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 attributed 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 1684 that hylozoism entails the 'clubbing together' of infinite minds everywhere, and around the same time G. W. Leibniz is 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 they are eating the souls of ancestors when they eat walrus meat; and it is a 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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

This Is Not a Philosophy Blog

And that title is not a riff on Magritte, where I claim of a thing that it is not the thing it obviously is. This is, in a direct and literal sense, not a philosophy blog. I feel the need to make this clear every now and then because, from the fact that I am a philosopher, and from the fact that I have a blog, many have incorrectly inferred that I have a philosophy blog. (I do have a blog that is focused on my work as a philosopher, namely, jehsmith.com/philosophy, but it is to jehsmith.com, without the extension, that people are generally referring when they mention my 'philosophy blog'.) 

A philosophy blog is a very particular thing, and indeed something very, very different from a blog maintained by a person who is also a philosopher. Philosophy blogs tend to involve a great deal of vocational humour (in essence not so different from the Far Side cartoons you might once have found on a paleontologist's office door), and a lot of concerned discussion of state-of-the-discipline issues: what sort of lighting should be used during APA interviews, which journals should be boycotted for their slow response time, etc. Occasionally, interspersed between these items, you will find some discussion of the actual content of the discipline, though the truth is these days it's getting harder to say where the line lies between, on the one hand, the actual, contentful, inspiring questions that motivated us to get into it in the first place and, on the other hand, the business of it, the running of the discipline. One fears that in the near future there will be ever more self-referential, discipline-focused events passing themselves off as philosophy: 'APA Special Session on Seating Arrangements at Philosophy Conferences: Should We Rearrange the Chairs?' 

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be thinking about stuff like this (especially when it comes to the crucial matter of eliminating cognitive bias). I'm saying I'm not the one who's doing it, not here. There is no state-of-the-discipline chatter here, nor, I hasten to add, any vocational humour. Nor, for that matter, is there much discussion even of the content of the discipline (the content in the old sense of ideas and arguments and stuff). Philosophy comes up fairly regularly, but it has no special pride of place, and is probably less central to my concerns here, year in and year out, than poetry, folklore, literature, music, autobiography, product packaging, and any number of other things I care deeply about. It is not that all these things are of equal or greater importance to philosophy in my life, but rather that this blog serves for me principally as a place to address all those things I care about that cannot find their way into my professional teaching and research profile.

On occasion, I myself have contributed to the confusion by giving in to temptation and ejaculating some opinion or other about the culture of academic philosophy, as when I complained recently of what I see as a strain of conservative pronatalism among North American philosophers of my generation. One of my resolutions for 2013 is to refrain from doing this; if I don't like something about the culture I'm a part of, I am of course free to simply think about other things, as I should have done in this case: like poetry, for example, and all the other beautiful things for which this blog really exists.

One thing I've been thinking about recently --and here I might be lapsing once again into state-of-the-discipline chatter, but hell, it's not 2013 yet-- is how much clearer, and how much more legitimate, the distinction would be between 'my blog' and 'my philosophy blog' if I were principally interested in blogging about sports, or whiskies, or kayaking, or the furniture I'm building, or the children I'm raising. Now I have nothing against these endeavors, but as it happens my interests lie elsewhere; I have nothing to say about Messi or Laphroaig or whatever, and plenty to say about, e.g., Kafka. And this means that my elsewhere is not neutral territory, but is sufficiently philosophoid to be seen as the sort of stuff a philosopher cannot be interested in without being interested in it qua philosopher.

And this is where the old, facile distinction between the continentals and the analytics, as between those whose philosophy emerges from literary preoccupations and those who come to philosophy via a broad concern for scientific explanation, intrudes uninvited upon my blogging idyll, and gives the casual visitor the impression that because I am concerned with literature here, I must belong to the first of these two camps.

So let me make something very clear: not only is this not a philosophy blog, a fortiori it is definitely not a soft philosophy blog. And let me be perfectly honest: I don't have the slightest clue what Derrida or Husserl is on about, and what little fragments I've managed to understand have failed to capture my imagination in any way. When I am writing as a philosopher, Aristotle, Henry More, Spinoza, and Leibniz are my guiding lights. I believe, moreover, that what we call 'science' must be the ultimate arbiter of questions about the nature of reality, and I believe that at least in principle definitive factual answers, i.e., the truth, can be arrived at for such questions.

But anyhow my point is that the vast majority of the time, the interest I take in things here is an interest I take quite apart from the line of work I'm in, and quite apart from my my orientation in that work, even if, admittedly, this interest often lies somewhat closer to philosophy --and even to that philosophy I've confessed to knowing nothing about-- than do, say, the NBA playoffs.

So, to sum up: this is not a philosophy blog. I don't like philosophy blogs. This is a non-philosophy blog about all those things that matter to me that cannot be easily incorporated into my professional profile. And there is no reason why I, a philosopher, should not be free to maintain this sort of non-philosophy blog, any less than my peers should be free to maintain their Monty Python blogs or their blogs about The Wire or their favorite coffee shops in the Tri-State Area or their favorite vacation spots in Tuscany.

There is another discussion to be had about how the project of philosophy came to be so defined that the full range of interests I've mentioned could not be incorporated into it. Leibniz, for example, would have drawn the boundaries of the discipline very differently, and his blog --and Leibniz definitely would have had a blog-- would have been a philosophy blog with notes on the diversity of plant species in Siberia, on how to build a reckoning machine, with poems about cider, and proofs for the existence of God (for me --as for Leibniz, I think-- the crucial distinction is not whether you see philosophy as deriving from science or from sentiment, from truth-seeking or from self-expression, but rather whether or not you see philosophy as appropriately concerned with the great abundance of particular things in the world, with all the res singulares). For now I will simply say that I am well aware of where the bounds of the discipline lie at present, that I am able to respect them in my professional activity, and that they are of absolutely no interest to me here. 

Why I'm Studying Sanskrit

My month-long ultra-intensive spoken Sanskrit course at the University of Heidelberg has come to an end. I was the oldest student, and probably the weakest (in my defense, I'd had only one semester of formal study prior to beginning the course). This was an extremely humbling experience, but also, in the obvious and clichéd ways, edifying, character-building, etc. The most humbling (or, to be frank, humiliating) moment came on the final day. I had naively signed up to take part in the Saraswati Prize Contest, which is sponsored by the Indian government, pitting non-Indian students of Sanskrit against one another as they each deliver a 10-15 minute speech in that language. I really did not know what I was getting into, but by the time it began to dawn on me that I was in over my head, it was all too late to pull out. So, this past Friday, in front of 50 or so people, many of whom speak Sanskrit as fluently as I speak English, I offered up the following --how should I put it?-- rudiments of sentences on the assigned topic, "Why Study Sanskrit?" (translation follows):

िकमर्थं संस्कृतमधीमहे ?

सम्भवतः अहं अधुना सम्भाशणं सम्स्कृतेन कर्तुं उद्युक्तो नस्मि । इदानीमप्यहं एतया भाशया अत्मानं सम्यक् प्रकाशयितुं न शक्नोमि । एकं सुन्दरं सुभाषितं उपदिशति : "मनस्येकं वचस्येकं कर्मण्येकं महात्मनाम् ।मनस्यन्यद्वचस्यन्यत्कर्मण्यन्यद्दुरात्मनाम्" ।। किन्तुवहं दुरात्मनो नास्मि । यो हि पठितुं अर्थयते तस्य अज्ञानं अपचारो नस्ति । अतो यद्यपि मम मनो व्यक्ततरं मम पदेभ्यो अस्ति तथापि एतनि पदनि पौंश्चलीयनि न सन्ति ।  यद अहं सम्स्कृतं पठितुं प्रविश्यमि स्म तदा पुर्वं एव अहं अष्टात्रिंशद्वर्ष आसम् । तदनिम् मया पूर्वं एव कनिचित् पुस्तकनि इतिहस्य दर्शनस्य यूरोपखण्डे विशये  लेखितनि । मह्यम् दर्शनम् जेर्मनि-देशस्य, प्रतमाम् आन्वीक्शिकी महोदयस्य गोत्फ्रिद् विल्हेल्म् लैब्नित्स् रोचते स्म । तदनिम् न किमपि सम्प्रदायस्य दर्शनस्य भारते न जनमि स्म । तत्कालम् मया अपि पदनि "वैशेषिक," "न्याय," "मीमाम्सा" इति तावन्न श्रुतवन्ति । इदनिमपि एतनि दर्शनि न सम्यक् जानामि । परन्तु एतावत् अपि अधुना गुरुतां च अर्थवत्तां च सम्प्रदायाणाम् दरशनस्य भारते अवगच्छमि । कुत एते गुरुता च अर्थवत्ता च ? । आरिष्टतलो लिखितोवन् : यथा पार्सिके तथा युवनदेशे अग्निः तुल्यम् अभिशोचति इति । एवमेव वक्तुं शक्यते : यथा युवनदेशे तथा भारते प्रश्नाः तत्त्वायाः च सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये तुल्यम् उत्प्लवन्ते । दर्शनम् युरोप-महदेशे न जयते स्म । युरोप-महदेशः दर्शनस्य स्वमी नस्ति । यद्यपि दर्शनम् एव संपत्ति मानुष्यतायाः अस्ति तथपि सर्वं रष्ट्रम् स्वकीयं विधिम् च स्वकीयां पद्धतिम् च तर्कायाः उपजानीते । परिणामतः यत्र यत्र द्वि दर्शनिकौ अन्यद्भ्याम् रष्ट्राभ्याम् मेलनम् कुरुतः तत्र तत्र अरिषण्यम् नस्ति यत् तौ परस्परम् दर्शनस्य विशये सम्ब्रवितुं शक्श्यतः । ताभ्याम् अपि सम्भक्ता भाषा वक्तव्या । अतः यदि पश्चिमः दर्शनिकः सम्स्कृतम् नावगच्छति, सः स्वकीयम् प्रतियोगिनम् भारतात् न अनुद्रष्टुं शक्श्यति । यः भाषाम् न वदति सः अर्थान् सैद्धान्तिकानाम शब्दाणाम् तस्याः भाषायाः अवगन्तुं न शक्नोति । यथा उदाहरणम् अनुचिन्तयमः शब्दम् "रुप" । एतम् शब्दम् अनुवक्तुं न शक्नामः । अपामित्यम् हि एतस्य शब्दस्य पश्चिमेषु भाषासु नस्ति । 26. यथार्थ अनुवदकाः एतम् शब्दम् कुत्र "matter" इति कुत्र "form" इति अनुवक्तुं । परन्तु पश्चिमदर्शने "matter" च "form" च द्वौ अपष्ठुरौ अर्थौ स्तः । पूर्वतनः हि उपस्तरम् उपरस्य अस्ति । तदर्थम् यदि अनुवदकः अर्थम् अनुपालयितुं इच्छति तर्हि शब्दः "रुप" न अनुवक्तव्यः । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्यकम् उदाहरणम् । अनुचिन्तयमः प्रविभागम् शास्त्रणाम् ।  ज्योतिःशास्त्रस्य प्रतिवस्तुः पश्चिमायाम् किम् अस्ति ? ।  ज्योतिषम् प्रयुक्तगणितम् च सर्वशाकुनम् च व्यतिशजति । इत्थम् एतम् शब्दम् "astrology" इति अनुवक्तुं शक्नुमः । किनु यत् पश्चिमायाम् एतस्य शब्दस्य असमना अर्थगतिः अस्ति तत् अस्मभिः न विस्मरन्तव्यम् । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्ततः न्यायविद्याम् । एषा विद्या षोदश पदार्थान् व्यतिशजति तथा प्रमाणम् च संशयम् च वादम् च जल्पम् च । पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः तु सर्वान् एतान् शब्दान् शस्त्रे "logic" न विचन्ति । यत् एतानि दर्शनानि -- मिमंसा वेदन्त न्याय इव -- केवलम् सम्स्कृतेन युक्तम् अवगन्तव्यिनि तत् एतैः निदर्शणैः स्पष्टम् भवति । यदि एतानि दर्शनानि पश्चिमैः दर्शनिकैः न अगतनि तर्हि ते दर्शनम् एवम्, यत्रकुत्रपि एतत् दर्शनम् उत्प्लवते, अवगन्तुं न शक्श्यन्ति । दर्शनम् हि भारते प्रतिध्वनिः च प्रतिच्छाया च दर्शनस्य यवनदेशस्य, आरबदर्शनम् इव, नस्ति । चरित्रम् च वृद्धिः च दर्शनस्य भारते नितरम् अव्यतिकीर्णाः सन्ति स्म । केवलम् भारते पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः पूर्णा च स्वयंशासिता च विपारीतता स्वकीयायाः परम्परायाः अनुद्रक्श्यन्ति । तद् अपि  बहवः सहकारिनः कनद-देशे च अमेरिक-देशे च विशवसं कुर्वन्ति यत् दर्शनम् भारते नस्ति, यत् तर्कः सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये भारते केवलम् अन्धश्रद्धास्ति । नूनम् खलु तत् केवलम् शुद्धा पक्षपतिता अस्ति । तेषाम् अज्ञानं निर्मूलयितुंर्थे पश्चिमा मद्यसथैः दर्शनिकैः प्रयोजनं अस्ति । याः सुज्ञाः उभयोः सम्प्रदयोः सन्ति, तैः पश्चिमा प्रयोजनं अस्ति । अहं तदृशः दर्शनिकः भवितुं इच्छमि ।

Why Study Sanskrit?

It may be that I am not yet ready to give a speech in Sanskrit. Regrettably, I am still unable to express myself well in this language. A certain beautiful subhāṣita teaches: "wicked people think one thing, say another, and do something else." But I am not wicked, for whoever seeks to learn is at no fault in his ignorance. Thus, although my mind is clearer than my words, nonetheless these words are not meretricious. When I began to study Sanskrit, I was already 38 years old. At that time, I had already written a few books on the history of European philosophy. I was particularly interested in German philosophy, and above all the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. At that time I didn't know anything about the tradition of philosophy in India. Back then, I had not yet heard words like 'Vaiśeṣika', 'Nyāya', and 'Mīmāṃsā' Still today, I do not know these schools well, but at least now I understand the venerableness and importance of these traditions. In what way are they venerable and important? Aristotle wrote that fire burns in Persia just as it does in Greece. It could likewise be said that as in Greece, so in India, questions concerning reality, truth, and being arise in the same way. Philosophy was not born in Europe, and Europe is not the proprietor of philosophy. Yet although philosophy is in fact the property of all humanity, still, every culture invents its own method and its own system of reasoning. Consequently, whenever two philosophers from two different cultures meet, mutual recognition is not certain. They must also speak a common language. Thus, if a Western philosopher does not know Sanskrit will not be able to recognize his own counterpart in India. Whoever does not speak a language will not be able to understand the (full) meaning of philosophical terms in that language. For instance, let us consider the term rupa. This term is untranslatable, for it has no equivalent in Western languages. As a matter of fact, sometimes translators render this term as 'matter', and sometimes as 'form'. But in Western philosophy 'matter' and 'form' are two opposite concepts, for the former is the substratum (or underlier) of the latter. Thus, if the translator wishes to conserve the meaning, he must not translate the term rupa. Let us consider another example. Let us consider the classification (or division) of the disciplines. What is the equivalent in the West to the science of jyotisha? This discipline includes both applied mathematics and augury. We can translate this term as 'astrology', but we must not forget that this word has a different meaning in the West. Let us consider, finally, the science of Nyaya. This discipline involves sixteen categories, such as 'the means of knowing', 'doubt', 'discussion', and 'wrangling'. Western philosophers do not recognize all of these categories in their science of logic. Is, then, Nyaya 'logic'? The only way to adequately answer this question is to approach it from within the language in which it was articulated. By these examples it is clear that these doctrines --such as Mimamsa, Vedanta, Nyaya-- can only be clearly understood in Sanskrit. If these doctrines are not understood by Western philosophers, moreover, they will not be able to understand philosophy itself, wherever it appears. For philosophy in India is not an echo or a shadow of the philosophy of Greece, as is Arabic philosophy. The history and development of philosophy in India was entirely independent. Only in India will a Western philosopher find a complete and autonomous counterpart of his own tradition. And yet, I have colleagues in Canada and America who still believe that there is no philosophy in India, that speculation about truth and being in India is merely superstition. Of course this is a pure prejudice. In order to eradicate their ignorance, the West needs philosophers who are mediators. The West needs philosophers who are competent in both traditions. I would like to be such a philosopher.

*

So that was that. There was some polite applause, and then the next contestant began his speech (this was my Serbian friend Marko, a true Wunderkind who seems to have gained his high proficiency in spoken Sanskrit primarily by watching Sanskrit newsclips on YouTube; I hope he wins the prize). 

Now it should go without saying that what I said is not quite what I would have liked to have said. Rather, what I said was a sort of compromise between what I wanted to say and what I was able to say. The core thought, which I believe I was able to convey, was that India provides the best, and perhaps the only, full-fledged instance of an independent philosophical tradition that covers all of the fundamental questions addressed in the European philosophical tradition. Arabic-language philosophy cannot provide a comparison case, since in fact it is a continuation and development of the same tradition with which Europeans identify; and Chinese philosophy cannot provide as useful a comparison case, since for the most part it is concerned with ethics, statecraft, political philosophy, and rather less with the metaphysics and epistemology that have, arguably, underpinned the Western philosophical tradition (I am waiting for this point to be refuted). For this reason, any serious attempt at understanding the nature of philosophical inquiry through cross-cultural comparison will be one that considers the similarities and differences between the Indian and Western approaches to philosophical questions. 

I take it as a contingent fact about world history that India and Europe developed philosophical traditions, and I take it as a contingent fact, also, that Sanskrit has been the medium for so much important philosophical reflection. To this extent, beyond the fact that my Sanskrit is terrible, there is another reason why I will probably not be winning any prizes from the promoters of Sanskrit in India any time soon: I am not saying what they want to hear about the value of this cornerstone of their cultural heritage.

Within India, Sanskrit is promoted largely by conservative and nationalist factions, and their take on the antiquity and expressiveness of the language is rather different from anything that a linguist or a scholar could assent to about any natural language. In short, they don't really think Sanskrit is a natural language at all. It is, rather, the Devabhasha, the divine language, which exists entirely outside of history. Now in classical Indian philosophy the idea of a transendental language that is channeled through human beings but that is not produced by them yields very interesting reflections about the nature of both language and meaning. But as an understanding of language today, this theory can have no place among thoughtful, reasonable people. Remarkably, many Western students of Sanskrit are perfectly happy to buy into the nationalists' myths about Sanskrit, thus bringing about a strange collusion between idealistic Western aspirations to enlightenment and universal harmony, on the one hand, and a rather conventional sort of ethnic chauvinism on the other. I have heard Western students of Sanskrit rapturously declaring that this language is 'the mother of all languages', that it bears a singular relationship to truth, that it is not of human origin, etc. (For a small sample of this sort of nonsense coming from Westerners, watch this.) Unfortunately, the Indian promoters of Sanskrit do not go out of their way to quell this enthusiasm. Professional Western scholars of India, in the meantime, who surely know better, strive for a delicate balance: they do not wish to offend the people who care most about the thing they themselves study, and so, I gather, are indulgent of unscholarly views about the antiquity and origins of the language.

Sanskrit is important, and the corpus of scientific, philosophical, sacral, and poetic texts produced in this language is surely one of the richest, probably the richest, contributions to global textual culture ever. Millions of these texts remain unstudied. Western philosophy, to the extent that it refuses to take an interest in these texts, will remain, as I've said before (paraphrasing Nietzsche), nothing more than a catalogue of its own prejudices. As far as I'm concerned the case for studying Sanskrit makes itself, and there is no need at all to invoke higher spiritual incentives in order to justify one's interest. 

If only I had been able to put it this way in my speech. 

--

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The Stone

This is a tale I wrote in Sanskrit. It is my first composition in this language. It is severely constrained by what I am able to say, and even what I am able to say I can only say in a halting and mistake-ridden way. And yet, somehow I am pleased with it. I experience my beginner status as a sort of formal constraint, almost Oulipian in the way it binds my expressive power to rules that are not of my own choosing and that make the resulting composition something completely different from a free play of the imagination. The goal then is to express something meaningful, and ideally even interesting, within these constraints. There's more I want to say about this project of learning Sanskrit, and about the new reflections on language learning in general that it has stimulated. But for now I'll just post the tale. (Corrections from more advanced Sanskritists will be humbly taken and appreciated.) 

*

शिला 

एकदासित् शिला । एतायाः शिलायाः पदाः न सन्ति स्म, न नेत्रेपि, न श्रवने, न लोमचर्मनम्, न वदनम् । शिला गन्तुं न शक्नोति स्म, प्रानितुं न शक्नोति स्म, खदितुं न शक्नोति स्म, न किं अपि कर्तुं शक्नोति स्म । परन्तु एतायाः शिलायाः जिवात्मन् अस्ति स्म । सातिवाकुशलिन्यासित् । एक्स्मिन् दिने पक्शिनि शिलायायाम् उपविशति स्म । पक्शिनि झटित्यनुभवत् यत् शिला जिवितासित् । सोक्तवति : "भो शिला" इति, "तव किं अभवत् । शिलाः केवलम् अजिवनि वस्तुनि सन्ति" । शिला प्रत्युक्तोवति : "धिक् ! अहं न जानामि किं मम अभवत् । अहं शिलास्मि । गन्तुं न शकनोमि । प्रानितुं न शक्नोमि । खदितुं न शक्नोमि । न किं चित् कर्तुं न शक्नोमि । अहं केवलम्  वस्तुवस्मि । मया न जीतव्यम् । न जानामि अपि कुतः अहं विशयः एतायाः कथायाः अस्मि" इति । पक्शिनि उक्तोवति : "तद्विशये चिन्ता मस्तु । गन्तुं नातिव सु्नदरम् अस्ति । अहं च नितरम् बुबुक्शास्मि । तव जीवनम् सुलभम् अस्ति । त्वया केवलम् चिन्तयितव्यम् च ध्यनम् कर्तव्यम् च । भूमिः तव भार्यास्ति । चिन्तनम् तव भोजनम् अस्ति । सुन्दरम् एतत् जिवनम्" इति । एतैः शब्दैः पक्शिनि समुत्पतति स्म । शिला पुन एककिन्यासित् । कुशलिन्यासित् । सा तस्या भार्याम् अलिन्गति स्म च भोजनम् खदति स्म च । भक्शणम् कृत्वा प्रस्वपिति स्म च स्वपनम् पक्शगमस्य विशये करोति स्म च । 

The Stone 

Once there was a stone. This stone had no feet, no eyes, no ears, fur, or face. It could not move, could not breath, could not eat, could not do anything at all. But this stone had a soul. It was very unhappy. One day a bird landed on it. The bird immediately sensed that the stone was alive. It said: "Hey, stone! What's with you? Stones are only non-living things." The stone replied: "What a pity! I don't know what's with me. I am a stone. I cannot move. I cannot breath. I cannot eat. I cannot do anything at all. I am only a thing. It is not for me to live. I do not even know why I am the subject of this story." The bird said: "Don't worry about it. Moving is not so wonderful. And I'm always hungry. Your life is easy. You just have to think and meditate. The earth is your wife. Thoughts are your food. What a nice life." With these words the bird flew away. The stone was again alone.  It was happy. It embraced its wife and had a meal. Having eaten, it went to sleep and dreamt of flying.

Notes of a Novice Student of India

Any specialist on anything will have had that peculiar experience of coming across some casual comment from a total non-specialist about the very thing to which one has devoted one's life, a comment made as if there were no such thing as specialist knowledge, as if what we know in any domain at all were just so much hearsay and vulgarisation. Lord knows I've seen plenty of people denouncing Descartes, for example, or praising Spinoza (seldom the reverse), who know nothing, but nothing, about Descartes or Spinoza. This is easy and costless to do (and we all do it, including those of us who pride ourselves on being specialists and who really care about getting things right in our special domains), so long as one doesn't mingle with the specialists in the domain about which one holds forth.

I've been thinking about how this works, about this seldom-discussed aspect of the sociology of knowledge, quite a bit recently, as I go deeper in my mid-career shift to what used to be called 'Indology' (more on this telling term soon). I am still a near-absolute beginner, yet I am now reaching the point where I can no longer say whatever I want to say on the grounds that I don't know anything anyway, and that the people with whom I'm speaking don't know anything either. I am now interacting with people who do not find it at all peculiar to care about Pāṇinian syntax theory, or about the rules of proper inference in Navya-Nyāya logic. The days are over when I could make sweeping claims about civilizational differences (the sort of sweeping claims my colleagues in philosophy often make) as regards rationality, for example. So in short I'm learning to be careful about what I say, which is really nothing other than entering a community of specialists. I expect anything I say now will appear naive to me when I look back on it in a few years, which is only to say that I will have entered more fully into that community. But one has to start somewhere. 

What used to be called 'Indology' is now referred to more obliquely by phrases such as 'South Asian Studies', 'Religions- und Kulturgeschichte Südasiens', and so on. To some extent this shift can be explained as part of the broader changes that turned geology into 'earth science', and so on. Here, it's just a matter of rebranding, and has nothing to do with respecting the sensibilities of the subjects themselves that are being studied (rocks and sediment don't have sensibilities). In addition, there is the broad impact of Saïd's critique of Orientalism, and the bizarre presumption that if we redescribe ourselves as doing 'studies' of something rather than the '-logy' of it, then we are somehow immune to that critique. But unlike the transformation of Sinology into East-Asian Studies (it's gone translinguistic now, too: in Montreal you can major in 'Études est-asiatiques'), Indology is weighted down by other historical legacies than just the one Saïd picked out, since the gaze upon India has often been one that did not treat it as exotically other, but also, for often less than liberal reasons, treated it as fundamentally, autochthonously, the same. Thus there were several generations of European Indology that used the archaeological, linguistic, and philological evidence of a common Indo-European history for simply sinister, and distinctly European, political ends.

One thing I am quickly learning is that it is best, in South Asian Studies today, to simply leave that particularly charged aspect of Indology's past alone. It is the stuff of cranks. Recently, I was castigated for observing that the shooter at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin would have done well to have learned that, according to the Nazi ideology he claimed to value, Sikhs are themselves Aryans, and worthy of respect from nativist white Americans. I noted that Aryanism is bullshit and suitable only for cranks, no matter who is deemed a member of that class, but still, I said, one ought to start out with the likes of Wade M. Page using principles to which he would be sure to assent. I argued that if he were to learn this much, he might well conclude that the world is more complicated than he had thought, and maybe he should just pause a while and reconsider his prejudices. No sooner did I finish writing this than I got news of some white yokel in Texas who was using his belief in 'Vedism' to claim that he had a first-amendment right to not have his groceries handled by an African-American supermarket clerk. Oh Jesus, I thought, I guess I was wrong. Here is a textbook case of someone who is clearly made worse by the tiny bit of knowledge he manages to come by. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as Brian Leiter likes to say. I suspect that this clown found his way to Vedism via some fringe white-supremacist nonsense, some pamphlet or blog of collected half-truths. Perhaps we would have seen similar results with Page (but then again, one might also point out that the idiot in Texas isn't shooting anyone, he's just being an awful, awful person). 

With a fringe like that, one can well understand why the mainstream defines the range of legitimate interests as cautiously as it does. But while I'm speaking as a newcomer, it seems to me that there must have been quite a traumatic rift in the Euro-American study of India at the moment when the hippies --that is, if we should attempt to pigeon-hole them, the people who looked to India as the place that is precisely not Europe, and therefore worth learning from-- moved in to replace the older generation of Indologists-- that is, again to pigeon-hole, the people who looked to India primarily in view of its Indo-Europeanness. Wendy Doniger describes herself as a 'recovering Indologist', and I imagine there what she means is that she has spent her career, as someone who came up in the sixties, seeking to overcome the limitations of the generation that trained her. Of course, she has also had to position herself, like many Euro-American post-Indologists, in opposition to Indian popular opinion. And here we have an additional complicating factor in the strange play of forces that has given us today's 'South Asian Studies': there is a tension between what Indian religious and political conservatives like to hear about Indian history and civilization, on the one hand, and on the other what the Euro-American post-Indologists, however much they may have been influenced by an early hope for total inter-civilizational harmony, have to say about India.

Hindu conservatives, old-fashioned European Indologists, and sixties-era harmony-seeking South Asianists all seem to have left their mark on this peculiar field, and for better or worse to be benefitting from each other's work while also doing their best to avoid direct confrontation as to the deep reasons that motivate their respective interests in the field. Again, I'm speaking as a newcomer, and am particularly sensitive to the ways in which I might come across as not knwoing what I'm talking about, but I do think it's safe to say that the different possible ways one might come to study Sanskrit are rather more various and complex than the motivations that might bring one to the study of, say, Swahili. There, one could predict with a fairly high degree accuracy what the Swahili student's general take on the value, the sources, and the 'actuality' of East African culture and history are. Not so with those who are looking to Sanskrit as a portal of entry into Indian culture and history.

I add that this tumultuous history seems fairly sub rosa among the youngest generation of Euro-American students of South Asia. A generation or so after (I imagine) students such as Doniger had to confront the ancien régime of Mircea Eliade et al., students of South Asia today can approach it with an insouciant and innocent 'interest in other cultures', or in learning about the place their parents came from. I suppose this is progress, though part of me thinks that the contested nature of the discipline of Indology ought itself to be considered an integral part of South Asian studies today.

One division that does seem meaningful among the new generation of South Asianists is that between, on the one hand, the students who care first and foremost about India the place, who think one must go there, who care about Bollywood, food, the big fat Indian weddings of college roommates, and so on, and on the other hand the ones who don't, who take India as a place that happens to have produced some great ideas and innovations, but that one need visit no more urgently than, say, a Plato scholar need make a trip to Athens. I am probably closer to the latter camp, though I am certainly as interested in the everyday world of contemporary India, in all its phenomenal richness, as I am in anything else. I expect I'll make it to India at some point, but it will be nothing like a pilgrimage. I will think of it as work, I expect.

I started working on classical Indian philosophy principally as a result of a very significant encounter, perhaps six years ago, with some of the work of G. E. R. Lloyd (which I've known longer than six years, but which took a while to hit me the right way). Lloyd does not work on India, but rather on ancient Chinese and Greek medicine, but nonetheless it was his work that seemed to provide to me a methodological model for the sort of research I would like to do. As time goes on I'm finding myself more and more hung up on questions of methodology and, one might say, of metaphilosophy, wondering how to put two belief systems into comparison without simply resorting to impressionistic observations of the sort, 'This sounds like that', and without favoring one of the systems over the other in the comparison. Lloyd focuses on medicine, which perhaps lends itself more easily to comparison than philosophy as a whole, a field so nebulous, with a denotation so unstable, that one must always wonder whether one is talking about the same thing from one century to the next, let alone from one civilization to the next.

So I'm finding myself unable to really get started on the comparative project I'd set out on, yet I'm also finding myself happier and happier with the passage of time at my decision to start working on this stuff. I'm more convinced than ever that to the extent that academic philosophers stay in the village of European ideas, they are really only, to paraphrase Nietzsche, offering up a catalog of their own prejudices in the guise of philosophical arguments. There are big questions that interest me --such as the idea that grammar is for the Indian tradition what mathematics is for the Greek-- but again I'm getting sufficiently socialized into the world of real scholars in this field that I am now sensitive to the difficulty of addressing this sort of question head on.

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On Dieting

An uninspired jeu de mots sometimes found in ads for low-end diet products inadvertently asks a deep question: Why weight?

The third-century Patristic author Origen thought that in the beginning all the angels were entirely free of corporeal matter. They spent their time circling around God, concentrating on him, thinking of nothing but him. But some of them grew distracted, and began to fall away, and as they fell they grew sluggish and heavy. The more distracted they became from the divine source of their being, the heavier they grew.

But they did not turn into stones or clods. If only! Instead, they were endowed with a different sort of bodies, precarious bodies that could only remain in existence to the extent that they also remained in perpetual exchange with the world around them, taking it in, turning it into self, and excreting what could not be transformed. “That alone is dead, which eateth not,” wrote the 16th-century iatrochemist Paracelsus. He describes eating as a perpetual replacement of the matter of the body, matter that is perpetually in the course of being burned up. Whereas stones have their identity secured by the fact that their parts remain in more or less stable cohesion with one another, living bodies remain the same bodies, or at least the bodies of the same individuals, only to the extent that they have new matter, food-matter, continually passing through them, like the water through a fountain.

It is in this respect, the English Epicurean philosopher Walter Charleton wrote in the 17th century, that “nutrition is but generation continu’d,” the perpetual re-creation of the corporeal substance that is always in the course of burning up and dying out. Stones have their being from their parts, and in order to keep being they only have to keep sitting there. But a living body is a delicate balance. Its parts have their being only through the sustained performance of an elaborate dance.  Keeping a body alive is more like keeping plates spinning, or like juggling balls in the air, than like guarding some precious jewel in a safe. This condition of our animal bodily existence can give rise to a sense of virtuosity when we feel we are on top of things, keeping the plates spinning fluidly, leaping over hurdles, doing youthful handstands; but it can also seem a particular sort of bondage: keep the damned things spinning, no matter how weary it makes you, or you will die.

Why it is precisely this sort of corporeality that should be our punishment for turning away from the divine is something that is never explained by Origen or anyone else. If, as the Pythagoreans taught, the body is a prison, why does it not simply hold the soul within constant, unchanging, stone-like walls? Our punishment is plainly more Sisyphean than simply carceral, though unlike Sisyphus, condemned to the eternal repetition of a brute task, we are expected to eternally maintain a fragile balance. What a strange predicament this is is something that has gradually retreated from view since the 17th century, when mechanical analogies for the functions of the body first became available. Soon enough, the work of the stomach would come to be comprehended in terms of the work of the factory, and both of these would come to be thought of in terms of mere efficiency (one wonders, though, whether in our post-industrial era we will ever begin to hear more fashionable, information-based or cybernetic accounts of what it is stomachs do). Today, there is a right way to run the work of the digestive system, there are good 'fuels' and bad ones, and children are taught to believe from an early age that if they simply master the rules of healthy eating, of right fueling, of sound industrial management, then there is nothing irreducibly or in principle problematic about this work that has been assigned to them.

It may be that an older form of wisdom speaks to us through proverbs, the sort of wisdom that reeks of grandparents and people even older, that announces 'you are what you eat' as an existential truism, for example. But this sort of wisdom is for the most part drowned out by chatter, about good carbs as opposed to bad ones, about the exalted ideal ratio between carbs, proteins, and fats, about whether food should be free of some negative element or other, whether it should be raw or cooked, whether it is fitting that animals be slaughtered to produce it. And all of this chatter takes place in the mode of facticity: it is put forth as if it were entirely science, and had nothing to do with culture. The striving upper middle class thus avoids McDonald's not because it is where poor fat people go, but rather because the food served there is 'unhealthy', a term that can only conceal its normativity under a thick coat of false consciousness. And thus urban subcultures emerge that condemn gluten, or that advocate a diet based principally upon meat à la Tartare, as if there were no logic of social distinction at work, as if it were simply the case that their way of eating is the correct way, the natural way, the way cavemen ate, the way we ate before we were corrupted by the Agricultural Revolution, by modernity, by supermarkets, or some other hypothetical loss of innocence.

There is no more awareness in either the bourgeois or the Bohemian expressions of this chatter than there is in traditional folk cultures, with their highly prescriptive conceptions of how one ought to eat, that 'the natural' is a contested category, that in nutritional matters as in everything else, grand gestures and elaborate programs that spell out how to live in accordance with nature are at least as artificial as everything else we come up with. Whole Foods occupies a different cultural space than the McDonald's a few blocks away; both are however equidistant from Nature. But it may be that all this moral chatter masquerading as scientific truth, all this unending spelling out of the facts of the matter about how human bodies naturally nourish themselves, is just what enables us to carry on without having to address the real problem that underlies and gives rise to all this talk: that there is no correct formula, and that a body in constant need of nourishment, even when it is well nourished, even when it is nourished as perfectly as is naturally possible, is still a body in a curious predicament, that is always balanced on the brink of annihilation, and whose life is perpetual death.

Today, then, though food is on everyone's mind, as a culture we plainly lack the conceptual resources for reflecting on the bodily condition that food sustains. Many people would have no use for these resources anyway, for they do not experience this condition as peculiar at all. They thrive in the dancing of it, even believing that they are their own choreographers, that their parts fit together in the way they do as a result of their own free design. And their bodies grow beautiful and excellent, at least for a while, and even when they eventually grow tired of dancing, some of them do not complain, or even question the conditions of their existence.

I was never one of these creatures. Anyone who has ever seen me on a dance-floor will be able to confirm that I have no idea what to do there. But what most of them will not have observed is that this unknowing is my general condition. My everyday way of being in my body is really no different from my rarely seen dance moves. In various periods of my life, I have, by force of will, attempted to just ‘get into it’ --a revealing expression--, and have even succeeded for short stretches of time in convincing myself that I was in fact into it (the most joy I have ever felt in a single moment featured a soundtrack by a certain Coolio--something about riding along in a fantasy--with me and three other attractive young people flailing around in a cramped 106th Street apartment, in the summer, it must have been, of 1996). But in the end I have always returned back to my true condition, the one described in Origen’s fable of the fate of God’s distracted angels.

I do not believe in God or sin, but no exercise of intellect will ever rid me of the feeling that my body is a punishment for something, and that the only possible absolution lies in striving to return to some original undistracted state, to stay focused on that thing the body-dancers have forgotten.

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Animals, for their part, still do not know that when they are eating, they are eating calories. Animals just eat. Yet they too can be put on a diet, can have their corporeality compromised. Studies of earthworms, pigs, dogs, monkeys, and all the way up the chain of being to humans have shown that, when fed on a regular diet of 20-25% less than the ordinary caloric intake for the species in question, a creature will on average live longer than those of its conspecifics that are left to eat whatever they like.  This datum has served as the scientific justification for the new so-called 'calorie-restriction movement', whose members are typically not teenage girls, but middle-aged men, high-achieving professional men, the sort of insufferable tight-assed perfectionists you might also find running marathons.

The calorie-restrictionists insist that for them there is no such thing as 'dieting'. This word calls to mind the amateurishness of recidivist Jenny Craig clients, who respect an alimentary regime in the same way Sunday painters might dabble in aquarelles, without any real expectation of selling a canvas, let alone of bringing anything truly beautiful into existence. The calorie-restrictionists are, by contrast, professionals, and their commitment is for the longue durée. They recognize that maintaining a low weight is a quantitative science, and not alchemy. One loses weight by reducing the number of calories consumed relative to the number of calories burned, not by recourse to preparations from açai berries and other such elixirs. They also seem to understand what most Americans do not: that a calorie --in contrast with phlogiston and sundry other hypothetical entities adduced in the past to explain the innate heat of bodies-- is a pure abstraction, a unit of measurement of energy, and not a substance that can be physically separated from food. The calorie-restrictionists are in this respect the heirs to Lavoisier: no-bullshit calculators of the bodily economy of energetic input and output.

But if they excel in chemistry, their moral cosmology is fairly disappointing. In perfectly Manichaean fashion, one of the prominent links on their website spells out the various respects in which their movement contrasts with anorexia as light does with darkness (the society's symbol is a radiant sun). Thus, for example, as we learn from one restrictionist website:

 Anorexia: I am bad.

Calorie Restriction: I am good.

Anorexia: Hidden and secret.

Calorie Restriction: Open and public.

Anorexia: Focus is weight.

Calorie Restriction: Focus is calories.

And so on. The last of these distinctions seems momentarily to its authors to drift too far in the direction of the unhealthy and unbalanced. Thus while cautioning that you should not be "obsessed with the scale on your bathroom floor," but instead with the one on your kitchen counter, they rush to add "that 'obsessed' might not be the word you want to aim for." If you are going to obsess, "the kitchen scale is probably better than the bathroom scale. At least you're in the right room!" It is as if the Manichaeanism collapses momentarily, and the authors acknowledge that, in spite of the cheery veneer, any life project that requires its adepts to eat less than their bodies tell them to eat cannot be only about radiant, bright-futured health, but must also have a share of the dark and anorexic force that is its official opposite.

In their bivalent breakdown of the various respects in which they differ from anorexics, the restrictionists fail to notice a third path, distinct from both their own glorification of health and longevity, and from the gloom-and-doom rejectionism of the anorexics, and much more deeply rooted in human history than either of these. This is a path that would more naturally present itself to a person with a predisposition to some sort of eating disorder who is lucky enough to be born into a deep-rooted religious tradition, rather than the secular individualism of both the anorexics and the restrictionists.

I have in mind askêsis, the path of the ascetic, which has nothing to do with either healthy self-cultivation or unhealthy self-absorption, but instead with concentrating upon that thing from which, on a certain understanding, we’ve been distracted. It is by rediscovery of this path, this calling, that we become able to place the desire for weight loss within its proper context, to understand it as a consequence of our metaphysical predicament, and not of glossy magazines and the advertising industry. This is, precisely, the predicament of embodiment.

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Excerpted from a forthcoming essay.

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The Venereal Gadfly: More Notes towards a History of Orgasm

I've observed before that until at least the early 19th century, 'orgasm' did not mean what it does for us today. In La philosophie zoologique of 1809, for example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck uses the term to describe something like the vital principle in an animal, which in various other iterations has been called élan vital, archaeus, soul, etc. He defines 'orgasme' as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive."

At some point after Lamarck, I imagine, the orgasm comes instead to be seen as a sort of culmination or maximal expression of this force, as the moment in which we are living our bodily life to its fullest. I suppose. I'll try to chart the development of this new meaning some other time, but what interests me here is the matter of how, if not by the term 'orgasm', did authors up to Lamarck's era describe this physiological event?

In my reading of Latin texts on animal generation I've often come across a curious phrase, the true meaning of which escaped my attention until yesterday, when I found it in Tobias Andreae's Brevis explicatio corporis humani prout anima vegetativa pollet of 1669:

Oestro igitur venereo animalia perfectiora irritata, spiritum seminalem tam subtilem emittunt, ut licet (observante Harveo) visibile semen penetralia uteri non intret, hic tamen pervadens spiritus.

The more perfect animals, therefore, agitated by the venereal gadfly, emit a seminal spirit that is so subtle that (as Harvey observes), granted that it does not enter into the innermost reaches of the uterus, nevertheless this spirit pervades.

Oestrus venereus, obviously, is a fixed expression for 'orgasm'. But oestrus, in turn, without its venereal modifier, originally had a much broader scope. Thus in Liddell and Scott's dictionary of classical Greek we find:

ΟΙΣΤΡΟΣ. the gadfly, breese... an insect which infests cattle... II. metaph. a sting, anything that drives mad, Eur. : absol. the smart of pain, agony, Soph. 2. mad desire, insane passion, Hdt., Eur., etc. : --generally, madness, frenzy, Soph., Eur.

So oestrus, or oistros, means in the first instance 'gadfly', 'pest', and secondarily, 'irritation'. One striking thing about this term in its later transformations in scientific Latin is its strong association with female physiology: thus 'estrogen' is, etymologically, the hormone productive of sexual irritation in women, while non-human female primates spend a period of each month, 'estrus', that is, in visible sexual agitation.

But why is the sexual itch marked as feminine? One thing that comes as a surprise to people with little historical memory is that it was not until very recently that sexual insatiability came to be associated with men. In the early modern period, these were classic female attributes, and if a man were to exhibit them he would be thought to have lapsed into effeminacy. The idea that men are naturally and essentially the lustful ones, and the pseudoevolutionary explanations that are offered for this idea, are really nothing more than apologetics for our own current set of prejudices. I have never come across a single early modern male author who owns up to his own libidinousness. They write about themselves as if sexuality were not a defining factor of their existence.

But when did the shift of prejudice occur? I suspect that it happened roughly in tandem with the shift in the meaning of 'orgasm', which in turn was a reflection of a much broader shift in the conception of the place of sexuality in an individual person's identity. The culmination of the sexual act came to be described not as the relief of an itch, as a physiological release comparable to sneezing, but rather as the culmination of the vital force of the body, again, as the supreme expression of one's bodily life. And naturally, it was men and not women who came to be seen as charged with this vital force.

This lexical shift, away from an association of sexual climax with feminine 'estrus' (in the Euripidean and Sophoclean sense) and towards an association with masculine 'orgasm' (in the Lamarckian sense), leads me to think that the idea that female orgasm remained largely unknown to men until the sexual revolution is really a symptom of our own era's lack of historical depth, of our tendency to begin our histories in the Victorian period. Female orgasm was well known long before 'orgasm' came to mean what it does today, but it was conceptualized as a physiological disorder to be dissipated, an irritation, and not as a 'positive' force.

I had hoped that something could be said also of Plato's description of Socrates in the Apology as a 'gadfly', which, along with the familiar leitmotif of the Socratic dialogues, according to which the philosopher functions as a 'midwife' for the birthing of ideas, would have perhaps provided some more fuel for the idea that there lies, at the origins of the philosophical tradition, what in some circles might be called a 'genderfuck'. But it turns out that the word Plato used for this sort of gadfly was μύωψ, while the extension of oistros or oestrus to sexual irritation, and the addition of the modifier 'venereal' seems to be an invention of early modern or Renaissance Latin medical writing. Still, I take the shift in our conception of sexual climax, from estrus to orgasm, and at the same time also from female to male, to be no less remarkable a genderfuck, and, if I'm right, to offer a powerful piece of evidence in favor of a revisionist account of the history of sexuality since the beginning of the modern period.

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Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

This novel is an important contribution to Icelandic literature. It channels the past millennium's experience of nature and history in that peculiar place, but does not aspire to mere peculiarity. For this reason, it is a great shame that the book has been packaged for foreigners as a sort of offshoot of Björkian quirkiness.

Sjón has long been part of the creative circle that includes Iceland's most marketable pop icon, as are many of the currently dominant generation of Iceland's cultural, and even political, elite. I had thought, when I bought the novel on may way out of Reykjavik yesterday, that I would be mildly amused by the literary effort of a graduate of the '80s punk scene. I also worried that it might not be worth my trouble at all, that this would be another case, comparable to Sven Regener's forgettable novels, which he started writing when the physiognomy of middle age set in and he could no longer front the Berlin band Element of Crime with any dignity. But this is not one of those cases. Sjón is a writer of literature, who happens to have been present at some Sugarcubes shows (and, perhaps revealingly, joined them on stage to play, of all things, the air guitar).

The novel is called Rökkurbýsnir or 'Marvels of Twilight' in the original Icelandic, has for no apparent good reason (other than a disconnected if intriguing flourish in the final few paragraphs) been called The Mouth of the Whale in English. This too must have something to do with marketing. The perennial appeal of Moby-Dick maybe? Of course it is an admirable thing to produce even a faint echo of Melville, but that is not at all what Sjón aims to do. His is prose that frequently lapses into poetry as if by inward inclination. The mood of it is rapturous, at times almost reminiscent of Saint John the Divine's coda to the New Testament.

It tells us the story of a certain Jónas Palmasson 'the Learned', an early-17th-century Icelandic natural philosopher, runic scholar, and healer. He is self-taught, and syncretistic in his commitment to Christian faith and to Icelandic folk-beliefs. He is a devout follower of Paracelsus, and is something like what the Swiss physician and occultist might have ended up being if he had been born, liks Jónas, into what was essentially an Iron Age society, with few books and only a fairly barren natural landscape from which to learn.

Part of the narrative (though this is not a very narrative novel) concerns Jónas's voyage to Copenhagen, at the request of Ole Worm, the actually existing historical character who founded the Museum Wormianum, one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in early modern Europe. Worm has heard of Jónas's learnedness, and hopes that he can help him to decipher runic writing, something Worm in fact attempted in his Runir, seu Danica literatura antiquissima [Runes, Or, the Most Ancient Danish Literature] of 1638. Jónas is hesitant to aid Worm, since he has been persecuted in his home country for sorcery, and is in Denmark in part to clear his name. But he is happy to clarify for Worm the true origin of a purported unicorn skull. It comes from a narwhal: Icelandic traders had for centuries been duping Europeans who were willing to pay enormous sums of money for remedies made from a powder of the marine mammal's tusk, on the presumption that this came from the mythical terrestrial mammal. The build-up to the revelation of the skull's true origin is somewhat tedious for those of us who have read the 1628 treatise De Unicornu by Caspar Bartholin (Worm's brother-in-law), and it all starts to feel a bit too Eco-esque. Not surprisingly, this sequence is the one that is marketed most aggressively in the publisher's packaging of the novel. (Unicorns appeal, I gather, in roughly the same way Björk does.)

When I say that this is an important contribution to Icelandic literature I mean in part that the author channels a tradition that stretches back to a time when literature was meant to do something other than what it has been doing since the 19th century or so. Jónas has few books to read, does not know Latin, but is loyal to the idea that nature can be read, and that books, ideally, are epitomes of nature. Nature in turn is Divine Creation, and learning is the project of mastering the order behind this creation. One of the most touching sequences concerns Jónas's recollection of his first encounters with his future wife, Sigga:

Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angleic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to?

In her youth Sigga correctly predicted an eclipse through astronomical calculation. Her kinfolk ran around like it was the end of the world, but she was calm. She and Jónas both embody an approach to learning that is 'scientific', in that it seeks to get things right, but also one step away from sorcery, in that it probes where one really isn't supposed to go (as a boy Jónas specializes in laying his hands upon the bellies of old crones, and diagnosing their 'female illnesses'). This shared disposition unites Jónas and Sigga erotically: science as a hymn to creation, as the basis of erotic love, and finally as a highly charged danger zone that borders on the magical. Sjón reconstructs with sympathy the world in which this all made sense.

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The Hinternet

Having grown tired of my own shtick, of the endless me-centricity of this here project at www.jehsmith.com, I got it into my head that perhaps I should instead be channeling my energy into a more collaborative effort. To that end I decided to create a group blog.

The first thing I did was to register a new domain name: www.thehinternet.com (some time ago I had registered www.clinamen.net, but I forgot to pay my annual fee, and the address was taken back by ICANN or whomever; and in any case neo-Lucretianism had just grown too fashionable for me to want to associate myself with that old idea of 'the swerve').

I learned after registering the name that the term 'hinternet' is already in use, evidently mostly among conspiracy-mongering off-the-grid types who worry about 'the government' 'shutting down' the Internet, to describe some anarchic assemblage of ham radios they've put together to simulate the workings of the Internet. I thought when I first learned this that we would do better to change our name. I decided to stick with it, though. Let 'hinternet' be polysemous. Let us see what the primary meaning of the term will be a decade from now.

The Hinternet is going to be developed into a group blog, one that will be like a great many other such blogs before it, with this one noteworthy difference, that it will not be stultifyingly boring. It will draw on the interests of the artists, academics, critics, and scientists who contribute to it, but there will be absolutely zero shop talk: no moaning about performance reviews, the tedium of grading, parental leave, &c. Just ideas, discussed with elegance and conviction. I am envisioning something like Cabinet Magazine, transported into the format of, say, The Daily Beast.

I am not yet sure this will even be possible. Certainly, there is not much else on the Internet that aspires to this end. That's why it's called 'The Hinternet': we're going behind and around the established conventions in this venue, acknowledging that we've moved into a post-paper world, but seeking nonetheless to preserve something of the non-evanescence, the feeling of relative permanence, that one used to get from ideas discussed in print. We will also differ from existing blogs in that we will try to be self-contained, also somewhat like an old-fashioned magazine. A post that provides a link to a post somewhere else with a sentence or two of commentary will not cut it here.

It will take a while yet before we begin with our regular stream of posts. For now, we would like to ask you to help us out by spreading the word about The Hinternet. 'Like' us on Facebook, for example, and encourage your friends to do the same. The more readers we have, the greater the incentive will be to write good stuff, which will get us more readers, and so on, in an unending virtuous circle.

We already have most of our bases covered, with excellent writers ready to hold forth regularly on architecture, cognitive science, the history of science, linguistics, literature, &c. We would be interested in hearing from an aspiring music critic interested in gaining some exposure. Someone who lives it and loves it, and who knows how to write.

But what, you are no doubt asking, will come of jehsmith.com? Don't worry, I'm only branching out, and you can continue to expect regular doses of variously pessimistic, haughty, underground-man-like meditations; out-of-place Gallicisms, obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with language, and hints of religious fervor shrouded by over-loud protestations of non-belief here in my regular space. But I've grown a bit tired of these various personae, et j'ai le goût de faire autre chose. I think it will do me good to blend into a collective effort (of which I am the supreme controller, of course).

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This Year I Betrayed My Country...

From the n+1 2011 Year-in-Review. For other contributors' perspectives on that annus horribilis mirabilisque, please go here. 

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that’s how it felt, even if, from what I’ve been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province’s charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about “her successors,” and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I’ll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the “Canadians of convenience,” that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says “Reno, USA”: surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away. 

Christopher Hitchens

I loved and revered Christopher Hitchens. And don't start in with that stuff about Iraq either: I loved him in large part because of his various idiocies, not in spite of them.

Beyond the politics there is also, perhaps, this reason for not loving him: he was aggressively middle-brow. He was wrapped up in the daily news cycle, but was careful to pepper his copy with just enough discussion of timeless literature, to appear on television with just the right sort of timeless Britishness, to drop in just the right number of foreignisms to appear classically learned (mot juste, nil nisi bonum, etc.), to come across as something more than a journalist.

But who am I kidding? That's exactly my level! Or at least it is a good deal of the time. I've often thought of Christopher Hitchens and Perry Anderson as representing the only two models of engaging with the world that are at all attractive to me: the one hot and pugnacious and in the thick of it, the other icy and above-it-all and somehow omniscient; the one more full of shit than the other but for that reason also more human; each occupying his own clearly marked-out spot on the social brow.  I'm sure Anderson thinks Hitchens was a boob, and will say nothing good, or nothing at all, about him now. Both are staunch enemies of the nil nisi bonum rule for speaking of the dead.

For several years the rhythm of my week was structured by Hitchens's Monday column in Slate. I was patient with the more aggressively neo-con pieces (though even here I think I've understood, if not approved, the internal logic of the path from Trotsky to Wolfowitz). His stuff on religion never interested me that much, other than for the insult comedy it afforded him. He seemed to me, here, simply blind to the value of the imaginative, anthropological perspective on belief, but this is by no means his shortcoming alone. I treasured the excoriations of Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other professional fools, and often found myself reading them two or three times in the hope of reliving the pleasure of the first.

Things changed when he got sick. As if afraid of contagion, I stopped reading him. I wrote him off as already dead. I realize now this was a way of managing, however immaturely, the anticipated emotional blow of his death, the loss of that week-structuring dose of whatever it was he had to say. Occasionally I would stumble inadvertently on the articles chronicling his protracted demise, which he was now writing for Vanity Fair. I read these in pained awe. If he was only a journalist, he nonetheless managed to make journalism do what Socrates and Montaigne claimed philosophy, at its most excellent, does: he made it a preparation for death.

This morning I received a group e-mail from my friend Abbas Raza, whose website, 3 Quarks Daily, allows me regularly to dump many of my extra words. 3QD has often seemed to me a sort of electronic shrine to Christopher Hitchens, or to the ideal he represents. The site comes strongly endorsed by Richard Dawkins and the like, yet it has long been clear, I think, that a blurb from Hitchens would have been the real holy grail.

The subject of the e-mail was: 'Hitch, 3qd'. I imagined for a second that Abbas had succeeded in roping the dying man into some project or other: judging some contest, being at the center of some multi-author forum, or something. I am a fan of almost no one but for that second I felt something a bit like I imagine baseball fans do when they catch the home-run balls hit by their idols, or whatever: I thought I was going to come into some sort of contact with the only person to whom, in my adult life, I have written adulatory messages, 'fan letters', some might call them (two, no reply).

Abbas was of course asking for 3QD contributors to memorialize Hitchens, not to interact with him. I don't know, though. What is there to say? Would 'death not be not proud' serve as a mot juste here, as it did for him in his own tribute to Susan Sontag? I could also go on and on rehashing favorite bits from the oeuvre, but one in particular stands out right now. It was about some Virginia Tech administrator whom Hitchens had deemed dim, and who had declared some days after the 2007 massacre on that campus something like: It's OK to be happy again; it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing. The birds were singing during the shooting, too, Hitchens responded. So, anyway, the birds are singing.

On Marriage

[From my forthcoming essay in Lapham's Quarterly]

...The rebranding of couples as “partners” is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units. Heterosexual couples began calling one another “partners” at some point in the late 1980s or early '90s out of a sense of solidarity with their gay friends who could not yet be spouses. Believing themselves to be friends of sexual otherness, they were at the same time abetting the ongoing transformation of marriage into a variety of modern capitalist work. And it is at precisely this moment in the history of marriage that it became feasible for the institution to subsume same-sex couples: the moment at which the hard work of individuals had fully replaced exchange between families as the basic model of what a marriage ought to be.

When marriage was a matter of exchange, the gender of the units of exchange was a non-negligible factor in the determination of who should be exchanged with whom. When marriage comes to be seen as a line of work, by contrast, and when individuals are seen as free to choose their own vocation, then it correspondingly transforms into a gender-neutral institution. It is thus exactly the historical moment when marriage becomes a variety of work rather than of exchange that the genders of its members cease to matter. Marriage was always an economic matter, but members of marriages were not always its employees, and this is what the awful new talk of “partnership” is really about...

[To read more, look for the 'Family' issue of LQ, coming out in December.]

In Prenzlauer Berg

Among the grimmer thoughts one has to contend with on any visit to Berlin is this: that one could very well be staying not only in the logistical nerve center of the Final Solution, but in the very building, and perhaps in the very same room, in which a Holocaust victim once lived. This possibility rose to 50%, in fact, when I was in Berlin a few days ago, and stayed in a six-unit building which housed, according to the commemorative plaques paved into the sidewalk outside, three separate Jewish couples who did not see the end of the war.

These plaques ensure that no visit to Berlin will ever be too fun. They are also the most decent, and most properly scaled, Holocaust memorials I've seen, anywhere, just the opposite of the misfired maze near the Brandenburger Tor (which induces, paradoxically, a sense of fun one knows one isn't supposed to be having), and a universe away from the grandiose theoretical statement of Libeskind's Jewish Museum. The plaques pull you away from the abstraction of large numbers and into the scene of what must have happened right there, in that building, the scene of individual lives unravelling.

When I hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying at the UN that there is nothing wrong with 'questioning' the reality of things, as for example the role of Al Qaeda on September 11, or the role of genocidal intentions in the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, it's hard not to think: would you like also to question the reality of, say, Max and Julie Grünwald, who lived at Prenzlauer Allee 15, and who, it was reported, committed suicide while in a Gestapo prison on April 8, 1933? It has of course been pointed out that Holocaust denial is, rhetorically, a form of shrouded Holocaust affirmation, and what the Iranian president really means to say is not that so-and-so was never killed, or was never even born to begin with, but that if they were, so what? Ahmadinejad is probably motivated by a sense of the disparity between the commemorative resources devoted to this one particular historical instance of human suffering on the one hand, and, on the other, the massive scale of largely uncommemorated, unacknowledged, and ongoing death and murder and cruelty in the part of the world for which he takes himself to be speaking (perhaps the Muslim world, perhaps more broadly the 'global South'). This is in itself not an ungrounded sense to have, and if one can acknowledge it and articulate it without lapsing into disgusting conspiracy theories, one is doing no wrong. But no amount of historical truth will get the basic fallaciousness of the following sort of reasoning through Ahmadinejad's paleolithic skull: that, simply because bad thing b is happening over here, bad thing a must not have happened, or in any event is not worth bringing up.

Anywhow, what struck me about the Grünwalds' story --unlike that of the others at Prenzlauer Allee 15, who were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944-- is that their decision to take their own lives a whole decade before they would have ended up in an extermination camp is openly acknowledged in the commemoration, but this is done by means of a very special, and uniquely German, term: Freitod. A 'Free death' is an honorable suicide, in every respect the semantic opposite of Selbstmord (literally: 'self-murder'; there's also the Latinate Suizid, but that's not really German). This term is certainly resonant of the Stoic reminder that, as Epictetus put it, 'the door is always open', though apparently as a bit of vocabulary it can be traced back only to the early 20th century, and was inspired by the section of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled 'Vom freien Tode' ('On Free Death'). In the period in which the Grünwalds had recourse to it, Freitod was also, no doubt, being used by Nietsche's vulgar sister and others like her to characterize the sort of death one might meet for the sake of one's nation or race or whatever. But for the Grünwalds it was presumably just an open door, the only open door, and had no meaning at all other than as a resolution to a dead-end predicament. 

There is little trace of the DDR in Prenzlauer Berg at this point. Cupcakes and pet supplies are now being sold in shops where, when I first arrived in 1990, one could still see communist signs advertising Obst und Gemüse or Kleidung for sale. These were empty promises, to be sure, but the signs remained for many years after the fall of the wall as beautiful relics of a lost world. Now, even though it is as if East Berlin never existed, Weimar and Nazi Berlin still hang in the air. One still sees the faded paint in the advertisements on the sides of buildings for Conditoreien, that initial pre-spelling-reform 'C' somehow echoing all the fragility and transient joyousness of the 1920s. And one sees the plaques, with names like 'Maurice' and 'Jenny' that also, like the archaic spelling, convey a message from a lost Berlin, one that was at home in the rest of the world in a way the Nazis could not stand, and in a way that, I think, the city has been trying to recover ever since.

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