Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Moral Status of Rocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interpreting Tino Sehgal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Race and the Enlightenment: Some Replies to Critics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Delights of Disgust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Enjoin a Double Law Upon My Sinews

I've been reconsidering my earlier attempt to characterize the distinction between philosophical interests and extra-philosophical ones. I'm finding my initial stab at it more than inadequate. I sought at one point to say that it lies in one's appreciation of res singulares, of singular things, and that, though natural philosophers in the past would have disagreed, one handy criterion we have today for distinguishing between the philosophical and the non- is to accept as philosophical only that which doesn't directly concern itself with this particular plant or country or river or planet, but always stays far enough away from the abundance of singular things to, so to speak, maintain its dignity.

There is something to that, but I think, at least historically, another more significant line of demarcation, one that extends back to Aristotle and that remains perfectly relevant today in making snap judgments about whether a blog is a philosophy blog or not, is the collaboration between the metaphysics of substance and the law of the excluded middle that compels all of us following in the tradition of Western philosophy to affirm that any given thing can only be the thing it is. This sounds easy enough to accept, and at little cost, yet it leaves us ill-equipped to deal, for example, with Ovid, or the Grimms, or Saxo Grammaticus (about whom more in a second). We are familiar with Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, as between that which ranges over the possible and that which relates the actual (and the fault of Herodotus, unlike Thucydides, had been to fail to grasp this distinction), but there is an even more fundamental distinction between different conceptions of possibility, depending on which 'laws' one starts with, and here you could say that philosophy and poetry are both subdivisions of the sort of thinking that ranges over the possible, and the crucial difference has to do with each subdivision's stance on the identity of things over time. Philosophy wants fixed things, substances; poetry --a significant portion of which we now call 'mythology'-- allows metamorphoses. 

This is not at all a new observation; I am simply recalling it from my culture's storehouse of received wisdom in order to come to a clearer explanation than I was able to offer previously of why this is not a philosophy blog. It struck me last night as I was reading Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta danorum, a 12th-century compendium of Danish history and lore. In one incident recounted there, Hardgrep seeks the embraces of her foster son, Hadding. But she is descended from giants, and he complains that "the size of her body [is] unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal." Hardgrep assures him:

Youth, fear not the converse of my bed. I change my bodily outline in twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews. For I conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my own sweet will: now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants again on earth that head which was near the firmament. Thus I lightly shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops. Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil. I dart out my ingathered limbs, and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the embraces of men.

This kind of thing goes on more or less constantly in the world Saxo describes: humans coupling with relatives, with giants, with bears; being born from monstrous black seed, being kept alive by corrupt matter rather than blood. But none of this is ever really so damaging, since forms change freely, and there are advantages to being monstrous just as there are advantages to being comely. 

Now Saxo is a Christian, writing in Latin, and he wavers between denying that such transformations are possible, and affirming that they are possible, but denouncing them as sinful. As for me, I definitely do not believe they are possible, but I also think it is extremely important for a humanist to reflect on why, in the majority of times and places in human history, people have spoken as if they were possible. There is one tradition in human history --descending from Greece, reaching Denmark by the 12th century CE (even as it retains its memory of pre-contact ways of thinking) and now dictating the range of things that can be said at academic conferences, and in polite society, in Java, the Amazon, and the Arctic-- in which such transformations are explicitly not possible, and this is the tradition I work in. These transformations do seep back into this tradition at different times and places, but usually more as a threat or a taunt than as anything like a conceptual revolution; thus the natural philosopher Richard Lower allowed a brief whiff of Ovidian metamorphoses into philosophical debate in 17th century England by succeeding in transfusing blood between species; and arguably much of what seems so outré about figures like Deleuze comes down in the end to their daring to chicken-walk at the boundary between the two subdivisions I've described. But for the most part, philosophy continues to define itself as the tradition that can take no interest in Ovid or Saxo and their flights into the impossible. 

And anyway, to get back to the distinction I was attempting inadequately to make the other day: here I am very interested in giant women who wax into strange aspects, gods who appear as swans, &c. Which --and this is the key point-- seems pretty close to just another way of saying that this is not a philosophy blog.

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. 

More Notes on Humans and Animals

I am growing increasingly convinced that people who believe  we have an absolute moral duty to see to the well-being of all other human beings, to install water-purifying equipment in villages on the other side of the world, etc., and who, at the same time, happily contribute to the ongoing mass slaughter of animals, are really just picking and choosing their causes. There simply is no compelling reason why I, or anyone, should suppose that all and only human beings are the worthy targets of moral concern. This is not to say that you should care about animals. It is only to say that there is nothing natural or obvious or conclusive about your belief that you should care about all and only human beings. Your belief is a prejudice, characteristic of a time and place, and not the final say about where the reach of moral community ends.

We have an extremely peculiar ontology, from which we suppose our moral commitments flow. It is unlike anything in human experience prior to the rise of the modern West. In all other places and times, since the appearance of the human species, there has been a presumption of some sort of shared socio-natural community that extends well beyond the boundaries of the species. This sounds like an exaggeration, and it attributes to many groups of people views they have left no explicit record of having supported. But from the explicit record, anyway, there is not a shred of evidence of any culture ever supposing, prior to our own, that moral community is defined by the boundaries of our species.

There is a well known rift in the feminist and anti-racist movements, between those who are willing to consider their plight in relation to the way we treat animals, and those who think that the very suggestion that the two questions could have anything in common is offensive. See this comment thread at the website Feministe, for example, for a cascade of mockery of the very suggestion that there might be a connection between masculine domination of women and human domination of animals.

To refuse to pay attention to the obvious parallels is to remain willfully ignorant. Inequality in human society emerge in direct conjunction with the domestication of animals. You can not understand the one without understanding the other. The very fact that consideration of one's own plight in relation to the plight of an animal can seem degrading to, say, a feminist, only shows how thoroughly successful the human domination of animals has been. But if you are looking to understand things, rather than simply looking after your own, then you have to take the wide-focused view, and consider humanity within the community of beings, to which we have uniformly and without exception believed ourselves to belong for the vastly greater part of the history of our species.

When we try to imagine what belonging to such a socio-natural community is like, what we usually do is to think about how much we care about our pets, or how much we enjoy bird-watching, or zoos, and we suppose that primitive Amazonians, say, must have done a lot of this sort of stuff. Thus we stay all the while in our moral-intellectual comfort zone of modern anthropocentric individualism, projecting back onto people in the distant past a caricatured version of our own token and fleeting attention to beings beyond the bounds of our species. In fact, though, this entirely misses the sort of difference we are attempting to understand; it is as off-target as if we were to suppose that hunter-gatherers, out collecting berries or fish, conceptualized their activity as 'a good line of work'.

It is, principally, the work of anthropologists that enables us to think our way into the world of people who inhabited a socio-natural community with non-human beings, and to do this without simply projecting onto these people our own ontology. Philippe Descola, in his monumental Par-delà nature et culture, has done much to reconstruct the non-anthropocentrist ontologies of societies outside the modern West. 

The Makuna, for example, say that tapirs groom themselves with roucou before dancing, and that peccaries play the horn during their rituals, while the Wari' suppose that peccaries make maize beer and that the jaguar takes its prey back home for his wife to cook. For a long time, this sort of belief was taken as testimony of a sort of thought that is resistant to logic, incapable of distinguish the real from dreams and myths, or as simple figures of speech, metaphors, or word play. But the Makuna, the Wari', and many other Amerindian peoples  who believe this sort of thing are not more myopic or credulous than we are. They know very well that the jaguar devours its prey raw, and that the peccary ruins maize crops rather than cultivating them. It is the jaguar and the peccary themselves, they say, that see themselves as carrying out acts that are identical to those of humans, who imagine themselves in good faith to be sharing with humans the same technologies, the same social existence, the same beliefs and aspirations. In short, Amerindians do not see what we call 'culture' as an appurtenance of human beings, since there are many animals and plants that are held to believe themselves to be in possession of it, and to live according to its norms (187-88).

Similarly, when a hunter sings a song to his prey in order to woo it into 'giving' itself, it is not that he has been unable to make the empirical observation that animals do not ordinarily respond to human natural language in the same way human speakers of that natural language do. Rather, every stage of the hunt, including the tracking and the slinging of darts, and other acts that can be recognized by an outside observer as expressions of practical reason, is embedded within a cosmology of perpetual exchange between all domains of the natural world. Descola asks rhetorically:

When an Achuar hunter finds himself within shooting reach, and he sings an anent to the game, a supplication intended to seduce the animal and to assuage his mistrust with captious promises, does he suddenly lurch from the rational to the irrational, from instrumentalized knowledge to chimera? Does he completely change his register following the long period of approach in which he knew full well how to mobilize his ethological expertise, his deep knowledge of the environment, his experience as a tracker, all those qualities that enabled him to bring together almost by instinct a multitude of indices into a single thread that led him to his prey?

It is not that the hunter suddenly shifts from practical-rational action to the merely 'ceremonial' at the moment he begins singing, but rather the singing flows seamlessly from the same rationality that gives rise to the practices, and that is based on a belief in the constant cycling of immaterial life principles between the human and non-human domains. We can recognize and measure this cycling from the outside within the very limited terms of calories, but from within the cosmology that supposes that this exchange is itself constitutive of both individual human beings as well as of humanity itself, there is no reason why it should not also be manifested in verbal exchange, or communication in the usual sense, across domains.

The constant cyclical exchange rests, generally, on a metaphysics of the individual according to which every natural being, including every human being, is constituted out of the life principles of other natural beings. The predicament of the eater, and also what puts him most in danger of deep transgression through cannibalism, stems, as an Inuit informant put it to Knud Rasmussen, "from the fact that the nourishment of men consists entirely in souls." If this suggests to the student of Western philosophy a metaphysics of nested corporeal substances, she or he may not be entirely off track. Interestingly, Descola, following the precedent of Viveiros de Castro and, before him, Durkheim, sees Leibniz's metaphysics as providing a point of access to this sort of animist ontology. Leibniz, like the Makuna and the Wari', supposes that "est sujet qui se trouve activé ou 'agenté' par un point de vue" (197), and thus that the discontinuity of forms in nature is underlain by a deeper unity, and is explained by a difference of perspectives. Perspectivism, Descola explains, "is thus the expression of the idea that every being occupies a point of view of reference, and thus finds itself situated as a subject" (197). Descola, following Viveiros de Castro, concludes that a Leibnizian perspectivism is "an ethno-epistemological corollary of animism" (202). Every being, on this view, is an expression of exactly the same rational order. But heterogeneity or discontinuity of forms arises at the corporeal level. Different beings have different bodies, and so also different phenomenologies, since their perception of the world takes place through their bodily sense organs. This means also that they must conduct themselves in the world differently, that they will be non-identical with respect to their agentive means, even if at a fundamental level all in the end have the same rational ends. Animals are pursuing fundamentally the same ends as humans, even if the different conformation of their bodies requires them to do this differently. There is no ontological gap between them and us, only circumstantial differences, or, to speak with Leibniz, different poitns of view.

This independent existence as rational agents pursuing rational ends in their own way, becomes difficult to conceptualize with the rise of domestication, when we know what animals are doing in their 'private' lives, because we are in control of their lives. They are standing in the barn, or they are tied to a post; they are not at home with their families, cooking and making beer. Culture continues to be attributed to animals in limited spheres of human imagination, such as children's tales. But it does not define our primary, 'grown-up' understanding of what it is animals are like, of what their natures are.

When, in our society, people attempt to win back for animals a degree of sensitivity, of social attachment, and so on, it is now always conceptualized as a sort of lesser approximation of the richness of human social life. Animal-rights advocates will point to the social bonding of a given species, and anthropocentrists will predictably respond: so what, that is only a distant shadow of what human beings are capable of. Animal-rights advocates, just like the most committed speciesists, remain anthropocentrist to the extent that they are measuring animals' capacities, and implicitly or explicitly their moral relevance, by a human yardstick.

We need anthropology, zooarcheology, and related disciplines in order to adequately understand the problem of human-animal relations, and in order to even begin to make normative claims that can have any kind of purchase on us about how we should be interacting with animals. We need these disciplines much more, in fact, than we need neurophysiological research on animals, scientific research on the very narrowest understanding of science, that tells us the objective truth about what animals are capable of feeling and thinking. In spite of what animal-rights advocates never stop hoping, telling the public about the findings of this research changes nothing: it makes no difference to people with an a priori commitment to the non-membership of animals within our moral community to tell them that animals are capable of feeling pain. They're capable of feeling pain, yes, but they're animals that are capable of feeling pain, is the implicit response. So so what? The boundaries of our moral community were not established in the first place based on a misinterpretation of the empirical data about what the inner lives of animals are like. There is therefore no reason why an improvement in the adequacy of the empirical data should be expected to result in a modification of the boundaries of our moral community. 

The way we think about animals, rather, flows from a fundamental ontology, characteristic of a society that is structured in a certain way. This society, with its associated ontology, has been 10,000 years in the making; it begins with pastoralism, and culminates in our current system of factory farming, in which animals, now conceptualized as pure commodities, exist entirely outside the bounds of moral community. Efforts to bring them back into that community are based on weak and unconvincing appeals to sentiment, dressed up in the language of objective science, on the part of a small minority of people: Look how much this turkey cares for its offspring! Look how this pig can operate a joystick! They're just like us! Except that they're not just like us, since on the reigning ontology a pig operating a joystick is an entirely different matter from a human operating a joystick, and again, nothing that pig does with the joystick is capable of budging this fundamental ontology.

Of course this ontology is not entirely a priori. It has a history. And if there is to be any hope of displacing it, this will be through uncovering and examining this history, and not through treating the question --as all Anglo-American philosophers have until now-- as if it were a simple matter of learning from science what sort of entities animals are.

Must Philosophers Be Parents?

Before I proceed to estrange my reproductively proficient allies, let me begin by saying that I love kids; those who know me know that when I am around them, they delight in my comical ways, and after I'm gone they beg their parents to invite me over again. I have godfatherly and quasi-avuncular relations with numerous little ones, and real avuncular relations with one who is no longer so little. I think they're all great. In fact, I'm on record as saying that childhood is, so to speak, where it's at, and that adults are but the phantoms of former children. I love kids, and I love childhood. This is not an anti-kid screed.

It is, however, anti-natalist, and therefore goes against a prevailing conviction among my peers that the life that fails to cycle back upon itself in kind if not in number, as Aristotle put it, is the life not worth living. 

I hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I am concerned about the way in which the public display of one's parenthood is increasingly a part of the expected career path of the professional philosopher. I often hear of all the great new insights colleagues have had since becoming parents, how this has advanced their thinking about language acquistion and a priori knowledge, about the ethics of care, or the metaphysics of personhood. Sometimes the insights are theoretical in nature, while sometimes the importance of parenthood is celebrated on the grounds that it advances a philosopher in his or her practical project of philosophy as a way of life.

I have been explicitly told three times over the past year, by young philosopher parents, that there are philosophical insights that one simply cannot have without living through the fundamental experience of parenthood. That such an expression of pronatalist normativity exactly mirrors the sort of bias philosophers are by now so well trained not to express, about other quodlibetal forms the intimate life can take, is something that is surely in need of explanation. I suspect it has something to do with the recent, massive success of the campaign, which I support, to deheterosexualize the idea of parenthood. Once this goal was largely reached, at least within pockets of our society, the academics who found it desirable felt comfortable reverting to an evidently innate sort of conservatism. The family unit has been shaken up a bit, and the role of fathers reconceived, but in the end the nearly compulsory philosopher-dad-with-kid pictures that now clutter the faculty profile pages of departmental websites are every bit as conventionally pro-family as the 'at home' pictures on the now-defunct Romney-for-President website. They send the message that to be a philosopher is largely, even principally, to be invested in the bringing up of the next generation, to be doing it all 'for the children'. 

Every one of these pictures shows a figure that Nietzsche, for one, would have described as 'comic'. Thus he tells us what he things about the domestic life in The Genealogy of Morality:

Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer-- they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule.

Now Nietzsche was of course a raving and sorry case, who precisely failed to implement philosophy as a practice of the good life. But his historical point is unassailable, and the truth of it helps us to bring into relief the exceptional situation of current academic philosophy. The life of the philosopher was traditionally something akin to life in a monastic order; it placed an extremely high demand on its initiates, and forced them to choose between different and competing fundamental goods.

This is particularly clear in the Indian tradition, where the choice was explicit between being a 'householder' and being a 'world-renouncer', as the two ways of expressing Hindu devotion. It was also explicit that the former figure would necessarily be prevented from advancing as far as the latter in matters of illumination. Philosophy was an askesis, and as such was incompatible with the domestic life. Of course these days the fashion is to reconceptualize domesticity so as to fit whatever image we prefer to maintain of ourselves, so that, for example, when a new mother has to cut back on her yoga sessions, she can announce that she is now engaged in 'the yoga of being a mom'. I have read Patañjali's Yoga Sutras, and I have not found anything about that.

Nor have I found any convincing evidence that the figure of the philosopher can be transplanted from the cloister to the household without serious deformation, let alone any evidence that --again, as I've been told three times over the past year-- one cannot fully realize one's potential as a philosopher unless one is a parent.

Implicit in this presumption is the idea that adults learn things from the children in their lives, that the children give the adults a way of imagining themselves into forms of perception and awareness that are largely off limits to us tired old phantoms. Yet remarkably some of the best writing on childhood by philosophers comes from before the era in which parenthood was part of a philosopher's public identity, and was written by philosophers reflecting on their own childhoods. In many cases, these writers were themselves childless, but nonetheless were able to find within themselves resources of imagination and Einfühlung that completely belie the conceit that there are states of awareness that the childless cannot know. I am thinking for example of Richard Wollheim, who had children, but who never would have thought to write about them in his memoir, instead preferring to focus on his own first years. In his memoir, Germs, he describes his own monumental achievement in learning to use toilet paper, and confesses: "It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility."

I think of E. M. Cioran, and Andrea Dworkin. I even think of Derrida, whom I ordinarily can't stand, but who captured the experience of childhood eloquently and touchingly in his 1991 essay, 'Circumfession'. These philosophers wrote profoundly on childhood, without having to trumpet their own parenthood. Childhood, they understood, is a source of answers to fundamental questions about what it is to be human, but one can ask these questions perfectly well without having to lapse into a conventional pronatalism that, notwithstanding the efforts to ornament it with the seriousness of a philosophical project, is in the end only an afterecho of the very most conventional values that we, as critics of our society and our age, spend most of the rest of our time kicking against.  

Spatial Perception in Second Life

I recently opened an account in the massively multiplayer virtual-reality game Second Life, in order to test out some thoughts about what digital avatars might reveal concerning the metaphysics of personal identity.

I am roundly mocked by everyone I meet there as a 'newbie', and am criticized for my laziness in procuring new clothes, hair, skin, sexual organs. But I don't want to procure these things; I think my standard-model avatar looks just fine. My experience is not at all what I had expected it to be, and I'm finding the philosophical reflections it is stimulating lie rather far from questions of personal identity, in the realm of perception.

One thing that struck me right away was the intense familiarity of the sensation of flying in Second Life. I knew it from dreams, and as in dreams it feels in 2l both perfectly natural and somehow sinful. At first I tried to keep my flying time to a minimum, since one is fairly lonely up in the air and the original idea had been to meet people through my avatar in order to learn whether he (alright, to be honest, she) could in fact be said to be me. (The picture shows me flying outside the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.)

So I walked around a lot, down corridors, up and down staircases, through alleys and fields. And just as dream-flying had supported my 2l-flying with an immediate background of familiarity, a sort of a priori, so too within just a few hours of exploring in the virtual world I started to experience my navigations through similar environments of the real world against the background of familiarity that 2l had begun to provide. That is, walking down a corridor in 'rl', I would sometimes find myself in a momentary state of confusion as to what level of reality I was currently dealing with.

This didn't happen everywhere. Mostly it happened when I was doing in rl what might be called 'exploring': looking for the right number on a hotel-room door in a new city, trying to take a shortcut through an unfamiliar alley, etc. I had a very uncanny sense on some of these occasions that it was only the sort of perceptual experience I'd had in 2l that was enabling me to make sense of the experience I was having in rl at all. As if 2l were itself the a priori framework of spatial perception!

That's absurd of course; I had got by just fine for decades in the absence of virtual reality. I didn't need a simulation of space to teach me what space is and how to move through it. And yet that feeling was there, and, I confess, it was confirming the suspicion I've long had that some version of idealism in fact provides the correct account of reality. 2l didn't teach me about spatial perception, but it did harmonize with a capacity that was already there. This is a harmony that, when one is experiencing it, one senses could have been exercised just fine without an actual spatial world out there for it to operate in.

And at moments I thought: holy shit, we've conjured into existence this whole new reality that does just fine without real reality. What amazing creatures we are. But then I thought, in turn: what would happen if I were to show this new reality to my cat? She, were she to exist, would be entirely unimpressed. She would not even recognize it as a reality, but at most as a luminous object, a computer screen, within her singular reality.

Now we can write this off to her lack of intelligence, but then we might instead imagine another sort of being, one we all recognize to be intelligent but with a vastly different sensory apparatus at its disposal, a being that is unable to recognize, for example, pixel-based two dimensional representations of objects in space as representations. We might try to show this being what a philosophical thrill-ride 2l is, and it might say to us: "I can see that you are having a thrilling time, yet I can't help but notice that your actual experience here does not differ in kind from the experience you have when daydreaming, or listening to a story. These are varieties of what was once called ambulatio animae that need no technological support, but that, like 2l, permit a person to go wandering about in a strictly speaking non-existent space. Sitting at a campfire in the middle of the Paleolithic listening to a story about a descent into the nether-world would have done substantially the same thing, and while 2l provides a sort of hard-hitting illustration of the insufficiency of rl for accounting for experience, storytelling and daydreaming were already, all along, fairly compelling illustrations of the plausibility of idealism (or at least of a sort of phenomenalism that takes the ulitmate elements of reality to be perceivers; call it what you will)." 

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The Annual 3QD Philosophy Prize

I recently served as judge for the annual 3 Quarks Daily Prize for philosophy blogging. To see the full results of the contest, go here. These are my comments on the submissions.

This was a very good year to be chosen as judge for the 3QD Philosophy Prize, for there were many worthy entries and all of the pieces that made the final round were, to my mind, eminently worth reading. Of course, the consistently high quality of the entries made selecting the winners a very difficult task, and even if my choices were somewhat more based in shareable reasons than those of, say, Paul the Octopus (RIP), they were in the end, admittedly, my choices, based on my own views about what matters in philosophy blogging, and about the direction I would like to see this activity take in the future.

Now before I get to these choices, some preliminary thoughts on the current state of this new genre of philosophical writing. There are plenty of jokes going around these days about bloggers haughtily claiming to have 'published' what they have in fact only 'posted', or calling their posts 'pieces'. A number of the finalists here go so far as to call their posts 'essays'. At the same time, many academic philosophers (and presumably academics in other disciplines too), not a few of whom have taken to projecting their own views throughout the blogospheric ether, have been intent to draw a sharp distinction between real philosophical writing on the one hand --rigorous, exhaustive, footnoted, peer-reviewed, consequential for the shaping of debates within the discipline-- and the blog-based letting-off of steam on the other.

The facts about the sociology of knowledge in the Internet age are making this distinction ever harder to maintain, however. Many of the finalist entries here are in fact rigorous and exhaustive, some are footnoted. They are not peer-reviewed in the same way that articles submitted to journals are, but arguably being invited to contribute to an academic group blog, in recognition of one's scholarly achievement, is not in principle different from the vetting process involved in scholarly publication. It is true that such an invitation is explicitly based on personality and reputation, while journals are in principle based on anonymous, merit-based selection. But this is only how things work in principle, while in reality personality and reputation do take a person a long way in the peer-review process, and, conversely, merit takes a person a long way in the project of becoming a blogger deemed worth listening to. As for shaping debates within the discipline, finally, there is no doubt that blogs are already doing this. Whether this is good for philosophy or not is another question, but it is a fact that it is happening.

Increasingly, though, I am finding it difficult to say what counts as a blog post, and in this respect I do not think that the substitution of older, more familiar terms such as 'piece' or 'essay' should always be met with derision. Surely, it cannot just be that a piece of writing is disseminated by electronic means, to screens rather than paper, since if this were the case then it would follow that (probably) within the next decade or so, all philosophy writing will be philosophy blogging. So then we must search for other, narrower criteria for identifying a 'piece' as a 'blog piece': non-password-protected, perhaps, or smattered with hyperlinks. One common criterion for identifying a piece of writing as a piece of blog writing is that it be relatively informal, conversational, or fun. Relatedly, it is often supposed that blog writing should be unpolished, cranked out at a rapid-fire pace, unedited. Finally, blogging is often held to be relatively ephemeral, to be launched out there like some quasi-utterance, and then to fade as the days pass and it slides further down the blog wall (or whatever that's called).

But these are neither necessary nor sufficient criteria for being a blog piece, and most of the finalists here do not meet them. Some of the entries were in fact heavily edited by people other than the author, such as the piece from the New York Times Opinionator series, which this bellwether newspaper is trying to promote as its blogging arm. How exactly we are supposed to distinguish between the online edition of the Times and a Times-related blog, or between Stanley Fish's 'posts' and David Brooks' 'columns', is something we are left on our own to figure out. In the present contest, even where the entries are likely not edited by committee, there is still nothing informal about most of them. In many cases, the entries are explicitly presented as drafts of academic 'pieces' properly speaking. I have tried, nonetheless, to stay fairly close to the current accepted meaning of 'blogging', even if this meaning is, as I believe, untenable in the long run, and to prefer entries that are relatively informal, that experiment with images and links rather than just delivering text, and that in other ways seize onto and celebrate the opportunities that online, non-peer-reviewed, spontaneous writing opens up. I have, namely, chosen the following three finalists for the first, second, and third prizes:

1. Experimental Philosophy: Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection This is a very well written piece, and it might serve as a model for how to address important philosophical issues while still staying true to the free and informal spirit of the blogging genre. More importantly, it is a fine example of what I take to be an important, if still adolescent, movement in contemporary philosophy, which takes empirical research on the way actual human beings reason exactly as seriously as it deserves to be taken. This is a movement that is particularly well adapted to the blog medium, and it is no coincidence that so many experimental-philosophy supporters have jumped into this medium so avidly. I am not completely convinced that we can answer the philosophical question of whether only true things can be known by going out and learning what ordinary people say about the matter. But then I am not convinced that we can answer the philosophical question at all, and I suppose, at least, that learning what ordinary people think about truth and knowledge will help us to take a measure of the difficulty of the problem.

2. Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Recharting the Map of Social and Political Theory: Where is Government? Where is Conservatism? Along with the other contributions to the symposium of which it is a part, this piece provides a very nice example of the sort of serious and high-level exchange that is facilitated by the blog medium. Blogging is not always about the solitary emission of individual opinions; sometimes, as in the web symposium, it is also about building intellectual community. In her contribution, Elizabeth Anderson offers a lucid and substantive critique of John Tomasi's book, Free Market Fairness, pointing up the limitations of a libertarian conception of justice, but also compelling the non-libertarian reader to appreciate and take seriously the possibility of a morally well-founded vision of free markets.

3. The Philosopher's Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine. This piece is a very lively engagement with J. S. Mill's defence of the freedom of opinion, and its failure to distinguish between two very different domains in which human beings might have opinions: the ethical and religious domain on the one hand, and the domain of facts on the other. The author goes on to show how a failure to distinguish between these threatens to hamper democracy, by opening up the possibility of democratic debate about rational truths and facts that in fact require a very different sort of treatment. The argument seemed fairly obvious to me, but the author succeeds very well at that other task often held to be distinctive of philosophical blogging, as opposed to properly academic philosophical writing: he engages with important issues in the current news cycle, and shows how philosophy can help us to make sense of them.

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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Hannoverian Usurpations

I am growing ever more convinced that a great deal can be learned about a culture by looking at the way it exercises its control over the exchange of fluids. I'm not talking about semen and menstrual blood (though surely those too). I'm talking about alcohol, soda water, fruit juice, and, most of all, coffee.

Now among the sort of North Americans I know, there is an unspoken rule that you must regularly denounce the North American way of preparing and dispensing coffee, and you must with equal regularity praise the European, and particularly Latinate, way of doing so. But in truth this is all just so much jockeying for social distinction, and in the end no one can give a compelling reason for the superiority of espresso over what we used to call 'drip', but what the Brooklynites jockeying for their own form of social distinction are now insisting on calling 'pour-over'.

I for one am much happier with a 24-oz. paper cup from some Interstate gas station than with the split-second of pleasure I get from the concentrated millimeter or two of coffee reduction I'm expected to relish, standing at a counter like some barn animal, when in Rome. I like to sip large quantities of coffee, more or less all day, and everything in the Catholic parts of Europe is set up to prevent me from doing this.

Germany, interestingly, seems to be as mixed up with respect to coffee styles as it is confessionally. Today, here in the capital of Lower Saxony, I was unable to get what I wanted from hotel staff --a proper Kännchen of brewed coffee--, so I pleaded with them to run their 'automatic espresso machine' for me, with these special prepared capsule things made by Nestlé that you insert into a little hole in order to extract an ounce or so of liquid, and to do this ten times and pour it all into a thermos that I brought from home. They looked at me like I was crazy. No one can drink ten espressos and survive! (This is all rather like the hubbub that inevitably accompanies the consumption of hot sauces, where everyone has to gather around and make a big scene when a friend chooses to add a little jalapeno sauce to his food. As if anyone ever really ran the risk of serious injury from commercially available condiments.) But I wasn't drinking ten espressos. I was drinking a thermos full of mediocre coffee dispensed from a miserly machine, whose sole reason for existence is that it allows Germans to imagine they are doing things the authentic, Italian way.

The Thirty Years War, I mean to say, didn't quite settle the matter of how things should be done around here. You have to go further north, to solidly Protestant Scandinavia, in order to find people who know how to drink coffee (have a look, by the way, at the statistics on per capita coffee consumption by country): huge quantities of black coffee, dispensed freely, with no concern at all about 'going too far'.

In Paris, where I will be as of tomorrow, I will simply have to accept that adequate caffeination will, again, be a perpetual battle. I have been seen by Parisian waiters, hardly known for their flexibility, to order two, three coffees at a time. Vous attendez des amis, monsieur? I'm asked. Non, I feel like saying. J'attends mes cafés! And it's not just coffee, either, that is held back in this way. Bottled beverages of all sorts come in what I consider taste-sample dimensions. The sort of Americans I know of course think all this is very admirable; they echo Mike Bloomberg in their denunciation of American serving sizes, and of the proven link between Big Gulps and obesity. I won't deny the reality of this public-health problem, but I will insist on my right to not be treated, individually, as if I myself were a public-health problem. Of course, in Paris if not in New York it is not concern about public health that diminishes the serving sizes of beverages. It is rather, if I may speculate for a moment, the weight of tradition and community: drinking is something that must occur socially and quasi-ceremonially. Everyone should be dispensed the same amount, and the ultimate standard of the serving size is the gorgée of Christ's blood that has been dispensed --socially, ceremoniously, and in equal measure for all-- since late antiquity.

It is not surprising that the Roman-barbarian, Catholic-Protestant divide maps, in turn, onto the grape-grain divide. Those who know me will know I prefer wine, and can't stand beer. But in the ideal world, I would be permitted to drink wine as if it were beer: from a mug, and without regard for where the others are at in the emptying of their own mugs. Imagine: a culture of wine, freed from the culture of Catholicism.

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I am often told that I am wrong to suppose that I am perceiving the Slavic substratum of those parts of eastern Germany that have been --with a few exceptions, such as the Sorbian pockets near Leipzig-- thoroughly Germanized since the 13th century. The Slavic Schicht might survive in a few place-names, I'm instructed, but that's it.

But toponymy does matter. No other words are so resistant to change as the words for places--  human settlements, but abov all features of the natural landscape. How, for example, can Berlin fail to feel Slavic when it has neighborhoods, like Pankow, with that -ow suffix? The fact that this -ow constitutes the single exception in the German language to the rule that w should be pronounced as what anglophones think of as v --that is, here the -ow is pronounced just as when Americans say 'ow!'-- only reinforces the perception that there is something peculiar going on here, that these places were named according to rules that the current inhabitants did not invent.

Subtle things such as these, I suspect, play more of a role in history than we often imagine: why, for example, did the Soviets take just that part of Germany that had been de-Slavicized 800 years earlier? It could have something to do with a vague sense of recognition, attributable in part to toponymic features. The boundary of the former DDR constituted the western-most frontier of the historically Slavic world, and a certain species of irredentism would see the Soviet occupation as a just reclamation.

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It is a difficult question: what counts as reclamation, and what as usurpation?

When I taught in Ohio I had a colleague who liked to come by my office to talk about Leibniz. These conversations were of the sort that leave you, after the first five minutes, thrilled to find someone with similar interests, while after ten minutes it begins to dawn on you that the other guy's reasons for being interested in the same thing you're interested in look nothing like your own reasons.

It turns out this colleague had been a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio for the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Now these people, I've since learned, attribute a great deal of world-historical significance to a cluster of events that took place around 1714, when the Elector Georg Ludwig of Hannover left Lower Saxony for London, where he restyled himself 'King George I of Great Britain'. This much is widely known: the royal family of England has remained Hannoverian since his arrival; England is ruled, at least symbolically, by German usurpers. This explains, for some, why so much of the British aristocracy was hesitant to go to war with the Nazis; and it explains, at least for the LaRoucheans, why Leibniz is such an admirable figure.

For what is less known about the events of 1714 is that Georg Ludwig's humble librarian, G. W. Leibniz, had pleaded to go along with his employer to London, but was told that he could not, and must instead stay in Hannover in order to finish his work on the history of the Guelf and Estes royal lineages. The work was unfinished, and Leibniz died two years later, embittered at being left behind. In the meantime, he had also flirted, unsuccessfully, with the royal courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg, in the hope of being made a full-time councillor at one of these and abandoning that stupid history of the Guelfs for good.

Now LaRouche, somehow, appears to believe that the British royal family is the dark secret force that is pulling the strings of world government. Not the Trilateral comission, not the Rothschilds, but Queen Elizabeth II and her relations. Oh, and Al Gore. Moreover, LaRouche sees the decisive event in their sinister rise to global domination as occurring at the very moment of Georg Ludwig's relocation to London. They thus see Leibniz as representing the real Germany, and King George I as a betrayer and an impostor. They also see Isaac Newton as King George's court philosopher, and thus see the bitter, decades-long controversy between Newton and Leibniz as some sort of battle between good and evil.

That's all I know about the LaRoucheans. One sees a lot of them on the streets of German cities, with their Obama-with-a-Hitler-moustache posters. LaRouche is married to a German woman, very much his junior, and together they seem to be reshaping the movement as something that reaches far beyond US electoral politics. On three occasions, in Berlin, Hannover, and Montreal, I've stopped and asked the people manning those sad card tables with the hand-written placards hanging from them, whether there is anything, but anything, that Lyndon LaRouche has said with which they disagree. On one occasion, the answer was 'no'; the other two times, the answer was 'yes', though the respondents, when pressed, could not give any concrete examples.

I am no fan of the British royal family, whereas I admire Leibniz very much. In fact, when I started writing about Leibniz, I approached it more or less as a homework assignment: some guy to work on, who will help me strengthen my scholarly skills precisely because I have no particularly strong sympathies for him. But now, some years on, I find that I am, literally, Leibnizian: generally speaking, I would consider myself a rationalist, determinist, theist, phenomenalist, panvitalist. So my sympathies now line up in the same way those of the LaRoucheans do. But heavens, may I never have an office next to one of them again.

It is said that Leibniz hesitated to move to the royal court at Vienna, because this would have required a conversion to Catholicism. I can understand that. Technically, I am Catholic, for contingent biographical reasons I will relate another time. But in spirit, I know which side of the divide I belong on. I register this divide principally in terms of cultural factors others might consider trivial, or anyhow even more trivial than the old consubstantiation-vs.-transubstantiation debate. Like coffee, for example. But wars have been fought over lesser things. 

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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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Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum

It has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

Or which, perhaps, in the case of the stunning, sublimely unreconstructed Galérie d'Anatomie Comparée at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, they scorn, because they understand why this stuff matters, why it's worth looking at even, or perhaps especially, if you are not a kid, and no longer strictly speaking need to be educated, and certainly no longer need your education to come sugar-coated in fun. The adult seeks it out, I maintain (and I believe Buffon, Cuvier, et al. well understood this), because it is philosophical, it is an aide to philosophy: it triggers reflection upon the diversitas unitate compensata that is nature; upon the predicament of mortal corporeal substances such as, but not only, ourselves; and upon what still remains in a certain sense the utter implausibility of there ever being such a person, to speak with Kant, as a 'Newton for the blade of grass'. The natural history museum is in this respect unscientific if not anti-scientific. It works like art. Hell, why not just come out and say it? It's infinitely better than art.

Except that, well, it is art, too. This is something that Damien Hirst well understood with his shark and stuff; the only fault is with the spectator, who did not realize that natural history museums had already been delivering substantially the same spectacle for several centuries. In the case of the Parisian gallery, the art in question is 18th- and 19th-century European art, and its medium is bones, skin, organs, and tissues. The remains on display are both the things themselves, and at the same time representations of the things: representations according to the vision of nature of the naturalists who collected and displayed the things (and who did not at all share in today's reigning ideology of 'science', its importance for the kids' future, etc.). And this is what is thrown away when natural history museums are renovated: a window onto nature through keen-sighted naturalists, who also brought with them a now-unfashionable aesthetic and philosophical sensibility about nature that is worth preserving as much as the things themselves are.

The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals' bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out.

This is probably more than a child is ready to appreciate. Fine. Take your kid to some inane exploratorium. Or just get it over with and head straight for Chuck E. Cheese. I'll be at the Galérie, sans enfants, quietly meditating on nature's incomprehensible prolificness, and upon the noble effort of a few great men and women to come to know it in full.

A Plea for Folk-Philosophy

There is a well-known division between two camps of academic philosophy, often called 'analytic' and 'continental', with each side more or less convinced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a provincial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those expressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, yurts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy?

Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized provincial city in Transylvania. As part of the opening ceremony, the local Orthodox bishop was invited to hold forth on the value of philosophy. He seized the opportunity to denounce Marxism, existentialism, and even rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His éloge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking over the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 18th-century materialism.

The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his exact background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary, and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, probably Augustine, maybe even the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a physical body? What is infinity?

Now on most reckonings those are philosophical questions, yet the reaction of the visiting party (myself included) was to dismiss the bishop as something of a yokel. I suspect this would be the reaction of the vast majority of professional academic philosophers in the West, and a fortiori if it were not a Transylvanian bishop, but rather, say, a Mongolian shaman, who deigned to hold forth on the questions on which we take ourselves to be experts. While at the time I went along with this prevailing sentiment, it now seems to me that this encounter was in fact nothing other than a clash of provincialisms.

The problem might simply be that the term 'philosophy' is used in two very different senses: one to describe a well-defined tradition of systematic and methodical inquiry, which appears to have developed independently in human history only in China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean; the other, which might be called 'folk-philosophy' or 'ethnophilosophy', on the model of ethnoastronomy, ethnotaxonomy, etc., to describe the set of cultural variations on a range of beliefs about nature, the self, etc., which humans qua human cannot help but have. But one way of moving beyond provincialism might be to consider the possibility that all philosophy is in a sense ethnophilosophy.

After all, the minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine. The difference is that the pastoral people's minds have different prostheses and institutions to support and to mirror their thoughts. A revealing parallel case is law: does law begin with Hammurabi, and receive its first mature expression in the Roman period? Or were these milestones simply the explicitization of something that was already there, that cannot not be there wherever there is a society that is organized in some way or other according to a set of --perhaps unspoken-- rules and prohibitions? Is a written legal code the coming-into-being of a new way of thinking, or is it the transfer of a familiar way of thinking into a different, external storage medium? If we are prepared to accept the latter possibility, we are thereby enabled to think about, say, Roman law, in fruitful comparison to, say, Hausa law (generally called Hausa 'custom'). And similarly with philosophy.

Philosophy in our narrower sense might be more rigorous than folk-belief, yet still indebted to folk-belief in ways that it ought to be part of the philosophical project to uncover. An analogous uncovering has been undertaken in recent decades in the cognitive-scientific study of folk-taxonomy. It has become clear, in particular,  that the modern system of Linnean biological classification, while more exact and rigorous than pre-scientific and pre-literate systems throughout the world, is not for that so much a rejection of the earlier systems as it is an outgrowth of them. This discovery tells us something not just about the history of science, but also about the way that science at present continues its project of carving up the world.

The distinguishing feature of Indian, Chinese, or European philosophy, on this approach, would turn out to be not some greater clarity or depth of thinking. Instead, it would be a by-product of the way certain, principally Asian, technologies, above all writing and the reproduction of written texts, are incorporated into a society. The presuppositions and aims of inquiry might be different for, say, an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, and the technologies and institutions for pursuing these aims are certainly different. But there are still human minds there puzzling out the nature of reality and of humanity's place in it. This activity ought to be of interest to philosophers not out of some naïve celebration of cultural diversity, but rather for the hard-headed scientific reason that it gives us a real measure of the full scope and range of humanity's responses to the questions we call 'philosophical'. Taking this measure is one way of deepening our understanding of these questions.

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