tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17248322004111471672024-03-05T12:54:56.640-08:00The ChasmI attempt to overcome the chasm, the divide, between many philosophical traditions. Maintaining traditions that don't talk to any other traditions makes thinking stale.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.comBlogger343125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-55528181544329800322013-06-15T17:50:00.001-07:002013-06-15T17:50:01.256-07:00Barzun on William JamesI am reading some of Jacque Barzun on understanding and reading William James. I found this passage rather unique:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow;">[The real problem] in James as writer of philosophy is his irrepressible humour. He shares with Swift, Lamb, Samuel Butler, Shaw, Chesterton, and Mark Twain the disadvantage of having used yet one more rhetorical means which, though legitimate in itself and generally pleasing, somehow distracts all but the fittest readers. Most people seize on it as an opportunity to escape from the serious thought just preceding and thus miss the seriousness in the next, the humorous one. The great humorist always runs the risk of not being taken thoughtfully, while the normal men of ideas, faithful to solemnity, invariably are.</span></span>Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-35358011703763502292013-06-09T01:25:00.002-07:002013-06-15T17:44:50.446-07:00Caputo and the End of EthicsCaputo has a book, <i>Against Ethics,</i> that deals with the same thesis in the <i>Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory; </i>it's entitled <i>End of Ethics</i>. I hate the article. In fact, I despise the point: regurgitate Levinas about singular uniqueness of the individual, the radical alterity of the Other, and think Levinasian phenomenology calls into question the existence of ethics as a discipline in philosophy that seeks out how to deliberate about right and wrong. For Caputo, ethics deals with universal rules and duties, and Caputo simply continues the well-intentioned Levinasian line when Levinas says in the opening of <i>Totality and Infinity</i>, I hope to "not be duped by morality." Instead, we should be uber-ethical and allow for the singular uniqueness of others to overflow. The ramification of accepting his critique is that he has given us one duty at the expense of thinking his critique is not a replacement for the supplanted duty. Yet, it is. The Levinasian critique just functions as a super-duty from which everything else depends. However, Levinas never gives you a way to think about respecting the radical alterity of the other except maybe to never reduce the singular uniqueness to another. However, this superduty could be equally guilty of the same reproach of formalism often accused of Kant's categorical imperative.<br />
<br />
The contempt for ethics originates in the following two claims: A) a very Kierkegaardian reading of morality as singling out the universal and B) somehow believing that the universal harkens back to the language of presence called into question by so many of the poststructuralists discourses in other disciplines (the very same stupid disciplines that give rigorous study of Continental texts a bad name). The belief is so widespread in these circles that to make any universal claim - let alone a philosophical claim about the methods of normative ethics - is to commit to the impossible. These critiques are many and they might focus power or language as reasons to why we cannot know or utter universal claims in ethics.<br />
<br />
However, limiting a discussion about ethics to rule-following is idiotic. If contextual-dependency really undermines the capacity for universal claims and a global morality, then it is not the content of morality we should be so concerned. Instead, we can still talk about the agential capacities and offer robust conceptions of ethical experience to mesh with how we experience values. We will find that a variety of capacities are shared between people, and that we can talk about how best to apply these capacities in a world where morality is seen as only following rules and doing one's duty. All in all, Caputo's pronounced end of ethics is always offered too soon. Just because we are skeptical of a particular research program does not entail the immediate dismissal, but instead we should see just how far our skepticism extends. In limiting his critique to duty, he cannot delimit virtue ethics (though he does some work to dispense away with virtue ethics as yet another way in which believers in ethics are deluded), which calls into question duty-responses to moral reasons inherent in the context now facing us.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-61606664345359365392013-05-30T09:19:00.001-07:002013-05-30T09:45:27.433-07:00Threads of Power<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One
central theme developed in pragmatism and nowhere else in philosophy is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">power</i> of an idea. For the pragmatist,
the conceptualization of the idea follows from their effectuating force in the
consequence of human action. Thus, a secondary – but no less influential idea –
follows from the rule of conceptualization. Ideas exert an influence in their
effectuating force on human experience. They are effectual, and this may be
referred back to what I meant by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">power</i>
of an idea, its effectuating force. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When we study an idea, we can trace its effectual
possibilities it possessed in the past and what such an idea may hold for us in
the future. However, as many have noted, pragmatism is extremely focused on the
possibilities of action to improve life. Therefore, pragmatism is often locked
temporally with its attention to the future. There is little, if any, attention
paid to the past. Yet, pragmatism’s insight into the effectual power of an idea
can be read backward through the hermeneutic threads that have persisted.
Through hermeneutics reflection, traces of ideas can conceived when we retell
the interpretation of their past. Gadamer strictly delimits that interpretation
is always enacted to understand the situated present. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I will suggest in this lecture both methods may be united
to address how various threads of power converge in the present. The power of
an interpretation arises when we first look to the possible conceptual linkages
of an idea maintained with other ideas or concepts. An interpretation
synthesizes various possible linkages between ideas and/or concepts; I call
these <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">narrative threads</i>. The past
concretizes in the interpretation of various narrative threads in the present
act of understanding, and a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sense</i> of
that idea’s danger, necessity, or emancipatory sense illuminates the
present-into-the-future. Then, we can evaluate the status of any given
narrative thread pragmatically. Let me give an example. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Narrative threads underlie the formation of any
discourse, and in fact, many discourses do not acknowledge the historical
senses implicit that inform these threads. Specific to our reflection, here,
the concretion of these discourses take for granted how they are constituted by
the reification of those that appropriate an idea to exert its power. My concern
is for threads of power. When the Affordable Care Act passed, the government
mandated that everyone purchase health insurance or face a penalty on their
taxes by January 2014. The conservative disagreement is about the mandate
itself. It forces people to purchase a service they do not want. If someone
cannot identify how their labor mixes with the gain of one’s own self-directed
purchasing, then Obama and the Democrats are transgressing the Lockean norm
about property to which we in the United States are so ensconced. There is an
implicit and formative sense of violating liberty here that can best be
understood as an idea deriving from Locke. Like it or not, ideas are
efficacious to the conceptual space in which these narrative threads are at
work at the intersubjective level. If the Affordable Care Act is to succeed,
then a cultural dialogue about Lockean status of property and liberty must be
addressed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">However
one understands these claims, these ideas are situated in a thread and the
concepts of that thread form a narrative in which the ideas work a certain way.
Synthesizing the temporal orientations and methods of pragmatism and hermeneutics
allows us to detect the movement of these effectual threads of power. We can
ask how exactly did the Lockean norm arise? Where did its philosophical
emanation exert its influence the most? Jefferson? Or did Jefferson’s words in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Declaration of Independence </i>implant
ideas of liberty and property in the public consciousness to the point that
these ideas have infected the political imaginary for several generations? One
can easily notice that wealthy Americans have a particular fondness for the
concept of the individual that Locke articulated in the 17<sup>th</sup> century
in what is now called “The Liberty Movement” and the rise of the populist
libertarian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that fondness, the
fondness for individuality can be exposed in its shortcomings that arise when
we take into account exactly whom an individual can be. For when the 17<sup>th</sup>
century mind conceived of an individual’s liberty, women and other minorities
were not conceived in that narrative at all. Consequently, “all men were not
created equal” as we might say given that public consciousness now conceives
African-American men as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">men.</i> In fact,
Locke wrote slavery into South Carolina’s constitution and Jefferson owned
slaves. The thread of power, here, may inherit these same difficulties of
patriarchy and exclusion. Mitt Romney’s 46% are not established
property-owners, but in the words of Ayn Rand “takers.”</span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">These ideas (and many more) are linked to
us today. In fact, the pragmatic-hermeneutic stance is committed to the fact
that an idea may be at work in ways that we cannot imagine. The point of the
philosopher is to be sensitive to the historicity of ideas and how ideas
continue to exert their influence. So many threads of our ideologies and knowledge intertwine. Religion folds into politics. Politics folds into economics, and even religion folds into economics creating a culture saturated with how these threads tie together. Bound together, these threads create knotted narratives that often make little sense and threaten the ethical well-being of those people that unwittingly participate within these narratives. A significant effort of the philosopher is to untie these threads and distill their essence for others to see their harmful effects.</span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-41688626934296378132013-05-17T02:30:00.001-07:002013-05-17T02:30:59.201-07:00James and Scheler Comparative Paper Introduction<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The following is the beginning of an essay I am writing. I thought I would share it here. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Phenomenology is
a name for a variety of approaches that take experience seriously. In these
approaches, the common <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">desideratum</i> is
to describe concretely the constituting subject acts in relation to the
constituted object. The core of phenomenology is the systematic description of
this co-relational act-object structure in which neither act nor object is
privileged more than the other. If descriptions are not concrete enough, then
the phenomenologist has either privileged one-side of the relation or neglected
a dimension of lived-experience that should remain explored in her descriptions
of that co-relational structure. I argue that Scheler’s description of
intentional feeling loses sight of the concrete lived-body and this encounter
with Scheler through pragmatism opens up the deeply felt dimension of reality
that underlies both James and Scheler’s philosophy. In trading the relevance of
the lived-body for enduring psychic and spiritual feeling, Scheler reveals how
feeling intends the values of the Holy and culture. In these feelings, the
values acquire a sense, but no mention is made of how those values manifest in
the experiencer involve the lived-body. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With the dearth of the lived-body,
one could insist that Scheler is neglecting a crucial aspect of overall
phenomenological experience. Thus, there is a crisis to be faced. On the one
hand, Scheler gives a description of intentional feeling and the value
correlates that constitute experience. In saying that, Scheler’s values involve
our world. They appear on the back of deeds, persons and things. They
illuminate aspects of our lived-experience in this world, and yet by denying
the relevance of the lived-body in the experience of values in feeling, the
disembodied nature of the higher feelings calls into question exactly how
concrete Scheler’s phenomenology is beyond its articulation in vital feeling. By
revealing the embodied relevance of the lived-body in psychic and spiritual
feeling, we no longer must face a crisis of concretion in Scheler’s thought.
The crisis is dissipated once we start to read Scheler’s thought pragmatically,
even when we move beyond the lived-body. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However, I do not stop with the
crisis of making Scheler’s notion of the lived-body more concrete. This is only
an opening. Instead, meditating on Scheler’s lived-body opens up a common
pragmatic ground revealed by James. Both Scheler and James regard feeling as
constitutive of experience before we can articulate anything about experience.
Experience is shot through with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feeling</i>.
Moving from the relevance of the lived-body and feeling, I start to open up the
basic insight that James not only saves Scheler from his own irrelevance, but
the commonalities on the very relation to reality can open up a powerful
pragmatic interpretation of Scheler’s later metaphysics. Let me describe how I
see this paper unfolding. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First, I outline the problem of
disembodied feeling in the four value-rankings that appear in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Formalismus</i>. In the second section, I
introduce William James’s pragmatic thought as a way to conceive of feeling
situated in a body. Working from James’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Principles
of Psychology</i>, I argue that the James-Lange hypothesis can remedy the
observed defect of Scheler’s intentional feeling. In the third section, I defend
three points of agreement between Scheler and James and what I take to be a
Jamesian reading of how the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">divine is
felt</i> in James’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Varieties of Religious Experience. </i>In
the fourth section, an analogy is made from James’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Varieties </i>as a way to regard Scheler’s later metaphysics. Since
Scheler’s later metaphysics articulates life’s energy as an impulsion (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drang</i>), and Scheler works from the
bottom-up tracing impulsion in the lived-body, I interpret this transition as
Scheler coming to grips with flaw I observed in his disembodied
intentional-feeling in its higher forms. Regarded pragmatically, the activity
of intentional feeling described on the side of impulsion and its relation to
spirit (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Geist</i>) is shown to have the
pragmatic consequence of putting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">embodied-ness</i>
back into feeling. While I confess that one could read Scheler’s metaphysics as
an internal solution to the problem I point out, a pragmatic reading avoids the
charge of metaphysical dualism, and illuminates Scheler’s pragmatic appeal to a
larger world that may benefit from it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-42801335622652561252013-05-16T18:35:00.001-07:002013-05-16T18:39:08.090-07:00Graduation and Current Wisdom. I have done it. I have burnt bridges, but damn it, I did it. In some sense, I should be screaming a triumphal tone. I should have many responsible and thankful things to say, but they really would only be about two people this year, two faculty members that went above and beyond for me while I learned who never had my back at all. I will refrain from any more comment lest the forces of darkness seek me more harm.<br />
<br />
I can tell you what I learned from receiving my Ph.D. in philosophy.<br />
<br />
1. There are little if any jobs. The fact that so many of us are unemployed when we reach the other side proves that the system is not sustainable. Warn your friends, but don't put much stock into them listening. They will be enamored with writing their dissertation, and if they do, suggest they take up a trade.<br />
<br />
2. If you attended a non-Leiterite school, you are worse off for it given that gatekeepers in the profession did go to those schools. Yet on the other hand, if you did attend a non-Leiterite school, you may be the one-stop solution to smaller liberal arts college departments. It's a mixed bag.<br />
<br />
3. Powerful people in the profession are best avoided altogether. These same people may demand disciple-ship. Search your soul if you want that. I would advise not picking them as supervisors; they don't have the time to develop you, unless of course they are actually interested in you as a person. Pick a supervisor who will give a shit about you as a human being. Life will be easier.<br />
<br />
4. Learn a little lesson about how philosophy is actually written before graduation. Philosophical papers advance specifically outlined theses, and the grad student requirement of being open to new ideas is fine. Yet, do not think that when you are done that you must be open to every single philosophical idea. Hopefully by the time you've written a thesis or dissertation, you should decide what arguments are the best and have some idea of your own commitments. You should be a good listener about various positions that you do not agree with, but thinking that being critical is being dismissive is stupid. The point is to have the conversation. Moreover, the Continentals that can see exegesis or interpretation as an argument to be had make more headway than those that cannot. See next rule.<br />
<br />
5. If you've spent years only reading Continental philosophy, the best of luck to you. That's all I can say. Even I cannot abide such people. Hermeneutic insulation does nobody any good.<br />
<br />
6. Learn to discuss your ideas in a public forum without being insulted that someone might disagree with you completely. If you cannot do this, change professions.<br />
<br />
7. There are bullies and sycophants in every department. There are people that hang on every word of some powerful personality or consider themselves such a powerful personality. Sometimes, the sycophants have learned to think only one way and argue something akin to Marxism would conclude X, Therefore X (Pick your philosophical position). Their inability to argue from a point of view other than their own should be a strong signal to you. Avoid them, or in the very least, avoid anybody not interested in actually being your friend in the truest Aristotelian sense.<br />
<br />
8. Learn to tell the indifferent from sincere.<br />
<br />
9. Learn to read another language. Don't be an analytic philosopher of language that can only speak English. There's something very bizarre about such a person.<br />
<br />
10. There is no boys-network to which being a white male confers an advantage when one comes from a non-Leiterite school. White privilege and being male is a product of entrenched political alliances and if your institution is without resources, then there is no advantage to be had. Move beyond this talk. Try to be the best philosopher you can be and demand the same from all genders. The most helpful way to do this is to insist upon clarity of argumentation. Be a colleague to anyone that will reciprocate professionally in kind. If someone never reciprocates, cancel the relationship. In graduate school, you don't have time to dilly-dally with those that never take you seriously as a person, let alone a scholar. <br />
<br />
11. A dissertation is not your magnum opus. Get it done. About half of all doctoral candidates bail out at this point. The dissertation is simply a demonstration of your ability to focus on one research area for an extended period of time. It also teaches you how to organize your time and what editing professional research is like. You will also master Chicago Manual Style. Above all, remember one simple adage: the best dissertation is a done dissertation.<br />
<br />
12. Put the X-box on the shelf. Commit to one gaming session a week, if that. Nothing more.<br />
<br />
13. If you are married, stay out of departmental politics altogether. When the grad students get stupid and go out and drink, go home to your spouse. A lot of the stupidity of graduate student life occurs when the academic life and social life intermingle with alcohol.<br />
<br />
14. Avoid people that mythologize victimhood, especially when they are better funded than other people.<br />
<br />
15. Avoid curmudgeons that have an axe to grind against you. These people usually swear a lot and hate your optimism about life. Optimism may be naive, but it helps with the drudgery of life with a Ph.D.<br />
<br />
16. Avoid graduate school if you can. If you are forced to go either by your own soul or some other strangely spiritual force, attend a program that is able to fund you for four years.<br />
<br />
17. If you are practicing German pronunciation, do not look at yourself in the mirror. You will think you are Klingon.<br />
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18. When you are ABD, do not think of yourself as a student. At that point, you're a scholar-in-training.<br />
<br />
19. Read all you can about teaching. Teaching is your bread and butter.<br />
<br />
20. If your program produces scholars, or pays little attention to professional development, then pay attention to what Georgetown is doing with its Ph.Ds. They did stellar in the 2012-2013 job market. Their website building and neatly composed syllabi are just two of the reasons we should all seek to emulate their professional development.<br />
<br />
21. Read New APPS blog. It rocks.<br />
<br />
22. Jettison your blog the moment you go on the market. Blogs can be a personal repository of information as to how you developed. You should simply present the developed best version of yourself at an interview.<br />
<br />
23. Relate to others as colleagues even if they do not reciprocate in kind.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-69581835915790302162013-04-19T11:26:00.001-07:002013-06-15T17:46:45.531-07:00HOW BEST TO TEACH INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS?I have been offered a job teaching Introduction to Ethics. I have been given full creative control in designing my course, and while I have not talked to the department, I wanted first to reflect on teaching ethics for myself. Feel free to speak to me about where you also see an Introduction to Ethics course, and its value.<br />
<br />
Earlier in the semester, I objected to an Intro to Ethics course I learned about. The Professor had designed it to re-direct the class away from classical theory survey course, and instead, he taught the class under the question of spiritual vocation or calling of the students. Marx and Weber were principal sources of reading for the course. Had the Professor done right by the students? Maybe. I am ambivalent about it. As one might expect, some of the students were ill-prepared to think about their own values in relation to being called in life. The students "didn't get it." In fact, this experience of being-called or acting under a spiritual vocation does not really "catch" the current undergraduate mind as much as thinking of morality in terms of rule-following.<br />
<br />
Yet, the class makes sense when we think of how limiting rule-following accounts can be. I prefer virtue-ethics and sympathize with the designer's intention. Yet again, the purpose of an Introduction to Ethics class may serve several functions that prevent what we, as moral philosophers, think about morality. We should be honest about that. Our theoretical approaches might pre-dispose us to teach certain ways over others.<br />
<br />
The purpose of an Introduction to Ethics course introduces students to what philosophers have said about living a moral life. In so doing, the practical upshot of this course is that it forces students to reflect on issues in their own life in a systematic way. Ethics can open up reflection in ways that the student never considered. For the philosophy department, the Introduction to Ethics course may serve as a primer for higher courses in applied ethical courses or a higher-level ethical theory courses. If the department views the course in this way, then an implicit harmony of this intention must be reflected in the Introduction to Ethics design. Some departments might view freshman level courses as services courses in the core curriculum and teach the same theories independently of what the Introduction course teaches. If that is so, then I need not worry about its relation to how the department teaches higher-level ethics courses.<br />
<br />
If students will never take another ethics class ever again, then it seems reasonable that theoretical survey approaches would be used. Pack as much ethics in as much as possible! Students should learn a good deal of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. They should study how these approaches can illuminate different cases and find some exploration in applying these methods to cases themselves. However, the theory survey approach can be done in two ways, and by delineating two ways, I do not mean to suggest that these are mutually exclusive. They are not.<br />
<br />
First, we can use primary readings of major philosophers. At some places, undergraduates are equipped with the reading skills to do this; other times they are not. Second, we can use someone that has explained the ideas for them. The former can be done through requiring students purchase translations of Kant, Aristotle and Mill, or I can use a historical anthology. Public institutions typically favor keeping the cost down for students and anthologies or cheap translations are used. At SIU, the Dean wants departments to be sensitive to the fact we have the highest amount of grant funded students in the state.<br />
<br />
Regarding the latter, I can teach someone like Rachels that puts the ideas together for the student. In such a class, students are removed from the burden of thinking through difficult readings. They are responsible more for getting the relations of the ideas right as someone like Rachels has articulated them in the reading. In this way, I do not teach the content of Kant and Mill from their own words, but how Rachels articulates them. In some ways, this is easier on my end. I am not burdened at lecturing about a philosophical text, but could focus on the arguments as extrapolated by Rachels. I focus more on the ideas, but then again so do the students.<br />
<br />
I could supplement teaching philosophy through the use of literature. For instance, I could use Victor Frankl's <i>Man's Search for Meaning </i>or Elie Wiesel's <i>Night. </i>Sometimes, I feel the Holocaust is a bit used and abused. If anybody has thoughts on this, I would love to hear it, and for the record, I do agree with Nussbaum that literature has a place in teaching ethics. I have even heard of a class using Agatha Christie novels.<br />
<br />
Next, I could restrict the amount of theory that is done, and devote an entire class to the best approach to ethics. As a virtue ethicist, I cannot help but think that a course on virtue approaches might be the best way to proceed. I could restrict the course to a time period, like Plato's dialogues, Aristotle and some of the Stoics. Then, I could fast-forward to contemporary appropriations of those same themes. Yet, given the other thoughts about the role of Intro to Ethics, the course may serve other functions that such a restriction would be seen as a disservice.<br />
<br />
Finally, I have been thinking about the classic three text Introduction to Ethics. I select three texts pitched in a meta-narrative I tell the students. I devote five weeks to in-depth study as to what the philosopher says. Of the three, Nietzsche's <i>Genealogy of Morals </i>is used as the skeptical text. Of the three, I am thinking De Beauvoir, Nietzsche and Kant. I would teach Kant as a person that thinks that morality requires a foundation. Nietzsche would be skeptical of that foundation, and De Beauvoir would articulate an ethics even in light of a lack of foundation--a point that Nietzsche would agree with her on. I would fit these texts together and use the class to tell that story, roughly speaking. On my part, I would say that this is the most avant-garde of how I have imagined teaching this course. The drawback of this selection is that the course must come to a synthesis of the texts relation, and when I do that, I do not necessarily apply those ideas outside of that narrative easily. That might generate two conflicting aims to which the students might confuse, and it might stifle teaching the material.<br />
<br />
At most public universities, they teach an anthology that divides up the course into three components: metaethics, normative theory and practical ethics/applied ethics. Let's call this the tripartite conception. For the most part, I find this approach reasonable. It keeps the cost low, and there are several texts that are devoted to this distinction with readings in each of the three sections. Of those that I have seen, Schafer-Landau's books are commonly used. Students get a sense of all the types of moral philosophy. The drawback is that students think about ideas, the readings are analytically dense and eschew the historical side of moral philosophy. As everyone knows, I am devoted to understanding philosophy through its history. I do not know if I could sacrifice that even if I taught a classically analytic and ahistoric approach to moral philosophy.<br />
<br />
In summary, I have talked about 4 approaches: theory-survey approach, restricted-theory approach, three-text approach, and the tripartite conception. In addition, I have also talked about some ideas concerning the selection of texts from anthologies, primary authors and to the supplementing these with literary examples. I have not drawn any specific conclusions. Instead, I am leaving it purposefully indeterminate, and invite comments about how best to teach Introduction to Philosophy.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-65188020625065792392013-04-19T09:48:00.002-07:002013-04-19T09:48:32.261-07:00Le Guin on LibrariesUrsula K. Le Guin has been my favorite writer for years. Before Hogwarts, there was Roke Knoll and Isle of the Wise. Before Raistlin, Ged chased Cobb. Before Butler's performativity of gender, there were the Gethenians. And even Harold Bloom once claimed, emphatically it would seem, "Le Guin, more than Tolkein, has raised fantasy into high literature."<br />
<br />
In a book of essays I own by her, <i>The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination, </i>she writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow;">Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination. Just like the kid in the Carnegie or the student in Widener, that was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow;">That joy must not be sold. It must not be privatized, made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow;">And that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, and that's everyone, when they need it, and that's always. (22-23).</span></blockquote>
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Bravo.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-87551705279524023362013-04-17T12:04:00.002-07:002013-04-17T12:04:28.558-07:00Joe Rouse's Paper on Heidegger and Philosophy of ScienceEvery once in a while, I find a paper that I really enjoy. Joe Rouse's<a href="https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/jrouse/Heidegger%20on%20Science%20%26%20Naturalism.pdf"> paper</a> on Heidegger and his philosophy of science is a good expansion in an otherwise serious area of neglect.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-3481466069429501632013-04-16T07:59:00.002-07:002013-04-16T07:59:56.957-07:00Philosophy Carnival, AgainAgain, there is no Continental philosophy at the <a href="http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2013/04/philosophers-carnival-sequicentmensial.html">Philosophy Carnival</a>. There isn't even the bad-analytic-friendly-Heidegger appropriated by Dreyfus to talk about things analytic philosophers care about or some such thing that the main participants might seemingly care about, e.g. naturalized Nietzsche or friendly and critical reception of Foucault. Instead, the Carnival is a celebration of West coast and central plain states people yet again.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the only blog posts by women contributors are those blog posts specifically about women observing culture or the profession. There is no substantive blog post about a philosophical issue written by a woman. If the Carnival took seriously Herbert and Kukla's posted blog post, they would have found articles concerning philosophical issues written by women and not re-post what the organizers already know they should be doing. Though to the Carnival's credit, it has picked the two most well-known blogging female philosophers (Kukla and De Cruz), so maybe there is a silver lining in what was picked.<br />
<br />
Certainly, there is no tolerance for philosophical pluralism. One might need a good dose of openness in the way that either Gadamer or Dewey talk about being open to experiencing the world.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-62530926762005271602013-03-11T02:01:00.003-07:002013-03-11T02:02:37.703-07:00Philosophy Carnival Lacks Any Continental Philosophy And That's A Negative Thing<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have noticed that for the past three months (at least) that the Philosophy Carnival has been fairly dominated by analytic philosophers. Keeping in mind Jeff Malpas recent <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/landscaping-heidegger-davidson-gadamer/">interview at 3AM</a>...</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow; font-size: 15px; line-height: 19px;">the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is a political distinction. This is important, because we often mistake it for a philosophical distinction. But it isn’t that, at least not primarily, and that is why the ‘discussion’ has been going on for so long (it certainly isn’t recent), and shows so little sign of going away. Unlike some analytic thinkers, who seem to want to abandon the analytic/continental distinction in favour of just ‘philosophy (but who then often go on to make clear that when they talk about ‘good philosophy’, they almost always mean ‘analytic’ philosophy), I don’t think the distinction can simply be discarded, since to do so is to blind oneself to the political realities that are at work</span></span></blockquote>
<br />
I think it is time to organize our own Continental philosophy carnival. As Malpas has confirmed, this distinction is not philosophical. Often analytic philosophers use either "family resemblance" or the metaphor of <i>style. </i>I do not think these apply directly. Indirectly sure. These might explain some of what is going on. Yet, the fact is that often what is seen as interesting to analytic conversations could not find purchase in a larger culture due to their neglect of the hermeneutic, phenomenological and pragmatic features of human life and action.<br />
<br />
Take for example the entries in this <a href="http://blog.kennypearce.net/archives/the_web/blog_carnivals/philosophers_carnival_149.html">month's carnival.</a><br />
<br />
I have searched since October 2012. There hasn't been one article on a Continental author, not even to Protevi at New APPS that analytics know.<br />
<br />
Moreover, Kenny Pearce has been a host of the Carnival several times over, and I feel that the the Carnival circulates in a network of blogs. This might explain how selection bias amongst its organizers avoid Continental philosophy while driving philosophy into oblivion. Having read through a lot of the Carnivals, one could possibly be convinced that there is an endemic of people worried about Plantinga!<br />
<br />
<br />Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-23852394305879847252013-03-07T10:37:00.003-08:002013-03-07T10:40:04.149-08:00Phenomenological Theism and the Phenomenology of Moral Experience
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I am presenting this at Steubenville’s Must Morality Be
Grounded in God? Conference. This is still very much a work in progress. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Consider what I call the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Argument
from Moral Experience</i>: <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1)
Moral facts are experienced as being objective and non-natural.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(2) The
best explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is based
on phenomenological theism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(3)
Phenomenological theism is the thesis that God is immanently revealed in moral
action. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(4)
Therefore, the experience of moral facts provides evidence for thinking theism
is true. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the following lecture, I would like to assess the
argument from moral experience. My argument from moral experience is inspired
by a rendition of the typical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moral Argument
for God’s Existence</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1’)
Moral facts are objective and non-natural.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(2’)
The best explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is
theism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(3’)
Therefore, the experience of moral facts provides evidence for thinking theism
is true. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The difference between these two arguments
is based on shifting the inference from the existence of God to the experience
of God. For the experience of God is immanent in moral action, and what we want
from morality can only acquire a sense and meaning from looking at the
structure of moral experience where God is felt. I will admit that part of this
analysis is inspired both by Scheler and Levinas, but my real ambition is to
get at the heart of the arguments as to why we might think Scheler and Levinas
correct in these matters. Let me speak to the organization of this essay. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">First, I will explain the grounds for holding each premise,
and why I find it far superior to the Moral Argument for God’s Existence. Next,
I will offer phenomenological reasons why the conclusion follows from the
premises. In the Argument from Moral Experience, this will involve an in depth
analysis of premise (2), which is doing most of the work of the aforementioned
argument. Second, I will explain the motivations for why I focused on the
phenomenology of moral experience as a reason for concluding theism is true. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(1) could have been stated
different, such as “ (1’) Moral facts exist as objective and non-natural.” The
assertion of extant moral facts is harder to prove than the experience of moral
facts. The hard moral realist asserts the existence of an independently true
body of moral statements, which are true and treated very much the same way as
one might treat the belief that “Cats are mammals.” We treat the moral belief
that “People should be fair to each other” as suggesting something true for all
situations to which people would relate to each other. The reason why the hard
moral realist finds moral claims convincing is that they can oblige us from the
simple fact that they are true. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1’) however proves too much. First, the hard moral realist
is metaphysically extravagant. He wants objectivity so much that he treats
moral claims like scientific claims. However, the truth conditions for such
objectivity distort how we experience values. First, we do not experience
values as an object of knowledge. They are felt deeply in intentional feeling.
Second, we do not assent to a proposition like a controlled scientific inquiry.
Instead, values are felt in exigent situations about the goods in question.
Moreover, the last two experiential reasons are motivations for why someone
might insist upon the truth of hard moral realism, but without a careful
phenomenological analysis of experience, the hard moral realist often is
self-serving in those features of experience he selects about experience that
motivates endorsing his extravagant metaethical position. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let us look, then, at some features
of moral experience more carefully. If both you and I share a similar feeling,
we can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intend</i> the same value. Let us
use the oft-repeated example that you and I stand some distance from a group of
teenagers setting a cat on fire. There is nothing physical in that situation to
which we normally assign value, and yet we employ value-talk about the
situation. At this point, we are safe to assume that we experience the cat
burning as unnecessary suffering, and this action bears the value cruelty
beyond belief. If we asked the teenagers why they did it, we might try to find
some abuse in their background or some underlying motivation for why they set
the cat on fire, but looking for motivation of someone is different than the
felt-demand of value in that situation. We experience the wrongness of that
suffering deeply. From the experience, we begin to see that we have some
language to talk about how both you and I felt about that act. To see if we
have the same moral hunches and reactions, we talk to others that react
predictably similar to the same situation. Setting cats on fire is felt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i> cruel. From this common co-feeling
about the situation, we can conclude that there is some reliable objectivity in
how I and others feel and that nothing physical in that situation could account
for the feeling of cruelty manifest in our acts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In (2), the phenomenology is the
explanation. Usually, metaethical positions import the assumptions about
reality as why we experience the world as we do, but phenomenological
description reverses this priority and looks to describe an experience of an
exemplar phenomenon before inferring ontological commitments. One might object
that this makes phenomenology, then, self-serving for what it wants from
ontology. However, I concede some of this without admitting the self-serving
nature of phenomenological method. Presupposing metaethical commitments about
moral experience before looking to experience itself is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">worse</i> than looking to experience as a way to solve philosophical
problems. For the phenomenologist, taking experience for granted means removing
philosophy from the concerns of those that live it. In such distancing,
metaphysics can be employed to assert categories about experience that are not
found within experience at all, and such attempts could presuppose an ontology
about particular values. One motivation shared amongst phenomenologists is the want
for philosophy to concern itself with concrete matters of lived experience
rather than proposing any conceptualization removed from experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In moral experience, we experience
values as being on the backs of goods, deeds and persons. We feel these values
between us despite their lack of physical tangibility. We re-feel what someone
else feels and in that feeling, we are presented with value’s givenness.
Intentional feeling is correlated to a specific value-quality. Bliss fills our
whole personality with the Absolute value of the Holy. Our feeling of health is
connected to how our environment is given to us. In the highest value of the
Holy, our capacity to feel alongside others is renewed in the highest possible
way. We are instilled with a perspective completely outside of us that comes
unto us in ritual and religious experience more generally. Thus, when premise
(2) predicates “objective” and “non-natural” features of morality, these
qualities are aspects of experiencing intentional-feeling associated within
religion. God is the source to which we aim, and in aiming to that which is
completely Other we become oriented towards that which is pure difference in
our very action. We can easily welcome both widow and orphan to be fed by
having a renewed connection to Christ in the Eucharist. The singular unique
otherness of the other/person finds expression in both Levinas and Scheler. The
person is given to us as a possibility within the immanence of the suffering Other.
“Objective” here means “intersubjective” and is due to our capacity to re-feel
what others feel that binds us to others and the emanating presence where God
is felt. Before God, we are all unique. In relation to Him, I am Ed, a Ph.D.
graduate from SIU, born in New Jersey and raised in Western Pennsylvania. My
wife is Ashley, born in Youngstown Ohio and thankfully a Steelers fan. There is
nobody like her or me in existence. That’s the point. The objectivity takes on
a new sense within phenomenology. The objectivity in other moral philosophies
amounts to a substitutable other. Before Kantianism, we are all agents. Either you
or I ought to do the same thing in relation to the categorical imperative. Both
the non-formal ethics of Levinas and Scheler attempt to supplant this modernist
tendency of equalizing differences between people and insist upon the radical
unique otherness of the “person.” Ashley is not valuable due to species
membership, the fact that she is a rational agent or any other criterion beyond
herself. Instead, Ashley is absolutely unique, and it follows from her radical
uniqueness objectively that she is absolutely valuable. In fact, the
possibility to love another rests on accepting the singular uniqueness an-other
person. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Second, “non-natural” follows on the
heel of the singular uniqueness of persons. On this point, phenomenological
evidence is rather convincing. The fact that a person can never be objectified
or reduced to another category is what it means to be a person. Instead,
persons are of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spirit</i>. We cannot be
adequately categorized since we are beyond categorization and simultaneously we
are the source of that categorization. Persons are the source of meaning in the
world, and consequently, they cannot be derived from that which they engender.
Persons are not reducible to anything in the world. If intentional feeling
precedes all pre-volitional and pre-cognitive experience, then it is only from
the shared intentional capacity of persons that is responsible for why
experienced objects in life have meaning (and therefore value). Scheler’s later
metaphysics aims to articulate a view beyond the phenomenological but
preserving the insight of the person’s non-objectifiable spirit and at the same
time how persons and God participate in being together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">According to Scheler, the person encounters a world in its
vital urge. The vital urge reaches outward towards a goal in the world, and the
world is given to us in resistance. The vital urge is rarely satisfied and if
it attains its goal and the world conforms in some way to us, the world will
comply ever so briefly. Then, life will be given to us in this worldly
resistance once more, and we will not be sated. Within this movement, the
coming-to-be feltness of the resisting world is called value. In this way,
values are at the spiritual act-center of the person reaching out and filling
the content of our experience of actions, things and others. When we relate to another,
when we help another person, they – like us – encounter a life in which our
drives, energy and desire find resistance in the world around us. All reality
is given in resistance but capable of ever higher spiritualization. While
spirit is initially impotent to physically affect the world, we can experience
a calling within our vital-urges and learn to suspend their effect on us. Thus,
by suspending our attention to the vital-urge’s movement to a resisting world
and thereby suffering, human beings can apprehend a higher value than simply
their vital-urges. This happens when we act on love and within acting in love,
God stands between us and others, or what is meant in premise (3). We can
aspire to the level of spiritual feeling and values of Holiness. Thus, again
the point of religion is to open ourselves up towards the inherent
spiritualization in human life and realize it in all we do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The point of phenomenological theism is not to replace the
sense of God has in His own right. Instead, accepting “(2’) The best
explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is theism”
commits one to adopt the same phenomenological reasons inherent in the
Schelerian commitments I have explained here. Typically, an objective value is
one that can be demonstrated publically according to norms and justifications.
There are many possible ways we might do this. We might show that the consequences
in one outcome maximize better than in another outcome. We might show that one
course of action is more rational than another. However, the point matters not
how we justify a course of action. Instead, these approaches presuppose the
very phenomenology of experience underlying my motivation for emphasizing the
phenomenological insight over (2’). The utilitarian assumes value is already
knowable and that there is something like an impartial perspective to which
various outcomes can be assessed. The impartial standpoint in this secularly
committed approach relies upon an experience of thinking objectivity and
non-naturalism true. Values stand between people with respect to feeling; they
are irreducibly part of another’s experience, and yet we act upon them because
in participating in value the manifest benefit grows out of the presence of
that action. More secular theories might call this elevation of goodness in the
world acts of beneficence. In such a way, the intersubjectivity of what these
people take to be “objective” and valuable is wholly realized in action between
them and what becomes realized is a commitment to love the other. This love
manifests insofar as the utilitarian is more sophisticated in what she seeks to
maximize beyond mere hedonic calculation, but let’s leave this alone for now. As
long as the moral philosophy in question seeks to realize values through
action, there is something like a growth, a becoming, a presence of beneficence
underlying the affection such action brings. This is the experience in question
that is shared between secular and sacred approaches to values. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The growth and becoming of love
suspends the descending effect drives have upon us whereas love participates in
the intersubjective spirit of persons. For Scheler, persons can only be those
that can suspend the effect of drives upon us and reflectively bring into
awareness the act of suspending drives. Thus, persons and God are capable of
this, but when love takes on the highest value of the Holy, individuals become
given as absolutely other. There is no higher value than the absolute value of
the Holy. In this way, the intersubjective constitution of community can be
based upon a commitment to the Holy in the immanence of our firsthand
experience of Others. In our case, this commitment is the directedness of my
intentional act loves the other person as they are without imposing upon them
any objectification. Hence, objectification cannot be a source of making the
other a victim or reason for justifying abuse. Since spirit is pure
non-objectifiability, I can only leave the other be as a unique other before
God. In this way we can see the role of premise (3). The immanence of the
singular otherness comes by encountering them as each person is, singular and
unique. In the 20<sup>th</sup> century, the massive abuses of genocide arise
out of the tendency for governments and people to judge others through
objectified categories. A Jew can be less than human, so can Blacks in the
American South. The point is rather striking. By acknowledging God as a source
of immanent otherness underlying the otherness of people I encounter in life, I
adopt a philosophy incapable of re-presenting the singular uniqueness of
an-other. Instead, through God, we start with the recognition of singular
uniqueness and preserve the commitment to the non-objectifiability of human
beings first and foremost before all other commitments in philosophy. This
prohibition of objectification delimits the possibility of a metaphysics of
human beings at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Finally, “the experience of moral
facts” establishes a deduced relation to “thinking theism true.” I am
suspicious of metaphysics. Like Levinas, I want to supplant the tendency of
Western thinking to avoid “the logic of the same” or what Scheler repeatedly
calls “objectification.” The practical consequences of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century’s abuses have all subordinated the radical otherness of the person to
some category that dehumanizes. In fact, we might read this subordination of
the person to categories of metaphysical speculation in the tendency of
modernity to de-personalize the person. Instead, the first philosophy is not
metaphysics, but the ontology of the person. There is only one being that is
wholly other than I can re-present Him/It, and this is God. As Jean Valjean
sings towards the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Miserable</i>:
“To love the other person is to see the face of God.” In Schelerian speak, this
realization is the recognized givenness of the person within the experience of
their very uniqueness—what he calls “spirit.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, I broadened this insight, and claimed that “the
experience of moral facts” confirms “thinking theism true.” A moral fact could
be the recognition of a proposition that expresses that I owe others charity
when I can manage it at no cost to myself. Moral facts are propositionalized
positive and negative expressions of what I owe others. In our moral
imagination, we often imagine what it might mean to fulfill some mysterious
action and sometimes we want to universalize all others like the imagined other
and the imagined action as a basis for how others would act given the same set
of conditions. Yet, such an approach is dedicated to the objectification if the
intention may have been seeking out only what I ought to do in that situation.
I do not regard the others as anything other than those that again can be
substituted for another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-51997187810730865012013-03-07T10:06:00.001-08:002013-03-07T10:06:21.281-08:00On the Possibility of Epistemic Ressentiment?
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In this post, I would like to
expand the case for what I call epistemic resssentiment. The possibility of
epistemic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment</i> came to me
when I happened upon a forgotten passage in Scheler’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment</i>. In his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment.
</i>Scheler traces all varieties of experience in which ressentiment occurs,
and proposes several initial forms in examples to arrive at the core of true
ressentiment proper. Towards the end of the first part, Scheler writes: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
...a secret <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment</i> underlies every way of thinking which attributes
creative power to mere <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negation</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">criticism</i>. Thus modern philosophy I
deeply penetrated by a whole type of thinking which is nourished by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment</i>. I am referring to the view
that the “true” and the “given” is not that which is self-evident, but rather
that which is “indubitable” or “incontestable,” which can be maintained against
doubt and criticism. Let us also mention the principle of “dialectical method,”
which wants to produce not only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">non-</i>A,
but even B through the negation of A. All the seemingly positive valuations and
judgments of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment </i>are hidden
devaluations and negations. Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct
contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through
critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated
with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment. </i>The establishment
of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most
important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with
reference to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">objects itself.</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment</i> criticism on the contrary,
accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And two paragraphs later, Scheler informs us of the formal
structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment </i>itself: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
The formal structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment</i> expression is always the
same: A is affirmed, valued, and praised not for its own intrinsic quality, but
with the unverbalized intention of denying, devaluating, and denigrating B. A
is “played off” against B.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In these two passages, I do not intend an extensive
exegesis. Instead, I will expand what Scheler means in order to offer an account
of epistemic ressentiment. I will distingusi two varieties: Metaphysical
Lifeworld Ressentiment and Interlocutor Ressentiment. I find difficulty with
the latter and insist on the plausibility of the former. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In the extensive passage, Scheler
introduces the modern period and dearth of trust in self-evidency. For him, the
condition of modern philosophy is one in which the true and the given cannot be
experienced at all, let alone be the subject matter of a knowledge claim.
Modernity exemplified in Descartes offers only the inner working of
subjectivity as a measure for any knowledge claim. A knowledge claim must be
inconstestable and indubitable. For Scheler, this Cartesian emphasis removes
the knowledge claim from putting us into contact with the world and its objects
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in the right way</i>. For Scheler, only
direct contact with the world and objects themselves serve as a normative
principle for making knowledge claims. If a philosophical system does not have
contact with the world and its objects in the right way, then those knowledge
claims become questionable. In Cartesian thought, the world and its objects are
divided into the realm of extension and the workings of the subjectivity where
one feels the valence of self-reference as a source of validation for all
knowledge claims. Yet, what is really happening is that the subject is the
affirming the value of itself to deny and denigrate the realm of objects.
Descartes’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cogito</i> plays up the
self-referential function as a measure to which all other claims must be
grounded upon, yet the privilege of one is made at the expense of nature in an
unconvincing division between thinking substance and extended substance.
Therefore, any philosophical system that has its source and validation in the
subject cannot tease out the difference between itself and genuine knowledge
claims without succumbing to epistemic ressentiment. In the preceding passage,
Scheler describes two forms of epistemic ressentiment: 1) Metaphysical
Lifeworld Ressentiment and 2) Interlocutor Ressentiment. Let me first take up
Metaphysical Lifeworld Ressentiment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The concern for a test in the
Cartesian sense, the test of indubitability, is a case of epistemic
ressentiment of asserting the value of the subject over and against the world.
I call this Metaphysical Lifeworld Ressentiment. In truth, any philosophical
system – as is the case with both empiricism and rationalism is secretly
“nourished by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ressentiment.</i>” These
examples embody a system that introduces the unnecessary division between
intentional acts and objects. As I have said earlier, when Scheler observes a
dearth of the world and object leading one’s own epistemic efforts, this
commitment is a residuum of Scheler’s phenomenology of “spiritual seeing.” Such
spiritual seeing requires only that a commitment to experience of acts and
objects be described in tandem with each other.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
…phenomenology is neither the name
of a new science nor a substitute for the word philosophy; it is the name of an
attitude of spiritual seeing in which one can see or experience something which
otherwise remains hidden, namely, a realm of facts of a particular kind. I say
attitude, not method. A method is a goal-directed procedure for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thinking about </i>facts…before they have
been fixed by logic, and second, of a procedure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seeing</i>… <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That which is seen
and experienced is given only in the seeing and experiencing of the act itself,
in its being acted out; it appears in that act and only in it.</i> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, we can
easily understand why Scheler urges the return of both the “world” and “object”
in the long passage after mentioning Descartes. The object is “that which is
seen and experienced is given only in the seeing and experiencing of the act
itself, in its being acted out; it appears in the act and only in it.” In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment</i>, the lack of
phenomenological content of acts-in-relation-to-the-world is lost in
Descartes’s succumbing to epistemic ressentiment. The real open question
remains, however. In proposing this initial form of epistemic ressentiment,
does Scheler advance an implicit commitment to interpret all
non-phenomenological forms of philosophizing as guilty of epistemic
ressentiment? I will return to this question later. For now, I think we are
ready for a formal statement of epistemic ressentiment (ER) for both
Metaphysical Lifeworld Ressentiment and Interlocutor Ressentiment: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ER: is an epistemic act or system of epistemic acts
constituting an entire philosophical system in which the valuation of a
knowledge claim A is affirmed not for the intrinsic quality of honoring the
intentional relation and expressing truth, but to denigrate another knowledge
claim B or system of epistemic acts consistent with B.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Next, let
me transition to Interlocutor Ressentiment. We can see this definition in the
second matter before us, dialectical method. In that method, it is usually
accepted that an Interlocutor can put forth a conclusion resting on several
premises and another epistemic agent can propose their own counter-argument as
to why the first argument is either unsound in its content or invalid in its
structure. I largely accept these norms given that adherence to these norms
produces better philosophical positions than those that might ignore these
norms of good reasoning. However, there are times when these norms are not
guided by a search for truth, but are instrumental tools in the critique of
opinions. In some ways, the social experiences at some APA meetings tend to
devolve into harsh exchanges that feign civility between interlocutors. In
those instances, argumentation – like subject/object split systems in the
modern period, are capable of being more concerned with the “establishment of
criteria for testing the correctness of opinions” than “fruitful criticism”
judging opinion in relation to the “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">object
itself.</i>”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>When Scheler mentions
the “object itself,” he is expressing a concern for the phenomenological
object. Phenomenological seeing is, therefore, a normative principle at work
here. The whatness of the phenomenon guides our insight of the object
correlating to the epistemic act in immanent intuition. The object opens itself
up to our epistemic act. Insofar as we are valuing truth itself in the
epistemic act, the object must attend the act to get it right. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Scheler is
pretty clear that true ressentiment requires two elements. First, the person
feeling ressentiment must be impotent, and incapable of releasing the emotive
discharge of ressentiment. Moreover, the feeling of ressentiment requires
comparison with others—typically in the form of envy and jealously. From the
following two passages, the comparison between subject/object split modern
thinkers and those who use the dialectic method, neither envy nor jealously
seem especially apt for what I have been talking about here. For the modern
thinkers, the comparison is made from a stable subject against an indifferent
world of objects. The epistemic acts of modern thinkers in subject-object
epistemologies are more concerned with logical consistency than letting direct
contact with the world and objects guide understanding. In this way, modern
thinkers never understand the primal-urge drives and affective instincts at
work in a particular metaphysical system. In fact, Scheler and Nietzsche would
agree that only through philosophical reflection can the very unconscious
motives and factors shaping a metaphysical system and cultural lifeworld be
brought to the foreground. These unconscious motives can be a source of value
delusion in which delusive preferences are promoted by inhering in the very
heart of the metaphysical system for an entire cultural ethos. An ethos for
Scheler is a particular understanding of the objective value-rankings in which
an individual and culture may have a true or false ranking of the eternal
value-rankings. For instance, a cultural ethos may prefer pleasure over the
epistemic truth, and this value-preferencing while not right when measured
against Scheler’s value-rankings may be ingrained in their lifeworld. As such,
these ingrained tendencies and responses underly the entire metaphysical
lifeworld ethos. In Descartes, for instance, all persons are reduced to a
homogenous universal rational subject that with the use of reason will come to
be a “master and possessor of nature.” Clearly, Scheler thinks that the
function of phenomenological reflection brings the immanent relation between
the person and the primordial feeling of the knowledge claim and its object
into full view, even beyond the particular ethos in which one is living.
Otherwise, a person may be deceived by the value-delusion that redirects the
drives, instincts and desires implicitly shaping the understanding of a
knowledge claim and its object into a misapprehension of how values are ranked
objectively. For this very reason, Resisting epistemic ressentiment occurs when
persons value truth, justice and the beautiful over the particular ethos that
lowers these values of the object to serve some other purpose. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
dialectical method of philosophy, the social experience can serve other
purposes beyond truth. In some ways, Scheler’s brief allusion through the
powers of negation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">non</i>-A and the
denunciation of B seem suffuse with an awareness of the problems in social
epistemology in which interest/belief and power/knowledge are intimately
interwoven. Like before, the mere criticism of an opinion without reference to
the object employs the same phenomenological norm as before. Without being
guided by the act-object correlating structure, the use of dialectical method
can conceal what is truly occurring. Notice, however, in the formal definition
of ressentiment Scheler regards the relation of the negation of A as a silent
“unverbalized” devaluation of B, even if B is not strictly mentioned. In the
much the same way as before, the devaluation of someone else’s opinion involves
here the comparison of one’s belief to that of another. The social reality can
be a dialogic exchange that occurs in speech or writing. Using the dialogic
exchange in a dialectic method entails a social act. For Scheler, social acts
entail the presence of the others in order for them to be realized. The dialectic
method, therefore, is social and intersubjective as the earlier example of a
metaphysical system. The introduction of a test of correctness conceals that
the exchange between two or more interlocutors, yet ressentiment is a movement
of psychic energy that once internalized and repressed lashes out in the
epistemic act shared with others. In ressentiment, one person becomes devalued
by the other in an exchange. On the surface, this epistemic ressentiment is
difficult to see. The social aspect of the epistemic ressentiment is not
concerned with truth but through devaluation and negation. In devaluation and
negation, a silent intention is unconcerned with truth. The devalued person
illustrates the stupidity found in the heart of his personal core beliefs. The
devalued person and his beliefs are regarded as a cause for why others do not
accept my beliefs. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We are now
in a position to evaluate both types. First, I will mention the problem with
the Interlocutor Ressentiment given in Scheler’s exposition of the dialectic
method. Here, Scheler’s case is a bit overstated, nor is Scheler’s agitation of
the modern period and its inability to allow evidence through intuition freely
given. These are insights that need more refinement, and I find them
insufficiently articulated in epistemic ressentiment. In the dialectic method,
arguments are scrutinized by offering up counterexamples and reasons that might
falsify a premise in the argument. Moreover, someone might show that the
argument contradicts itself, the conclusion is not supported by the premises or
any other number of argumentative mechanics. These argumentative mechanics are
accepted as norms for philosophizing generally speaking. Given that philosophy
inquires into conceptual questions that common sense, faith or science alone
cannot grasp, the application of dialectic method and the logical norms ensure
that philosophizing can arrive at truth. In this way, logical norms and
dialectic method can conceal some silent intention unverbalized intention for
epistemic ressentiment, but it would be very hard for the activity alone in the
critique of mere opinions to conceal such intentions due to the wide range of
those logical norms associated with dialectic method. Even phenomenological
seeing requires logical consistency and the avoidance of contradiction when the
phenomenologist describes the act-object intentional structure. These are norms
that govern phenomenology as well as underscore dialectic method. As such,
direct phenomenological contact with the world and objects is not an entirely
reliable indicator when epistemic ressentiment occurs between two interlocutor as
an ability to honor the truth as Scheler seems to imply here. What I will say
is that phenomenological seeing is necessary for detecting epistemic
ressentiment just not sufficient. Not everyone engaged in argumentation or
claiming knowledge in relation to someone else is interested in honoring the
truth as they should, but for those that value truth above lower values in
Scheler’s rankings are immune from epistemic ressentiment. Epistemic
ressentiment is better understood as a value-delusion. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
epistemic ressentiment is better understood as a form of value-delusion, then a
revision of my formal definition is required. Particularly, I must revise what
ambiguously appears as “denigration” and qualify what I mean by it. The
denigration of B is a distortion of what is co-given or co-felt and like the
metaphysical lifeworld ressentiment, there is a distortion on the part of what
I know from how the cultural lifeworld constitutes my knowledge in both the
affective and cognitive dimensions. Both these experiences embody how a
particular ethos can reveal the value-preferences of an entire culture. In
other words, the case for epistemic ressentiment makes sense as an opening up
the possibility of what will become Scheler’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Principles of a Sociology of Knowledge.</i> While I do not have space
to develop the following thought, it should be shared.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I conjecture that the pursuit of real factors in epistemic acts
fosters epistemic ressentiment, and the pursuance of ideal factors avoids it.
Let me transition to Metaphysical Lifeworld Ressentiment. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Scheler’s
insights for Metaphysical Lifeworld Ressentiment are better developed. Still, I
would like to pause and return to my earlier rhetorical question: In proposing
this initial form of epistemic ressentiment, does Scheler advance an implicit
commitment to interpret all non-phenomenological forms of philosophizing as
guilty of epistemic ressentiment? From the two brief passages here, that might
seem likely. However, we must remember that Scheler’s phenomenological method
is one of seeing, and it privileges intuitive evidence to gain access into the
primordial affectivity, value-structures and the beliefs foregrounded by them.
In that way, there are other possible methods one may employ to arrive at the
same insights for Scheler. Pragmatism brings into reflection the cultural
milieu of a particular problem or valuation in much the same way. For
pragmatists are concerned with how some ideas, conceptions and beliefs
functionalize in the cultural lifeworld, and James in particular is aware that
metaphysical beliefs are motivated very much by our practical and aesthetic
interests though pragmatism would never propose an eternal value-ranking. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In this
short post, I have come full circle, and while not a refined reflection,
certainly we can see that epistemic ressentiment is a possibility, but the
metaphysical and lifeworld ethos must already saturate the domain of an
epistemic agent. Moreover, the sociology of knowledge, even if not Scheler’s
but possibly Mannheim might better articulate the relationship between social
aspects of knowledge and epistemic acts. I am digressing and should end this
post. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
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<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Max Scheler, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment</i> trans. W.
W. Holdheim (New York: Glencoe, 1961), 67-68.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Scheler, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ressentiment, </i>68.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1724832200411147167#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Max
Scheler, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Philosophical Essays </i>(Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1973): 136-201. Scheler, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phenomenology,</i>
137-138 here. Emphasis mine. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-59496095969294164532013-03-06T19:55:00.001-08:002013-03-06T19:55:50.088-08:00An Oddity of The Left?<br />
I have many friends on the academic Left. These span the gambit between ultra-revolutionary classical Marxists to tame Habermasians that only want to cultivate communicative praxis in political discourse. In this post, I ask that you allow me to indulge in thinking there are soft Leftists and hard Leftists. Hardly anybody in my experience is a Hard Leftist. Hard Leftists were perhaps famous during the 1960/70ss when counter-cultural politics occupied a height unparalleled since that time. Now, Hard Leftists are simply novelty, an interesting oddity on campus, and I have come to think that even the very successful academic careers tend to tame Hard Leftists into Softer Leftists. To be a hard Leftist requires a constant passion to address systemic wrongs or a series of wrongs usually through an overarching unified explanation (Marxism of some variety), and the constant ire of their philosophical and political passion is unnerving to many. You may have observed this when they teach, but then the same professor goes home in their Bentley they bought from what they make at a tier 1 research school.<br />
<br />
Softer Leftists simply only want to engage in a critique. They see their efforts at clarifying existing power structures, but often they do not live what they teach. The disconnect, however, is explainable by their softer attitudes and the want to open the eyes of whom they teach. They are affecting culture in a slower way. The Hard Leftist desires revolution of some variety; the Soft Leftist would welcome a revolution of awareness. Both, however, never have any productive positive solution to offer.<br />
<br />
Strangely enough, the only philosophers that offer solutions as part of their routine are applied ethicists and thinkers of a pragmatic bent. This strikes me as odd. Some of my Leftist friends in both camps are so upset at the world that they continue on upset in the maddening fixation fueled by critique, but they never reach beyond critique or when they call for revolution, they are constantly calling for activism about something different each time.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-18794532150873034382013-02-27T08:39:00.002-08:002013-03-07T10:11:45.422-08:00Favorite Quote<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I am rather fond of this. Manfred Frings: </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: yellow;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: yellow;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The element that easily survives all transiency is familiar to anyone entertaining an undivided commitment to truth. It is the spiritual joy that accompanies all individual search for truth. In this search, the philosopher experiences a communion with his self; he experiences the silence of gathering of his thought and the humility and thanksgiving for all that exists. Kant experienced this overwhelming joy in seeing "the star above" and the "inner moral law" within him. This experience is shared by the twenty or so great thinkers, at one time or another, independently of the different eras and zeitgeister they lived in.</span> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: yellow; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">It is precisely during this being drawn toward truth, toward totality of the world, and perhaps God, that the philosopher feels to be above the historical situation of his own times, looking down on it as if from a bird's-eye view. But he seems to have been unsuccessful over the ages in carrying the message of what he thusly intuited into the philodoxic attitude prevailing in everyday life. (Philosophy of Prediction and Capitalism, Martinus Nijhoff: Dodrecht, 1987: 4-5)</span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: yellow;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Sometimes, I feel this way--a pure joy in trying to find the truth despite the consequences. </span></span>Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-75688924092118609952013-02-24T19:31:00.007-08:002013-02-24T20:25:46.714-08:00Continental PublishingSpringer is the largest publisher of Continental philosophy journals by far. They have very specific series that constantly publish work in phenomenology. My life cannot really get by without it, and I am indebted to a few articles retrieved through our library's membership to Springer Online. The hardcopy of some material is in excess of 150 USD, and the outrageous fees they charge the library to have access to their online content is skyrocketing. The reason they get away with this high price tag is that universities like mine have a dedicated enormous budget for purchasing and joining Springer. Slowly, those budgets are shrinking due to a lack of public funds from the state.<br />
<br />
However, I recently learned of a few journals in something called the <a href="http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs">Open Journal System</a>. My alma mater is one of several schools involved in the <a href="http://pkp.sfu.ca/about">Public Knowledge Project.</a> There is everything from Herpetology to Cultural studies featured in their list, and a few philosophy journals. I encourage everyone to explore this project and to contest the monopoly on philosophy from private publishers. I will be sending out work to some of these journals as I think the reward for scholars will be fruitful.<br />
<br />
Best,<br />
<br />
Chasmite.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-69299457724908552932013-02-22T08:01:00.000-08:002013-02-22T08:01:02.344-08:00Hermeneutic Reminder<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
While many advocates of philosophy may cater to conceptualizing analyzing problems rather than the historical threads that constitute the horizons in which those problems emerge, here's a wonderful example of how the interpretive assumptions [of religion in particular] find their way into <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=udMrLcin6YIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA5&dq=scripture+justify+slavery&ots=cdVXNRT2we&sig=vJFSvHUkPAqFhiCCDIPZJUEZmz4#v=onepage&q=scripture%20justify%20slavery&f=false">Thornton Stringfellow's justification of slavery</a>. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Stringfellow's example testifies to the fact that there is a place for philosophical reflection that brings to light the interpretive forces at work in a situation. </div>
Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-52029266483188728332013-02-22T07:09:00.004-08:002013-02-22T07:26:34.939-08:00The Philosophy of Culture and the Liberty MovementIn recent years, there has been a perceived effort on the part of Conservatives to identify what they mean by liberty in the intention of the Founding Fathers while simultaneously reading into this "liberty narrative" that policies of the Obama Administration transgress personal liberty. For this reason, liberty activists legitimize their own ideology by emphasizing they are more genuinely faithful to founding principles of the United States than those that disagree with them. The Students for Liberty are <a href="https://studentsforliberty.org/event/2013-international-sfl-conference/">organizing conferences</a> about liberty, and the <a href="http://www.theihs.org/">Institute for Humane Studies</a> is closely linked with them. Furthermore, the IHS think tank has generated concern in the profession of philosophy at large. Recall <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/01/institute-for-human-studies-pertinent-experiences.html">this discussion</a> at Leiter's blog.<br />
<br />
I wish to take aim at the "interpretive story" surrounding what I call liberty activists. These people are uncritically Lockean and while I have made this criticism in other venues, I think there is a tension what a proper philosophy of culture or philosophical anthropology would say to someone committed to this antiquated view of Locke and the 17th century. What these liberty activists accept uncritically is that the individual is a wholly formed autonomous rights-holder with an a priori personality. This individual thesis holds that characteristics of the individual are already attached to the individual and that all relationships are incidental to the atomistic individual. Most noticeably, 17th century social contract theorists assume the individual within the state of nature as the starting point of how they legitimate political authority. Jefferson inherited this conception of the individual from Locke, and the Conservatives appropriate Locke's skepticism about government in general.<br />
<br />
If these liberty activists, which includes libertarians, Randians and Austrian School enthusiasts to name but a few, all adopt a view of the self as an atomic individual and that view is metaphysically nonexistent, then liberty activists are in trouble conceptually. They are basing an entire worldview on an illusion. The three main conceptual features of this liberty activist worldview are very reliant upon the ontological existence of the individual thus considered.<br />
<br />
A) S is an individual only insofar as S is created by God.<br />
B) If S is created, then S is entitled the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness<br />
C) States are created to protect the natural rights of S.<br />
<br />
I wish to suggest a remedy to this worldview. The reason why the view of the individual is so thin is that liberty activists define what a human being is only in reference to the exercise of personal liberty. The thinness corresponds to the lack of a philosophy of culture/philosophical anthropology surrounding the depth of the analysis of humankind in the social sciences more generally, but for now this critique is only focused on the liberty activists assumption about individuals. As such, I see two questions necessary for the liberty activist to answer:<br />
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<u>1. What is the essence and meaning of man? </u><br />
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This involves the ontology of what human beings are. This question takes up our relation to others, God and the lifeworld. The latter is the overlap with the next question.<br />
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Primarily, this question addresses the ontological underpinnings of supplying an answer to what a self is in a larger context than simply the narrow ontological explorations of philosophy of mind. However, a 21st century would include the ontological explorations of philosophy of mind for a fully-integrated view.<br />
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<u>2. What is the essence and meaning of culture? </u><br />
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As the Germans did at the end of and into the beginning of the 20th century, all the social scientists (and this includes the economists) would offer a view as to what the essence and meaning of culture is. Max Weber is the prime example of someone aware of the acute forces at work culturally upon people with the publication of his 1904 <i>The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism</i>. Ferdinand Tonnies, a German sociologist, analyzed social groupings with a view to culture. Max Scheler, the renowned philosopher, also invented the sociology of knowledge. Thus, economic science is identified as taking place in a horizon of historical forces that come to determine the expression of the human being and her place in culture. Even a remote sensitivity to what it means to be human embedded in a cultural horizon would conclude that some ontogenesis of forces are at work upon the individual. We are not simply born in a vacuum, and the accounting for the individual is rather complex.<br />
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As is pretty evident, American social science did not evolve into exploring these questions. In fact, they went in a different direction. American social science studies the thin individual and the thin structural features that constitute a lack of understanding questions 1 and 2. Is it no wonder that conservative intellectuals in their want to celebrate American individualism in the Founding Fathers would find the same thinly veiled deception of the individual in its Lockean determination in the 18th century so appealing?<br />
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Why These Two Questions, Why Not Something Else?<br />
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Simple. Every social scientific interpretation that informs the value judgments typical of liberty activists relies on a set of implicit assumptions and the way in which these implicit assumptions shape subsequent inferences can be more truthfully brought to life. These questions force the social scientist and liberty activist to be honest about the depth and range of what is being talked about. In truth, this limitation is true of all social scientists, and any behaviorism adopted for analysis is simply the avoidance of thinking through 1 and 2.<br />
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By celebrating the thin individual as never having its origin in the mutual interdependency of others, the liberty activist is exposed. They are basing their entire system of thought on a shoddy metaphysical illusion. The purpose of this thin self is to promote two myths: the myth of the self-made man and the myth that being responsible for one's fate can be determined by doing work. Both of these myths can readily be dispensed with a modicum of self-reflection.<br />
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The self-made man is the same ontological view of the individual found in what I cited as the outmoded Lockean conception. The atomistic individual is solely responsible for her own fate. As such, if she is poor, suffering and down on her luck, she is eminently responsible. Nietzsche profoundly talked about a similar structure. In Christianity, we are made to think of ourselves as responsible for our own sinful nature. Though in asking someone to be responsible for something they clearly cannot control, the Christian is at odds with what it means to be responsible. We become self-deceived. Following Kant, we can say that we should only be responsible for what we can do. This insight is often claimed as "<i>Ought implies Can.</i>" The same applies to being poor. The poor and the vulnerable are not responsible for the systemic forces that often overdetermine the possibilities they can actualize, and sensitivity to this insight does not delimit the individual from optimally maximizing what they can given what little they can.<br />
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The immediate objection to my denial of austere freedom inherent in the atomic individual would be to restate it boldly and confidently. A person can work themselves to a higher position. In some cases, this claim is true. However, the work on social mobility in the United States would firmly deny that we can be uber-responsible for a fate we cannot largely control. Moreover, the only recourse of the liberty activist is to then again assert the love of liberty, which attempts to make us responsible for our own success even though the forces conducive to that success are somewhat more determined than we would like to think. Capitalism requires the belief in meritocracy. If I start a business, I have a chance of being successful. While this claim can be true, the virtue of meritocracy is rather to promote a self-deception on the part of those have-nots who must be exploited for the maintenance of the wealthy. These have-nots will never question the self-reinforcing ideology liberty activists do not want questioned. For the most part, liberty-activists already come from money (all one has to do is following the money for the IHS and one finds the Koch brothers) and their possession of that wealth is predicated on a myth that they were solely responsible for their success and wealth. The mutual interdependency of communal forces had nothing to do with it. If they made it on their own, then they are simultaneously devoid of any responsibility for charity and to others. See how this myth of the individual plays out here.<br />
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Let me start to draw this post to a close. I will summarize my efforts thus far. First, I identified the philosophical underpinnings of the ontology of the individual appropriated from Locke. I argued that this view is suffuse in what I called the liberty activists, and this view of the human being is common to all species of liberty activists: Randians, Austrian economic enthusiasts, libertarians and American conservatives. While I do not take the theses up in any focused way, liberty activists are committed to this view in three ways: A, B, and C. In considering their commitment to A, B, and C, I offered a diagnosis as to why this is the case. I argued that a view of the thin individual can be mitigated by promoting the philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology to underlie future efforts of looking at A, B, and C. A common feature of liberty activists shared with other social scientists is a lack of considering what human beings are and the meaning and essence of culture. I do not wish to advance any particular answers to these questions, but only to point out that the error of liberty activists might be avoided if they were suitably engaged with concepts that actually map onto reality.<br />
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Next, I argued there are two crucial myths that underlie why such a thin and over simplistic view of the individual: the myth of the self-made man and the myth of work. The latter comes out of the former. I make an argument of analogy of the self-made man to Nietzsche's analysis of sin. Both involve the strange self-deception that one is responsible for one's fate entirely even though there are forces at work that the individual cannot control, yet the individual is made to think they can control their fate. By extension that one may work to confer benefit upon their social standing is more illusory than real. Hence, these two myths help proffer the deception that capitalism is good for anybody, but in truth is more fixed than we would like to admit. In failing to admit this, proponents of capitalism continue to praise the system that benefits them through a fetishizing of "liberty" and the metaphysically absurd view of human beings common to the 17th century.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-77380280744042762122013-02-18T20:58:00.001-08:002013-02-22T08:02:45.341-08:00Aphorisms of the EdgeThese short quirky aphorisms are based upon an exercise in writing. My thought is that there are ways to present ideas beyond argumentation. I do not know if they work at all, though I am thinking of a version of the design argument based upon entropy. As I said, this blog is also my space to rant.<br />
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I paint with concepts from the soul onto the world. I paint with concepts seeking an order from within the experience of the world, and hoping that the intelligibility of the world is enough to sustain my desire for the beauty of the soul that projects itself onto the world. We desire to meet ourselves and its likeness in that which is given in disarray, disorder and chaos.<br />
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The philosopher is a horrible artist, but then again, the artist is a horrible philosopher.<br />
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For me, the miracle of creation is simply that there is something rather than nothing. If it is sloppy, barely tied together in the fabric of reality, I am pleased. I am pleased to meet the order found within the glistening vast cosmos of apparent chaos. Even if life grew from natural processes, the fact of its emergence testifies to the sublime interplay between chaos and order, even an order that disintegrates at the edges of the universe.<br />
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There must be an edge somewhere, where the unfinished becomes finished, where the energies of creation sparkle and dissipate into the vast something-ness.<br />
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Nothing is a vantage point, a conception of a beginning from a finite intellect that can only apprehend the time and space within the lines it draws---at least, this is where Kant has lead us.<br />
<br />Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-64317943881344713802013-02-18T02:26:00.001-08:002013-02-18T02:26:40.799-08:00Crisis of SpiritI think we can learn from Husserl. I always have, and yet I want to borrow the German term "Geist." <i>Geist</i> signifies the irreducibly qualitative feature of human experience understood through the humanities. By the humanities, I mean the spirit-driven sciences called <i>Geisteswissenschaften. </i>They include: philosophy, history, philology, and the social-sciences. As French postmodernism has continually denigrated the possibility of achieving knowledge of transcendence, I want to re-inscribe the problem of spirit back into philosophical reflection in relation to the current crisis . The purpose of philosophy is nothing other than the clarification of human spirit, and the ontological basis from which spirit can be understood.<br />
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It is not enough to assume that this level of irreducibly-basic feature of human experience as a subject to be a hallmark of the late 18th and whole 19th century. One could basically read my commitment as a philosophical antique, and yet when the humanities adopted French postmodernism, what we found is a legacy of irrelevance. The humanities no longer tied their fate to the pursuit of truth. Truth belonged to science, and if there is something like "truth" in the human condition, then that truth originating in qualitative study could only be gleaned by remaining forever open to the various phenomena in the spirit sciences following postmodernism's commitment to an inability to arrive at knowledge of transcendent phenomena, though we can speak about phenomena forever delimited to certain domains. There could never be a trans-contextual domain of knowledge that applied universally to the spirit of humanity. From the standpoint of postmodernism, culture either reflected the postmodern condition or the popularity of postmodernism outstrips our ability to know its wrongness.<br />
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However, I want to resist the pull of postmodernism. The spirit-sciences have no basis now, and with the success of scientific inquiry, if we are to privilege spirit after its eclipse, we must do so bravely and without reservation. Following Scheler, it is possible to talk about the triumph of the phenomenological subject as a point of disclosure of spirit, and to re-align our philosophical understanding of human experience with the universal movement of spirit. However, I will also not be dragged down the bias of humanism as well. For Scheler understood the person to be of spirit, and in being part of spirit, the person was radically unique. Only a personalism that preserves singularity of spirit can fend off how metaphysics is used as a point of preventing difference to emerge in metaphysical discourses. Metaphysics need not be a form of violence, and the unfortunate resistance of Levinas and Derrida have convinced generations of Continental philosophers to forego an attempt at discerning the rational truths of humanity.<br />
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Thus, I think we are faced with a crisis of spirit, and I do not suspect this is the same creature as Husserl articulated. What Husserl first observed has never been solved, but diagnosed. The cancer of a de-personalizing worldview - mostly in the name of capitalism - has overtaken the liberal order, and the philosopher now finds himself in the unique position of re-addressing the tumor so long ago identified by Husserl but given new life in its current form at the beginning of the 21st century. For the very same crisis that occurs within philosophy and the spirit-sciences occurs as a crystallization and instantiation of this cultural problems in the very institutions charged with preserving and transmitting culture: the university. The university is so co-opted for purposes other than the pursuit of truth we are lucky that any work in the humanities gets done, and again, the cultural appreciation for the different kinds of research that gets done in the humanities is lost on a culture that cannot stand to be questioned. Instead, the university is only for the instrumental purpose of getting a job, and even in that function, the language of efficiency, of cost-benefit analysis conceals the movement of spirit at work in the spirit-sciences. In the university, the humanities are incidental to the economic considerations of university education in which those that judge the worth of an education cannot judge the enterprise valuable except in the form of the very sterile utility that stands as the lowest form of value in Scheler's thinking.<br />
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Hence, the culture is in crisis not only in the sense that culture does not listen to its philosophers, but that the populace at large has become culturally illiterate to the very sources of formation that motivate scholarship in the humanities. The rich cultural life of humankind that fostered ideas of democracy, rights, art, beauty and the like no longer sway the average American, much less the global abject poverty of the global South. A culture insensitive to art, let alone philosophy, cannot experience the very reflective moment when we -- as rationally reflective beings - come aware of the very forces of cultural formation that inform us as human beings. When and if we do become aware of it, we tap into the spirit of humanity, and it is only in philosophical and aesthetic reflection that we become aware of ourselves-as-ourselves in the larger world. I make the claim that only art, philosophy and religion can facilitate the aim of acquiring the depth and movement of spirit, and this facilitation is only potential. Many forms of philosophy and art are constrained as the universal restriction in other forms of the humanities, e.g. English literature.<br />
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Some humanities follow the postmodern model. I am committed to the thesis that this is a mistake. In their attempt to resist metanarratives, postmodernists eschewed the very spirit in which we are all motivated to learn about the spirit of humanity. For the spirit that moves and is revealed in these various cultural objects in a postmodern lens is restricted by the substituting spirit with a concept of self-identity. Becoming reflective of the hardships an identity faces in the culture at large is not an expression of insight into a common spirit that could appeal to justice of why a group was wronged. Instead, the self-identity becomes a limit, a point where reflection cannot surpass, and it breeds an implicit narcissism in which the scholars projects the desire to understand their own identity as a basis from which no universal cognition of humanity's spirit could take place. There are many forms of philosophizing incapable of knowing the movement of spirit: hermeneutic phenomenology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, British empiricism, reductionistic materialism projects to name a few.<br />
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The only remedy is to capture the motivations of Husserl and replace the Husserlian rubric with a Schelerian one. The purpose of metaphysics is to acquire knowledge of spirit, and only a phenomenological ontology of spirit can achieve the basis from which all other humanities should be based. The purpose first and foremost of the spirit-sciences is to render regional domains as a participation in the lifeworld of spirit. No other form of humanistic inquiry can render spirit clearer than phenomenological philosophy.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-80727427811997410142013-02-18T00:45:00.000-08:002013-02-18T01:35:16.719-08:00On Some Types of PhilosophySometimes, I really don't know what it is that I do. More often than not, I call myself a philosopher, but I am so confused as to what philosophy is (as everybody is in my discipline) that the best anyone can do is tell you they know what philosophy is when they see it. Sure, I have an approach, and while I can give that two cent story, let me first meditate on why we tell the stories of justification that we do.<br />
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Not only are philosophers confused about the methodological approaches and limitations to philosophy itself, we hold steadfast to a few beliefs in light of this confusion. We may hold these beliefs tentatively as teachers of philosophy. For the moment, we might think that philosophy is the attempt to arrive at clear and distinct ideas, to get clear on our sense impressions, to abandon foundations altogether and seek out the conditions that barely hold experience together. Let's call this philosophy-in-the-teaching-moment. This definition shifts as we teach survey courses or issues. This approach is the easiest, and we need not be beholden to our own thoughts insofar as we are charged with teaching the thought of others. The philosopher gets lost in the teaching moment, and actively avoids defining what philosophy is.<br />
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Next, there is the privileging-of-epistemology approach. If there was one justification story about philosophy and its function, I would think this the most commonly repeated story of the 20th century analytic tradition. All philosophical problems are thought in reference to the imagined position of an epistemic subject. Indeed, this approach is the most useful contribution analytic philosophy makes, and when philosophy is written at its clearest, philosophers have this epistemic position in mind.<br />
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The problem with the epistemic viewpoint approach to philosophy is the oversimplifying nature such a position entails. Many philosophers reduce all other forms of inquiry to the epistemic subject such that pre-cognitive levels of experience become distorted and oversimplified to the point that this position vitiates lived-experience. If experience is no longer a guiding concept and philosophers idealize the epistemic position, then the transforming of philosophy into problems is itself an idealization that severs philosophy from attempting to link the concerns with lived-experience and those philosophizing. The problems construed by analytic philosophers often seem irrelevant to the common concerns of human beings. One finds it commonplace that elite philosophers often scoff at the criticism that they have made themselves irrelevant by abandoning experience.<br />
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Next, there is the experience-based approach to philosophy. I am very closely attuned to this approach, though admittedly there are fair criticisms one may bring to bear. Exemplified in phenomenological and pragmatist approaches, experience-based philosophers attempt to connect philosophical reflection to lived-expeirence. The phenomenologist attempts to describe how conscious acts correlate to their attendant objects, and pragmatists desire reflection to bear out in the consequences of action. While both differ in the methodological assumptions, the overlap consists in describing the stuff of immediate experience and keeping true to the immediacy as it becomes conceptualized. Thus, philosophy is a rendering of experience, and by connecting reflection to experience, a therapeutic element underlies both attempts. For instance, in phenomenology, by rendering experience, the phenomenologist promotes eidetic seeing to others. In pragmatism, one generates concepts ameliorative to illuminating truths for an entire culture.<br />
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The limitation of experience-based approaches lies in the plausibility stories of why such methods work. For the phenomenologist, one must accept wholeheartedly something like intentionality (as I do), and for the pragmatist, one must have a very thick conception of how experience works. In fact, Deweyans have a very developed epistemology and logic found in Dewey's thought called "the theory of inquiry." These very thick conceptions of experience may be as built up naively as the epistemic position is for analytic thinking.<br />
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Third, there is the philosophy-qua-science approach. In this approach, philosophers attempt to anticipate the now metaphysical problem of what x is such that when science takes over the domain of explaining x, philosophical framework may anticipate and lay a basis for scientific inquiry. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind often work with this approach. The philosophers seem to follow the empirical research, but empirical researchers could care little if anything for the philosophical speculation. Philosophers push the concepts farther than empirical interpretation can. In that way, the philosophers take on the duty of imagining frameworks that might be the rubric of theorizing later on for philosophers.<br />
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Many of the analytic approaches to philosophy take the scientific position naively.<br />
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Fourth, there exists a discourse-hermeneutic approach to philosophy. Slightly related to the experience-based approach, discourse-hermeneutic approach considers philosophical reflection a type of excavation of those historical continuities that constitute the possibility of our own reflection. Philosophy's task in this approach is to preserve modesty since reflection cannot transcend history, context and language. These three things circumscribe our attempts at thinking, and in some sense, this approach brings to light how the transgression of history, context and language leads to abuses. Under this umbrella, one might consider feminist/social epistemology's critique of mainstream views of the epistemic subject an example of this approach. Foucault's analysis of power in contextual circumstances<br />
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So here are several "stories" we tell ourselves about philosophy. There is nothing to prevent the synthesis of these boundaries from flowing into each other, and I do not discriminate about which is proper. For me, all of them have their upshots and shortcomings. What we can notice is that once we tell a particular story, we provide a justification for what the activity of philosophizing is. Each justification is an interpretive story of a set of assumptions, all of which cannot be brought out into relief at any one time. Yet, when these approaches are brought together, their frailties and strength can be seen in equal measure. Furthermore, I do not think my list or brief explanation sufficient for all varieties of philosophy.<br />
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In these stories, we read the history of thought and our place in it. To be a phenomenologist is to be committed to thinking philosophy should outline the contours of experience before imposing ontological assumptions about reality onto the experience. While that can illuminate some features, it can conceal others and philosophical reflection becomes - at least for me - a way of navigating larger issues in cultural experience, drudging up aspects of experience that constitute but remain hidden. For instance, the way we talk about unmanned drones conceals the assumptions behind the forceful rhetoric used in the media. We talk of "collateral damage" in war since those killed do not matter to us as much as the measure of the US military's success. The success of the mission matters more than the occasional blunder, yet when we think about it, "collateral damage" is a de-personalizing term. It de-personalizes the young Afghani mother or son killed with a precision guided missile. What gets concealed is the depth and mystery we find in experience, but often overlooked.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-4226058040184090752013-02-08T13:40:00.002-08:002013-02-22T08:10:52.418-08:00Argument from Bodily AutonomyBefore people read this post and assuming my stance, perhaps <a href="http://philosophicalchasm.blogspot.com/2010/10/politics-and-everything-conservative.html">reading my moderate position </a>might be handy.<br />
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Abortion.<br />
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There is no other hotbed issue an ethicist could talk about in the US that as a moral philosopher we might all rather ignore in the Intro to Ethics classroom. Having taught ethics before, I can assure you everyone has a moral intuition about the status of a fetus, and there is no other issue more safeguarded by one's female colleagues than the right to decide one's own biological destiny. This topic can be very personal. Often, the very reaction it elicits borders on fanaticism in both the pro-choice and pro-life camps. Furthermore, abortion is the cultural litmus test of partisan membership in either the Republican or Democratic Party in the United states. The only exception, it seems, is the Catholic Democrat whose opinion on social justice sees Christ as dismantling an oppressive power structure of Rome as one might apply his teaching to oppose capitalism and favor redistributive efforts. Even then, the Catholic Democrat is typically against abortion. As Christ's teaching are taken to protect the vulnerable, the poor and the weak, certainly it follows that a fetus is <i>prima facie</i> vulnerable.<br />
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The argument from bodily autonomy is a favorite amongst those that most justifies the permissibility of aborting fetuses. While it is hard to belive that Judith Jarvis Thomson invented the thought experiment that invented the position, her violinist thought experiment has inspired its defense in a creative way.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you (J. J. Thomson's Violinist thought experiment)</blockquote>
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From this thought experiment, let me construct what I think is the Sophisticated Argument from Bodily Autonomy supported by the previous thought experiment. Most objections to Thomson show rightly, I imagine, that her thought experiment is disanalogous in many ways. For instance, Mary Anne Warren clearly shows that the analogy of the violinist is only<br />
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1. All human beings have a right to life (including the fetus).<br />
2. If a human being grows into a mature adult with sufficient practical reason, then the autonomous use of that mature human beings practical reason is the source of determination for that person.<br />
3. Autonomy confers value on our actions and is the condition for being a person.<br />
4. Even with the right to life, the fetus does not have a right to the use of a female's body. If the fetus did have the right to use of the female's body, then it would violate 2. <br />
5. If the fetus has a right to life, then its right to life conflicts with the claim of a mature autonomous female to be the source of determining her own ends.<br />
6. Given the conflict, the right of bodily autonomy trumps the fetus's claim to 1.<br />
7. By extension, therefore, any hindrance of autonomy restricts the value-conferring action capacity and condition for her to be a person.<br />
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The real question is what even the best version of the argument regards about abortion. Abortion advocates concede the right to life of the fetus. Admittedly, I think that's where the debate starts on both sides. Many pro-life activists want to conclude that the fetus has a right to life, and then stop the debate there. However, it's not clear that's what either party should want from morality. Morality is to inform us about our duties in cases when there are two persons with competing claims. In this case, the exercise of autonomy is argued as being more valuable than the fetus's right to life. Why is that?<br />
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The exercise of autonomy is what it means to be a person, and be part of what Kant called the Kingdom of Ends. The Kingdom of Ends is what appears in a milder form of premise 1 above. Having a right to life indicates that we start with the assumption that all human beings have an intrinsic value, and that being so valuable, all human beings are taken into account in moral considerations. Kant assumed, like defender of the Argument from Bodily Autonomy, that the development of the person matters in one direction. Only beings that grow "into a mature adult with sufficient practical reason" are capable of determining their own ends. Only autonomous people are capable of being worthy of moral consideration. In this way, I think the proponent of the Bodily Argument position cannot help but inherit some of the same problems Kant inherits.<br />
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First, the abortion case is unfairly stacked. Fetuses will develop autonomy, but they do not have it yet. Therefore, they are a marginal case in the same way that developmentally disabled people stand outside of full moral consideration permanently in Kantian ethics. As a matter of prudence, we do not kill off the disabled when they are part of our lives already in the world, but we decide matters about their care that require autonomy they might not have depending on how developmentally-challenged a person might be. In this way, developmentally-challenged people can be half-persons, three-quarter persons or not persons at all. Similarly, the fact that fetuses are not yet autonomous we rob them of that possible autonomy by justifying their termination early because their possible autonomy taken as a right to life impedes the present autonomy of the mother. Yet, the present autonomy of the mother is no more of a relevant moral property than the fetus's potential autonomy. Possible moral properties weigh on our decisions all the time as much as present ones. It's only that the pro-abortionist advocates a conception of morality that favors wholly autonomous beings over those that will someday be autonomous.<br />
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Second, the reason why the fetus stands outside of full moral consideration is that the transition between 5 and 6 above still relies on the lesser sophisticated assumption that women can use their bodies as they see fit. Being a person is being autonomous with one's body. In this way, the bodily autonomy suggestion makes all experiences of the body equal in moral consideration. Abortions become morally neutral in the same way that one might say a haircut is morally neutral. Yet, it is never the case that morality requires full bodily autonomy. The expectations of any community are that I not use my body in certain ways. It would be unhealthy for me to start cutting my skin with knife. The authorities would be justified in impeding my autonomy and calling for an evaluation of my pscyhic health. Additionally, tt would be wrong for me to go naked exposing myself to others in my community. As such, the claim that I can use my body as one sees fit defies the expectations of being part of a community. We accept as being part of a community certain restrictions on how we can determine the use of our own bodies and more generally how autonomous we can be.<br />
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Third, while I have trouble with the Argument from Bodily Autonomy, I cannot help but be skeptical about the assumptions it makes about morality. The role morality plays in autonomy-based ethics is not what I want from morality at all. I do not want autonomy to be the final arbiter of claims between persons as much as I want morality to protect the vulnerable, dependent and weak. Their will be times even when fully-developed persons conflict with each other over competing rights, and in that case, we cannot simply respect both persons as autonomous end-setters. Instead, something more will be needed from morality. Let me propose to you what I think morality is and how it ought to function.<br />
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Morality is the set of self-other relations that prescribe what we ought to do and not do to others. Kantians, feminist libertarians, or feminists appealing to a principle of autonomy, are committed to this view of morality as am I. However, that's where it ends for the others and not for me. Morality should also account for marginal cases that get missed in the autonomy-perspective. The fetus is one such case only for a short time, and to be fair, the language of "marginal cases" only applies to the logic of autonomy-based perspective if we keep to such a perspective. Let me be clear. I do not think we should keep to that perspective alone.<br />
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The dependency of children upon parents and society is not new. We cannot ignore how the vulnerability of the fetus and the dependency of children matter in the search for our own duties. It's not as if the dependency of children and vulnerability of the fetus are new to the human condition. Instead, morality is about fostering a world in which the vulnerability of others is wholly internalized in the search for what my duties are to others and to myself. In addition, I am a committed constrained pluralist in which the fact that moral situations exhibit a claim of vulnerability.<br />
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Moreover, the want for bodily autonomy could be a desire to remove the reproductive burden of females. Abortion, birth control and condoms liberate, but they are not morally equally. Abortion kills a viable fetus; birth control and condoms prevent pregnancy. Unfortunately, a biological fact does exist that makes females responsible for the reproductive burden of the species. Some feminists in conversation with me have desired the full removal of this burden through uses of technology and time will tell. However, the fact that these technologies liberate women somewhat from the reproductive burden of the species does not mean they are morally equal in their liberating function.<br />
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Finally, I do want to say what I have not claimed. I have not argued for an exceptionless commitment against abortion. Instead, I have called into question the argument from bodily autonomy as a poor argument. To recap, let me summarize these objections again. A) Within the autonomy-perspective, the autonomy perspective cannot account for marginal cases very easily. B) The existence of marginal cases prompts an intuition that morality is more about the expression of human vulnerability than the autonomy-perspective can. C) Appeals to autonomy phenomenologically distort the moral relevance of abortions to other exercises of bodily autonomy we find unproblematic. C) is by far the biggest flaw.<br />
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If you wish to comment on this thread, then be aware that I am not interested in people that react emotionally to the topic. If your comment is incapable of deductive reasoning, rigor and decent writing, I will not publish it. This is one of those rare times where I would only like to talk to philosophers about this issue.<br />
<br />Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-57352521389796471572013-02-06T16:14:00.000-08:002013-02-06T16:14:25.605-08:00Killing Osama Bin LadenOn 9/11, I had woken up early to attend a political science class, and as a commuter student, it took me a half-hour to reach Slippery Rock University. Nestled in the woods of Mercer County between farms and Pittsburgh, SRU is pretty isolated. As one might suspect on 9/11, nobody came to class. On the contrary, hysteria was everywhere. When I entered the Political Science hallway, a girl was crying. She had family in New York City, and she was in tears.<br />
<br />
That night, I had a blind date. I bought her a rose and we went to Ruby Tuesdays. It was a horrible time. I may have worried what's-her-name. I said that some policies of the West were aggressive, and that perhaps we had this coming. I did not mean in any way that we deserved to be attack, but that I could understand why someone would hate us enough to attack us. This conclusion did not go over well. This is the problem with philosophy. It allows you to view the world from different perspectives long enough that you can understand the rationale of why somebody did something even if you don't agree with it. Sadly, not everyone has this ability and in my private life, I was accused of sympathizing with terrorists. I did not care. I, alongside several professors, formed the Slippery Rock Peace and Justice Coalition and urged the campus community perspectives of peace.<br />
<br />
Over the next year, I spent the year meditating on our response. I was going to school to be a philosopher after all. We attacked Afghanistan quickly enough. America had rose from the ashes of its anger and acted with Bush crying for vengeance. Suddenly, the lame ass Republican stood for something. All the while, American citizens heard and vilified Osama Bin Laden. We elevated Mr. Bin Laden to the level of a nation-state. We declared war on a group and focused on one person.<br />
<br />
In many ways, Bush made me a campus activist. I became President of Amnesty International. I organized peace rallies. I fervently beat back the intellectual and naive challenges of my Conservative students in the Political Science Department, and I philosophized about peace. I did not seek a religious foundation for this peace. Instead, I went back to Kant as I usually do when I am confused. I re-read <i>Perpetual Peace</i>, and fell under the spell that if we can make the world more democratic, then a more pluralistic attitude towards the world could spread like wildfire--at least, this was my hope.<br />
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Since that time, I have never wavered in my commitment to peace. Peace is more important than anything else. In the past year, I am openly questioning my membership in the Democratic Party. To set them apart and convince Americans the Democrats are the choice for the Presidency, the Democrats boasted that they were the ones that "got Bin Laden." At the microphone at the Democratic Convention, Vice President Joe Biden cried out "Bin Laden is dead; GM is alive." At that moment, the Democratic Party violated an ethical principle felt deeply in my heart. You do not celebrate the pain and suffering of another, and it's even more important to not celebrate that death if the person is responsible for your suffering. Why?<br />
<br />
Simple. You become the very thing you hate. You fuel hate, and that hate has a way of making it around the world like wildfire. Disagree?<br />
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Consider the mob mentality of lynching. If a society fetishizes a group and project all their hatred onto a type of people, then the mob can very easily pour tar, burn and hang another human being. We can re-feel the impetus of that hate, and take it into ourselves sharing in the very same substance of the experience alongside somebody else. Instead of racial attitudes, the experience of Bin Laden is more individuated. We want <i>him</i> dead and Bin Laden, then, symbolizes all others. All others must be like <i>him</i> in their villainy, and as such, the same mentality of racist attitudes that dehumanize an entire group and harness vitriol are focused through one man as the token example of how all others must be. Dehumanizing occurs. Now, I don't know which is worse, but I would propose the experiential difference between dehumanizing a group and an individual involve the same emotional structure. The only difference is that the more individualized the object of hatred, the more personal the hatred can be felt even by members of distantly removed from 9/11. Bin Laden attacked my country. And when it's that much more personal, we can obsess about it easier than we can about an entire group.<br />
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At great moral cost, Biden implicitly committed himself to dehumanizing one of the principal agents responsible for 9/11. At that point, he extended de-humanization and passed it off as a political virtue. Bin Laden needed to be brought to justice, and sometimes thinking back on that day, maybe he deserved to die. However, my feeling approval for his death, and Bin Laden's inability to share in a world with me reflects also my inability to share the same world with him. In that feeling, it is me versus him. There are times when I remember waking up for class and seeing the second plane impact the World Trade Center. I felt angry, anxious and sad. On that day, the emotions are many, and my lived-experience runs together like a seamless fabric. I cannot parse the emotions of that day effectively.<br />
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What I do recognize is the necessity for due-process, the proper exercise of the virtue of justice belongs solely to the domestic institutions that pursue it in a principled and regulated fashion. Say what you will about the American justice system. It is not perfect, but the system would have been a better avenue of channeling our want for vengeance into something higher than sending Navy SEALs to assassinate him. The SEALs should have brought him back. He should have been judged by the very principles we extoll that make us better than some other places in the world where justice is a matter of fending off the accusers.<br />
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The procedural requirements of justice are many. There are procedures for a fair trial, how evidence is handled and even how we treat prisoners all fall under strict guidelines, regulations and Constitutional amendments. These "rules" sometimes let the bad guys get away domestically, and other times we fail to honor them. Bad guys get away then, too. However, what these procedural requirements do is not only protect the victim's rights. More than that, these procedural requirements protect us from ourselves; they habituate society to accept these practices as a defense against the all-too-easy emotional contagion of mob mentality. If Bin Laden had been captured, brought to the United States, and tried in a US Court of Law, there may have been loopholes in the system. His trial may have revealed more about our virtue than we wanted, and for that reason, it may have been prudent to assassinate him overseas. We may have not wanted to reveal the <i>impossibility of fairness</i>, and what does it say about us that we were not even concerned with trying. Maybe the lesson learned is that it is easier to destroy than sustain and harder to sustain what might be given lip service but is no longer there at all.<br />
<br />Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-71337260092271891492013-02-03T06:55:00.001-08:002013-02-03T06:57:15.711-08:00Postmodern Pedagogy and TextsOn a recent on-campus interview, I had met with what constituted the humanities departments on campus for lunch. Even on the Search Committee, there were no philosophers. Instead, at lunch, I had been flanked by three postmodernists, and the most repeated questions of the day were not about my research, as a Historian and two English faculty were not interested in Scheler or phenomenology. They were interested in my approach to <i>texts </i>when I teach.<br />
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An elderly man with a beard asked "Is it necessary to read the history of philosophy when teaching philosophy?"<br />
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Emphatically, I replied "Yes."<br />
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He shook his head in disagreement. I delineated two approaches to the standard Intro to Philosophy program. From my perspective, these are not exhaustive but just typical. Either we teach philosophy with readings from the history of philosophy or we teach someone's synthesized version of those concepts, e.g. James Rachel's <i>Elements of Morality. </i>Then, it was suggested there is a third way. You can have them read the newspaper.<br />
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Later, I learned at the faculty dinner what at that time made no sense. I am firmly committed to the teaching of the history of philosophy. In fact, if anything, this approach gives me an "edge over the competition" as many job ads indicate knowledge of history advantageous. As a teacher I am dedicated to the belief in a philosophical canon. Put more succinctly, if one researches Merleau-Ponty, then philosophizing about Merleau-Ponty requires that you have knowledge about Plato. Strange? Couldn't one just continue on for years only specializing in French phenomenology without specific reference to Plato? Well, yes. Yet, the appreciation for the very horizon of history is a very big motivator for understanding these authors, including Merleau-Ponty. The canon is small historically and undoubtedly, Merleau-Ponty has responded to Plato in some fashion even if I do not know what structures that encounter. But what about teaching?<br />
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I take the treatment of any historical text in philosophy as a moment of brilliance when the constellation of ideas shines brightest. The reason we read and teach Hobbes is that nobody has ever manifested such brilliance in trying to justify the state's political authority as resting solely on the collective self-interest of everybody else. To be sure, there are contemporary philosophers that feel Hobbes is closest to their own answer and develop insights either inspired by or framed within Hobbesian thought (David Gauthier in analytic political philosophy), yet I would never teach contemporary thought to an introductory course.<br />
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The postmodern approach to texts is more open and indeterminate on purpose. There is no distinction between what counts as literature and what does not count. As Derrida insisted, there is no distinction between philosophy and literature. Instead, all texts are permitted the same status. This openness is why one could read the newspaper at the same time teaching philosophy. They are all valid approaches to the ideas we want to teach. In philosophy, I am be closed to what counts since I believe in a philosophical canon. The field is smaller. According to the English faculty, I was playing with a smaller deck of cards than I should have and this small deck obviously has an effect on how I teach.<br />
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We can resist the postmodern approach to texts. Consider the following analogy. A theoretical physicist develops a framework for experimental physicists to situate their study of physics. There are some ideas that experimental physicists cannot directly test and so the status of string theory is constantly uncertain. Consider also that while not an empirical science, the philosopher is in the position of developing theories and frameworks that become appropriated by humanistic inquiry in general. In this sense, the philosopher is a "physicist of the humanities." Media studies, English departments and sociology may all appropriate from the constellation of philosophical ideas. Media studies might apply Habermas to interpreting some body of work done by Director X. English departments will apply Levinas or Foucault to their texts, and sociologists may appropriate Marx. All these approaches will always distort or use what is relevant immediately to their studies and discard the rest, even if in that dismissive want for appropriation they understand Habermas, Levinas and Marx poorly. They do not need to respect the historical horizon that engenders these authors or appreciate Hegel's influence one Marx, Levinas's response to Husserl and Heidegger, or Foucault's genealogical method derived from Nietzsche. As the theoretician that synthesizes these philosophical frameworks and develops new works to be appropriated, it is my job to know that history. Therefore, <i>we can resist the postmodernist on the grounds that not all texts inspire in the same way; philosophical texts are those that inspire the search for truth.</i> Plato has had more direct effect on history than Chaucer ever did.<br />
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The search for truth surfaced in our conversation. A member of the English department told me that the text does not just contain information, the text is an aesthetic object as well. According to her, I was dedicated to the view of the text-as-information. In some ways, yes. However, the aesthetic I appreciate in philosophical texts is simply different. I view Hobbes's search for the truth and his presentation of it as encompassing, rational and highly problematic. Still, it's a wonderful attempt at the search for truth, and this reverence for past thinkers to represent the search for truth is an aesthetic of the universal, a holdover of the Hellenic influence felt even today in philosophizing. Whereas other disciplines may be decidedly postmodern, permitting the self-consciousness and identity to situate and determine the limits of thinking, e.g. LGBT studies, Chicano studies, or African-American studies just to name a few, the philosopher may be guilty of allowing the universal to creep back into the classroom where others would deny its presence. The universal can be reason or truth -- perhaps it's best to use the untranslated Greek here, <i>logos. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Husserl wanted to re-appropriate the ideals of ancient philosophy and the <i>logos </i>to be a guiding force for the culture of European humanity. He diagnosed the crisis of spirit within the contours of Europe and he was very much aware of that limitation in mind. The ideals of ancient thought were expressed in dedication to philosophy as a task for universal truth, and maybe it is not so important about how these attempts are made. In fact, these attempts may always fall short, yet the expressive moments in the history of philosophy are the spaces to which we permit the search for truth to be made, and in that space are produced texts containing the inspirational residuum of truth that those that deny the <i>logos</i> nevertheless appropriate its texts to express their own limited vision. A fact of irony not lost on the only philosopher in the room being interviewed for the philosophy position!Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-88617297322657723642013-01-31T15:25:00.000-08:002013-02-01T08:19:16.949-08:00The Future of UniversitiesConsider a unifying threat to the liberal arts from Republican governors as outlined in this <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/30/texas-florida-and-wisconsin-governors-see-large-overlap-higher-education-platforms">IHE article</a>. Among the major reforms, they would:<br />
<br />
A. Compensate universities on how many graduates receive jobs<br />
B. Support the slashing of traditional liberal arts programs or majors that do not directly generate employable outcomes.<br />
C. Support professional majors that directly correspond to the needs of the market.<br />
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A, B and C are based on the assumption that university education is about "getting a job." That's it. There is no other purpose to go to university. Second, once one adopts this thesis, there seems little one can do to convince them otherwise. Or is there?<br />
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Let's start with a different theory about the university, and let us concede that one fact is people attend university is that "getting a job" is one motivation. I argue it is still possible to have a conception of the university that can accommodate this motivation of students without making all other reasons for the university's existence subsumed by it. That's the problem with the Conservative want for reforming state universities. They seem dedicated to the proposition that the only optimal reason people attend university is employment. In a wider conception of the university, the university does more than train potential employees.<br />
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<br />
Let me list what I think the university does, and we can start from there.<br />
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1. Universities transmit cultural knowledge onto a new generation of young people.<br />
2. Universities re-socialize people into productive citizens by exposing different populations to each other in a variety of settings.<br />
3. Universities train the mind in terms of reasoning, writing, and reading.<br />
4. Universities innovate existing science and technologies as well as existing frameworks and knowledge.<br />
5. Universities showcase the aesthetic multiplicity of the human condition.<br />
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Now let's set the Conservative thesis about higher education off to the side. In truth, I am only calling this the Conservative thesis in response to the article above.<br />
6. Universities train potentially-employable people.<br />
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From the above list, 1-5 resonate on a different level than just simply being places that train people to get jobs. 1, 2, 3 and 6 are student-focused outcomes. 4 belongs to the scholars of the university alongside 5, though 5 could belong to the whole community. I would say 1 imbues every other subsequent number after it, including 6. But notice, down our list if we took the whole of 1-5 versus someone that did not attend university, the employability drastically goes up such that 6 can be an anticipated outcome. In this way, I see 6 as more of an indirect benefit from 1-5, but the Conservative thesis can be counted as a direct benefit also. I might be wiling to see it both ways. My only point is that 1-5 share a relationship to 6 even though people want to make universities all about 6.<br />
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On the list above, we can accept that 1-6 exist in harmony with each other. When one receives more attention than any other one, universities become close-minded and adopt a narrow-minded culture. Currently, the economic anxiety of college educated professionals weighs on everyone's mind, and 6 is in the driver's seat when Governors take a long look at their public institutions. However, without the public financial support or respect for knowledge in general, 6 is unlikely to carry the day without 1-5. If people use 6 to evaluate universities, then the research culture and all other benefits of the university will be sacrificed for 6. I don't think it is slippery slope to anticipate turning public universities more and more into community colleges. For the public university, the point is to be sensitive to 6 without sacrificing 1-5.<br />
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Why Exactly are 1-5 Needed?<br />
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Assume that a university did fund a public university based on the employment outcomes of its students. The line of reasoning is that university's are accountable for the employment of their majors. This choice puts universities in the driver's seat where market forces determine them. Market forces take on a life of their own, and university's cannot be responsible for that which determines them, and in some cases overdetermines them. First, students decide on their own majors. If a student majoring in English literature never took an internship, only went to class and indulged in hedonism for four years, then the university should not be responsible for the self-determining choices of its youth. Second, as I said, market forces are in a state of constant flux often moved by factors way out of our control. Therefore, the university should not be responsible for what it constantly cannot be responsible for. <i>Ought</i> implies <i>can</i>. it. The attribution of responsibility is misplaced.<br />
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Universities can control what they charge to students. They can control how they are structured and what they implement. They CANNOT control markets such that setting them up to be responsive to markets will always be reactionary and such thinking will set universities up to fail.<br />
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1-5 are needed for the purposes of having a culturally-literate society. We want citizens to vote and make the best choices. We want people to reason well, be informed about the world and make good choices all around. We want people to draw connections between various contexts and elicit connections concealed from the surface. A person should appreciate the contexts that come before herself as well as those contexts alive in her own unique situation.<br />
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More than that, given that markets change over time, if we funded universities based on student employee outcomes, universities might inadvertently generate too much or too little of one "commodity." During recessions, many undergraduates go to law school, seeing a J.D. as an often more useful degree than an MBA. Recently, however, lawyers haven't prospered since there are too many of them. If all of a sudden accountants are no longer needed and all we did was emphasize accounting to the students for the market need over the past five years, the university has created a situation in which someone is trained only to do one thing. Another recession that takes out accountants and they're toast. However, the argument goes if the same student had taken a decent spread of liberal arts classes, that student will have the skills such education engenders and might be more-rounded to bounce back from the fate that might befall her. As such, a strong liberal arts background improves the bounce and the skills people need throughout life beyond their employment. In that way, 1-5 are best served by a liberal-arts intensive undergraduate degree with chances for the student to determine themselves.<br />
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Let's restate this line of reasoning. 1, 2, and 3 pass on skills to the student that improve him beyond simple economic focus of 6. At the same time, however, 4 and 5 support the existence of 1, 2, and 3.<br />
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What to Do?<br />
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Now that I have more clearly delineated the problem, we can do several things to reduce the cost of the university in general:<br />
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1. The Professoriate can take a much more active role in administration. The bloat of administrative cost to universities came at the cost of professors not wanting to volunteer their time while at the same time the ascendancy of university bureaucrats that specialize in administration without ever having been scholars themselves. Public universities might want to think about adopting Australian National University's model. They have two tiers of faculty: research and teaching. Developing a teaching faculty with little or no research expectations might improve the quality of teaching.<br />
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2. With the professoriate taking more of an active role in the university, cutting inefficient and redundant administrators can make a difference.<br />
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3. Introduce an Americorp benefit of reduction or elimination of student debt of Ph.D.s that decide to teach at a public institution and pay them a modest salary with benefits.<br />
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4. Restore pre-Recession support for higher education.<br />
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5. Have a nation-wide year of employment or service for college students. Pay them a modest stipend and reduction in student loans and have companies use the massive federal database to match potential candidates to future employers. Centralizing this process might make it easier to monitor the employment conditions of young people.<br />
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6. Experiment with online courses as well as online pedagogy. If Ph.D.s get involved with this from the beginning, then it is harder to eliminate our relevance when colleges do want to go this route.<br />
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<br />Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1724832200411147167.post-16121916446997089772013-01-28T00:16:00.000-08:002013-01-28T00:16:54.723-08:00Aesthetic Values Vs. Ethical ValuesScheler considers the intrinsic value of art on par with the moral values. They occupy the same level of givenness as spiritual values. I want to explore the possibility that aesthetic values are trumped by moral values. Scheler is silent on this issue since the various value-rankings receive no internal measure or prescription about values in the same ranking. Within the same ranking, various values are incommensurable with each other, and therefore inquiry is invited on this score. Here's something akin to the argument I am currently pondering:<br />
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Argument from Communal Priority<br />
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(1) Aesthetic values concern reasons that count in favor of the status of an artwork<br />
(2) Moral values concern reasons that count in favor of why we ought to pursue a particular course of action or why we ought not pursue a particular course of action.<br />
(3) Both aesthetic values and moral values must be instantiated in worldly goods.<br />
(4) In order for a society to function, there must be at least some settled prima facie agreement of moral values and the corresponding worldly goods that embody these agreed upon moral values.<br />
(5) Aesthetic values are not necessary in the settling of prima facie agreed upon moral values<br />
(6) If (5), then aesthetic values are trumped by moral values as a requirement of civilization.<br />
(7) Therefore, aesthetic values are trumped by moral values as a requirement of civilization.<br />
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Premise (1), (2), (3) are true by definition. (3) follows from accepting Scheler's distinction between values-as-that-which-manifests in terms of a good. Goods are valuable as "bearers of value." A hammer may be instrumental to my purposes in building a house, but the hammer could also be a holy relic manifesting some deeper truth of Holy life. Material goods can come to embody all types of value. Needless to say, we only encounter values in terms of goods, actions or persons. Given the material logistics required for civilization, I posit (4) as a criterion of what it means to be social beings living in communities. <br />
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I do not want to call (4) a definition. Perhaps, intuitive belief is the right word, an a priori belief akin to a Rossian moral intuition. Moreover, I am rather unclear what I mean by society's "functioning" on purpose. It stands to reason that if we are communal beings, and human beings require some type of infrastructure for culture to develop, then spaces must be devoted to their appearance in a functional way. Following Arendt, I think certain worldly spaces are devoted to the manifestation of certain values, and the creation of art work attests expressing some evaluation of how values manifest. Roman art work might be dedicated to the continuing endurance of Rome itself. Roman culture seemed to subsume all aesthetic expression under the <i>Roma Aeterna</i> ethos. In this way, art work can enhance or even destroy our ability to pick up on other values. For now, I won't worry about this here. Instead, I only want to clarify further what I intend with (4).<br />
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The real argument occurs in (5), (6) and (7) as a <i>modus ponens</i>. Notice within the argument, moral values receive more priority from the fact that aesthetic values are not necessary as a requirement of civilization. However, there is a strong line between necessity and how art may augment moral values once civilization has been established. Art can disclose critical reflection or open up discourses about values in new ways. However, this augmentation of discourse or opening up perception turns on the very fact that civilization develop to a point of stability. Philosophers are not ideal in a warring state, and this fact follows why Plato must ban Homeric myths from the ideal city as much as why civilization cannot entertain aesthetic values as important as moral values. Moral values establish the material condition of civilization itself. While this establishment will never be perfect, there will be at least some agreed upon prima facie beliefs that fill out the space between persons such that the business of practical life can commence.<br />
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Whence practical life can commence, participants in that lifeworld will develop the spirit of its practical life in terms of aesthetic works. Aesthetic works are the moments when spirit comes aware of itself within individuals, and an intersubjective space opens up inquiry such that one might say that the spirit of the individual comes to embody the whole. The whole becomes questioned in the reflective moment of the individual turned to spirit in art. This opening up of discourse in an intersubjective space cannot come about if moral questions are neglected, but nor can the moral questions advance in understanding if the self-reflective moment of culture never occurs in actual artworks of the society.<br />
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However, I do not want to urge the complete superiority of moral values over aesthetic values, nor do I want to oversimplify the relationship between them. In fact, the tolerance for art is directly proportional to how openly pluralistic a society can be. If the tolerance for certain avenues of aesthetic expression diminish, then there will be the diminishing of our capacity to live tolerantly with each other. Thus, the relationship between them is incommensurable, yet if some external factor reduces our ability to appreciate spiritual values in the form of aesthetic and moral values, then our society is incapable of experiencing justice or beauty as values in their own right.Carbondale Chasmitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13594688764570047726noreply@blogger.com0