Bodies and Patience

Sickness is an attunement to the body. We notice every nook and cranny of our own body since it is brought into relief as sick. The sick body is always contrasted against the former vitality the body possessed in the past. Thus, sickness constitutes its temporal meaning from the present to the past as a regression. This regression is experienced in various modes in particular feelings. There is the depression that sets in when one feels like they will never possess the past vitality they once did, and a regret towards the future for not harnessing that vitality for purposes left unfinished or never initiated. Regret and depression commingle when so much attention focuses on the constant fixation of "getting better" no matter if it is hope of an unknown diagnosis or one that threatens disability permanently. 

Post-Pluralist Society, Birth Control and the Patterns of American Social and Political Life

The debate surrounding whether or not the Federal government can mandate coverage of birth control on insurance companies that service religious health care plans isn't exactly about women's rights or religious teachings per se. There is a deeper philosophical quandary. It is really about whether or not the state can enforce its conception of the right and the good upon its citizenry. Now, more than ever, I think we will start seeing a post-pluralist society emerge in which government leaders no longer show restraint in imposing what they feel is the right and the good.

What I am about to say may be alarmist. I'm very aware of that. However, I never thought I would hear a Presidential Candidate like Rick Santorum. Here's a Presidential Candidate running for office, and he thinks the presence of birth control threatens public safety. He thinks of this issue as a "policy issue." The backlash of the Catholic bishops or even their intellectual worldview (such as Feser's post here) represent a decisively poignant lashing out against American political liberalism to allow for private and reasonable conceptions of the good. In effect, the conservative political base is coming at Obama not simply as a partisan, but as a symbol of an entire ideology opposed to everything they believe in even when that is an oversimplification of significant proportion. It is not only the conservatives that are mustering these efforts; there is a certain dogmatism of the left emerging that will respond in kind. In each case, the divisions of American political parties have subsumed any chance of reasoned dialogue about these issues. They are only interested in asserting their ideological systems of belief. This has already had significant consequence in American life.

One consequence is that political regions of partisan support surface. If you are gay, you'll move to the San Francisco Bay area, or other metropolitan West coast regions. Utah will always be a safe haven for conservatives. Like will always beget like. This voluntary seclusion and growth in numbers indicates that the preference of the political culture has had an impact. If we were ever to experience Differences in a positive and constructive way such that the radical singularity of the Other should be part of our experience, such experiences are no longer possible (I'll leave it an open question if we ever truly did experience Differences in a productive way). With that possibility goes the forced socialization of differences necessary for toleration.

Following suit, our politics and media have grown insular. Conservatives have built their own channel -- FOX News -- through which they don't have to be challenged just as much as liberals have flocked to MSNBC. We have started to build patterns of reinforcing assertion of someone's identity in public spaces and spaces of information exchange guided naively along these partisan lines. Internet IP addresses register what type of media you read and as such, when you load up Yahoo News only certain stories will populate fitting your established worldview. We are no longer experiencing any cognitive and social dissonance in our political and social spaces. There is no common experience of Differences anymore. This goes without saying since the public space where we disclose ourselves is slowly shrinking away.

Now, perhaps we never truly did experience as much Difference as possible. Still, years ago, racial integrationists sought the need to expose others to Others. That was a hard won victory for many, and now the only experience of others lies in the cramming of cities at work or in public school systems. There are few public spaces left to all of us through which we become exposed to Difference. Many of those to whom we meet is a function of our position and class in society. My high school consisted of mainly White professional families. We had one African American female in our entire high school and she was adopted. University has been the only time where I have met many different people from all over the world. Outside university, however, I don't have any experiences as global, or as unique. And now, public universities are vying for public support in a climate that does not want to fund them and sustain their accessibility to a shrinking middle-class.

Again, you are wondering how we got here. Well, I've tried to show that a post-pluralist society is realization of how we've organized and arranged our social patterns in the world. This organized arrangement is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in our cultural milieu that no longer seeks to understand Difference. Instead, it has become enough to assert an ideology as a form of power over others. This suffuses both sides of the political spectrum to such an extent that it could've been the other way around. The Catholic Church or Catholic Congressmen could've mandated that secular institutions forbid birth control. In both examples, secularism or catholicism can form patterns so confident that they have access to objective moral knowledge about how culture and individuals ought to be that they close off the openness to Difference. In the end, such confidence takes off and becomes a form of ethical violence as Levinas has fully shown. More than that, when we think we have access to a proper conception about how society ought to be, we forget the humility moral knowledge really requires.

So how to proceed? First, we could reassert Rawls' political liberalism in light of these social patterns. If that idea takes hold, political institutions cannot use any comprehensive doctrine when offering public reasons for why they acted in a certain way. For Rawls, living in a democracy means that every action of the state and its institutions must be justifiable to all that live within it. Therefore, there must be a public reason as to why the state acts as it does. The only restriction to public reason is that the state abides by a principle of mutual respect which is something akin to Kant's respect of autonomy. Religions count as comprehensive doctrine, and therefore lie outside what can justify state action in a democracy. The problem is that religion is not going away any time soon and Western democracy did not become less religious.

Secondly, we could allow that religious reasons can meet the burden of public reason. Habermas pushed for something like this recently. I am equally dissatisfied with this answer since the language of public reason promotes an unyielding deontology about what we ought to or not do as a society that gets appropriated by ideologues. Perhaps, part of the problem lies exactly in the language used to address justification of policies.

Thirdly, I offer a different answer. It will not be as concise as Rawls. Instead, I think that we should conceive of state actions and our participation in the state as aiming toward a chief end. Sounds familiar? Pretty Aristotelian, huh?! Except the chief end is not a teleological abstraction to which everything conforms. More than that, the chief end is openness to the wholly other (and for the religious, this will mean a conception of God as wholly other). Flourishing can only happen if a state allows for the radical uniqueness of others coupled with a pattern of social organization that forces others to encounter Differences. Now, I don't know exactly how to do this, but among some of the options of the Greek world that inspires my speculation is the practice of taking our meals in a common area. More common areas and public spaces could organize events that draw us together. Festivals and a calendar of public events meant to celebrate not one singled out Difference, but Differences in the pluralistic sense might inspire conformity to the chief end of openness.

In the end, I do not want to hang the solution of birth control and proper health care coverage on the lofty idea of openness qua flourishing, yet I wanted to move past a debate that merely asserted a transgression of what is right of one group over another. Rights become asserted when one group finds itself injured in one way or another, even if there has never been a claim or right asserted in that particular way before. This boundless expansion of rights then makes the assertion of right superfluous. Instead, I think virtue ethic standpoint combined with Levinasian respect of the radical singularity of the Other might just be one solution to try. In addition, I have also argued that if we do nothing, the world is slowly becoming a post-pluralist society in which all identities assert their own difference not as a point of what we ought to respect following Levinas, but instead that the assertion of difference involves an ideology of power that subsumes difference into it.

Midsouth Philosophy Conference

I absolutely love Midsouth. It has been running for 36 years, and I've participated in it for two years running. Last year, I gave this strange paper on ethical naturalism and phenomenology. This year I am comparing the methodological assumptions behind Scheler and Heidegger and measuring these methodological assumptions against value's givenness. It is not a terribly important paper, but it is, however, decently done.

I anticipate that my area of inquiry will not have that many people attending the talk. Like anything else, there are some dominant analytic trends. Despite many analytics walking around, SIUC is well-represented there alongside Memphis continentalists...Hehehe.

Inclusiveness and Philosophy

It is well known that philosophy has a disparity of women in it, and few women exist in the "canon." Even more so, it is important to actively seek out patterns of behavior that implicitly (or worse... explicitly) block the participation of women. As such, the New APPS blog actively posts conferences that have no women participants. This is an effort to bring to light patterns of conduct that hinder the participation of women. It is an effort of inclusiveness.

Inclusiveness is not the same as pluralism about philosophical approaches. I have recently encountered this problem.

Pluralism in philosophy is an ambiguous phrase, but when applied to philosophical approaches means "people have many approaches to what they consider philosophy and they do such things here." For instance, University of New Mexico has historians, Continentalists, Asianists and analytic philosophers all under the same roof. Similarly, SIUC has Americanists, Continentalists and Asianists, and other things too. In such a way, pluralism can also indicate that non-analytic approaches are taken here. In addition, pluralism might indicate that within a tradition, many approaches are taken even given that these terms are pejorative. At an institution, we might find people that think philosophical problems should be addressed in terms of conceptual analysis, or through philosophy of language or cognitive science. There is enough of a gap even within traditions to note that they have nothing in common. For instance, a Marxist and a phenomenologist can differ significantly on many things like the structures of existence, and how to explain the experience of history. A Derridean postructuralist has nothing in common with a dedicated Husserlian other than the starting point of Husserl. At that point, pluralism is the result of intellectual humility realizing that we might not have all the answers, and that perhaps we should let a thousand flowers bloom.

Inclusiveness is a social effort to include all those that are different for whatever reason. In this way, inclusiveness can be independent of pluralism, but in a very minimalist sense. I might not like Smith, and she might hate me. We might have entrenched our heels and perhaps we do not respect each other's work (since we have no intellectual humility). However, when it comes to, say, hiring a candidate, she and I agree on the same thing, and as such, we pull our collective weight to come together for an important cause. We actively seek to include those that are different from ourselves up to a point.

Inclusiveness in a robust sense subsumes pluralism, and presupposes it. To actively go out of your way and include others signifies a strong commitment to valuing many different intellectual approaches because you cannot control what others do. This is even more true for graduate student communities. You have to befriend and promote a community from those that are there already, and like your family to some extent, you cannot chose your colleagues (although in some sense we do if you were on a faculty search committee, and graduate communities can insulate themselves to their class year, domain of specialty or restrict themselves to favorite drinking buddies). The problem is robust inclusiveness is more ideal than concrete and often falls short in practice of becoming minimalist fairly quickly. This happens if a sub-group of the community initiates a cause and forms expectations of others to join in on their cause without first involving them in the initiative.

Ruminations about Abortion

1. Bodily ownership and autonomy arguments favorable to abortion usually rely on portraying abortion as a morally neutral practice like getting a haircut. It is not a question of "taking charge" of one's life entirely.

2. Secondly, it is harder to justify abortion the more developed the fetus is. Third-term abortions are abhorrent to me, though in extreme cases probably necessary. Behind this intuition,  there is a type of sorites paradox occurring about exactly when gametes become a human being. 

3. Anti-abortion arguments imply a conception of the state that legislates what can happen between a doctor and a patient. I am nervous about that implication. In addition, anti-abortion arguments usually focus so much on the intrinsic value of the fetus, they ignore, or oversimplify the contextual significance of the mother and the subsequent intrapersonal relations that get called into question by the act. 

In this post, I want to pay attention to 3. It should be clear that I have not offered any systematic arguments for 1 and 2. I am simply informing the reader what suspicions I have at large. 

When a woman goes to an abortion clinic, it is usually indicative of more than simply her impending act. I am going to leave that alone. Instead, I want to think about what implication her impending act has at the cultural level. When a young woman goes to an abortion clinic and we ONLY focus on the permissibility or impermissibility why are we not addressing the cultural influences of such an act? What about this culture gives rise to abortion? This is the philosophical question pressing my soul. What type of woman get abortions? If it is as I suspect women of a lower economic status, then why are we not fighting poverty? In the year 2000, only 27% of  abortion patients were poor, but in 2008, they were 42%. That number more than likely increased in this recession.

The Guttmacher Institute's report is a good place to start. Notice the high amount of co-habitation, or single-mothers already with children. Notice that women in a marriage are far less likely to get an abortion. Now, I am not advocating being a moral prude. I'm far from that. I simply want to urge that the debate about abortion move beyond the permissibility of the act itself. This happens to follow from what I call a metaphysics of convergent vulnerability.

An abortion is an event. For an event to occur, it must be the convergence of many things coming together. This is also true for every human behavior. A human being exercises some relative freedom in their life, but that relative freedom takes place with many co-operating factors converging upon an event such that a field of intrapersonal relations subsist in order to make such an event happen. At the abortion clinic, the doctor had to have went to medical school where the abortion procedure was taught. Such a procedure can only be taught if there is continual transmission of medical science in general. Members of the profession had to develop suggestions for medical engineers to build tools. The medical profession not only had to teach the use and application of its science and its tools to students, but the profession had to develop ways for future doctors to practice their skills. The doctor had to locate his services in a building, and someone had to have a building to either sell or rent to the doctor. Many of these relations recede into the past, but some must be continually renewed in order to sustain the present flowing into the indeterminate future. Finally, some intrapersonal relations persist but are not proximate to the situation at hand. The doctor's office is like any building location such that the police must be committed to defending its public safety like everyone else. However, the police's commitment to enforcing public safety has no proximate relation to a woman pacing back and forth outside the abortion clinic.

What we should be asking is whether or not there are key sociological factors that motivate the likelihood of a woman getting an abortion. If there are iniquities that give rise to the likelihood of the act, then society can take steps to protect women from being exposed to environments that foster women seeking out abortions as solutions. Of course, this rumination depends on linking economic iniquity of the environment and those that dwell within those environments. I, like Aristotle, think that ethics cannot be divorced from the political realities that enforce and reinforce the environments in which people realize their lives. The fact that we can change the environment such that others may flourish is one key premise of mine. I'll be fully honest about that.


Relative freedom over one's life is the range of thing's we can control immediately. However, it is not an absolute freedom divorced from the field of intrapersonal relations that constitute all moral possibility. In this way, I suggest that philosophers try to identify those assumptions behind what possible reasons a woman might want to receive an abortion. Several suggestions come to mind:

1. The cultural understanding of a relationship is skewed. Men still make more than women, and women do not fare as well as men financially. Men can act more freely than women, and it is often the hallmark of some feminists to achieve an ontological equivalency with men. In intimate relationships, this might mean thinking that abortion is a technological equivalent to thinking that women like men can sleep with whomever they want without moral consequence (which is false for either men or women). Indeed, abortion can be used this way. However, the dynamics of our current age do not consider how nurturing relationships should be. Let me explain.

Allain De Botton wrote a piece on love and talked about it on NPR a long time ago. In that piece, he rightly identified that Hollywood movies only portray the difficulties of getting together. Every romantic comedy your wife or girlfriend has every shown you has been about resolving the difficulties of getting in love. No one stops to think about the everyday work it means to make a marriage work. Such nurturing relationships are part of what is lacking in the field of intrapersonal relations and probably why married women are far less likely to get an abortion. They are in environments conducive to planning children with their partners. We do not have a culture that reflects on the likely and sustaining causes of iniquity that put women and men at risk in varying ways.

Phenomenology is Ontology: How Phenomenology Becomes Philosophical Anthropology (shortly stated))

There is a philosophical analogy I'd like to draw. Years ago, metaethicists insisted that their discourses were neutral with respect to normative theories. This entailed that the truth of whatever, say, the concept of good is did not impact whether or not utilitarianism was the best normative theory. The higher-ordered inquiry transcended normative theories and had no bearing on them. This has been argued as a boldfaced lie.

In phenomenology, we commonly tell ourselves that descriptions are neutral. We strip away all our presuppositions and biases about a phenomenon, let that phenomenon come to self-givenness, and describe it from the position of the transcendental viewpoint (a la Husserl). This whole process is in conceptual tension with the natural attitude, the perspective necessary to assume when we describe nature as a set of causal relationships. Such a perspective, it is argued, cannot get at the primordial intentionality as to how consciousness relates to phenomenon. The natural attitude is the third-personal viewpoint, the one we take to describe events as if we stand over and above them impersonally observing what happens to be the case. We forget that human beings fundamentally live out their lives in the first-personal viewpoint as intentional creatures and never fully achieve the reflective distance feigned in the third-personal viewpoint.

When a phenomenological thinker draws the distinction between the phenomenological and the natural attitude, the phenomenologist only lays claim to primordiality in opposition to the empirical standpoint. The descriptions are ontologically neutral since the whole phenomenological reduction pushes aside our biases in bracketing. I take issue with this. Like above, the phenomenological descriptions are said to be primordial, more privileged and yet somehow they still receive more priority than the natural attitude. The natural attitude receives the same treatment that normative theories receive. Normative theories and natural attitude models explain only by assuming much about concepts; they depend on a more primordial level of inquiry. Here's where the similarity ends.

Metaethicists don't lay claim to ontological neutrality like phenomenologists. The metaethicists are steeped in questions about the ontology of value. To given an account for why cognitivism is true about value is to offer an ontological account about value. Similarly, I argue that phenomenologists are steeped in questions about the status of essences, concepts and what it means for something to be "given" and an object's givenness. Many phenomenologists, Heidegger notwithstanding, rely on a thoroughly traditional metaphysical and theological language to describe phenomena. Somehow, I think Heidegger's inspiration from poetry does not succumb to this problem as much.

Heidegger appropriated phenomenology to originally approach the question and meaning of Being. For him, phenomenology is a way into doing fundamental ontology. This follows from the fact that phenomenological methods open up a way into ontology, specifically when we start to think about how the self is constituted by the lifeworld, and we start to uncover the implicit becoming and participation of the self as a socio-historic subjectivity immersed in the lifeworld. This is why I think that Scheler's work, which opens up to a yet-to-come-metaphysics becomes ontologically rich. The ontological richness and need to elucidate the relationship between man, the world and God is what Scheler calls philosophical anthropology.

Prospectus Defense

Okay, so I have been writing and encouraged to write as I continue with thinking and reading through Heidegger and Scheler. However, I had not defended my prospectus, and now I am defending my prospectus. It is really happening. I can see more light at the end of the tunnel. Now, the light is bright with tiny streams of white pouring along the contours of the tunnel. The tunnel walls are more refined and somewhere in the distance someone is waving one of these:

Apple Products, Teaching and FoxConn Workers

I prefer Apple to PCs. I used PC for years before my wife got one. I borrowed her computer "all the time" to her annoyance and my joy. Recently, I realized that computers are like food. We don't know where they come from, and once you learn about the conditions of some livestock, you begin to wonder about eating meat. Today, I read an article, and while I'll admit about being a "smart guy", I never would have thought that Apple products were made in China. More to my dismay, I would have never thought Apple would put profits before the value of treating workers fairly. I assumed naively they were made in pristine conditions. It is one thing for someone else to get dooped, but not me. I should have known better. I should have had some cynicism about the world philosophy usually provides to know that things need questioned. With Apple, you always see a pristine product, clean surfaces and geometric lines that impose upon you a clean ideal of its inception. This is false now, and forever in the back of my head as I go about teaching and interacting with likely students that are mesmerized by Apple products. Among the many examples, consider this excerpt from the article:

Daisey [the journalist involved in the report from the article] interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using "hexane," an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.

So the people that clean the screens are using a neuro-toxin! That just takes my breathe away and now, I will be e-mailing Apple a link to this blog entry. I would welcome any response about the treatment of workers in China. I especially think it germane they respond with positive change, and not some liberal platitude. Otherwise, I -- as a PhD Candidate writing my dissertation and a professional that will have contact with numerous young minds -- will always use the FoxConn treatment of workers as an example of how someone ought not act. As a graduate student, I have already taught 650+ students, and will teach many more in the years to come. Let us say I get a job teaching a 4/4 load at a university that does semesters. Here, around 35 students is a maxed out capacity for teaching Intro to Philosophy. Let's say I did only intro courses each time. That would be 240 students per year, and any time I do Intro, I always cover moral philosophy. Moreover, my favorite teaching preference is always Intro to Ethics where one could do case studies of company practices, and talk about what ought to be. Let us assume this to be consistent for 30 years until I retire. In that time, I would have contact with 7200 students in my classroom in one lifetime. This is also not the number one actually encounters at a university that are not the ones you are teaching.

Here are some of the pictures and reporting from a sister article.

So how about it Apple? Address the conditions of FoxConn and the working conditions of the Chinese, and specifically if you do respond. Follow the article's suggestion:

 Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple's profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.
In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.
So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.
(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course — almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)
The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.
That's not a value judgment. It's a fact.

There are always independent minds in a computer science department willing to build you a computer for far less than you pay a company to make one.

This article is making me literally sick that I am writing my dissertation on an Apple. It is a very visceral thing, and Apple needs to respond now. To be clear, it is not just me they ought to respond, but permanent reform and apologies to the workers. I feel deeply bitter and betrayed. Moreover, joining the FLA as detailed here is not a real start until Apple pushes the Chinese government to treat its workers better. A Washington DC-based monitoring group is a platitude.

Leiterite Headaches: Crochetedly Ole' Critchley

There is a really, really deep-seated hatred of not what we might call "Continental philosophy" but Simon Critchley. Leiter hates him. He abhors him, and the 'Party Line Continental' approach to philosophy. In a devastatingly characteristic fashion, Leiter writes

The actual reality is this:  there are a group of philosophers in the Anglophone world--at about a dozen PhD-granting programs in the US (basically the "SPEP universe"), and at a handful of places in the UK--who are marginalized from and not very knowledgeable about the main tendencies in Anglophone philosophy over the last fifty years, but who are deadly serious about Heidegger and who need to justify their existence to university administrators.  Even though there are now literally hundreds of philosophers at the major "analytic" departments that award PhDs who work on the Continental traditions in philosophy (including Heidegger), these SPEPPies need to perpetuate the illusion of two different "camps" so they can explain why the folks in "their camp" aren't taken seriously outside their network...

I don't mean to prod, but there is no nice way to say this. Having a like for Heidegger's philosophy is no different than doing a dissertation on, say, Kantian practical rationality, and then having to face the anonymous administrator. At the end of the day, administrators don't seem to get that the humanities in general are necessary for civilization. They simply and often think that you can't get rid of everything else except the English department because employers want students to write well. They just happen to have the name of the language everyone needs to be writing well, and so they are the only humanities to be left at the end.

Moreover, Leiter does admit that Party-Line Continentals are "marginalized from and not very knowledgeable about he main tendencies in Anglophone philosophy over the last fifty years." However, I think this patently false. I know several younger Heidegger scholars that don't fit this bill and have come from "SPEPpie" institutions. Lauren Freeman's article on moral particularism and Heidegger is exceptionally revealing. Steven Crowell's reading Heidegger and Korsgaard is intriguing. So, it is very possible to come from these schools, have a background in the tendencies of Anglo-phone philosophy and seriously reject those approaches. It's allowed to happen.

Again, there is some good work being done at SPEP just like good papers in epistemology are given at the APA.

At serious issue is the hermeneutic character of Heidegger's thought, and what this means for anyone that thinks philosophy arrives at some privileged insight. If Heidegger is right, then there are no more immutable truths revealed at the end of the day. It is in these ramifications of section 31 and 32 inside Being and Time that incur the most wrath when we think about the methods we use in philosophical reflection.

On Reading Heidegger

My relationship to Heidegger is always rough. When you read him, it is hard to come away unscathed. Your thoughts take on his troubles as if someone had scratched you with mental sandpaper and once you wipe away the dust, you find a lingering smoothness you don't want to admit is there. I have never had this experience with any "analytic philosopher" before though perhaps there is an admitted love of Bernard Williams, W.D. Ross and Martha Nussbaum I find comforting. It is definitely not the same.

In a alluring passage, Heidegger illuminates what he thinks the "ultimate business of philosophy is," or at least one of its many features.

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems (section 44 in BT).

I love that phrase preserving "the force of the most elemental words" through which undergo life. We live through life in its depth and mystery. In this way, Heidegger has always had a poetic bent to a phenomenological orientation to human life. Moreover, this is also suggestive as to why Heidegger finds all art poetic, and why I find his works preserving this elemental force and restoring wonder to philosophy from my brief excursion into analytic philosophy. Some insights escape us if we do not hold fast to how we undergo and experience them firsthand, and some structures of experience cannot be encapsulated by previous philosophical frameworks. Therefore, a new vocabulary that attends to the phenomenological mystery must be brought to the fore while at the same time not creating an "uninhibited word mysticism" in Heidegger's own words.

Preservation of elemental force in Western philosophy reveals one of the many currents operating in Being and Time. In BT, Heidegger is worried about how we relate and actualize the past into the present while simultaneously acknowledging the limits of human finitude. Central to his concern is the possibility of philosophizing itself, and even though Heidegger is suspicious of elements from that past as forming likely possibilities for the future of philosophy, he is deeply aware of the imposed limits of philosophy. It is no surprise that the above passage occurs in the section on truth. For him, "truth" is a time-honored concept and though it has been distorted by the past, it is still one of the most elemental words in philosophy. However, at the end of that section, Heidegger re-infuses the word with an almost poetic quality that many might not tolerate.

On the flip side, Heidegger intimates the sense to which some philosophical terminology can obfuscate the dimension of lived-experience by simply imposing a technical jargon on a series of problems. One could argue this is what actually was going on in ordinary language philosophy where, for instance, the analysis of the concept good could illuminate an entire system of ethics for Moore. Now, perhaps, that's not entirely fair. Moore had inherited the problem of value as how value-predicates functioned in moral propositions. Even so, one could sympathize with Heidegger about a clever and often called analytic proclivity to merely think about "philosophical problems." I have never trusted that there are cottage industry of philosophical problems on their own. However, I do think that there are problems enmeshed in a history of thinking that constantly repeat and challenge thinking. It is simply not possible to get at the problem on its own -- as if one is distilling the essence of it -- without also thinking how such historical elements are appropriated by those thinking through them.

So, if you are reading philosophers and your soul is not enlivened, if the text stays dry and dull in your hands, then either you or the text is doing something wrong. Maybe a little bit of both?...Philosophy cannot survive if the wonder of its engagement is not conveyed in the reading of it and its elemental force is lost.

Leiter on Analytic/Continental Divide

I must say that I agreed with almost 100% of what he said here.

Phenomenology of Indefinite News and Bad Faith

The exercise of a right comes with the responsibility of its exercise, not mere possession. So many people in this country think they have a right to speak freely, but the practical wisdom behind the first amendment is to foster an informed citizenry. Political discourse means nothing if we don't take it upon ourselves to fulfill an epistemic duty to be as informed as possible, and this means to go further than cable news.

Simply due to the phenomenology of the experience, one might find warrant in adopting more options for information. When I watch cable news, I am drawn in to the news anchor, and it is an organic experience from the news anchor to the dearth of content. The news anchor gestures, her voice calculating. She is pretty or he is handsome. The voice is melodic and average; the news anchor cannot be smart--only average in appearance, mannerism and depth of perspective. The news anchor is dressed in business professional suit, and participates in a broadcast alongside the spectator. The broadcast itself feigns a terminable point to which there is no end in site. Therefore, the spectator awaits the announcement and news, and the news anchor unwittingly crafts the discourse to embody its inevitable arrival. Yet, it does not come at all. In politics, though some event might be accomplished; it can always be undone. Conservatives can always undo health care reform. Some event's are too concrete not to arrive, but when they do they are held onto for dear life.  


When there is a lot of build up for some announcement, the camera pans to squeeze every sense of an event's termination. What will be the outcome of Dr. Conrad Murray? Eventually, the jury will exit, announce judgment. For the 24 hour newscycle, it will continue. The camera pans to a panel of experts. These experts will speculate about what is to come next. Even though there is some resolution, there is no resolution for America. He will receive a lighter sentence because California is overridden with inmates already. The Judge will give the maximum penalty in this case claims another. At this point, however, the spectator doesn't know that the news cycle is trying to generate more drama out of an event that generated countless stories before. America's consciousness cannot endure without knowing what will happen, or so the mentality is proffered by cable news. The broadcast attempts to overcome the event's finality in judgment by generating more content of an indefinite future to which the broadcast is headed. If and when that does not work, there is more. 


Later that night, a panel of experts led by a comedian or some pundit will claim an outrageously controversial claim. Pehraps, it is about M. Jackson's race and the fact that Murray is black (or some such nonsense). The claim will be outrageous and its only intent is to generate more emotional drama over the terminable event so as to render aspects of the trial as interminable--that is, until the newscycle finds another story to feed its desire to present content where none exists. In this way, the newscycle doesn't inform. Rarely are facts presented and when they are, there is bias everywhere operating at a subtle level. This is because what holds for political discourse in the United States is nothing more than browbeating ideology. 


So what can be done. For starters, we could teach more philosophy. But obviously, I have an interest in that sort of thing. 


As a citizen, we should expand access to information and make it socially unacceptable for people not to be informed. I don't know how to do this. I am sure this means that while everyone might not want to read the American Political Science Review, they should. 

Theism and Philosophical Faith

I don't usually comment on this topic; I leave it indeterminate. I find discussions about God overly simplistic and in an academic climate, if it is found out that you are a theist, people generally dismiss you without much foresight. But as I get further into the dissertation about Scheler, I am constantly questioning his move to Catholicism, and the romanticism of the universal church and feudalism central to his political thought. As a philosopher, I could spill nothing more original, newer or insightful into the discussion of God. In fact, I am anything but conventional with respect to God even though I take fellowship in the life that church offers.

For me, God is not a paternal authority in the heavens that revealed his infallible word in the form of the Bible that informs us as to how things literally are. This type of naivete with respect to scripture and to the concept of God unnerves me. Accordingly, not much can be said about God. It's not as if we have a speculative use of reason that can apprehend through intuition or the imagination what God must be like. In fact, Kant showed that speculation can both affirm and deny the thesis of God's existence with equal precision. As such, we are left within an "antinomy". This happens because speculation over extends its concepts without having any frame of reference in experience. For Kant, reason operates within strict limits. Therefore, if traditional metaphysics is deprived of its right to use speculative reason and moreover it has never been grounded in experience, reason loses its authority altogether to create a metaphysical system in which God is understood (or in which God is rejected). Kant's thought is liberating. Let me explain.

When a scientist and creationist both insist on the literal truth of their belief about the universe, they are attempting to describe reality as such. The scientist reifies his current models, considers them literally true about the structure of the world compared against Biblical literalism in much the same way that metaphysicians thought they could describe reality as such in speculation. Some might not insist it is the same since scientific procedures are open to revision through systematic experimentation. However, to be against the falsity of Christianity, the skeptic proposes science as a static alternative no matter what that current alternative is. Neurath's boat is taken as is. It's only relevance is that it is a substitute for a religious perspective.

When a religious observer insists that what is written is literally true, the religious observer denies there exists anything like interpretation. The Earth must have been created in 6 days. God revealed scripture as inerrant to human beings through revelation. As such, the content of the literal language cannot be challenged under any other guise but itself. Religious truth somehow transcends the attempt of finite human beings to understand its content given the distance in historical context of a nomadic people speaking a different language to the politics of what books exactly could count as official scripture.

When scientists desire to refute religion, they reify scientific content to be revealing of reality and its structure as such. When religious observers desire to refute science, they reify religious content to be revealing of reality and its structure as such. In both cases, they over-extend their concepts and on top of that reify reality to suit their own needs. In both cases, reality is, at best, a mind-independent world of facts that can be disclosed as such. This is similar to the Kantian position in which both the thesis and the anti-thesis are asserted without having any ground in experience. The mistake lies in not only considering the world mind-independent, but in thinking that one also has access to that mind-independence and the taken for granted assumption that reality endures uniformly as such. Under such a view, the epistemic standpoint we take up to reality is vastly oversimplified, and this explains the oversimplification of both. The scientific perspective cannot reify the world; it requires inquirers to maintain an openness such that future models of explanation can be revised. Likewise, the religious perspective relies on inquirers maintaining an openness to future possibility since God exceeds any representation we may have of She/He/It. Such an openness requires interpretation and not the literalism that accompanies that understanding. This can be shown in what faiths means.

Faith is not simply an epistemic standpoint with commitments attached to it such that it can be replaced by a superiorly informed standpoint of science. It is not as if these standpoints trade only on knowledge about reality as such and that's all that needs consideration. When scientists make that shift in an argument where they trade one belief that describes the world for another, they have forgotten that life cannot simply be reduced to the epistemic position from which it is judged, and more than that, the epistemic standpoint is not primitively-basic to life as many past analytic philosophers have regarded (I can have more to say about this later). Instead, life is a matter of a dynamic orientation we maintain towards the world.

God is not a being separate and apart from the world anymore than subjectivity for me is separate and apart from the world. Instead, being-human consists in taking up the possibilities towards life and experiencing the world in a very "thick" way. Every scientific or religious possibility involves this dynamic orientation of life. And within that orientation, both succumb to the relational possibility we call experiencing the world. Each bears within itself a limit to what can be experienced. For the scientist, the world is a series of causal relationships and the scientist seeks to control and harness nature for human purposes. It is therefore silent on the very transcendence of God if God is taken to be above and beyond the representational-causal order, and within a religious orientation, God is best regarded as the God not-yet-arrived (the kingdom yet to come), the expression of everything that is wholly other.

Since God cannot be known with any exactitude and exists as beyond all representational order, it is a matter of faith that it is taken up and lived just as much as the faith operative in science might summarized as the belief that nature is accessible to experimentation. The only requirement of this faith is not in reifying it as a possibility with a determinate content, but instead faith requires the openness to the God to which exceeds all representation. By exceeding all representation, God cannot be appropriated for any particular agenda, belief or creed. He cannot legitimize the oppression of that which is different and other. In this very exceeding representation, God's inability to be appropriated, reified and used for some instrumental end is the model by which the otherness found in humankind must be treated. In God as wholly other, so too is one human being completely and wholly other unto himself/herself, and it is this absolved and transcendent individual uniqueness that human being shares in God.

In such a conception, the transcendence of God is not a reality-as-such. It is not a metaphysical transcendence objectively discerned. Instead, the transcendence of God lies in the very same unique singularity of one individual. As Jean Paul Sartre showed a man is a "series of projects" that transcend himself. Many of our concerns and projects take on a life of their own above and beyond their origin in us, and yet in some sense, we must take ownership of them as well. They are as much a possibility for others as they are for us, and it is in this being-responsible-for in which any woman or man reveals his unique singularity to the world. In this way, I draw upon the same existential attitude that exhibits projects that man comes to exceed himself and likewise within God too. This transcendence, however, is a communal possibility, a renewed possibility in which we all must honor the singularity of God. The singularity of God is the infinite wholly otherness found in each other, and so it comes as no surprise that God is the call of the ethical demand to serve the otherness found uniquely in all of us.

Now, this might be hard to swallow, especially since I sit in a pew next to you. I will not share that I am a philosopher. Amongst other church-goers, I am merely a man sitting next to them. I do not share my skepticism about literalism of scripture, nor do I tell them that I see literature as an articulation of a symbolic order conditioned by language, history and the uniqueness of the interpreter. I merely see God not as a metaphor but as a possibility in which community can be realized and a tradition to ground it. The part at which religion becomes negative is when that which exceeds representation becomes a dogmatism rather than the openness required in the inter-human world. It is in this openness towards difference, multiplicity and otherness in which my faith can be found. It is a faith of possibility and that is all God could ever be.

College Majors that Don't Pay

From the humorous post here to the ominous bureaucratic management of China's proposal here, it comes as no surprise that I, a philosopher, would wonder if both the United States and China operate under a mistake. This is the mistake that universities are responsible for the training of employees--this belief is supported by the thought that professional majors like engineering, computer science and business earn more than their liberal art counterparts. However, that might not be true. Consider Edwin Koc, Director of the Strategic and foundation research at the National Association of College Employers says,

But the advantage possessed by career-oriented majors may be short-lived. Once in a career path, the more general skills of communication, organization and judgment become highly valued. As a result, liberal arts graduates frequently catch or surpass graduates with career-oriented majors in both job quality and compensation. A longitudinal study conducted several years ago by the National Center for Educational Statistics found that the wage differentials that existed between career-oriented majors and academically oriented majors were all but eliminated within 10 years after graduation.

Now, if this is true, and my experience confirms that it seems to be so, then what universities should be doing is holding true to standards in which the best can succeed, and if others are willing to put in the hard work, then they too should be held to a standard of excellence steeped in the liberal arts tradition. This has always been my problem. Philosophy majors tend to be exceptionally bright. They are studying the physics of the humanities and they have acquired a level and depth to their critical thinking that outstrips the typical business student. Now, I don't pretend to be not biased, but I have also taught in universities in which this bears out time and time again. Business students account for 1 in 6 majors in the United States. Philosophy majors, I read somewhere, account for about 1% of all Bachelor degrees given out every year.

The NCES study doesn't surprise me given that liberal arts majors are more likely to attend postgraduate education of some variety, and the pressing need for future critical thinking skills in life may far outweigh exactly how an accounting major learns to do her thing.

But let me return to my initial thought. Is it the job of universities to improve the quality of the overall person, or train future workers in a economy? Why is it the university's sole responsibility to supply an economy with workers ready-made and gift-wrapped upon graduation? Given how volatile our economic cycles can be, I do not think something as unpredictable should have a bearing on educational outcomes at all. Perhaps, it is the economy and the people working within it that need to be more adaptive to the inherent chaos within how an economy moves. Ideas come from innovative people, individuals with skills to adjust to life. It makes no sense to plan a life around something as volatile as the economy. This is not a call to hold back a second and try to assess how we can best serve ours students. This can only be done by a liberal arts education that fosters the capacities to learn and adapt--that is, namely, teaching those critical thinking and communication skills that come from assessing arguments in Plato, or reading theology, art history or any number of classical disciplines in which have no direct immediate gain; instead, the humanities proffer a lifetime gain over a long period of study by promoting reflection, critical thinking and the ability to clearly articulate and appreciate contexts that transcend the immediate and instrumental needs.

Maybe the private sector can help and anticipate its own needs by further training people as the needs become apparent. If companies want good workers with critical thinking and communication skills, then perhaps they should invest in human capital more, and I'll increasingly teach more philosophy majors to boot.

UC Davis, Political Violence on Campus and the Occupy Movement

Universities are not places for police actions, and the intimidation used by police on peaceful protests. Universities are no violence zones. Period. End of story. I'm sorry, but call me old-fashioned. Weapons do not belong where the mind should have free reign. This means that violence of any sort is intolerable and wrong. Universities are about seeking out the truth and asking questions. The point of a university is never to be a place that condones violence. When the Chancellor Linda Zatehi condoned and ordered the removal of peaceful protesters at UC Davis, she violated the sanctity of the university. I am not surprised at the least, however. The Administrators of our universities are often scholars that couldn't hack it.

Now let's not be fooled. The Occupy Movement is so named since it is a form of civil disobedience that disrupts the cohesiveness of a public space's meaning. It seeks to appropriate that space, to re-invent its original function and re-integrate that space into an interrogation of the de facto meaning the space originally held. In this way, the Occupy movement seeks a transformation of a space as part of its protest. It is a disruption of the original status-quo, and calls attention to the specific problems and challenges facing America. As such, it is a new form of civil disobedience. It is a call to self-interrogation inasmuch as it might highlight or specify its claims.

Within the occupation, there is no violence. It plays on the ambiguity by calling for transformation by occupying, but occupying with irony. Usually, the term occupying is completely disruptive in that occupiers are the leftover of some invading force--"the boots on the ground" keeping steady the peace after some war. Here, they are occupying not through violence, but by locking arms, holding working groups and sharing ideas so that something may foment, come to the surface and radiate outward. It is a call for social transformation without much design; it is an organic dialogue that moves about in its own way like an infant learning to take its first step. Eventually, it will take form, mature and make demands. But part of its inability to be co-opted by the larger discourses is an enactment of political refusal. The Occupying movement is a movement actual commitment since so many times before the partisan discourses seek to integrate populist movements into itself and play off that political energy. Here, the political refusal is a resistance, a civil disobedient form itself. In that regard, it is very clever; it is neither Democratic or Republican. Though, I wonder how long before the possibility of the Occupy Movement becomes a New Left and integrates itself into the populist movement to reelect President Obama. Time will only tell, though I digress.

As a form of peaceful resistance, the system will lash back. There will be arrests, perhaps violence as we saw, and the integrity of the university will be far from the police officer's mind. However, it should never be far from the mind of a Chancellor that calls for the intolerance of peaceful protesting.

A. R. Luther's "The Articulated Unity of Being"

There is a lot in this essay, and I offer my thoughts in no particular order. I am, however, interested in what is necessitated ontologically for values to be given in experience, and how far the phenomenological method is privileged by Scheler--the latter is a question about the merits of interpretation of his works. Oftentimes when I discuss Scheler's work, it seems that people want to push the phenomenological angle and subordinate later inquiries into metaphysics and philosophical anthropology to Scheler qua phenomenologist. It is easy, however, to smooth over the complexity of a thinker's thought and relegate the complexity into a unified conception. We make systems out of past thinkers usually; it is rare that past thinkers attempted to systematize their own thought in ways we reconstruct and interpret them. Thus, I am plagued by the tenacity of the phenomenological angle of interpretation of his later works.

Most notably, Arthur Luther apparently had a fondness for the phenomenological interpretation to such an extent that he reads the Eternal Cosmos in Man against Sceler's phenomenology. 

For Heidegger, existence can be described without value. In some way, there is a mooded relief and backdrop implicit in the field of human life, but there are no values associated with those moods, only their function in relation to us. However, for Scheler, values can be articulated without human beings, but what they cannot exist without is God. For Scheler, as Luther interprets him, man, person and God come together in a creative becoming that is inexhaustibly full and rich. It is a coming together of the vital impetus and blind releasements of force and power in our biological reality and simultaneously the abiding and immediate expression of our primordial loving. For Luther, this structure has more phenomenological depth.

Pushing deeper here, it must be said that simultaneous and co-operative acting does not mean that God executes an act and that man as person executes an act, and that these two acts coincide. Simultaneous acting means that an act executed in and through man as person, when it is directed towards higher values (ultimately the Holy) is simultaneously God acting, to the extent that He is becoming in and through man becoming as the realization of values, which although disclosed in and through man, transcend man as absolute, by hence, as values of the absolute person, as values which coincide with the directedness of primordial loving. Moreover, in and through such realization of values God becomes really and fully who He is, but in a way that does not exhaust the fullness who He is because it is a way rather than that fullness itself. This relation between fullness itself, whole or totality (Ganzheit), and concrete expression, manifestation, realization is possible because fullness itself, whole or totality here is spirit, which is to say, no thing or object. Fundamentally boundless, the fullness which is spirit is inclusive while transcending as a whole or totality, any expression, manifestation or realization (Luther, Articulated, p. 36). 

The actualization of acts is a relational aspect given entirely in the fullness of spirit. Man as person realizes higher values in a simultaneity of God realizing his own fullness of spirit whenever we realize higher values. This realization is a becoming in and through man, and unmentioned in the passage above is the plurality necessitated by that becoming. As such, like Levinas, God can only be a possibility realized in human community in Scheler's thought. It takes others, and others held at the level of un-objectifiable spirit or person, for God to become realized in and through man. This is why Being for Luther and Scheler means "solidarity of persons." A solidarity of persons "is a community of uniquely executed dynamic orientations" (p. 37). Persons are radically unique points of dynamic orientation. Phenomenologically, they are given in terms of their ability to act and be free such that persons are spontaneous free initiators of acts.

The point of citing the above passage is that it one candidate amongst many that pushes Scheler in a phenomenological direction. However, I wonder if the tone of phenomenology is accomplishing anything significant here. This worry manifests since I have recently written extensively of the phenomenology of essences in the Formalism for part of my dissertation. I see this type of phenomenology as vastly different from Heidegger's hermeneutic turn in sections 31 and 32 of Being and Time. Luther construes Scheler's phenomenology as a deep commitment to an irreducibility. At the beginning of the Essay, Luther provides a lengthy but very relevant passage,

What is unique about Scheler's phenomenological approach is that it constitutes an attitude of "openness towards...", which permits what is revealing itself to reveal itself as it is in itself. The significance of this approach, or attitude, is that the openness it cultivates excludes reductionism of any sort. It is an openness which is ready for revelation in its fullness. More specifically, the openness here is the implicit affirmation that what appears is precisely what it is (Wesen) and not something else, hence, cannot be reduced to something else. The approach is not so much determined by an applied methodology as it is by how what is appear is , in fact, appearing in the openness who is man. The effort, then, in Scheler's phenomenology is not to reduce something to something else, or to explain something away, or to demonstrate the proof of something , but to account for "everything" as it discloses itself in concrete experiencing...Phenomena are everywhere apparent, referring to one another, in a dynamism of appearing that indicates an inexhaustible richness of potential meaning-fulfillment. The problem becomes one of penetrating each phenomenon, each revelation as it is in itself, in order to lay bare  or let appear in some way that center or core or whole or totality which constitutes its essence (Wesen) or inner actuality (Wirklichkiet), without losing sight of the fact that each phenomenon is in relation to all other phenomena. The relational character of "appearing" is a priori. Man is man as a unique "place" of appearing; appearing here includes implicitly all that can appear, without determining in advance what will appear, with respect to the phenomenon itself or to the phenomenon as situated in the horizon or totality. In short, one is always encountering a whole, in and through perspectives, which either diminish or augment, occult or disclose the richness of that whole (Luther, Articulated, p. 4-5)

Before, you will note in the very opening, two words used by Luther. These are "revelation" and "fullness." Fullness for Luther is a way to communicate how the givenness of spirit and God are considered overflowing. A language of epistemological emphasis would talk about spirit and God as reified abstract representations,and could not account for the experiential elements of these two words. Yet, this brings up the fascinating point that if Luther along the way has tripped up Scheler. In the Formalism, Scheler makes references to God and the relationship between man, person, values and spirit. Yet, he does not present his talk about phenomenological method with the chosen religious tones with which Luther communicates it. Phenomena are apprehended as immediately given essences within intuition. If anything, the phenomenology of the Formalism is more akin to something like William Alston's religious epistemology than importing the theological emphasis with phenomenological tones.

Luther's talk about phenomenological description not succumbing to reductionism is a familiar point, especially considering the inauguration of phenomenological method in Husserl preoccupied itself with the erroneous tendency of psychologism. Psychologism proffered to reduce logical laws to descriptive psychological laws to the point that the normativity of logical laws could not suggest itself as a way we ought to reason. Instead, if we reasoned logically, it was because we were determined to do so since we had proper psychologies. Husserl's Logical Investigations is, then, a defense of the irreducibility of logical laws and how they are constituted within intentional consciousness. Husserl, like Luther, is consistently a good phenomenologist, and insofar as Scheler is a phenomenologist, he is attempting to describe phenomena as they appear to him. We do not presuppose anything about those phenomena, but let them appear as they will in experience. However, this also commits us to the possibility that if we are "too open" or in Luther's emphasis too "open towards" in attitude, then any phenomenon insofar as we have a word for it, or need to invent one, can appear for phenomenological investigation. This would be fine if we were nominalists like William James. However, Scheler has some very nasty things to say about ethical nominalism to the point that we can infer that he would be against any larger commitments to nominalism. By Luther exploiting that phenomenological openness in Scheler, it is very easy to sneak within that openness the very suppositions of a theological phenomenology without really being honest about it. It is, therefore, an open question whether or not all things can appear, nor should we be so naively open to the world such that simply because Scheler's phenomenological approach admits of irreducible phenomena  that we should admit God, spirit, persons and values tout court.

Certainly, God, spirit, persons and values have a central place in Scheler's thought. This cannot be ignored. However, is it really the case that phenomenology can admit these things and still remain phenomenological? Perhaps, I am echoing Dominique Janicaud's worry too much. If we honestly bracket all things about moral experience, it seems intelligible that we can phenomenological access to the givenness of value in emotive intuition. I can readily point to examples of those kind such as loving and preferring in Scheler's thought, and readily admit them as evidence. Yet, to point to something like spirit or God is another matter entirely. Scheler can freely admit a phenomenological conception of the person as the intentional unity of acts. Being a person manifests as being the locus of intentionality in a lived-body. These are things that we can also easily point to describe. However, to call spirit the interiority of our experience the sphere of actuality and one of several spheres in human experience is not a readily available phenomenological insight. These spheres are not irreducible phenomena, they are mediated. Our understanding of organic and inorganic being might be phenomenological at first, but to put these concepts in touch with each other in a system is to exploit the openness attitude and irreducibility criterion of phenomenological description. Calling them phenomenological is a ploy in authority; it is a trump card against skepticism and the natural attitude. In this way, phenomenology is always in danger. It can be too open and liberal with what it thinks is given, and shore up one's biases rather than disclose what is truly given.

I suggest a way out of this predicament. When Scheler talks about how man relates to God, perhaps he is simply doing that attempting to conceptualize man's relation to God. Given how Scheler later came to reject Catholicism, it was a very pressing philosophical inquiry for him. We need not presuppose that this inquiry must take a phenomenological orientation that grounds all other attempts. To push the phenomenological angle oversimplifies many of the issue that Scheler's very short lived life could not further develop. What we do have, however, is a dynamic thinker that regularly adopts new methods, addresses completely new and alien contexts, incorporates old ones, and synthesizes all of these elements with frustrating detail. As such, Scheler scholars may always be frustrated that Scheler is not given to easy systematization, but that is exactly why we like him. This is also where Luther went wrong.

Update

A colleague of mine has a new paper coming out in Transactions and has given some brief description about it here. He combines insights from Heidegger and Dewey in much of what he does. I'm looking forward to reading it.

I also apologize for not blogging in a while. I have done some more work on editing Chapter 1 and have been very busy trying to internalize Scheler. Part of my attention has been to see what phenomenological method means for both Heidegger and Scheler--a point you might have thought made its appearance before introducing the problem in Chapter 1. However, I found it more logically conducive to establish what the problem is I find in Heidegger's writings before elucidating differences between Heidegger and Scheler. Chapter 2 is an expository chapter about Scheler's thought---mostly from the Formalism about his phenomenological ethics. I will draw conclusions and more comparisons in Chapter 3. It is a very simple plan. Right?

I have found that writing this montrosity is an organic process. It is a process of developing and going back, and revising what you have done. There are loopholes in my writing and Scheler's thinking, places where Scheler simply asserts his thinking and I find myself picking up the pieces from what he has done. For instance, there is a good a section where Scheler starts meditating on the nature of moral facts. It is familiar. Like an old friend, I feel like I am in the presence of Ross and Moore.

I have found that the most challenging part of dissertation writing is attempting to assume who is your target audience. Certainly, my committee is filled with a whole bunch of people knowledgeable about phenomenology. They know the differences between hermeneutic and Scheler's phenomenology of essences. However, the general reader would not, and so I am writing the dissertation to a target audience between my committee and the general reader.

Sometimes, I feel shorn philosophically. I am entering debates that are much older than myself, and sometimes I am not too sure they need retrieved. I am fascinated with the limits of phenomenology, conducting a phenomenological description about lived-experience and engaging texts primarily without the mediation of secondary literature. To write on Heidegger and ethics is so 1990s. We'll see where the dissertation writing takes me.

Seminar Question: Phenomenological Immortality and the Lived-Body

I should say that I am having a blast in the Husserl seminar I'm auditing. With that said, today's seminar conversation really got me thinking.

Today, we read Section 24 in Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Appendix 8. Husserl concludes that the self-becoming of self-consitutions appears in experience without beginning or end. This can be called phenomenological immortality, and so it is not a conclusion about immortality as a property of the soul or endorsing anything metaphysical. It is simply a thesis about how the self is given before the self. I am given eternally as self-giving. I took issue with the fact that self-constitution is given in this way as phenomenologically immortal and consequently, I went the other direction of the whole seminar.

For me, to talk of self-givenness in this way reifies the process as it appears. There is no lived-body here. As I walked with the Professor of the seminar, I repeated my frustration and urged that the self-temporalization of becoming may appear to us as given as phenomenologically immortal fashion, but that doesn't remove the fact that self-temporalization takes place in a lived-body. It is the lived-body that also impinges and makes me aware of how I am given before myself. In this way, I urged that the constraints of the lived-body imply a phenomenological mortality.

The seminar ended with me conceding that I understood what Husserl had meant, but there is still a lingering suspicion that, like Descartes, we have reified the process of self-temporalization and implied the manner of givenness we think reveals itself as phenomenologically immortal. The Professor urged me that even if we conducted the same level of description at the level of the lived-body, we would arrive at the same conclusion. This leaves us with the question I wanted to quickly write it down here: Would phenomenological immortality of the givenness of self-constitution remain immortal if the same analysis described self-constitution of the lived-body?

Paper Proposal for Reasons and Rationality Conference

Title: TBA

To act on a reason is to accept a propositional formulation to what a reason is. However, I find this type of talk limiting for two reasons. First, the fact that language constructs its syntax in certain ways might be misleading to what it is to act on a reason, and secondly, when we engage in “propositionalizing” reason, we abstract the intention, maxim or reason for acting from its worldly concrete context. An agent is someone that can give oneself a reason, and the reasons are separated from the context that inspire them when we talk in such a fashion. These two problems stem largely from Kantian conceptions of agency and rationality that still persist to this day.

In this paper, it is not enough simply to put out the “obvious” flaws in Kantian conceptions of rationality and agency. A difference must be posed, and a substitute for reasons must be found. Therefore, I briefly sketch out my conception of agency and reasons based in part by rethinking Heidegger’s existential analysis as a substitute for what the Kantian position defends and reviving the affective intentionality of Scheler’s moral philosophy. This has two advantages, and one flaw.

First, reasons are not possibilities given to oneself by oneself. There is more depth in this experience than Kant permits. For Kant, self-legislation stems from the noumenal character of rationality. This puts the practical agent outside the concrete world, and this really cannot stand. There is a question as to how that possibility arose in the first place. It arises in the “historicity” and the world we are “thrown” into which we have no control. The historicity of self-understanding implies that there are limits to practical rationality.

Secondly, the noumenal character of the practical standpoint, the claim of impartiality of practical reason, cannot stand. This can be seen by defending the existential analysis of moods that both Scheler and Heidegger open up in their analysis and its consequences it would have for agency. An agent cannot maintain absolute neutrality with regard to the reasons it comes to possess.

However, Heidegger’s analysis of affectivity is blind to values that feature in experience, and this is the flaw that while Heidegger possesses the fact that our reasons are always “mooded.”[1] Heidegger does not see that emotions are the place where values can be found. For my point here, values are evaluative reasons for actions, and I intend the term in that respect.

Let me take stock of this paper proposal, and what has been exactly claimed so far. First, the Kantian articulation of reasons as “propositionalized” and self-legislated is misleading and causes two confusions. It promotes the falsely noumenal character of what it is to give oneself a reason such that rationality and agency stand outside history and context in which true action is exercised. Therefore, I propose two theses about rationality and agency that attempt to return agency and rationality to the concrete world of experience.

1. The Hermeneutic Limit of Reasons: For any reason R, R is a possibility that comes to an agent A through historical mediation to such an extent that A’s identification with the possibility cannot be extricated from A’s situated understanding.
2. The Affective Intentionality Condition: For any reason R, R is always based in a existential mood M such that R can never stand outside M.

The first thesis comes out of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time and is less problematic than the second. Thesis (2) comes in two varieties Heidegger’s and Scheler’s respective varieties. First, Heidegger does not associate affective intentionality with having a value correlate. Scheler’s position does construe value in this way, and so it is to him that we must turn on this point to reject Heidegger altogether for the second thesis. Taken together, these two insights are corrective measures against what the Kantian positions fails to articulate. The Kantian position fails to articulate a worldly concrete conception of rational agency.

            Now, the reviewer of this proposal will note two things. First, this paper exhibits no ambiguous language concerning what Heidegger’s position is (nor Scheler’s position for that matter), and secondly, I am arguing against the Kantian position itself, not any particular Kantian. Therefore, I am engaged in a logical dialectic with a commonly held position and some thematization of that position is made on my part here. My thematization is based on a severe dissatisfaction with many Kantians to sneak unrealistic powers of autonomy into their conception of what rational agency is to such an extent that they ignore the historical source of that bias in Kant—the noumenal character of the practical standpoint.

            The paper is organized into three parts. First, I will outline the exact nature and character of the noumenal conception of rational agency in Kant and the problems generated from that conception. In the second section, I will propose thesis (1) and defend it. In the third section, I will propose thesis (2) and show why Scheler’s conception of affective intentionality takes precedence over Heidegger’s conception.

           

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[1] This insight is the thesis of my dissertation on Heidegger and Scheler. 

Yeah Okay But Still Blog's Practical Reason Proposal, Part 1 and 2.

I find any moral philosopher that questions mainstream ethical theories refreshing. Somehow, I think, moral philosophy has to re-invent itself and its methods when it gets to the point that ethics conceptualizes matters to such an extent that it does not bare out in experience. Sometimes you can run across a traditional metaethics professor that has conceptualized issues to such an extent that experience does not relate to the concepts. However, this is rare.  For me, this was the only area in analytic philosophy in which something-like phenomenological description and lived-experience mattered to the subject.

Still, I have questioned Nick's proposal in Part 1 and 2 while still optimistic about its initial thrust. It's a proposal worth checking out. My comments are under Part 2.