Intuition Pumping on Meillassoux

I have been thinking about addressing Meillassoux's correlationism critique, and addressing the challenge specifically to phenomenology. Below are some links I've been reading on this, though no serious philosophical reflection can commence until I get several book reviews done.

This is the best blog post I can find on the subject.

Somehow, I think Meillassoux's want for a realism of the "ancestral realm" guilty of the natural attitude (this is my prima facie intuition about depictions of his arguments, the best being Cogburn's articulation). By my understanding, speculative realists want a realism from the perspective of objects beyond or independent of being given, or mediated. The point of phenomenological givenness is to keep in view the co-relational structure and the fact that subjectivity is an experience of our constituting acts and the constituted world. A wholly independent perspective from an impartial and impersonal viewpoint loses sight of subjectivity (Husserl's term for this perspective is the natural attitude) and as long as we want to start with how we experience the world, what would the impetus for metaphysics achieve in retrieving the sense of the philosophical view from nowhere that characterized Western thought prior to Kant? It seems proponents of SR are just reaching back for something lost. In this way, I do not think SR adds anything new to philosophy.

I'll have more to say on this in the near future perhaps.

I have yet to really penetrate Meillassoux, as I have been buying books on Scheler left and right so be patient with just my intuition pumping for now.

Of course, there are very naive and enthusiastic pronouncements of Meillassoux that uncritically denounce phenomenology.

Of all the papers on this topic, I think Paul Ennis' paper a good representation of reading Meillassoux. You can find that paper here. 

For now, I would like general discussion about what you might think about correlationism.

Hinduistic Conversion of Sudduth

To make a long story short, a well-known Calvinist Christian philosopher, Michael Sudduth has converted to a certain form of Hinduism, and the thinkers over at RealApologetics.org have it very wrong. Sudduth wrote a very long protracted defense of his conversion experience, reproduced here. Again, notice at Triablogue how Sudduth's very long an personal articulation is an example of "emotional immaturity." It sounded very coherent to me, but what I really want to address is RealApologetics.com. Jamin Hubner has made a very strange argument.

Put simply, he denounces the "impersonal method" of "Christian analytic philosophy." He does not define what he means by impersonal. However, on the about section, it seems consistent to say that analytic philosophy of religion is not proper. For anyone seeking "to do apologetics apart from a biblical basis simply do not meet the standards God has for His people." Implicit and consistent with this commitment is the thinking that moving past biblicism, a commitment to a literal inerrant reading of scripture is the only basis to think about God. The analytic philosopher doing philosophy of religion in terms of Plantinga or Craig is way off base. Thus it is a no-brainer in explaining Sudduth's conversion:

So, yeah, it’s not terribly surprising that a “Christian philosopher” can jump ship and give his life to Lord Krishna, given how disconnected “Christian philosophy” is these days from the very foundations of Christianity: theology. 

So the concealed move is an ad hominem in disguise of a rational point. Hubner has offered a ad hominem argument that took the form:

(1). Sudduth claimed Hinduism is an expression of his previous Christian faith and converted to Hinduism.

(2). Sudduth is not a theologian

(3). Therefore, Sudduth's claims about his own conversion are false (and therefore not a challenge for Protestant Christianity.

Sudduth's conversion and testimony reveal nothing as a challenge for Christian apologetics because Sudduth is not a real thinker about Christianity. If he were, he would be a theologian and then reflect on the demands of explicating faith. The starting point of Sudduth's conversion is a species of proceeding to adopt a position removed from theology. Now, this drives me bonkers. It's a bait and switch with our really addressing the issue. This type of rhetorical shit is passing off the self-affirming bias of a theologian as reason why we ought not to be surprised. Sudduth is not like us; he was never like us. He is a philosopher and not a theologian.

I think we are giving up too much by allowing philosophy to be somewhat autonomous and disconnected from its very roots: God and His Word. The fact is, there exists no true philosophy apart from true theology, as Bavinck, Van Til and others have asserted through and through. And so, whether we like it or not, there exists no true philosopher apart from a true theologian.

However, this does nothing to explain why we should not listen to Sudduth's conversion on rational grounds. Hubner never addresses Sudduth's letter on rational grounds. To do so, might be to use reason; instead, Hubner just pounds his fist table thumping like a pretentious child that someone disagrees with you about the nature of the world. Sudduth offered deeply personal reasons why his faith changed only to be rebuked in disrespectful ways. A proper philosophical treatment of Sudduth would have respected his point, attempted to re-create the reasons he displayed in his testimonial and then propose a reasoned defense and challenge Sudduth. However, this just displays Hubner's ignorance on what philosophy requires.

More than that, however, I want to protest against a certain type of evangelism that assumes biblical inerrancy and its literalism as a starting point. Those points are certainly key foundational points as to how Hubner proceeds and why he founded the website in the first place. Yet, these two positions are common in Protestant thought. They stem from the re-appropriation of Augustine's personal relationship with God. By re-appropriating that one may have a personal relationship with God, the Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize the authority of the Catholic Church. They challenged the longstanding authority of the Church. Thus, many Protestant churches put the burden of self-discovery and faith in the hands of soul-seeking individuals. Fast forward to Evangelical often non-denominational "Christian" places of worship, and you will find many Americans reading the Bible on their own, discovering God in Bible classes taught by a pastor (sometimes anointed by Church Elders as in Baptist churches with little or no training in religion), but putting the emphasis to grow and learn about Christ on their own. Yet, what these individuals do not do is read enough Augustine to know what defined that personal relationship.

If you read Book 1 of Augustine's Confessions you'll find that he was taught Latin and Greek by the grammarians begrudgingly. He had a stellar education for the day, and with respect to his ability to think, he was certainly a genius. Beyond that, the latter part of the Confessions offers thoughts about God and eternity which are not contained anywhere in the Bible. He reflected and thought through his faith while historically inventing theology. In the Protestant world, it's not as if Bessie and Mary are going to learn to read Attic Greek anytime soon at their huge megachurch, learn how to read the Bible in its original language nor study the tradition that informed Biblical understanding for the past 2000 years since Christ. In fact, if you accept Biblicism and inerrancy what you read is what you get. It's as if we can just lift insight straight from the text in English no less and we are removed from the burden to actually think through the requirements of faith much less the burden of interpretation and the history of past interpretations that unknowingly shape our conceptions. I think this is a process and belief that goes without questioning in Protestant circles and it is stupid. Even at first glance, a Reformed theology takes its cue from John Calvin, a person that assumed many things about the nature of reality without argumentation, like the doctrine of the Elect and predestination. These are beliefs that merit philosophical questioning.

So the theologian is left scrambling and this is very much the case with Hubner's comments. The theologian scrambles because Socrates and his followers are able to poke holes in the orthodoxy of tradition. As many philosophers know, tradition is not warrant or justification even though all theologians like to feign that authority or their own tradition is warrant enough. What philosophy does is push the envelop past where the faithful like to tread. God's eternity is a concept that demands reflection. It's not as if the Bible has any answers about the nature of reality; it does have passages that one can interpret as offering an explanation for reality in some ways. It's not as if the Bible offers self-evident moral truths about internet privacy laws. The Bible can be many things. It is a book written for a very popular audience, and some are incapable of reflecting past the point of comfortable naive literalism where the faithful do not read critically and question the revelation of truth--much to their own detriment. Their were Baptists that defended the right to own slaves in 19th century America, and there were Northern Baptists that felt it immoral. Religion can be co-opted by many forces and the want for a clear-cut and un-ambiguous reading experience of the Bible motivates Hubner belief that theology trumps/constrains philosophy. In truth, philosophy enriches the naiveté of this type of faith itself. Faith is not as simple as picking up a dropped coin. There is a deep background that informs us, even unknowingly to the purpose, context, history, language and associated meanings to any claim we might make. Now, if this sounds like phenomenological hermeneutics, then good. It should. Even plain hermeneutics matters, however. Anyone can claim the simple neutrality of the Bible, but interpretation is anything but neutral.

In this post, I have explained what I believe may motivate the calling out of Christian philosophers as non-theologians. Despite the fallacious reasoning of the earlier ad hominem, I have sought to explain why I think Hubner thinks it is enough to say that Sudduth is not a theologian. In other words, (2) has no bearing on whether or not we should accept (1) as true. Even then, there are implicit assumptions that motivate Hubner. Hopefully, I have given the reader some context as to why interpretation matters reflecting on the very pre-understanding of the non-denominational Christian inspired by the Protestant move to re-appropriate Augustine's personal relationship with God. This re-appropriation is naive in identifying Augustine with any democratized attempt to know the Bible only in English since nobody in the democratized sense had such a command to make sense of the Bible in the original language. Such efforts have attempted to be like the New Critics in English literature that argued for a text-centered-only approach. Such naiveté clearly gives evidence to the wrongheaded notion that tradition does not matter and that our understanding of scripture can be simply be lifted off the page due to the text's inerrancy as revealed religious scripture. Even if we concede the special class of revealed truth to the Bible, the communicability in language and the subsequent unavoidability of interpretation leads me to think that the text-centered-only approach -- which is also the reason why impersonalized reflection of analytic Christian philosophy of religion is criticized in the first place -- expresses the desire of non-denominational Christians to leave their faith purposefully unchallenged. While leaving a faith unchallenged and dismissing philosophy not rooted in the Bible may be convenient, it adds nothing to the fact that such naiveté leaves many philosophical questions unanswered about faith, and philosophy exposes these unrefined elements much to the chagrin of those that pretend otherwise.

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day, there is a narrative of sacrifice of honor; we remember veterans. We extol those who are living and remember the dead. This takes place in a larger narrative that accepts the fact that the United States has gone to war, attempted -- if not succeeded -- in achieving its ends, and internalized the cost of that war for ourselves. Memorial Day never measures the cost of war to those we fought, the civilian populations we have killed and the fact that by fighting wars we are made more unsafe. 

We are more free. This is the constant adage to which our whole society accepts, like a doctor prescribing what we really need and we are not in any place to question the doctor, let alone the narrative. This narrative takes hold because so many of our relatives, friends and family have lost someone in those past conflicts. To question the immorality of war, its happening, undermines the individual who fights in that war since the individual narrative is a product of the larger narrative. This narrative pacifies the acceptance  of loss; makes it memorable. We toss flowers around, parade and have barbecues in solidarity. We transform loss into the continuation of the necessity that those deaths paid for my freedom may come again in a later generation. 

I am somehow more free than I would have been if a war did not happen. Perhaps, this is slightly true. With the United States asserting its geopolitical influence through the threat of force, we cause others to back down, and create and foster an illusion of our dominance. This is only a partial freedom. It is an assertive will-to-power. It must continually feed itself to sustain that dominance, and that's where we are partially unfree. We cannot accept losing that position in the world and feed it. In this way, we suffer at the hands of our own delusion. America the delusion. 

Dissertation Ruminations

I have been away for a while. Dissertating is not done by a long shot, but I have concluded the last mega-chapter, and I am rethinking its organization. I am going through the motions of writing an introduction that unites all three facets into one whole. On the most basic level, my dissertation is on the ontology of value, and I address that problem through Scheler's work. This has led me to a form of realism I like to call participatory realism. Let me describe my ruminations in no particular order.

First, the use of the world "agents" or "agency" in ethics does not sit well with me. Ethics is about persons, and Scheler's work allows me to restore the proper object of ethical study. Agency is paired with accident in the 16th century, and an accident is a contingent reactive being whereas agency is self-causing, self-moving. This dichotomy rips asunder the necessary and sufficient condition of personhood in general and often articulated without a body. Intentionality is the fundamental requirement for being a person.

Secondly, given a phenomenological interpretation, persons are that which orientate themselves in a particular act moralization, and participatory indicates that the self participates in the ontological reality of life-as-experienced (the intentional relation) such that the essence of a particular act (fearing, judging, valuing, perceiving) discloses the content of an experience. This content forms the basis of what it is to experience the world more generally against those attempts that abstract from this content and substitute an unexperienced, untrue formulation. This happens in all other forms of anti-realism and realism in ethics.

In Scheler, the particular act moralization that discloses values as objective is love. Love is a being-in-an-act that tends towards higher forms of spiritualization, and love can muster its own phenomenological evidence in this regard. Against other acts, love takes an object, but it allows the object so related to come to fruition as itself. It does not reshape or remake some sense of the Other into an image it would have of itself. Moreover, it is not an imposition of admiration from outside. Instead, love is an allowance for the uniqueness of the loved one to come into being as they are. It is acceptance of difference, individualization. In this way, love is the only way that community can be possible, and how we understand love as one way in which the person relates to the larger whole reflects the very possibility of community.

There are many that are skeptical about the promise of phenomenology. However, in the hands of an applied phenomenology like Scheler, phenomenology is a tool to discern the structures of experience. It does not matter if these structures of experience persist independently of our participation. That's the wrong-headed feature of any realism. Such realisms seek intelligibility in things that stand independent of us when in truth structures of experience require a renewal, a re-constitution in the affirmation of them in their very realization. The very possibility of phenomenology rests on the truth that it is not just individual intentionality, but an intersubjective element of experience that constantly re-constitutes the possibility of a sense to which we all can experience.

Dissertating

I find myself loving the process of writing a dissertation. Tentatively, I am entitling my dissertation Scheler's Phenomenological Ontology of Value. It is a twofold task of problematizing the ontological indeterminacy about value that plagues the Formalism in Ethics, and at the same time analyzing Scheler's being-in-an-act in his other works to formulate an answer to the question of value ontology. Scheler's works are intriguing, and they highlight my own philosophical journey in some striking ways. Years ago, I applied to SIUC to attempt to articulate a moral phenomenology, but knew nothing of Scheler's works. I thought this would entail reading the C-Manuscript by Husserl, and write on intersubjectivity. I wanted to fuse my inclinations of non-naturalism found in Ross, Moore and Prichard to phenomenology. At Southern, I have been given complete freedom to pursue this task and probably more so given how pluralistic our department is. This involves partial journeys through Heidegger, Ayer, Stevenson and very possibly Hume and James (maybe Roderick Chisholm on realism since he translated Brentano's ethical work).

My dissertation develops an account of Scheler's phenomenology of value called ontological participatory realism. I have not yet formulated the position of OPR, but if I were to characterize tentatively now, I'd phrase it in the following way:

OPR: the ontology of value V is given insofar as person P participates properly through a loving orientation such that the P complies with axiological preferring inherent in the context in which V is given to P and P acts to realize higher forms of V based in a loving orientation.

What is the Purpose of Political Philosophy?

I have always been attracted to thinking through the issues in value theory. My entire dissertation is on a phenomenological account of values, and while I do not practice intense reflection on politics in either Marxist, Rawlsian or Habermasian theory, I bask in its sun every now and again. However, I found some recent philosophers so radicalized that they questioned every premise I used. My objections to their argument fell on deaf ears. That wasn't the surprising feature of the conversation. I could not enter the discourse since I had not been radicalized enough. I failed to have uber-leftist street cred. I am a self-confessed Neo-Aristotelian when it comes to most matters in value theory, but I have never made up my mind on exactly what political philosophy is, its questions and what the proper formation of the polity should be. I do not even begin to wonder what a Neo-Aristotelian approach might be in political philosophy other than thinking that institutions possess the virtue of justice, let alone if the table of constitutions even applies from Aristotle's Politics. We'll leave that for another time.

A recent conversation with two colleagues in my department resulted in a fantastic realization. I am not radical enough. We were discussing the legitimacy of the state and the role prisons play in American society. Prison populations are incongruent in terms of race, economic power and educational level just to name a few. We could agree on the saliency of the moral facts about whom is in prison, and what the social iniquities are. Philosopher A advocated the complete abolition of prisons due to some Foucaultian critique of power and anarchist commitments. Philosopher B advocated a virulent Marxism or critical theory approach to the analysis that I could not quite follow. Admittedly, the view was a bit garbled. One of the claims made by A: state power is strongest when you are not under surveillance, that is, when you feel like you are not being watched but act in a manner as if you were being under surveillance. I broached some skepticism on this point. I simply asked what if this notion of power is more due to the fact that others take moral considerations seriously and defined morality as the set of impartial constraints we learn from upbringing and practice...

Now, I already anticipated the objection to my response. Philosopher A would say something like the internalization of moral constraints is not strictly impartial. That's all I got. I did not get that there is some dynamic of power that Aristotelian upbringing and focus on practice cannot encapsulate, and what that dynamic notion of power is, how it operates and most importantly how that view challenges my objection. Foucault has a lot to say about how power works in local contexts, and since I am no expert, I wanted to hear about it. I did more philosophical work in my head than the dismissive attitude about my objection---this is the strong point I want to make. Philosophers work by scrutinizing each other. The moment we stop "testing" our conceptions against other views that attempt undermine our own, the moment we stop having the intellectual humility to search out which political conception, critique and theory should be true is the moment we stop doing political philosophy altogether. We abandon what it is to be philosophical. 

Now, my sample is small and anecdotal. It should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I have talked to many people not only at my department but at conferences too. Most of these exchanges, however, have been the expression of consistent ideology. Consistent ideology is when the young philosopher learns to employ a set of concepts and concerns within a school of thought. However, this is minimal work inasmuch as young philosophers learn to speak Quinean about epistemology and metaphysics or Heideggerian about questioning modernity. We can all speak our specialties, and political philosophers are no different. However, the point of philosophy is to preserve the living-presence of these concepts. The moment these concepts become calcified is the moment we stop questioning them.

I am not advocating that someone cannot be a Rawlsian or any other such label. However, I am questioning that thinking stops with being a convinced this or that philosophy--the moment that happens is the moment philosophy becomes ideology. I suspect such a move from disciplines that do not engage in systematic argumentation about central commitments or core beliefs. I anticipate the English literary theorist who does not attempt to undermine the logical possibility of her appropriation of Foucault for the purposes of interpreting a text or the political theorist that appropriates Habermas. The appropriation is often ideological, and the scholarship of said philosopher is lacking (and decent exposition of central texts). For them, it is in the act of appropriating the theory we conceive and evaluate that matters. This is why the analogy of the philosopher to the theoretical physicist has some weight. I do theory and engage in theorizing so that others do not have to theorize just as much as the theoretical physicist does theory so that the experimentalists can carry on. The employment of these concepts outside their philosophical domain requires the fact that I test them out.

Given the fact that the qualitative questions philosophers address and the fact that philosophical questions are indefinite, these questions could be asked and reflected interminably. Therefore, it becomes incumbent upon us to arrive at answers and put them into logical form. The logical form of an argument provides normative ways we can all agree on in order to reflect on these questions. In addition, the form arguments take need not reflect solely the influence of argumento-centricism and its tendency to logocentrism. Any number of Continental authors can be read as having intelligent points, critiques and arguments. The point, however, is to at least strive for consistency.

So let me return to my experience. A and B are solidly convinced of their belief structure and in their inability to put that belief structure into tension with others, they are advocating an ideology. This relies on a distinction between philosophy and ideology, and this is what I have argued so far. Philosophy relies on the engagement with opposing viewpoints to brush up and test one's own conclusions. Ideology is the mere acceptance and eventual self-validating profusion of one's own commitments whether it be rightist libertarianism or leftist Marxism. This is what it means to be radical. Being-radicalized is a function of ideology, not the other way around.

Yet, there is the original question: what is the purpose of political philosophy?

At this point, I couldn't really answer the question. I think it is vastly more complicated than it was at the time of Rawls. In my experience, no one asks the foundational questions of this line of inquiry. The recent debt crisis and post-2008 recession has conjured new life in the critiques traditionally offered from the left about capitalism, and in equal measure the conservative justification of the neoliberal order. Moreover, it has caused an awareness and stretch of economics for other social sciences. I cannot anticipate where this will lead, but if there is any wisdom to what I've written, then let it be simple. Try to abandon ideology, and I'll always question the argument you're developing. That's why I became a philosopher, and I would hope that's why you'll question my questioning of your argument.

A Re-Enchanted Nature

Crisis. All philosophy is a response to it. Over at Larval Subjects, there is some disenchantment about environmental thought in general. It exhibits a lack of efficaciousness the author desires in political and cultural change about the environment. The solution, it would seem, is to accelerate the environmental degradation to the point that  the intertwined "government and industry" are therefore forced to change.

Now, this is the issue. We've messed things up so bad that we're having a global impact currently. Pick your poison; it doesn't have to be global warming. It could be deforestation, or ocean toxicity.

In the thread below, Mr. Bryant does wish for a proportionate response to what needs done. I concur. However, I wonder what this amounts to is the worry of another blogger that we use a market-driven solutions to fight back. Likely, Bryant's worry is that no response will be forthcoming proportionate enough if we don't do something quickly. Consumerism and capitalism are the two mechanisms through which we can effect change now, and consequently, the very mechanisms at root of environmental degradation. Therefore, let's use them.

No offense, but this sounds like saying to someone with skin cancer that they should bathe in the tanning booth a little longer. In seeking to abandon a sacredness to nature, we wind up removing all the ways that human beings esteem nature, celebrate it and revere it simultaneously. We forget that religious-spiritual orientation to the world has an impact, and sometimes for the better. Human beings seem to require a tradition that socializes and habituates a lot of their responses to crisis, and as such, we should attempt to re-weave the sacredness of nature back into our traditional spaces of meaning and spirituality. When Adam is asked to name all the animals that come before him, he is not naming to dominate them as the Protestant line often indicates. Far from it, he is participating in the creation of their essence through God's love. His participatory part in this creative process should be a hallmark of a tradition that celebrates God's majesty and likewise cultivates stewardship. Humankind is integral into this unfolding teleology of nature.

We fear this teleology of nature since it flies in the face of everything that is still modern in the philosophical sense. Ever since modernity, nature has been repeatedly disenchanted to the point that it is only a series of events happening in space-time. There is no higher notion of causality; there is no more pre-established harmony, or higher notion of form above the interconnected linkages of efficient causality. There is no final end to which all things aspire. There is only the process. Nature resembles one big clock. William Paley's 1757 argument from design is not a metaphysical argument as much as it is a reflective metaphor for a disenchanted nature yet to be thoroughly disenchanted. It gives us the idea that God designed nature, but stood apart from it as the watchmaker does his watch. After the watch works, there is no longer any reason to hold it sacred. The watch is meant to be sold in the store just as Locke's conception of nature is to infinitely supply the body with things to labor upon.

Of course, this might seem strange given how atheistic or secular philosophy can be. Indeed. However, I cannot help but notice the desire to dominate nature even through our most spiritually reverent traditions requires us to think of events as mechanistic processes. In the face of this, philosophers have tried to create an environmental ethics based on nature possessing a non-instrumental intrinsic value, a perverted Kantianism in some way. They attempt to give life a value within it. This is not taken hold of people's imagination since value integrated into life creates the anti-mechanistic rejection that haunts even Mr. Bryant's reflection. Mr. Bryant calls for the mechanistic processes to come to a crescendo that will automatically call for change. That crescendo, however, may come at too high a price that we do not want to pay, yet we need a proportionate response. One way to express that proportionate response is to overcome the cultural milieu in which such proportion is required. This is nothing more than rethinking nature as the self-sufficient physical system of cause and effect relations into that which has an end that outstrips even our knowledge of it. We must remake nature into something sacred.

Sacred spaces are inviolable. As long as lobbyists/industry/politicians can conceive of nature as something to harnessed or modified, then the problem will persist. The problem persists since there are very few sacred spaces left to us. Sacred natural spaces are the thing of pulling off the interstate or going camping into a state or federal park. At such a time, natural spaces have value on in that they provide a temporary escape. However, if we can re-enchant nature, and I am by no means suggesting there is one clear way to do this, then nature can be saved, preserved and cared for. This does require that we adopt a teleological principle hidden within how we conceive of nature. Like the Kantian idea of a suprasensible noumenal realm, a re-enchanted nature will be subsumed by threads of cultural mystification and unscientific theology. Yet, these threads of subsumption can affect people and help them reconceive of the necessity for action. Human beings must be re-integrated into the natural unfolding of nature. The process of mechanistic alienation starts with re-appropriating process language and instilling into it the purposes of harmony we so desperately need.

In Schelerian terms, we attempt to pull down higher values down to the level of either the useful, or pleasurable. We make nature into a consumable good so as to consume it for pleasure as immediately as it was manufactured. This also means we are not making anything durable or lasting to which civilization requires. As Hannah Arendt learned from the Romans, to work is to create a world of durable goods that outlasts even one's life such that there will be a durable world for our posterity whereas a world of labor creates goods as quickly as they are consumed. There is nothing to last in a world of complete labor and alienation from nature. The point is to re-instill humankind's participatory process within nature as one in which will have a long-lasting effect on its vitality, health and growth. At minimum, this requires a spiritual orientation that one finds often commonly shared with an ethical orientation (despite Kierkegaard's thoughtful separation of the two).

Mr. Bryant and company cannot exclaim shock that we continue to transgress against nature while at the same time denying to nature its near divinity/value that makes our knowledge of that transgression possible. We can conceive the world of hurt we are dishing out. The problem is that we continually create walls of justification that conceive the separation of our being from the world apart. Giving into Mr Bryant's accelerationism does not seem wise. It would only perpetuate this forced division between humankind and nature, and that's the very cause as to why nature is so thoroughly exploited; a point Mr. Bryant should have the philosophical acumen to anticipate, but doesn't.

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.