Justin Erik Halldór Smith

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

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See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.

The Gendered Conference Campaign Goes to Russia

I'm back to making trouble in the comments sections again. There appears to be a controversy between the Russian organizers of an upcoming Hume conference in Moscow and some of the prospective Western participants, concerning the under-representation of women among the speakers in the conference. The Russian organising committee, headed up by Elena Vostrikova, sent a letter to the complainants, in which she maintained, among other things, that "we consider your proposal to influence our conference by pressing the invited speakers to cancel their participation in it a manifestation an anachronistic colonial behavior which we also deem inappropriate." To see the entire letter, go here. My comment at the same site is reproduced below.

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I agree with Mme. Vostrikova that this is, in a certain respect, colonial behaviour. You cannot operate as philosophers at the international level, organising events that involve cultural exchange, without taking into consideration the differences between the cultures. In this instance, I believe that Western Europeans and Americans tend to see their cultural difference from Russia as less significant than the Russians themselves see their cultural difference from the West. (This is perhaps the only case in the world in which a group others itself even as those from whom it is self-othering in turn refuse to other it.)

Now, for better or worse, an entirely different history of gender politics in Russia has had as a consequence that, today, different cultural attitudes prevail concerning the 'natures' of men and women, and concerning the social roles to which these natures make them suited. Are these attitudes correct? I don't believe so, and I don't believe any of the readers here do either. But having spent a year and a half in Russia, I will confess that I have indeed sat silently through many conversations that reproduced essentializing commonplaces about gender difference: conversations which, had they taken place in the West, would have caused me to intervene in opposition. Why did I not intervene? Because unless something truly criminal is going on I believe in the edifying effect of quiet participant-observation, and because under the circumstances it would have been arrogant to do so, and in any case ineffectual. It would have been a small-scale instance of the sort of geopolitical manoeuvre to which Vostrikova and the others allude (it would say, like Jeffrey Sachs in another sphere of public life, 'We know better').

Now Russia also has an entirely different history of gender in public institutions, including the academy. There are indeed very high percentages of women in most scientific fields, as Vostrikova et al. point out, and this has in large part to do with the legacy of the Soviet commitment to advancing the representation of women in high-status fields (a top-down commitment that never succeeded in transforming popular attitudes about men and women).

Today, however, I fear that the high representation of women in the humanities has to do with the fact that financially the institutions where these are housed have been completely gutted, while simultaneously, in the post-Soviet era, ideas about what constitutes status have been completely reversed: leaving a peculiar situation in which women entered into high-status jobs because of a certain sort of Soviet progressivism, but now hold those same jobs in such large numbers only because Russian society as a whole has lost this progressive momentum: popular attitudes have proved much more enduring than when the Bolsheviks came up with that hapless phrase "The woman is also a person", and now the status of the jobs into which women were promoted has gone from one extreme to the other. They remain there largely because of the low status of these positions.

I'm not necessarily sure cultural exchange is always worth it (I declined an invitation to a conference in Iran a few years ago), but if you're going to go ahead with it then you would do better to not blunder in there with a Besserwisser attitude and start telling your local hosts how to do things, especially if you have no knowledge of or interest in the history that led them to do things this way in the first place. Russia is part of a different cultural-historical sphere than the one familiar to most Hume Society members (it has had, to be sure, a prominent Westernizing elite since Peter the Great, and a proper Enlightenment for the elite under Catherine, which tend to obscure from view this deeper cultural difference at the popular level: during the Enlightenment, the 'people' were serfs). Yes, I know there is feminism in Russia, but I would argue that as in Catherine's era it is salon feminism, and that in everyday use the word has a fundamentally 'importny' (imported) ring to it, like, for that matter, 'jeans' or 'Coke'. Perhaps someday things will be different, but the change is not going to be quickened by a group of Western philosophers chastening their Russian hosts for not adhering to the norms that prevail at APA-sanctioned events. Moscow is out of that jurisdiction.

A Cyber-Attack!

It has come to our attention that late last night jehsmith.com was violently hacked, perhaps by Russian mobsters, perhaps by Anonymous, we just don't know. What we can say is that this criminal operation left a most peculiar signature: rather than simply shutting the site down, they surreptitiously posted a piece that was earnest, heartfelt, and personal. Naturally, it was taken down immediately upon discovery, and we apologize to any readers who may have been made uncomfortable by its inappropriate content. We do not have time, on such short notice, to replace it with new material, so we have decided to run again one of our favorites from the Quaeries series, in which old Dr. Smith FRS nearly dies of the gout. We will be speaking with our lawyers and with our tech department to make sure that there will be no such outbursts of sincerity in the future. Now, back to the usual dissimulation. On with the pasquinade!

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Quaeries #6: Doctor Smith His Demise

O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that.

Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!

What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?

Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning "Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?" You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.

Now, to our Quaeries.

Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?

It is said that the dux of what is left of Rome, a certain Berlusconus, is known for taking pleasure in what is call'd the 'Bunga-Bunga'. Now evidently this is a sort of ars amatoria imported from those same Hottentotical regions that have given us whoomp. But we wish to know who would feign prohibit the very Ruler of Rome, who is no reckless youth like Heliogabalus, but a man of years and stature, from going in for such Delectations? What common plebs dares tell this Caesar not to indulge his Desires, yea, e'en when the foremost among them is to cavort upon the Bed of Waldemir Poutine?

And whence comes it that this Poutine, Ruler of all Muscovy, most of foul Tartary, and assorted Borderlands, should lend his very Name to a Dish of Earth-Apples, Cheese-Curde, and Browne-Sauce, otherwise belovèd onely of the Forest-Dwellers of New France? 

Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp and bunga-bunga, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?

O to the Devil with this senseless Exercise! As if it had any-thing to do with Lord Bacon's Project for the Advancement of Learning. I've had quite enough. Let's look at more of those comical sections. But bring the good ones. The ones with Eccentricity.

Isaac, I'm sorry. I've been so irrascible of late. So controll'd by the Passions. Not the womanly Passions (ut de passionibus virium taceam!), but the Passions of a Childe. I move from puerile Delight to the greatest Mournfulnesse as if for no Reason at all. I cannot work. I cannot ratiocinate. Nay, Isaac, 'tis clear. I am not long for this World.

Tell me, though, do you think they'll print a Notice of my Death in the Transactions of the Society?  Or will Squibb, that old Booby, seek to prevent it on these grounds alone, that I compar'd his Wife to the Bahama Mer-Cow lately dissected at Gresham's Caffè-House? I meant it in the mythological sense, I did! You know, the Sirens, &c. 'Tis not my fault if upon the very mention of Mrs. Squibb the old man thought onely of the Gutts and Blubber display'd on the dissecting Table.

No matter. What is a Memorial in a small Journal, whose pages will onely yellow and rot with the passing of cruel Time?

No Isaac, do you know the one Thing that might make this old senex happy for a moment? For you to massage my ankle. You know, just the way you do.

There now, yes. That's the way... O, quam dulce...

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To be continu'd, God willing...

To read the earlier installments in this series of Quaeries, go here, here, here, here, and here.

To follow Justin Smith on Face-Book, go here.

How It Actually Was

I seldom descend into the comments basements of the blogosphere: I figure if I have something to say, I might as well just say it here. But this morning I read a comment at another site (with which I am loosely affiliated) taking Richard Sorabji to task for his lampooning of Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam for their, let us say, creative uses of Aristotle. At issue was Sorabji's observation that Aristotle never read Descartes; the commenter suggested that this is no reason for a current philosopher to refrain from putting Aristotle and Descartes into conversation. Here is what I added to the discussion:

I'm with Sorabji. If this separates the history of philosophy from philosophy, so much the worse for philosophy. What historians of philosophy can do, like archaeologists or big-bang cosmologists, is to provide an ever more fine-grained and vivid picture of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

As in archeology and cosmology with their unique objectives, what this slow, massive project will eventually yield is a convergence on the truth about the range and bounds of human philosophical reflection. Picking and choosing, and putting dead philosophers into conversation with one another in an anachronistic way, is just a totally different game (and I'm tempted to emphasize game, in contrast with the earnest truth-seeking of let us say 'pure' history of philosophy). Sorabji knows about and values the once much-better-known science of Altertumswissenschaft, which saw the history of ancient philosophy anyway as part of a larger project that included palaeography, archaeology, philology, linguistics, etc. It yielded vastly more light on what Aristotle was up to than Nussbaum (save for her early work, such as the fine study of the De motu animalium) ever will.

Why care what Aristotle was actually up to? Because otherwise we might as well just invent a fictional mascot, Oristatle, say, and attribute whatever views we want to him. It is in this respect that 'pure' history of philosophy is realist, and all appropriationist forms of history of philosophy, whether 'analytic' or 'continental' (a trivial distinction with respect to this issue) are anti-realist.

Herodotus and the Naturkinder

In the 18th century, the figure of the Naturkind was the source of much speculation, the most well-known product of which is, perhaps, the tale of Kaspar Hauser. Philosophers supposed that if a child were to grow up without any exposure to human society, the resulting adult would be a living model of what it is a human being is most purely or naturally. One of the most pressing questions such a child would be able to answer, it was thought, was the matter concerning the origins of language: would it be able to speak at all? And, if so, what sort of words would it use?

Somewhat earlier --peaking as a topic, I think, in the mid-17th century-- there was an intense debate as to which language, if any, was the language spoken prior to the fall of the tower of Babel. The most common candidate was Hebrew, but Chinese, Egyptian, and others are also mentioned. Some argued that the Hebrew of which we have traces was not the real Hebrew, and that there is an earlier, 'Adamic' language that, if rediscovered, would disclose divine knowledge to humans.

Interestingly, in Herodotus, there is a sort of combination of these two varieties of speculation. In Book II of the Histories we are told of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who wishes to determine whether or not his nation is in fact the oldest on earth. He sets up the following experiment:

He gave a shepherd two new-born infants to rear, from ordinary families, and told him to bring them up among his flocks in such a way that no one ever spoke in their hearing; they were to lie in a remote hut by themselves, and he was to bring them she-goats from time to time, give them their fill of milk, and do whatever else needed doing. Psammetichus made these arrangements because he wanted to find out what the children's very first word would be, once they were past the age of meaningless whimpering. And so it happened. One day, when the shepherd had been carrying out this programme for two years, he opened the door and went into the hut, and both children rushed up to him, reaching out their hands, and said 'bekos' (II 2). 

It turns out, as Herodotus explains, that 'bekos' is the Phrygian word for 'bread', and that from this it may be concluded that it is the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, who are the most ancient of all people. By this peculiar reasoning, the oldest language is the language that one would naturally speak if not pushed off course by another, newer language. No explanation is given of language change, but presumably Herodotus, or the person who told him this tale, would suppose that all non-Phrygian words for 'bread' are in fact deformations or corruptions of 'bekos'.

This does not seem to imply any special status among languages for Phrygian, or any indication of a need for a return to the natural way of saying things. In this respect, early modern speculation about the origins of language --both the language acquired by an individual over the course of a lifetime, as well as all the natural languages of the world and the relations between them-- could not have been more different. So far as I know, the search for the first language and the speculation about what a Naturkind would be like were never brought together into a single line of questioning.

This is because, unlike Psammetichus and Herodotus, the early moderns supposed that whatever language a Naturkind might end up using, it would not be the original, primordial language of humanity; when the debate as to what that primordial language was was at its peak, moreover, a century before Rousseau and other speculated about children of nature, it was universally assumed that this was not a 'natural' language, that it would not congeal spontaneously over the course of a childhood suckling at the udder of a she-goat. Instead, it had a divine source, and so all subsequent 'natural' languages, like Latin and French, were corruptions of it not in the way that Egyptian was a corruption of Phrygian, but in a way that implied a loss, or, to put it in more overtly theological terms, a Fall.  

Learning to Speak New-Jerseyan

Qvande ie me suiz installé au Nouveau Jersey ya ung moys, ie me suis donaté la tasque d'appréhender la lingue locqale. Ladicte lingue s'appelle 'néo-jèrriais', car elle a sez raçynes sur l'yslette d'Jersey, qvi se troube dangs Lamansche yntre la France et l'Angglie. Ladicte lingue se rezêmbe énormueusement à la lingue des Francz de la France, e parmyz les scientificqs yan'a mesme qui diraynt qu'il s'agyte plus tost d'un diallecte qvedvne lingue séparate.

Pù-ymporte çequedyzent lez linguiçienz, si ie veuylle m'addâpter à mez nouvellez çircqonstancies, ylfaudraqve i'apprendz à parler aveq lez habitibantz. L'néo-jèrriais, parcontrâte aveq l'jèrriais d'l'yslette d'Lamansche, ayté natureusement beau-coûp transformé par le fayctqv'il aïayté parlé pendante des siâclz yn Nord-Américque, ouvilest entouré par des régions yntièrement angglophonicques, com parexemble l'Nouveau Jorvicq, l'Délouare, et l'Pennsylvânie. Doncq on dicte parexemble 'mon Camaro' auvlieude dicter 'ma voiture', ez on dicte 'le spray-tan' auvlieude dicter 'salon de bronzage'.

La version d'néo-jèrriais qve ie suiz çenzé appréhender ècelle d'Princeton, une esmalle ville universitaticque aumillieude l'estâte. Yçi-t-on parle ung néo-jèrriais verré raffinaté. Parexemble, s'ong veuylle sçaver où sont les toilettes, ong nedicte-paz 'toilettes' danz l'pluriel, comme yn France; ong dicte 'où e la toiletterie', com-sy l'endroyct où l'ong pisse ayté qvelq-choz d'abstrayct. 

Apprehender l'néo-jèrriais non è paz extremueusement difficillié, s'ong aye dé-jà qvelq'cognosçençe d'une-autre lingue soy-dictante 'Romanticque'. Çe qu'è pluz, lez habitibantz d'la région sunt verré patientz, e tous-jours énormueusement happé qvand un éstranger faict un esmall'éffort pou parler danz leur lingue. Doncq pou-quoy paz vener nou visître yçi au Nouveau Jersey? 

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Me suyvez sur Facebook. Clycquez yçi.

À penser un mystère

"Admettre que ce qui était ici, l'être qu'on se rappelle n'est plus, et que ce qui y est, c'est un être qu'on ne connaissait pas; c'est avoir à penser un mystère presque aussi troublant que celui de la mort dont il est, du reste, comme la préface et l'annonciateur."

A Few Final Words on Egypt

Egypt... has very many remarkable features and has produced more monuments which beggar description than anywhere else in the world. That is why more will be said about it. In keeping with the idiosyncratic climate that prevails there and the fact that their river behaves differently from any other river, almost all Egyptian practices are the opposite of those of everywhere else. For instance, women go out to the town square and retail goods, while men stay at home and do the weaving; and whereas everyone else weaves by pushing the weft upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards. Or again, men carry loads on their heads, while women do so on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, while men do so squatting. They relieve themselves indoors, but eat outside on the streets; the reason for this, they say, is that things that are embarrassing but unavoidable should be done in private, while things which are not embarrassing should be done out in the open.

--Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 35.

Rilke: A Translation

Judith's Return

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.
O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew.
Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.
Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.
Lover that I am.
Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.
Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind:
     as I go, as I go
and faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

*

Judith's Rückkehr

Schläfer, schwarz ist das Nass noch an meinen Füßen, ungenau. Tau sagen sie.
Ach, dass ich Judith bin, herkomme von ihm, aus dem Zelt aus dem Bett, austriefend sein Haupt, dreifach trunkenes Blut. Weintrunken, trunken vom Räucherwerk, trunken von mir - und jetzt nüchtern wie Tau.
Niedrig gehaltenes Haupt über dem Morgengras; ich aber oben auf meinem Gang, ich Erhobene.
Plötzlich leeres Gehirn, abfließende Bilder ins Erdreich; mir aber quillend ins Herz alle Breite der Nacht-Tat.
Liebende, die ich bin.
Schrecken trieben in mir alle Wonnen zusamm, an mir sind alle Stellen.
Herz, mein berühmtes Herz, schlag an den Gegenwind:
    wie ich geh, wie ich geh
und schneller die Stimme in mir, meine, die rufen wird, Vogelruf, vor der Not-Stadt.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, 1911

On Seeing a Deer: A Postscript

I failed to mention in my recent reflections on the possibility of a cervidocentric theology that there is in fact a very important precedent for this approach in the history of philosophy. I am referring of course to Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th-century Andalusian Arabic treatise describing the ascent of a human orphan raised on a deserted island by a motherly doe. The primal experience of her solicitude, the observation of the wisdom inscribed in her parts and in her actions, leads the boy gradually to certain knowledge of the truths of Divine creation.

Now as I've already said I'm wary of the need for such an ascent: I am perfectly content to simply stop and admire the doe. Yet I do think it highly significant that the author chose to start with precisely this animal. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the very word 'deer', cognate to the German 'Tier', may be understood to mean simply animal as such. There are animals that don't quite qualify for this generic status, in view of exceptional, often negative traits on top of their animality: they are loud, they eat meat, they eat garbage, they copulate in human view. But the deer is the silent plant-eater of the forest: elusive but without a trace of evil. God's perfect creature.

If Ibn Tufayl's orphan had been raised by an elephant, say, or a mongoose or a tapir, the God he ended up coming to know in the end might have looked very different indeed.

Notes on Anne Carson

The secret formula, soon no longer to be secret, of my intellectual formation, is that it  has for the most part consisted in a succession of remote tutelages under women a generation or so older than I, who work in no easily categorizable genre of scientific or literary or creative production, and whom I aspire, in certain ways, to be like. It is something like a unidirectional erotic distance-learning, a mixture of Plato's Symposium and the University of Phoenix. Here, the erotic, I should probably have to underline for you modern readers, is not some sexual pay-off, but an impulse, an aspiration-towards.

Anne Carson is perhaps foremost among these ideals. Here is what I like about her: she goes down into the language that goes down into the real predicament to which poetry is a response. Consider these lines from her 'Glass Essay' of the early 1990s:

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,

but as I came closer

I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off

the bones.

And there was no pain.

The wind

was cleansing the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.

It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.

It walked out of the light.

'Silver and necessary' made me think of walking through snow-covered meadows between my office and home, on moon-lit nights, and of how my bones are always there on these walks, and part of the very same composition. With this phrase alone she left me convinced me that I am myself a mediocre poet precisely to the extent that I had hitherto failed to notice that it is bones, and not ideas or sentiments, that reveal what a human life is like, or rather what is necessary to a human life, as well as the luminescent qualities of that necessary thing.

Carson goes down into language that goes down into being, but it never stops being, at the same time, a joke. This is most clear in her 'Book of Isaiah', which tells, more vividly than scripture itself, of the peculiar triangulation of God and man and woman, all with Carson's characteristically funny and enviable understanding of the insides of ancient languages:

Notice whenever God addresses Isaiah in a feminine singular verb

something dazzling is

about to happen.

Isaiah what do you know about women? asked God.

Down Isaiah's nostrils bounced woman words:

Blush. Stink. Wife. Fig. Sorceress--

God nodded.

This is no 'women's poet', Anne Carson. This is a poet who not only faces up to, but draws her very force from the accrued stereotypes and prototypes of millennia of violence, of men against men and of men against women (quite a bit less of the third possible form).

Carson understands that in order to descend into the language that descends into the predicament that necessitates poetry, one needs to descend into the body and its excretions. The culmination of God's peculiar and dysfunctional relationship with Isaiah comes when the latter is transformed (reduced) to the feminine state through the onset of lactation, a power that in the end will serve as a life-force that courses through all of nature. The comical travesty (in the proper sense of that word, that lies hidden in the way we speak of RuPaul and Divine) of a man condemned by God to sprout jugs, turns into a celebration of nature's own self-generativity:

Isaiah sank to a kneeling position.

New pain! said Isaiah.

New contract! said God.

Isaiah lifted his arms, milk poured out his breasts.

Isaiah watched the milk pour like strings.

It poured up the Branch and across history and down into people's lives and time.

The milk made Isaiah forget about righteousness.

As he fed the milk to small birds and animals Isaiah thought only about their little lips.

God meanwhile continued to think about male and female.

(Incidentally, I myself have written about a case described by the 16th-century physician Santorio Sanctorius, in the annals of early modern medicine, of a widower with an infant child who, by force of imagination, caused himself to lactate.)

Carson calls the collection I've been discussing Glass, Irony & God. I take it that the glass is the words like 'silver' and 'necessary' and 'bone', the words by which Carson descends by language into the predicament to which poetry is a response. The irony is the grasp of language, and the way she never lets you forget that as she descends into the silvery and necessary, she is always just playing with language, playing, that is, as a virtuoso performer, on the foundation of a rigorous mastery of the classical languages. (God seems to move between these two poles: something that has mostly to do with language, something ripe for a good linguistic joke or playful mixing of speech registers, even if tradition portrays Him as something of silvery necessity.)

The dependency of the classical themes of poetry upon the contingent features of language --a dependency that cannot but be generative of humor-- comes through most vividly in what I believe is my favorite piece by Carson, her so-called 'Drop't Sonnet'. The poem concerns the extinction of a special form for the second-person singular pronoun in English, and how this prevents her from refering to 'the streaming downspout of voodoo pine' that she had experienced in a love affair as --in relation to the lover-- thine. Languages are always changing, but a poet can't help but experience the present state of her language as impoverished, as in need of revitalization by an excavation of the past. No one of late has undertaken this excavatory task more rigorously than Carson.

On Seeing a Deer

In a number of posts recently I've attempted to convey the difficulties I face in connection with the question of belief in God. I have said that my answer to the question is generally context-dependent, and that I find that most contexts require the hardest Russellian line possible: namely, that not only is it naïve to answer in the affirmative; it is already naïve to accept the question as meaningful.

Now I have been living for a little while in a wooded region of central New Jersey, where there are many wild animals, including many deer (human inhabitants now speak of 'overpopulation'). Sometimes when I am driving I spot a deer in the woods along the road, and I slow down, and I stare at her, and she stares back at me.

What I am thinking in these moments is something like this: Hail, creature of God. The last two words of this silent salutation are strictly speaking redundant: to pick a being out as a creature is already to ground its being in a creation, performed by a creator. This is why 'creature' is not a scientific term. Now I have railed at length and on record against what is called 'creationism'. But when I meet a deer in the forest, it remains the case that this is an encounter with a creature. There is no other word for it.

Some might take this point as a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God. But I hate arguments for the existence of God, and I think the teleological is probably the worst of the lot. I have no interest in moving up from the deer to something supposedly better than it. But nor am I prepared to abandon the category of creature in favor of quadruped, vertebrate, etc. To this extent it is in encounters with wild animals that I get a full blast of just how much religion is left in me.

Introducing Clinamen

I do not own a great many things in this world. But I have managed to register a few prime domain names, including strictosensu.org, nolens-volens.org, and even the Latin version of Facebook: libervultuum.com. I've also registered the URL www.clinamen.net. This latter site is named of course for the hypothetical 'swerve' that the ancient atomists believed their fundamental particles must from time to time undergo, lest all of the atoms clump together at one corner of the cosmos, or simply come grinding to a halt.

Over the years people have sent me fragments of their écrits in the hopes that I will post them here at www.jehsmith.com. When I do answer, I remind them politely that this site is called 'Justin Erik Halldór Smith', and that this fact alone already places severe constraints on what may count as suitable content. Most importantly, whatever appears here must be directly connected to the life of the eponymous author. 

At the same time, I've been thinking for a while that I would like to branch out, and to start promoting more collaborative forms of online literacy. This both because I would truly like to help give voice to much of the very interesting writing I've been sent, but also because, in spite of the infinite expanses of the Internet, there is a disappointing dearth of compelling reading, or at least of sites that specialize entirely in compelling reading. It is hard to believe there is such a gap, but there is, and I intend to go some way towards filling it.

Within the next year, I intend to make Clinamen into a primary destination for those people the French still refer to --archaically yet endearingly-- as 'internauts': explorers in search of writing that is as good as the writing we used to see on densely printed paper, but which we now no longer have the patience to seek out at the newsstands.

Clinamen will not be an aggregator site, but will consist entirely in new writing, on the usual topics that matter to me and by extension to anyone who would want to write for a site with me lurking behind it: philosophy, arts, culture, history, science, language, animals, natural history, &c. We will be aware of currents in the academic and the art worlds, but will remain militantly aloof from both of these.

Many of the contributors will be academics, but there will be none of the usual academic talk of dental benefits, daycare, and all that careerist humor that always ends up looking like Gary Larson on a bad day. Nor will we be running a blog, exactly, in that there will be none of this 'As so-and-so said over at Daily Kos this morning...' or 'OMG Jon Stewart totally rocked last night!!!' The sentences strung together here, I mean to say, will be strung together for the longue durée.

My rolodex is large, I tell you, and packed with talented writers, so I expect Clinamen will make an impact. This is not, for the moment, a call for submissions, but only a sort of forecast as to where my web-based endeavors are moving. There will not in fact be such a call, at any point, but only discrete arrangements made on an informal basis with potential collaborators who seem to share in the spirit of the project. 

Clinamen is already 'up and running', as my tech people would say, but only in the most skeletal way, with a few placeholder articles dutifully standing guard.

I expect an official Clinamen launch date at some point around the beginning of the New Year. In the meantime, if you believe you may be able to contribute in some way, please do be in touch with me. Otherwise, expect occasional updates over the next months, and expect to have your reading routine altered for the better in 2012.

--Justin E. H. Smith

A Few Words on Egypt

I was asked along with several other people to make a statement on Egypt. This is a nearly impossible task, so I decided to specialize, doing what I do best by providing some historical depth to the Western habit of trying to make Egypt's course run this way or that. You can see the other contributions here.

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Justin E. H. Smith

By the middle of the 17th century it was sometimes heard that, while China is the France of the Orient, Egypt is its Holland: the former pair represented two massive and stagnant imperia, while the latter were dynamic pivot points of global trade. Since the Low Countries were too strong to be taken over directly by France, it was often proposed to Louis XIV that he, in effect, acquire his own Amsterdam by acquiring Cairo. The scheme would however have to wait for Napoleon to be attempted, but it was one and the same simmering ambition that was carried on from the old regime to the new one.

The plan for bolstering trade through an Egyptian presence was helped along by a parallel mythology, of Egypt as the ultimate homeland --going back to deepest antiquity-- of Occidental learning (see, for example Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus of 1652). Seen in this light, the current inhabitants of Egypt, the 'Saracens', were not so much stewards of the place as mere interlopers. They had not built the pyramids, nor devised the hieroglyphs, nor anything we hold dear. But that's all just mythology; geopolitically it really does make sense to subsume Egypt into a broader, continuous Mediterranean cultural sphere that includes (whoever we are) us. I recall seeing off in some dusty corner of Egypt a statue to none other than Il Duce, proudly proclaiming in its inscription that he was finally bringing the Imperium Romanum back together.

Meddling in Egypt, I mean to say, is not quite like meddling in Hispaniola or Borneo. We go way back; in fact, if the Hermetic corpus has a grain of truth in it, we go all the way back with respect to tradition. Even if Greece is the true birthplace of Western values, this does not permit us to discern at their onset an arrow pointing to the northwest and not one to the south. In fact, if we think of universalism and democracy as the greatest gifts of our Greek heritage, then it must be noted that they first started giving themselves in northeast Africa long before 'Europe' meant much of anything except by way of rough geographical contrast to Asia Minor. Neoplatonists were writing in Alexandria about religious toleration, for example, at a time when Anglo-Saxons could not even write their own names.

I don't know how helpful it really is to probe so deeply into history. But I am convinced that the myth --whose perpetuation really only got going in the 19th century, thanks in large part to the misguided analyses of Marx-- of the ahistoricity of Asiatic regimes is today nothing more than a convenient pretext for the Western support of mediocre kleptocrats and their shopaholic wives and mistresses. Egypt is as dynamic as anywhere else-- at times Cairo has favorably been compared to Amsterdam; and Alexandria to Athens. It has appeared stagnant over the past several decades because parties who are afraid of the forms its dynamism might take have conspired to make nothing happen at all. But where nothing is happening, something is usually simmering; and the glorious revolutionary outburst of the past week has reminded us of what we should have known all along: that Egypt is now as ever a powerful locus of change, and a pivot point of world history.

Superbowl Spleen

Let's see, how should I spend my Sunday? Should I keep reading Herwig Wolfram's magisterial History of the Goths? Should I perhaps go a-hunting online for some whimsical new videos of cats doing unexpected things? Or should I check to see if there are any noteworthy athletic spectacles on television?

There has been a dull din, growing louder over the past few weeks, that suggests to me that some big sports event is in the offing. Distant memories from childhood cause me to associate this din, in this particular season, with football. These associations, in turn, conjure up others still: of Ronald Reagan, of high-school meatheads in letter jackets telling me not to stand too close to their girlfriends, of ROTC, of PromiseKeepers, of words like 'buddy', of a model of American masculinity that quite literally spit me out as indigestible.

And now, here I am, back in the belly of the beast, steeling myself for yet another Superbowl. (The last Superbowl I can remember, in early 1994, I spent locked in a closet reading Anna Akhmatova as my parents hosted a wide-screen-TV Superbowl fiesta, complete with trays of bean dip made up with various ingredients to resemble a football field: sour cream for the yard lines, a goal post out of avocado, etc.)

Now all team sports may properly be described as sublimations of war, and to the extent that I've already confessed to 'getting' the Ernst Jünger-style aestheticization of battle, it is but a corollary confession to observe that I do find some such sublimations beautiful. But American football is not so much a sublimation of the martial as it is an outright advertisement for it. As far as I can tell this is how it's been for a very long time, which is precisely why it made such natural sense to fall back on the figure of the 'Gipper' when then-president Reagan made a characteristically hard-nosed move against the Soviets, or the Sandinistas, or air-traffic controllers.

And now today, from what I've gathered from brief glimpses while waiting in airport bars, the media event of a professional football game is entirely intermeshed with the promotion of US foreign policy (all this talk of honoring our troops, all these stupid ribbons, all this shitty conservative music at half-time that makes Bob Hope at the USO look like the Bad Brains), and with the preservation of the racial divide that defines American history (nothing quite helps to further reify the imaginary boundaries of race than the jovial displays of locker-room bonhomie between men of different skin tones, who never doubt that they belong to different natural categories and that their bonhomie succeeds only through the crossing of a real line).

I seriously do not understand how anyone who does not anchor himself to these ideological docks could nonetheless find something left over in the spectacle to get excited about. How, moreover, could anyone who is not American --or an immigrant trying overhard to become American-- possibly feel welcome at the spectacle? I do have friends who are not, politically speaking, yahoos, and even a few European friends, who adore American football. Until I hear an explanation, I will assume that they are all just trying to be idiosyncratic.

For my part, whenever I overhear or catch a glimpse of anything having to do with the NFL, I get a deep, preconceptual, instinctive sense that this is just not my world. I suspect that this is something that is not so different from the way sexual orientation works: sport might not be as important as kinship in the organization of a society, but it is pretty important. In both cases, when a person cannot play along with the way sport or kinship has been set up in a given society, that person risks marginalization. I am being quite serious when I say that I feel my marginalization very intensely on days of nationwide or worldwide athletic celebration. And as with sexual orientation, I feel like saying to anyone who would blithely insist that I need to lighten up and get with it: I can't. It's just not in me.

Of course, everyone will find him or herself unable to relate to at least some features of the modern world: many people hear off-the-cuff political analysis about, say, Suleiman's prospects in a post-Mubarak Egypt in the same way I hear the whooping and hollering about Ben Roethlisberger. That is, they don't hear it at all; they just switch it down to a sort of background humming.

I insist on writing semi-regularly about sports (my 'sports column', I like to joke) because I really do think this is important. Sports, as the t-shirt puts it, really is life for many in our society; and it is important to not allow this slogan to be elevated to, so to speak, a universal maxim with normative force. In this respect, I am quite serious when I emphasize the parallels to heteronormativity.

As it is, parent-child relationships are destroyed over a lack of enthusiasm on junior's part for throwing the pigskin around; and people actually lose jobs because they are unable to shoot-the-shit about LeBron James or whatever with their coworkers (not to mention the inability to go shoot a round of golf or 'some hoops'). Yet no one is there to defend them.

This remains for the moment a pernicious yet sub rosa variety of coerced conformity.  If I weren't an utter recluse I would start an advocacy group.

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Revisiting Egypt

I spent a month or so wandering around Egypt in the late spring of 1998. I went there from Germany, where I had been studying for the previous year. I did not inform anyone of where I was going, not my roommates in Münster nor my parents in California, and this charged the trip with a tremendous extra dose of intrigue and excitement. It also exposed me to intense crises of existential loneliness. A few dozen German tourists had been mowed down the month before by Islamists while walking through the Valley of the Kings, and the conventional wisdom was that you were not supposed to be wandering around at all, let alone wandering around without having left the proper emergency-notification information.

One night, on top of Mt. Sinai, I tried to sleep, shivering in a sleeping bag, as a group of Chinese evangelicals sang 'Amazing Grace' around a campfire, in Chinese, for hours on end. I decided to walk back down to the settlement at the base of the mountain. It was terribly cold and dark and I could not see the trail. There were flighted creatures --bats or birds, I don't know-- swooping down as if to harass me, and I quickly grew uncertain that I would find my way. No one I knew had any idea what country I was in. Was this an enjoyable sensation? It was a sort of epitome, in the old sense of encapsulation, of the generally manic-depressive condition that had brought me there in the first place, which might be summed up by the motto: I'm free! I'm free! I'm alone.

There were camels along the highway of the Sinai --real camels, not show camels, let out to graze by their Bedouin masters-- and the driver we hired to take us from Sharm El-Sheikh to wherever it is up near Israel that you can sleep on the beach for cheap (who the 'we' is is a question I might not have time to get to here, in any case it didn't last for the duration of the journey), he didn't think the prospect of hitting one of them was an important enough reason to turn on his headlights. He said it's inconsiderate to oncoming drivers to make them drive into the glare. There's the fatum mahometanum Montesquieu wrote about, I thought.

I had left Cath Neumann back in Cairo. She was a punk from Leeds, and had spent the previous eight months hitching from South Africa to Egypt, by herself. She was slowed down in Botswana when two adolescents held her up at knife-point and forced her to hand over her earthly belongings. Though an anarchist, she pressed charges, and the next she knew she was testifying in a drawn-out trial, which ended in the sentencing of two sixteen-year-old Africans to something like forty years in prison for stealing a white girl's backpack.

Anyway this is just to say that Cath had been around, and was not afraid to mingle. I, being utterly afraid or at least loath to mingle, really did not belong in Egypt at all. I was younger then and unlike today --I am now as good as invisible on the streets of any city-- easily got wrapped up in pointless and often dangerous conspiracies with just-met coevals. By the end of my first day in Cairo I had been talked in, by some smoothie named Hamdi with a bit of English, to going to the state-run liquor store, at which one needs to show a foreign ID in order to enter, to make some provisions for his cousin's wedding. It quickly came to seem to me that everyone in Egypt has far more cousins than I do, and they are all perpetually about to get married.

I had been pressured by Hamdi into this errand, pressured into a taxi with him to some squalid quarter of the city, into strained fraternity of a sort I would never even think of attempting with my own countrymen, until at some point I reached my limit of tolerance and began to yell at him: I don't know you. I don't care about your cousin's wedding. You have your alcohol, now have fun. I'm going back to my hotel.

On my way back, walking down a narrow alley just near Tahrir Square, I was accosted by a group of urchins. Their leader looked to be about sixteen; he had some sort of grease in his hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his t-shirt. "I hear you've been to the liquor store with Hamdi," he said. Yes, I replied, I suppose I have been. There was a tense silence, and I imagined he was about to pull a switchblade or something, but then he cracked a smile, and said, as if quoting a line from Menace II Society, or The Outsiders, or West Side Story: "You know what? I respect you."

I'm honored, I said, and I started walking. I entered the lobby of my hotel, a cut-rate and dusty but still majestic colonial-era building, and I started to walk up the spiral staircase. The kid followed me in and rushed to hit the buttons for the old cage elevator. "I'll bring the elevator for you. You wait," he said. I told him I preferred to walk. "I am getting the elevator. It is coming. You wait." I kept walking. When it arrived he got in and, moving up through the middle of the stairs, quickly caught up with me. "I did this for you," he pleaded through the wire mesh of the cage. "Why didn't you wait?" Old elevators scare me, I explained as I continued to move up the stairs. "You disrespected me," he said.

When we arrived at the hotel level an employee saw the kid in the elevator and began yelling at him in Arabic. The question of respect and disrespect ended right there, as my would-be blood-brother, Hamdi's rival, a familiar nuisance to the hotel staff, darted out of the elevator and disappeared down the stairs. The employee went back to the dingy desk and sat down. Behind the counter he had a black-and-white TV, on which he was watching a public address from Hosni Mubarak. Cath was sitting on a sofa in the corner writing post cards.  She was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."

The details are fuzzy but soon enough Cath and I were setting out to Giza to see the pyramids. Now she had seen the Nubian pyramids of Sudan and for her there was something far too easy about this quick jaunt out of Cairo. But the ease of it, and the conventionality, lent it a sweet character, something almost like what could be called a 'date', if the two daters' politics and personalities weren't so stubbornly exceptional.

We took a bus, and along the way she told me about a costume party at her commune in Leeds where she went as the 'personification' of the Situationist slogan: Sous les pavés la plage. Soon enough we were accosted by another young man who wanted, somehow, to implicate us in his life. He happened to live in Giza, and before we knew it we were sitting on the dirt floor of his parents' home. His mother and sister cowered in the kitchen, and periodically darted out to serve us bean paste, bread, and tea, without ever looking us in the eyes. The young man showed us his Boney M cassette. A donkey stuck its head in through the sheet that hung in place of a front door.

I have no memory at all of how we extricated ourselves from that meeting, nor of the subsequent visit to the pyramids.

Throughout my time in Egypt I was struck by the uniformity of men's hairstyles: short, parted on the side, moustaches without beards. I couldn't detect the existence of even the most marginal fashion subculture, or of any diversity of taste or manner at all. This impression of homogeneity contrasted with the rich internal lives of the characters in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I had bought at L'Orientaliste and had been reading during the trip.

At times it struck me that I would have felt I understood things better if I had remained content to read an Egyptian novel or two in Germany. The only encounters I had had in Egypt were these aggressive, almost menacing attempts at immediate friendship on the part of young Egyptian men. I have never been an easy friend to anyone, and I had no point of reference in my previous experience for what they seemed to be proposing.

I was not aware at the time that the superficial impressions I was forming were the superficial impressions of a dictatorship. There ought to be a word for it, oughtn't there: these oppressive regimes that nonetheless manage at the same time to convince Westerners that they stand for nothing so much as fun-and-sun (and perhaps a bit of edifying antiquity). It is interesting that the first two countries to catch fire in the wave of Arab revolutions currently underway, Tunisia and Egypt, are the two that have most successfully coupled base kleptocracy and pseudodemocracy with vapid and lucrative tourism industries.

I realize of course that one should not expect to learn much from the superifical impressions of a young flaneur. But I also think that the respects in which I was wrong might be more revealing than the reports of an expert traveler with some reason to believe he is right. In particular, I think my inability to relate much of what I saw --the desperation, the uniformity-- back to politics resulted from the mystified status of Egypt (like, perhaps, Thailand) in the traveller's imagination (even that of the not-totally-idiotic traveller, the traveller who would really like to learn): the impression based on the richness of antiquity, and sustained by the tourism industry, that the political reality of life in these places is somehow a parallel universe, even a distraction from their deeper nature. 

Anyway the stunning revolutionary outburst of the past week has made all that seem more naive than ever before. I imagine it is boys like Hamdi and the kid and the Gizan who are most likely to get hurt by Mubarak's thugs, and that their willingness to throw themselves into such danger is born of the same desperate willingness they had to make friends with me. I am thrilled that they have finally arrived at a moment when their wills can be turned to a better cause.

Divine Machines: An Interview at New APPS

Today is the first in a series of New APPS Interviews, which will run every Wednesday through the end of May, picking up again in September. 

Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). 

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John Protevi: Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin.  Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to "what we would now call 'biology'." Why the scare quotes on "biology"?

Justin Smith: I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.

JP: fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)

JS: This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.

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