Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Gadfly and the Spider

Nausicaa Renner wrote a very thorough review, in The Nation, of my book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, along with a review of The Stone Reader, to which I am also a contributor. Excerpt below. To read the whole thing, go here. 

Is philosophy practiced by a “specialized and privileged elite within a broader society”? Does everyone in society do it in some way? If philosophy were more like dance, it would be ubiquitous. But it isn’t a practice that we see in every culture—in fact, Smith asserts, it has only arisen organically as a defined practice twice in human history, once in Greece and once in medieval India. But if philosophy were more like ballet, we should be able to see it as part of something larger than itself.

Smith looks to answer these questions by surveying the role of the philosopher and the meaning of philosophy since ancient times in different cultures and across the world. Because he’s conducting a survey, his modus operandi is to take an expansive and prismatic view of the kinds of work a philosopher can do. While the survey includes practices that define themselves as philosophic, it also explores the philosophical aspects of things like ritual, myth, even astronomy.

The style and method of Smith’s book show him to be as good as his word. The text is divided into six chapters, corresponding with six “types” of philosopher: the Curiosa, the Sage, the Gadfly, the Ascetic, the Mandarin, and the Courtier. These categories are not mutually exclusive; they are more like archetypes or allegories, tools for exploring the changing relationship between philosophy and society. Each chapter flits about from East to West and from ancient times to modern; each teems with quotes, examples, personal anecdotes, and fictional monologues by its philosophical characters, offset as long block quotes. In writing this way, Smith has taken a huge aesthetic gamble—one that he never quite admits to. He writes, flippantly, that “A story needs characters,” making the conceit sound like a gimmick to sell books. He is selling himself short: His book is a laudable effort to straddle the many ways of thinking about philosophy, and to avoid promoting one particular perspective.

But the survey also has an agenda: Smith is vocal, in this book and elsewhere, about the problems that arise with a definition of philosophy that is exclusively Western. While I have no doubts about his appreciation for the philosophy of other cultures (he teaches classical Indian philosophy, for one), the point of his survey is less intellectual (or passionate) than tactical; he wants to convince academic philosophers that it’s a serious inconsistency, if not an actual logical fallacy, to define philosophy narrowly as a Western endeavor or, more constrained still, a Western academic one.

Jill Stein Is an Agent of Putin Too

Putin is now plainly following the same tactic in US electoral politics that he has successfully promoted in Greece and elsewhere: supporting both far-right and left tendencies indiscriminately. He is happy with any new political order that disrupts the establishment, and would welcome either a Jill Stein or a Donald Trump presidency in the United States. He knows only one of these two has any real chance of winning, and also knows that a good way of bringing this about is to support them both.

Stein is a regular guest of the RT network. Formerly called Russia Today, this English-language TV channel has adopted the Kentucky Fried Chicken strategy, rebranding itself 'KFC' in order to conceal the negative connotations of at least one word lending a letter to its acronym. Now, to some extent every major media operation is a propaganda operation, and in agreeing to appear in the NY Times or on CNN, people of conscience and reason are making a serious compromise. But RT is a media outlet whose entire raison d'être is disinformation. It also regularly features the conspiracy theorist and Trump satellite Alex Jones, and the antisemite and homophobe Gearoid O Colmain, who has recently been upbraiding the Stalin Society of North America for abandoning the Stalin-era Soviet position on 'homosexualism' as a perversion to be corrected by scientific Marxist conversion therapy. It's all good, for the RT network, and for Putin: however dirty and creepy, however massive the contradictions from one guest to the next, it all disrupts the stranglehold of liberal establishment discourse as dominated by American, and most Western European, media.

And RT is the media environment in which Jill Stein finds it possible to thrive. Pictures are now circulating of her seated at the same table as Putin at an RT gala dinner in Moscow last December. Nearby we also find a Trump advisor, Michael Flynn. It would of course be Kremlin-baiting and slanderous to simply point out that Jill Stein has been to Moscow. I've been to Moscow too and I hope to go back soon. (I would emphatically decline any opportunity to meet Putin at a staged spectacle, just as I would Trump). This is something much more serious than that: she is a core member of the media family of the Putin regime's English-language propaganda arm.

There is, again, no sustained or clear message in the propaganda. Putin's regime, unlike the Soviet Union, has no real ideology. The only message is intentional disruption of other messages, by means of whatever toxic ideas craven ideologues and unprincipled fools, hungry for media exposure of any sort, feel like throwing out there: anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, birthers, hardline Stalinists, people who think Noam Chomsky is an Israeli agent, etc. It's dirty as hell, it is soaked through with ideas and values that all of my American progressive friends would find abhorrent if confronted by them directly. And it seriously threatens the outcome of the US presidential elections.

I know many, many people agree that the establishment does need to be brought down, and so are sympathetic to any force that seems to be working toward that. But it is extremely naive to think that it would be possible to achieve any progressive goals at all in a new political landscape that Putin has helped to bring about. The hope for accomplishing progressive goals would come to a screeching halt, as all political effort of those who resist collaborationism would turn to overthrowing the tyranny, and short of that to minimizing the suffering under it.

Putin wants Trump to be president of the United States. Putin also thinks Jill Stein is alright.

The History of Plants

I will hold the Émile Francqui Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles next year. When I learned this my first thought was: Who's Émile Francqui? and my second thought was: I'm guessing I don't want to know. I'm guessing it has something to do with the history of the Belgian Congo.

 

And I was exactly right: in 1885 Francqui was appointed by King Leopold II to go to the Katanga Province as an army captain and a cartographer. Some sources, not least the Fondation Francqui, report that their namesake was active in combatting slavery, but what this seems to mean is that he was engaged in the Congo Arab war of 1892 against Zanzibari 'Arab' slave traders fighting for control of the Congo Free State.

Francqui's principal adversary was the Zanzibari ivory merchant, slavetrader, and memoirist known as Tippu Tip, a nom de guerre derived onomatopoeically from the sound of his gun. It is unlikely that Tippu Tip saw Francqui as any more enlightened than he was, but instead took the war as having to do only with control of territory. For his service there, Leopold would send him onward to China, to represent Belgian interests in the burgeoning mining industry.

As I was reading this part of Francqui's biography, I realised the name was vaguely familiar. A few months ago I was engaged in some minor research on the natural-philosophical and, shall we say, eudaimonistic writings of the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, beginning with his translation in 1910 of Georg Agricola's 1556 work De re metallica, and right up through his 1963 swan song, Fishing for Fun-- And to Wash Your Soul.

I had checked out through interlibrary loan from Bavaria the only physical copy of this latter book known to exist on the European continent, and had to give the ILL librarian a special pleading look as if to say, "What? This is research too."

The fruits of the Hoover research will be made public, in Cabinet Magazine, soon enough, but here what is noteworthy is the small detail of his own passage through China, in the first years of the 20th century, having even fought in the Boxer Rebellion in Tianjin in 1900, alongside his wife, Lou Henry. And who would become his great rival in the struggle for control of the Chinese mines? The Belgian industrialist and envoyé of the king, Émile Francqui.

Some years later still, after the outbreak of World War I, Francqui and Hoover would collaborate to direct and manage the Commission for Relief in Belgium, offering food supplies to refugees of the German occupation. One of the principal thoroughfares in Brussels today is the Boulevard Herbert Hoover, which I remember from the mid-1990s, when I briefly had a Belgian girlfriend and flew to Brussels from New York on a Pakistan International Airlines flight that made a brief stopover for refuelling in Europe before continuing on to Karachi. She, a Francophone, had disappointed me for her total lack of interest in the language of the Flems, and would not indulge for a second my attempts to translate the Dutch part of the bilingual cereal box.

I disappointed her for other perhaps more profound reasons, but anyhow I have been surprised, recently, to find these two men, Francqui and Hoover, meeting again, not just in Brussels during the Great War, after their period of enmity in China, but also, a century later, in my own curiosity, my own wandering from this topic to that.

Belgium has its Francqui Foundation, and the United States has, at Stanford, its Hoover Institute. If you accept an affiliation with the Hoover Institute you can expect to be unfriended by your cool friends, the ones who post links to new books from Verso and who rigorously practice the hermeneutics of suspicion, about pretty much everything: the New York Times, Disney cartoon princesses, Miley Cyrus twerking. Accepting to be associated with the name of Émile Francqui seems somewhat less charged, though in truth the men seem to have been very much alike.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I err through life, taking opportunities as they come, accepting invitations, without much suspicion, but also without the hopefulness young Herbert Hoover surely felt as he set out to impose order and progress in the world. As a topic for the lecture series I’ll give in connection with the year-long chair, I have proposed: "What Is a Plant? Philosophical Reflections from Aristotle to Goethe." The world is going up in flames, there is a coming global order of idiocy and barbarism, and, like Herbert Hoover with his history of metals, though without the optimism, I have chosen to focus on the history of plants. I want to wash my soul of the history of men.