and (ii) that these various subdivisions are characterized by greater and lesser physical and cognitive abilities, and/or by different temperamental or emotional profiles. Many of the racists who wrote to me cited genetic studies (e.g., this) that show, in one way or another, that traits do indeed cluster in populations. By a curious coincidence, within just a few days of my piece, Nicholas Wade --who has also appeared recently with a sympathetic appraisal of Napoleon Chagnon's Hobbesian éloge to the Yanomamö-- published an article in the Times trumpeting the great antiquity of the mutations that led to what are held to be typically East Asian traits. This article was in turn cited by many commenters as the scientific proof that 'race deniers' do not know what they are talking about. 

But I never denied that traits cluster in populations. There is a very simple, logical point that always seems to get shot to hell by the people who are poised and ready to fire back against 'race deniers' like me with the supposedly heavy artillery of genetic research. That simple point is that people who use such scientific research as a way of strengthening their case for the reality of race are begging the question. And I mean this not in the incorrect sense in which we now often hear this phrase from Republican politicians and from know-nothing advertising campaigns. I mean it in the sense of petitioning the principle: they are assuming at the outset the reality of the very thing they're supposed to be trying to prove. Yes, traits cluster in populations, but it is only if you have already presupposed that the human species breaks down into real subdivisions that you will subsume new information about such clustering into a racial schema. Otherwise, what you will notice are all the salient respects in which the population that is the locus of such clustering does not amount to a discrete kind. For one thing, it is entirely permeable at its boundaries, and thus has nothing in common with the isolated reproductive communities that constitute biological species on analogy to which races are, consciously or unconsciously, modeled. For another, trait clusters tend to be noticed in populations that were already of interest to us as purported races for initially non-scientific reasons. Take the example of the new discoveries about 'East Asians'. We assumed at the outset that there were such people, constituting a real subdivision of the human species, and then we went in search of their distinctive features. Lo, we found some in the sweat glands, hair follicles, and breast size of females. But would we find the same traits clustering in, say, Tungusic peoples, or the Chukchi? They are East Asian too, after all, Eastern Siberian, to be precise, and it is a contingent fact about human history that they are outnumbered by, say, Han Chinese. If we sample all of the peoples of the world, rather than the ones that are salient to us on pre-scientific cultural and historical grounds, we will notice that our conception of where the racial boundaries lie is rooted in our pre-scientific interests, and only subsequently filled out, as best it can be, by new genetic research.

This is particularly evident in the local US context, in which genetic and medical information about African-Americans becomes naturalized and universalized in such a way as to purportedly tell us something about a significanct subdivision of the entire human species, one that was formerly called 'Negroid'. But of course such information tells us nothing of the sort: it is useful for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes for doctors in the US to know that someone is 'black', but this in no way implies that the same information about a person in the Kalahari, Ethiopia, or even (depending on the culture and period of history you inhabit) New Guinea or Australia could be used in the same way. The information is of strictly local interest, and yet it calls upon a global system for subdividing the human species, one that places Khoi-San, Ethiopians, and African-Americans, at least, in the same quasi-natural kind. 

And this point needs to be emphasized in order for non-racists to have at their disposal the simple and obvious, but too-often neglected, response to the racists who invoke supposedly scientific evidence concerning the superior performance of black athletes in track events, or the inferior performance of black students on standardized tests. It is seriously unlikely that a mass-scale standardized test of everyone who is placed for historical and non-scientific reasons in the folk category 'black' could ever be carried out in a sufficiently rigorous way to warrant a conclusion of the sort: "'Blacks' perform worse on standardized tests than 'whites'." Again, what this would involve is devising a test that could be given to Namibians, Ethiopians, Haitians, etc., and whose results could then be compared with those of the same test as given to Norwegians, Circassians, Scotch-Irish West Virginians (who counts as 'white' in a given era, and why, is no less perplexing than who counts as 'black'). This will never happen, but that doesn't matter to the racists, because anyway what they really mean when they invoke such tests to ground claims of racial difference is that here, in our local context, there is such a difference. But race is supposed to be global, natural, a result of evolution, etc., while local differences are obviously only the result of civil history and culture. And this is the great inconsistency of the pseudo-scientific concept of race: that it is reaching too far too fast, invoking a global natural order to which claims about local 'racial' difference never accurately apply, and failing to notice that the local differences admit of a much more parsimonious explanation than the one that has to move all the way down to the level of biology.

There is a connected point to be made about evidence from history. Many racist commenters echoed David Hume in their suspicion that the accomplishments of non-white people have been exaggerated for the sake of 'political corectness'. Thus the racist Joel Eidsath sends, for example, this sarcastic dismissal of the legacy of Anton Wilhelm Amo:

Your contribution to the rather burgeoning field of "race does not exist" articles is much appreciated. The "there was once an African of decent intelligence" sub-category of these sorts of tracts can always use another entry! [Sub-sub-category, reference to the "black" St. Augustine.]

Nevermind, now, that my point was not principally to trumpet Amo's contribution to philosophy, so much as to observe the way his work was received by his contemporaries. Eidsath's main concern here is that anti-racists are looking a bit too frantically for historical evidence of the sort that would refute Hume's comment. But if you are skeptical of the Black Athena thesis in its particulars, there is still no avoiding a general corollary of it, that in order for a group to be perceived as substandard or as high-performing relative to another group, it must already be conceptualized as a group, and there is no good historical evidence that in the ancient world there were any categories that even loosely mapped onto our own 'black' and 'white' (and even these differ from region to region when taken synchronically). And if you wish to dispute that, then it might be helpful to move away from our own local concern about black and white, where our emotions are perhaps clouding our judgment, and consider a case of perceived racial differences that lies entirely off of our own historical and geographical radar (and by 'our' I mean 'most readers'). Anyone who has an intimate experience of the treatment of the Dalits in India can affirm that they are in a position very similar in structural respects to that of African-Americans. There are plenty of non-Dalit Indians who will tell you that, as history and statistics and good common-sense show, Dalits are plainly temperamentally different, more prone to criminal behavior, etc. In other words, Dalits are being conceptualized racially by the people who are discriminating against them, even if from a distance, for people who don't know anything about India, there is no perception of any racial difference at all.

One commenter wrote to tell me that my mention of the case of the Tutsi and Hutu weakened my argument, since in the Rwandan context these two groups perceive one another in racial terms. But what supposedly weakened my argument in fact did the opposite, since one of my principal points was precisely that race is the naturalization, or projection into the biological sphere, of what is in fact only a matter of local history: a history that might involve two groups in which genetic traits cluster differently, but can also involve two groups in which the supposedly essential or 'racial' differences are entirely invisible. So, to get back to Amo and Augustine, even if it were to turn out that no one we would consider 'black' ever made a significant contribution to the human endeavors that have historically been valued in Europe, this would still not enable the racist to get around the problem that who is considered racially distinct from whom --who is considered Dalit or non-Dalit for example, or who is considered black or white-- is always a local, contingent, and unstable affair.

While many racist commenters wrote to express their disapproval of my insufficiently racist position, another significant portion of commenters judged that my position is in fact racist. Most of these commenters judged that I misunderstand the American situation, and some supposed that this is because I am not myself American-- I am, though I have lived outside of the country for a decade. Sometimes it seems to me that being an American looking at my country from a distance frees me up to think and express views that are rather harder to arrive at from within the belly of the beast. It also becomes easier, I think, to examine American history comparatively, to resist the belief that that country has a Sonderweg that sets it apart, and to look at things like the history of race relations in a way that places this history alongside comparable --while, obviously, non-identical-- histories elsewhere in the world.

I believe that slavery and its aftermath constitute the defining legacy in the formation of the American identity, and I also believe that much of the difficulty of talking about and understanding 'race' in the US is a side-effect of a largely praiseworthy attempt to heal this trauma. To some extent since the end of the Civil War, but more importantly since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, there has been an effort to overcome ethnic divisions in the US by construing all Americans as Americans simpliciter, and to some extent denying that descendants of slaves on the one hand and immigrant European beneficiaries of white privilege on the other constitute distinct cultural groups at all. (The denial is not as severe as, say, the denial of cultural distinctness in the modern Turkish republic, which has lead to the denial of the very existence of Kurds, now conveniently redescribed as 'Mountain Turks'; in the US case, a certain amount of cultural difference is allowed to flourish in traditions of cuisine, music, etc., as long as it flourishes way below the threshold at which it might threaten the unity of the nation-state). But social reality forces us to acknowledge cultural difference in some way or other, even if the political legacy of integration forbids us from talking about it as cultural difference. And so we are left in a peculiar situation, in which it can easily appear more racist to speak of two cultures and no races, than to speak of one culture in which any lingering perception of difference is to be explained by appeal to the supposed fact that this one culture is made up out of two races. In other words, we've chased difference out of the political and cultural dimension, and it didn't have anywhere else to go but down to the biological dimension. Where, I repeat, it plainly does not belong. 

In this respect, at least, the US really does have a Sonderweg. I cannot think of any other multicultural society that has dealt with its internal differences in a similar way. This imperfect response to the legacy of slavery is, I would also add, itself a part of the legacy of slavery: the fact that 'race' suggests itself as a category for the interpretation of cultural difference is a result of the fact that we inherited this category from a system that found it useful for the preservation and enforcement of structural racism. 

One final note about cultural difference: Americans are to some extent justified in disputing the claim that there are 'two cultures' constituting their society, since obviously there are very many more than that. African slaves came from many cultures, and so did European immigrants (and, later, immigrants from elsewhere). But by force or by elective affinity, everyone who arrived was filtered into the one or the other (or became stalled as a problem case, a tertium quid, as, for a time, the Irish, Jews, and, more recently, Latinos). As many scholars have noted, ethnogenesis is almost always a matter of an initial political union. For example, in his monumental History of the Goths, Herwig Wolfram shows convincingly that the ancient Germanic people originally came into being as a result of elective tribal confederation. In other words, Germans are creoles too. All cultures, in their origins, are creole, and it is in no way to deny the distinctness of pre-modern African cultures to concede that, once brought here by force and compelled to adapt to new circumstances, over the centuries a distinctive African-American culture emerged. There is such a thing, like all cultures a loose, permeable cluster of family resemblances, and we don't need to drop down to the level of 'race' in order to make sense of it. History will do just fine.

The most interesting and formidable criticism of my article (particularly as formulated by Kenan Malik, drawing on his own earlier work on the subject) had to do with what was initially a throw-away claim in the article, about the contrast between Johann Gottfried Herder and the majority of his contemporaries. This claim then came to frame the entire article when the editors chose a title for the piece that made reference to the Enlightenment. (Why don't authors get to choose their own titles in the newspaper business? Where did this practice originate? Why don't more authors protest against it?) But my principal aim had never been to defend the counter-Enlightenment against the Enlightenment, and I am certainly aware, as was pointed out by a number of critics, that at the center of the Enlightenment there were many thinkers, notably Condorcet, who mounted laudable defenses of racial equality, fought for abolition, and so on. What's more, it is certainly fair to see the Haitian Revolution of 1802 as an inevitable extension of the revolutionary spirit that had first been sparked in Europe largely by Enlightenment thinkers' promotion of liberty, equality, and so on. Many, not just Toussaint-L'Ouverture but also a number of European sympathizers, did in fact suppose that the only legitimate place for the boundaries of equality to be drawn were around the entirety of the human race, rather than around a mere part of the human race deemed in advance to be, as the saying goes, more equal than others.

But still, but still, if we are to attempt to spell out some precise commitments that we may properly identify with that nebulous notion of 'the Enlightenment', it seems to me that at the core of this movement, or Zeitgeist, or whatever you might wish to call it, is the idea that history is progressive, and that Europe is, as of the middle of the 18th century, further along in the course of progress than the rest of the world. For their own good, Enlightenment thinkers supposed with near unanimity, non-European peoples must be brought into the fold of European history in order to be able to ride the wave, so to speak, of historical progress. This is abundantly clear in Kant, who supposed that the lives of South Sea islanders, to the extent that they are spent outside of the fold of history, are literally not worth living. And it continues to echo loudly in Marx, who maintained that the British installation of industrial looms in Bengal might have increased the misery of Bengali weavers, for the time being, but at least it did them the service of moving them into a historical position from which their lives could begin to improve. 

On this understanding, there simply is no room for indigenous voices at all, and I do not know of a single thinker centrally associated with the Enlightenment, including even Condorcet, who is able or willing to make room for such voices, to acknowledge that a life entirely outside of the grand unfolding of historical progress initiated by European civilization might nonetheless be worth living. I see the readiness to notice the intrinsic interest and value of sub-historical or extra-historical folk-ways as characteristic of a form of thinking that was from the outset self-consciously poised against the Enlightenement. I see Herder as one of the exemplary figures in this history (though I see interesting anticipations of it already in Leibniz), and I see it as echoing through the much later work of Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston, and many, many others. This is in no way to deny the laudable strains of progressivism in the Enlightenment, but it is to question whether progressivism, or the belief that the human good always consists in progress, is the exclusively laudable approach to the problems human diversity poses. 

A Discourse upon Tartar

As recently reported by the BBC, in August, 2011, a significant trove of documents from the first years of the Regal Society of London were found in the attic of a boarding house in Dover. The landlady, 73-year-old Mary Cruce, came into a windfall of almost 800,000 GBP when the papers were auctioned at Sothebys in March, 2012. Among the most surprising discoveries were a handful of verbatim transcripts of presentations on scientific topics given by individual members to the rest of the society. The practice of transcribing oral communication in such detail is otherwise unknown in early modern Europe. The presentation below, delivered by Dr. J. Smith to the Regal Society on June 24, 1686, provides a vivid example of the mundane interactions that took place within this key scientific institution, and confirms beyond any doubt the significance of Ms. Cruce's Discovery.

*

Dr. Smith: Isaac... Isaac!  Get o'er here, you Block-Head. What's that woman doing there? There, next to my Desk?

Isaac: You don’t recall, Sir? 'Tis Mrs. Eulalia Tubbs, from Humane Resources. She is come to ensure you employ the lessons lately taught to you in your Sensitivity Work-Shoppe.

Dr. Smith: My person! You mean, no mention of Half-Wits, Changelings, nor e'en the cul-de-jatte paraded before the Members of our Society February last? You recall, the fellow with-out Arms nor Legges, who roll'd about upon a wheel'd cart?

Isaac: You may mention 'em, Sir. You simply mustn't relish the Mentioning of 'em.  

Dr. Smith: Well how can they prohibit that, dear Isaac? I cannot help it if I take delight in my Labours, yea, and in the Advancement of Science. No matter, Isaac. Let us get down to to-day's business. To wit: A Discourse upon Opticks.

Isaac: I believe you are to present upon Tartar today, Sir.

Dr. Smith: Tartar, is it? Very well then. Tartar. A Discourse upon Tartar. 

[Clears throat.]

Gentle-Men, esteem'd Members of the Society, As is well-known, the Word, Tartar, stems from the Greeke name for Hell, which is Tartaros. The Land of Tartary is so-call’d because the Savages coming therefrom are like unto so many Demons out of Hell. E’en at a great remove they reek of Sulphur and fetid Flesh. They are squat, round-faced, and wear their Hair in a single Plait a-top their Heads, call’d natively a Iuk-Tak, which, being English’d, is a sort of Dread-Lock, yea, or Terrible-Clump, which falls to the side, o’er one of the Ears, and down to the very Waist. This Dreaded Lock is call’d lately a Polish Plait or Plica Polonica (Isaac, by the way, has inform'd me that these Words yield up many note-worthy Results in that ridiculous Search-Engine of his), as many fearsome Tartar Horsemen have lately descended upon Cracow and Vilna, and frighten’d the Christians in those parts with their infernal Odor, their craving for Horse-Blood, and most of all the fus’d Lock of Hair that falls from their Heads, that has over Time not only come together into one great Cord of Hair, but has even transform’d as ‘twere into an Organ of the Body itself, has become one with the Body, whose Blood doth now course through the very Dread-Lock as if this were but another Limb. ‘Tis said that if the Plait be sever’d from a Tartar’s Head, he will die from loss of Blood within the Hour.

Tartary lieth beyond Muscovy, and thus, we may infer, is a Land even fouler, inhabited by Men to whom the Muscovites be regular Gentle-Men by comparison. A Circassian General, whose Name escapeth me for the moment, hath truly said: Scrape a Muscovite, and you will find a Tartar under-neath, by which he intended, that Muscovy be a sort of Buffer ‘twixt the civiliz’d World and the savage, and that as a result the inhabitants there have over Time become what are call’d Mestizo’s or Mongrels… May I say that, Mrs. Tubbs?

Now don’t look so sour, Ma’am. Perhaps I’ve all-together misunderstood the Circassian’s Meaning. For another Theory has it that what was meant was this: When you scrape a Muscovite’s Teeth, you will find yourself with a great quantity of Tartar. Now this dental residue is so-call’d in view of its Likeness unto the Crystals, discover’d anciently in the Alchemick Furnace of the great Geber. These Crystals form in the making of Wine, which the Germans call Wein-Stein and which, when render’d into a Cream, call’d crème de Tartare, is used by Confectioners for the making of sundry Sweets.

It is said that these Crystals of Tartaric acid are lick’d by the savages of Tartary on their long voyages, as the brute Beasts that accompany them might lick upon a Brick of Salt. Some conjecture that it induces in them the wildest Phancies, yea, and Delusions, which only goad them on in their evil Ransackings of Christian towns and Hamlets, causing them to believe that they are become Bears, Wolves, or e’en the very Demons of Tartaros themselves!

Now this Tartar of the Teeth, thus call’d for reasons allready given, may be eliminated by use of a strong Dentifrice. The Saxon courtier Godfrey William von Liebnitz recommends a powder of ground Glossopetrae, which are either Snake’s Tongues or Shark’s Teeth harden’d into Stone, depending upon whom thou believest. But this von Liebnitz is naught but a Charlatan, and whatsoever he hath writ in matters of Dental Hygiene is assuredly to be pay’d no Mind.

What is more certain is that this Tooth-Tartar, as it is call'd, when scrap'd from the Teeth, be used by the Tartars in many recipes and Dishes. From but a tiny Scraping they obtain a great Portion of Salsa tartarica, or what is commonly call'd Tartar Sauce, and is said to be particularly delectable when taken with breaded Fish. This was lately confirmed by the crew-members a-shipboard with Capitain L. J. Silver (himself a Tartar faring from Simferopol), who did consume great quantities of this Tartaric delicacy when voyaging through the Antilles. They ate it not just upon Fish, but also as an accompaniment to pommes-de-terre fried after the French manner, and smear'd upon a fabled maritime delicacy known as a tais-toi-chiot or Hush-Puppie, which be a sort of fried Fish, with-out the Fish.

But the most famous Tartarickal contribution to world cuisine are surely the dishes of Steak, Salmon, and Tunny serv'd up à la Tartare, by which 'tis understood that they are all quite cold and raw, and thus do fail to undergo that basic Transformation by Fire that separates the Food of Men from the Fodder of animals. 'Tis a great question of Natural Philosophy, whether the Gut of Man be naturally suited for the devouring of Flesh. Petrus Gassendus points to the length of the Gut, to argue that we are better outfitted for the Eating of Plants onely. Other Philosophers disagree, yet all concur that if Flesh is to be eaten by Men, then truely, that Flesh must first be cook'd. All concur, that is, but the Tartars and the French-Men. Indeed, in this Respect our Gallic Neighbours differ not at all from the Wild-Men of the Scythian Steppe, being no less Blood-Thirsty and desirous of raw Flesh to gnaw upon, as Wolves, or common Carrion-eaters. They will devour their own Horses quite raw just as happily as if they were eating boeuf (and lately, I am told, Horse-Meat from France has been discover'd on this very Island, hidden in that most English of Dishes, the congelated Lasagne-Pie).

I have lately returned from a visit to the Académie des Sciences of Paris --where I presented a most memorable Rendition of my Discourse upon Opticks-- and did see there for myself great Mounds of coeurs-de-vache or Cow's-Hearts for sale at the out-door Markets, along-side the greyish Curd of cerveaux d'agneau, and the massive black-red foies of unknown Beasts. A French-Man will happily devour all of these before you, raw and unprepar'd, and will look upon you with great Contempt, as a sort of Bump-Kin, if you do not go in with equal Zeal for this Tartarick Feast. Yea, ne'er was I so reliev'd to find myself back at the Old Hogs-Head, dining upon a fine Stew of Beef and Cabbage which, the Inn-Keeper assur'd me, had been a-cooking e'en before I set off across the Channel to Calais, yea, to the Land I should now like to call Tartaria Occidentalis.

Mrs. Tubbs: That will be quite enough, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Smith: What's that, then? Do you mean to tell me I mustn't speak ill e'en of the French? Can this be, Isaac? I mean, Heavens! Is nothing sacred?

Isaac: [whispering]: Mrs. Tubbs considers France to be a place of Romance, Sir. I have seen upon her writing Desk fram'd images of Men embracing Women beside the Seine, and a copy of the well-known Book, The French Tongue for Simpletons, Idiots, Cretins, and Half-Wits. I think she's planning a Trip there, Sir.

Dr. Smith [shouting]: Ridiculous! What business could that old Work-Cow have in France?

Mrs. Tubbs: This Discourse upon Tartar is now finish'd, Gentle-Men. Dr. Smith, you will be hearing from Humane Resources again, that much I can assure you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've a Skiff to catch. Isaac, my bags.

Dr. Smith: Isaac? What is this? Where are you going, Isaac? Isaac! 

--

To be continued...  

The Enlightenment's 'Race' Problem, and Ours

This is my latest in the New York Times Opinionator series, "The Stone." To read the whole thing, go here.

Kenan Malik has written a very interesting critical response, here. I intend to write a follow-up post soon in which I reply to some of Malik's criticism, and also to some of the many comments on the Times page. 

*

In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.

In the following decade, the Scottish philosopher David Hume would write: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”

Hume had not heard of Amo, that much is clear. But we can also detect a tremendous difference between Hume’s understanding of human capacities and that of Kraus: the author of Amo’s dedicatory letter doesn’t even consider the possibility of anchoring what individual human beings are capable of doing to something as arbitrary as “complection.” For Kraus, Amo represents a continent and its long and distinguished history; he does not represent a “race.”

Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy: describing a report of something seemingly intelligent that had once been said by an African, Kant dismisses it on the grounds that “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”

For the full essay, go here. 

For more resources on Anton Wilhelm Amo, go here.

Eefin and Hambone, Or, What Is Culture?

I mentioned recently that whenever I come back to the US (I'm writing from Chicago), I enjoy immersing myself in this country's rich cultural history. This, for example:

 

My friends imagined that I was joking, that I was being my usual haughty, hi-culture, Europhile self. How can I get the message across? No matter how often I attempt to explain this, no one believes me: I am essentially a lo-culture kind of guy. Or, rather, I deny the legitimacy of the distinction. I do not believe that there is anything more earnest in Ernstkultur than in Unterhaltung. I believe, quite the contrary, that culture bubbles up from the depths, and that its genius is equally distributed across all places and times. And I have no patience, either, for these incessant reminders that Brahms incorporated Slavonic folk dances into his music, or that Copland was influenced by jazz; to those who bring this up I can only reply: don't waste my time, then, but give me Slavonic folk dances, and give me jazz.

What gives the appearance of some monopoly on genius to the sort of cultural output that is housed in museums and Lincoln Plaza and so on is just this: that brainless one-percenters are spending huge amounts of money to put their names on these monuments, and the brainless bourgeoisie makes pilgrimages to them, spending medium sums of money to have a brush with cultural objects that supposedly edify by their simple proximity. The illusion that genius is stored up in sites of high culture is sustained by capital and by the laziness and gullibility of culture's consumers: all the season-ticket holders, all the dupes of the museums' advertising departments, for their part driven ever further, under the compulsion of capital, to make the Ottoman sultan's throne, or medieval armor, or Greco-Bactrian statuary, look like so many things to buy-- passing them off as a special class of objects, museum objects, that you can buy in a way just by going and standing in front of them. 

Now that that's out of the way, let's get back to Eefin and Hambone. I remarked to a friend (who, again, thought I was joking), that what we are witnessing here (and in general are always witnessing on Hee Haw, the show that perhaps more than any other shaped my earliest thoughts about what culture is and how it works) is a performance of musical virtuosity that unites feigned cretinism with real genius (i.e., not the kind that's only sustained by capital). This is also the marriage of two distinct musical traditions, with affinities to forms we find, among other places, in Arctic Canada, Haiti, and West Africa. 'Eefing' is an Appalachian tradition of rhythmic vocal grunts and plosions (of making various noises that sound like 'eef'), which some people have identified as a sort of Appalachian ancestor of beatboxing. Here, as so often, the chicken-or-egg debate about American cultural forms (where either the chicken or the egg is Euro-American culture, and the other is African-American) is unnecessarily repeated: eefing and beatboxing are two different and perhaps historically interwoven traditions of using the body as a rhythm instrument. In its performance, eefing comes across less like beatboxing than like Inuit vocal games, to my mind. Hambone, in turn, is an originally West African tradition, sometimes called 'Juba', which is well-attested throughout the Caribbean and the southern US, and is, like eefing, a percussive use of the body, though it is rather closer to drumming. Here, it is clear that we are looking at a musical form that is in the first instance African-American, or, perhaps better, African-diasporic. That it crosses over so easily and perfectly into the totally white world of Hee Haw shows, yet again, on what a narcissism of minor differences racial boundaries in the US are sustained.

What is particularly engaging about Eefin and Hambone (as opposed to eefing and hambone), is that there's a certain queerness to them, and I mean this word in both its old-fashioned and its newfangled senses: they are represented as doing something you're not supposed to be doing, and doing it, as of necessity, together. They are repeatedly caught by the enforcers of hillbilly normativity, and are chased away with a gruff kick in the pants. But it's clear that they are in the end accepted in the community, and that they'll be up to it again soon enough. But what is it that they're up to, exactly? They're doing something rhythmic, doing it together, with their bodies, something that is ecstatic and grotesque, that is constantly under threat of prohibition, and that they seem, in virtue of their peculiar shared nature, unable not to do. This gets to the heart of the genius of music, as far as I'm concerned.

My Faith: Some Clarifications (with Special Reference to Emerson)

I have declined, and continue to decline, to reply to many of the diverse points of criticism directed against my profession of faith, which I released into the world a month or so ago. I had thought it would be clear that there is a sort of writing that does not invite arguments in opposition, but simply says lo! behold! ecce!, and carries with it an implied Whitmanian ass-covering: "You say I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself!"

I admit it surprised me how many people seem to be unaware of even the existence of this sort of writing, let alone the august tradition behind it. Some critics seem to be operating with an extremely limited set of resources, supposing that the only legitmate end to which thought and expression might be put is in coming up with fine little chunks of reasoning that might be suitable for inclusion in an introductory textbook of critical thinking. God bless the young adepts who have discovered logic, and put great hopes in it. But what a great portion of history's most sublime and rapturous writing will remain off-limits to them!

I admit, also, that I was surprised at how many people, believers and non-believers alike, were entirely unfamiliar with the tradition of thinking about God as something other than an entity, to be placed on the list of other candidate entities right alongside dolomite, sharks, bigfoot, and unicorns. As if God's 'existence' (something for which I do not argue) were something to be established in the way we might establish an existent Sasquatch from a clump of matted, orangish hair caught in the bark of a tree. Damn it, God isn't like that! There is a millennia-long tradition of thinking about God as in some way or other 'beyond being'. I take it that this is the primary understanding of God in most of the Abrahamic traditions of speculative theology, and I take it that one variation on this way of thinking is the belief that God is love.

Is love a thing? In some respects, yes, but it does not leave residues (unless you believe, as I also do, that everything is a congealing of love, in which case you may say that it leaves its smears and clumps absolutely everywhere). At any rate, it is not a thing in the way that Sasquatch's hair, were Sasquatch to exist, would be a thing. You can think this way of thinking is misguided, but heavens, please try to bear in mind that I am not the first yokel to be sucked in by it, and if you reject it you are also rejecting a good chunk of what can justly be called 'the wisdom of the ages'. Now this is not at all an argument ad auctoritatem; St. Paul and Plotinus and Emerson could all be utterly wrong. But it is an admonition, first of all, to go get some old-fashioned learning in you, and, second of all, to not allow the terms of the debate (as if debating were at all worthwhile here) to be determined at the outset by the unlearned, by people who can understand no other form of commitment than the sort that is modelled on the discovery of a clump of matted hair. These are not the terms in which serious religious thought has ever been articulated.

I was also criticized, strangely, for a supposed immature fervency, as if I were someone who had just discovered faith and was now a-quaking and a-shaking like some mad Swedenborg. I say this is strange, because I thought I had made it clear that this was not an account of a conversion, but rather a profession of a faith that I have always had. It might yet mature, of course, but it is not, as of now, in a stage of initial effervescence.

Finally, and relatedly, some critics did not appreciate my dismissiveness concerning reports of 'Western' conversions to 'Eastern' faiths (one critic claimed to know 'hundreds' of successful long-term converts to Buddhism; I don't know hundreds of people of any sort). I say 'relatedly' because, again, in that essay I was not interested in conversion at all; I was interested in taking stock of faith, and I suppose I am at least conservative enough to believe that such stock-taking can best be done in the terms already available to one. Because it touches upon something so deep, moreover, something the first bubblings of which come with the first experiments in thinking as a young child, it is fitting that one draw on the cultural forms that were already there at that early stage, rather than the later calques that came with the various young-adult projects of 'mind-expansion'. I am a student of the Upanishads and of Dharmakirti; but I am, in the spirit of Emerson, a Christian student of them.

It was Emerson, in his 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School, who acknowledged that "the evils of the church that now is are manifest," and asked, "What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms." The dean of American transcendentalism was not bemoaning the sort of yogic-quaker syncretism this very address unwittingly helped to usher in and legitimate, but rather the rise of a form of radical secularism as ersatz religion: "All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder."

Now I am not convinced, with Emerson, that secular resistance to religion willy-nilly takes on the traits of religion with the inevitability of some Animal Farm-like determinism. But it is hard to see the temples de la Raison as anything other than a transplantation of secular preoccupations into the cultic shell that had organically grown up around religion and then been forcibly evacuated by the Revolution. And it is hard, also, not to prefer Emerson's alternative: "Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify."

Have I yet adequately expressed how deep my admiration is for Ralph Waldo? I love his language; I love his Americanness. He is not at all American in the way that I and my people are American (when you are from Reno, Boston is already as 'Oriental' as Palestine was for Emerson), but man, is he American. I love his total lack of interest in buttressing his truth claims with arguments. Is Emerson, then, not a philosopher? He's a truth-teller, anyway, and he understands of the truth he tells that it is entirely private and entirely universal at once:

[W]hilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Emerson is extremely eclectic and creative in the approach he takes to his guiding lights in the history of philosophy. He seems to think that Kant's transcendental idealism is 'transcendentalist' in the sense of Vedanta, and that Kantian duty is something like an intuition of divine law. Thus he uses a sort of Kantian distinction between reason and understanding, but seems to think reason is something like faith or revelation:

[Jesus] said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.'

As an account of the Kantian distinction between reason and understanding, this fails miserably. As an account of the proper understanding of Christ, though, it transcends its era and joins up with the truth of the Gospels. For Emerson, Christ was so significant not because he was the son of God, but because he was the man who dared to say, 'I am God'. And everyone is an inflection of God, for Emerson: a truth about our predicament that wells up in the experience of love and joy.

Emerson hates supernaturalism, and believes that any miracle worthy of the name will be "one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." The states of the soul and the states of nature are one, too, and so any propagator of the true Christian faith is one who "shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy."

So far, I have been citing only the 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School. It is already sufficiently bold about the manifest evils of the church. In other works, Emerson will express himself more frankly about both his debt to other religious traditions, as well as his contempt for superstition. In The Over-Soul of 1841, he castigates those who would treat religion as so much back-alley haruspicy:

The popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul, the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their company, adding names, and dates, and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois.

The real horoscope, Emerson thinks, the one understood by the 'Hindoo bards', is the one that understands that the things of nature from which the vulgar horoscopist takes his readings are in the end identical with the soul:

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith.

It is this innateness and universality that also defines Emerson's rhetorical register and aims, and here, I think, is the best 'argument' I can find in reply to everyone who has expressed concern that I have lost my bearings as a philosopher and started spouting religious nonsense. I am seldom so confident in leaning on a quotation from another person to express what I myself would like to say: 

Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

Emerson knows that he cannot argue, but can only profess. He knows that his words will fail, even as he knows he cannot suppress the desire to use words, to try to describe the character and feeling of his faith. He knows that this is just a wind blowing through him, that he cannot blow it into another who happens for now to be standing in a quiet spot; but he also knows that wind blows everywhere the same, and that it is miraculous.

On Eating While Walking

I was going to call this post 'On Freedom', but I was worried that that might not adequately convey the seriousness of the topic. I'll get back to freedom in due time, but what I wanted to write about was, as I said, eating and walking, and also going to convenience stores, balancing huge cups of weak American coffee in my lap while driving, throwing empty 20-oz. bottles of Diet Dr. Pepper over my shoulder and into the back seat, and related activities.

I grew up on a county road, without sidewalks, surrounded by pastures. There was a Shortstop convenience store at the next intersection, but that was about a mile away and there were reckless drivers and feral white teenage boys in pick-up trucks with Skoal stickers, Bocephus insignias, and Confederate flags in the windows, and so it was not until I was of a certain age, 11 or so, that I was permitted to make the expedition myself. And to make it there and back, and to have enough money for a thing of Big League Chew and an outsized fountain drink, the sort that is now prohibited in Manhattan: that illustrated for me, and continues to this day to illustrate, without the slightest reduction in force, the concept, much discussed by philosophers, of freedom.

Later I began to ride a bike. I wanted, or claimed to want, to be the next Greg LeMond. I did have a 12-speed Peugeot, and in the summers of 1985 and '86 on a typical day I would put 40 or so miles on it, tooling around the splendid bike lanes along the Sacramento and American Rivers. But in fact my principal purpose was to discover all of the AM/PM minimarkets (the snacks-and-beverages arm of Arco gas stations) in Sacramento County, and to plot them on a map of said county with gold stars of the sort ordinarily reserved for exemplary homework (of which I produced none). I would buy up their dismal little burgers from under the heat lamps, and would dispense for myself a so-called 'Super Tanker', which is to say a 44 oz., or 1.33 liter, container of soda. I would sit up straight on my Peugeot and ride along, resting my Super Tanker on my belly, still fat from infancy, sipping from it as I pedalled, thinking about God knows what (not school, not the Tour de France), feeling free. Once my rêverie was rudely broken when a Jaguar convertible, if I recall correctly, pulled all too suddenly out of a parking lot and slammed into me and my drink. I went flying one way, the Super Tanker went straight into the air and landed in the passenger seat of the luxury car. The bike folded in half like a taco. The woman driving was Mrs. Tognotti, wife of the local auto-parts magnate. She was terrified, of course, at what had just happened; I was somewhat regretful about the condition of my bike, but delighted to see that, as if by the grace of God, the plastic lid had stayed in place on my beverage, which, after some awkward expressions of concern and of reassurance, I soon resumed sipping.

Not so many years later I would find myself loafing around Europe, a continent and a civilization that differs from my own, I learned, principally in this, that Europeans are only able to consume food and drink while stationary. Or perhaps they know that there are Greek shepherds and caravans of Gitanes --strictly speaking, Europeans-- who are off on the peripheries, with black bread and tomatoes in their pockets, wandering, gnawing. They know this, and so they manifest their difference from the nomads and pastoralists by stopping to eat. (They don't mind standing while they're doing it, either, like horses in stables; the important thing is that during the period of chewing and swallowing there be a complete cessation of what the ancients called locomotion.) They are also aware of a place called America, where the ordinary rules of civility are overturned, and people walk down the sidewalk devouring knishes and corn-dogs, yet not as a manifestation of backwardness exactly, of the sort they see in their own nomadic ancestors and cousins, but as a manifestation of freedom. They admire this, and even tell stories of how, perhaps on a trip along Route 66, they themselves once ate grease out of bags while gawking at the passing Joshua trees. I for my part have succeeded at the latter-day version of the test that French colonial administrators once made the local African chiefs endure, inviting them to the government villa and watching how they manipulated their argenterie: fluent know-how as to which fork is deployed when could even result in instant French citizenship. I've passed my own version of the test, as I say, but for me the greasy slop in a bag, to be eaten while in motion, is no romantic kick. It's my culture and my deepest identity.

It's been years since I had my own car, but when from time to time I rent one, and hit the road, my favorite part is, still, to stop at a gas-station mini-mart. I no longer eat burgers or any of what are called the 'empty carbs'; I don't smoke. There is not much for me at mini-marts these days, other than the 20-oz. bottles of Diet Dr. Pepper, which, I'm told, are giving me cancer and brain damage (the warning to phenylketonurics is particularly bold on this product, but I am not, so I have reassured myself, a phenylketonuric), and are actually making me fatter than the non-diet version would. I know all of this, but here's the thing: the freedom that I have associated with convenience stores since I walked to Shortstop by myself 29 years ago has by now, and by none of my own choice, concentrated itself into that horrible brown fluid, and when I stop in Upstate New York, just south of Plattsburgh but before I've hit the Adirondacks, and I buy myself a bottle of it and hit the road again, and it makes my eyes water, it makes me belch, and I shout along to some shitty music: when all this happens, in just the right balance, I am assured, in spite of what I have generally come to think in this greatly reduced adult life of mine, that I am in fact, metaphysically and for real, free. 

I do not like the dépanneurs of Montreal. They are shabby, stuffy, and uncertain of the social niche they mean to occupy. They are there principally, I gather, for the purveyance of beer, and I can count on one hand the number of times in the past decade that I have found Diet Dr. Pepper in such a setting. (These days the taste is for 'energy drinks', which I have never so much as sampled, and the kids are losing their taste for old-fashioned soda pop.)  Not unrelatedly, I confess I have never felt all that free in this place. But I do what I can, and each time I am walking back from the supermarket, to which --the humiliation!-- I am coerced into carrying my own reusable polypropylene sac (a defiant friend of mine used to say, in response to the inevitable 'voulez-vous un sac?': 'No, thanks, I'd prefer to cradle the groceries in my arms'): each time I am walking back, I say, I eat a bit of the food I have just purchased, not the sort of food that is supposed to be consumed while perambulating, nothing a European could imagine ambulatorily eating even in his wildest fantasies of American freedom, but rather food that practically lists sedentariness as its main ingredient: a cold veggie dog, a handful of still-frozen corn kernels, some kimchi pulled from its jar, which now bubbles over with sour effervescent juice. As I've suggested, I value my freedom.

I expect when I am ninety (as if I'm ever going to be ninety) I will continue to manifest my freedom with occasional requests that my nurse wheel me down to the convenience store at the corner. And as long as I have some pocket change and the physical ability to relish, if ever so slightly, the bounty of these expeditions, then I will continue to feel, fleetingly and silently, that the universe is not aligned entirely against me.

Spinoza said that freedom is not so much the state where there is no impediment between you and the thing you desire, as rather a certain agreeable sensation that sometimes accompanies the determined unfolding of things. I don't know. It is, certainly, a feeling: for me it is an irrational, childish feeling associated with an activity that for others (indeed, for others who are close to me) has nothing at all to do with freedom. Convenience stores are for many people loci of pure necessity, and to eat while walking would be for them only a last resort under duress. Different circumstances trigger the agreeable sensation in different people, but it is the same sensation, and I am happy to call this sensation 'freedom'. But place an impediment between me and the convenience store, a wall or an international border, or take away my money or my physical ability to maneuver down to the corner store, and my theory of freedom will revert straightaway to the Hobbesian: the world comes between me and my desire, and I am suddenly, thoroughly unfree. 

I suspect, to be honest, that others who do not know the pleasure of eating while walking, or of inhaling fries out of a bag while driving, have never truly experienced freedom. Europeans experience it briefly on their adventure trips to the wild west, but are quickly drawn back into the order of necessity. I don't know what experiences triggered the sensation that Spinoza called freedom, but I can't imagine they were ever quite as intense as mine. This is a stupid thing to think, of course, but I think the fact that such a stupid thing can be thought about freedom might take us some way toward understanding the concept in question.

A Note on G. E. Lessing on Animal Tales

G. E. Lessing, the great critic and philosopher of the German Enlightenment, noted in his 1759 essay ‘On the Use of Animals in Fables’ that “the great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons.”[1] Lessing wanted to know what we could learn from this. My own view is that his conclusions are dead wrong, but that the question itself is one that it took a certain kind of genius to ask in the first place, and one that remains as urgent as ever to answer, not just for the sake of literary theory, but above all for the sake of our understanding of what animals are, and of the way our moral commitments to them flow from this understanding.

Lessing gives two primary reasons for the replacement of human beings by animals in fables. The first is that we all tend to recognize more readily the sort of character represented by an animal species than by a particular human being.  If one were to relate the historical tale of Nero and Britannicus, for example, it was already quite likely in the 18^th century --and is all the more so today-- that most listeners will have no idea what these characters are meant to represent. But if a fable has as its primary function the imparting of some moral principle or other, as Lessing supposes, it is far better to replace Nero with a wolf, and Britannicus with a lamb. Everyone, we might suppose, down to the most ignorant yokel, knows what these creatures represent, and how they stand in relation to one another. If the purpose is to communicate a moral principle rather than a history lesson, why let background knowledge of individual human actors stand as a prerequisite? It is the wolf and the lamb that require the least in the way of shared background knowledge, and thus that serve most directly the fable’s function of universal moral edification. 

Lessing adds another reason for the casting of animals in fables, one that he claims derives from his ‘sensibility’ --a common trope of the distinctly German reception of Enlightenment values-- rather than from logical conclusions. He maintains that nothing gets in the way of the teaching of a moral lesson moreso than the passions. He brings up the example of the avaricious priest in 2 Samuel 12, who wishes to take away a poor man’s only lamb. Lessing maintains that in this tale our passion of sympathy for the poor man is great, as is our passion of hatred for the priest. But if we substitute animals for the relevant actors, then, in so far as these creatures are ‘lesser’ than we are, the arousal of the passions in reading about them is thereby reduced, and we are better able to focus on the moral lesson at hand. “We sympathize with the lamb,” Lessing writes, “but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle.”[2] 

I find the first argument interesting, and the second one deplorable. I also find that Lessing’s engagement with the topic leaves a great many considerations completely unexplored.

The second argument seems to me patently false: even though we have strong species-based loyalties in our reasoned moral commitments, these loyalties are most likely to be suspended when, as in a fable, an anthropomorphized animal occupies a role that in another genre of story-telling would be held by a human being. The substitutability of an animal for a human in a fable brings with it, I think, the transferability of sympathy, as well as the other passions that some people, including Lessing, might ordinarily reserve, at least in their strongest form, for members of their own species.

---

[1] G. E. Lessing, “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel,” in Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schiften, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1996, pp. 43-47, p. 43.

[2] Ibid., p. 47.

The Delights of Disgust

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. To read the entire essay, go here.

Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2010) appears to have been written for a high-school civics course. Implicit already in its title is the idea that disgust is inhuman, or perhaps pre-human, that it is a stage to advance out of on the way to humanity. For Nussbaum it's all very simple: Disgust is immature, and well-adjusted adults should grow out of it.

As an effort to shape law and public policy in the United States, Nussbaum's approach makes sense. But it's a sad fact of public debate in America that words intended to influence public debate must sound like they are intended for adolescents. From Disgust to Humanity is in large part a riposte to the argument made by Leon R. Kass, head of President George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, that disgust (for example, at the thought of anal sex) has its own inherent "wisdom," which may serve as a "natural" basis on which to develop a sexual ethics. Nussbaum argues against Kass, but the two are united by a sort of anthropological obtuseness. He is wrong to suppose that what disgusts us in sexual matters can simply be read off of nature, and that nature writes in the same idiom in all times and places. She, in turn, is wrong to suppose that just because disgust is culturally variable and thus to some extent arbitrary, and because it can result in oppressive social relations, it is therefore somehow inhuman.

I confess I am disgusted by a great many things about people (and about myself, but let's put that aside). I do not believe it is particularly urgent for me to overcome my disgust, even if I recognize that this emotion must remain entirely separate from my thinking about which laws would be most just. I am disgusted by other people's dandruff, facial moles, food stuck in their beards, yet I do not accept that in feeling this way I am judging those people to be subhuman. I take it rather that humanity, while endearing, is also capable of appearing disgusting.

In fact, one great problem with Kass's approach, which Nussbaum does nothing to refute, is that disgust and its various opposites—relish, delectation, delight—seem ever so delicately close to each other, and always ready to slide unawares over to the other side. This is not some abstruse psychoanalytic paradox, but a simple observation of an obvious condition of human bodily experience. The same things that excite our desire most—the naked bodies of other humans, the bright red shell of a boiled lobster, a cigarette glowing in an ashtray—are the things that always, simultaneously, threaten to excite our revulsion. Kass should be suspicious of his "wisdom" regarding the various uses of the anus, lest he find his revulsion crossing over all too suddenly into a very different sort of passion.

Cicero observed that the greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust. Nussbaum no doubt knows that, even if she prefers in the present work to focus on the Roman orator's more elevated treatment of the concept of humanitas,"a responsiveness to others that prominently included the ability to imagine their experiences." Could it be, though, that Cicero did not consider this responsiveness to the humanity of others as incompatible with being grossed out by them? Such a presumption of compatibility may, in fact, be truer to the spirit of humanitas than any version that results from an effort to isolate this responsiveness in its pure, other-embracing form.

That last point has generally been best understood in the arts; novelists and poets are often much better than theorists at appreciating the complicated ways in which disgust and desire work together, even conspire together, and at appreciating the ways in which this conspiracy, far from being an impediment to our humanity, is constitutive of it.

Rabelais, to cite one extreme example, pounds away with instance after instance of the disgusting ways human beings appear: in gluttony, in bestiality, in massaging one's groin with the downy head of a duck. The giant Gargantua is disgusting, and hilarious: a pair of closely related, perhaps inseparable adjectives. It is hard to imagine how one could operate freely in the humorous mode without courting disgust. Risibility, as the medieval philosophers understood, is a trait found wherever there is humanity. Rabelais courts disgust, but the reader never loses sight of the fact that it is humanity's marvelous, over-the-top disgustingness that is under consideration. In real life, too, the food in the beard would not disgust me if it were on a plate, and that is because the beard is on a human, and it is precisely his humanity I am recognizing when I am disgusted by him.

Nor would I reproach a culture, should one be discovered, that considers food in the beard a fitting tribute to a host after a fine meal. There are a number of historical examples of culinary practices that today seem no less repulsive. For example, French explorers among the Huron in the 17th century found it difficult to enjoy one of the local delicacies: a sort of cornbread, whose batter, before baking, was mixed with saliva in the mouths of the tribe's elder women.

Is that intrinsically disgusting? Well, it might help to recall that, biologically speaking, all cooking is a form of extrasomatic predigestion, beginning a process of breaking down raw food through dicing, boiling, etc., that is subsequently continued by our digestive system. That might explain why communal eating is potentially a source of great disgust. Like sex, it is a sharing of the stuff of life, and who you do it with determines to no small degree who you are. That is also why communal eating is so crucial for the establishment of social bonds, and thus why the French explorers in the end forced themselves to swallow the cornbread.

There is nothing categorically more disgusting about the Huron recipe than there is about the sort of predigestion that precedes communal eating in all cultures, yet this does not mean the French were simply being fickle when they felt disgust. Neither Kass nor Nussbaum, however, if they had been talking about cooking rather than sex, would have had the conceptual resources to come to that simple, and obvious, conclusion...