Nur für Verrückte

I thought it would be a good idea to really get a handle on why I’m here – not that I haven’t known what my goals are all the while, just that I had never sat down and wrote them out. It also seems to make it more official or binding when they are published on a blog – as if public humiliation would be the consequence of not drawing a line through an item.

1. Write a dissertation that interests me and that lives up to the standards of my mentor.

2. Learn French. It would be a shame to not be able to read some of my favorite French authors in French by the time I leave here. Yeah, I know I’m in Germany but because of my location I think I have a much better chance of learning French here than in California (especially since most if not all French courses in CA are offered at Universities – i.e.; no Goethe Institute).

3. Learn Latin. This is a STATE requirement. No not a University requirement but a requirement that hails from the very state I live in. Their expectations from an educated person includes knowledge of Latin. I’ve taken this on as a personal challenge… If I can translate Latin into German then I would be pretty confident that I could do almost anything (swimming to the moon comes to mind). Passing one language proficiency test per year would be amazing.

4. Immerse myself in German culture. Now that I’m no longer here as a short-timer my orientation to every-day life has changed. I’ve begun to notice the different degrees in which different foreigners acclimate themselves to Germany. Some continue to speak their own language, eat the same food that they ate in their home country, dress the same as always, etc, etc. Some try to blend in with the crowd. I think it makes it easier to live in a foreign land if you do and act like the people who grew up there. You don’t have to become them – but the food isn’t that bad, German clothes aren’t that bad, the German language isn’t unsavory and most Germans don’t bite – so why not follow the leader for the time being?

5. Be able to freely translate German philosophy into English. By “freely” I mean opening a random philosophy book and, by looking at the German text, be able to give an immediate English translation (no dictionaries!). It is more difficult than it might sound but it would be embarrassing if I couldn’t do it after spending a couple years of reading German philosophy.

More to come later – I need to sleep so I can wake up early and do some serious archeology (with furled eyebrows).

Here is a perfect example of the sometimes counter-productive nature of rule following – in this example the rule to be followed is one that leads to an idea of an educated person. I had to drop my French class because of the overwhelming impossibility of dedicating time to my dissertation, working, learning Latin and French. French was booted out of this line-up because I am required to learn Latin (and not French), as a step to becoming an educated person. Not that I have anything against Latin or that I wouldn’t have wanted to learn it (at least to some degree) at some point in my education it is just that I find it hard to pinpoint the utility the language has in the work I’m doing.

The amount of work being done in philosophy in the French language compared to that done in Latin is umm, yeah, much more impressive. I still have, however, a lot of time left in Europe to learn the French language – I just wanted to start now, you know?

My introduction to the French language will have to wait until next year.

In introductory courses in Philosophy Professors struggle to define “philosophy” for the students during the first week of instruction. The explanation I received was the standard explanation – one that breaks down the word “philosophy” into its original Greek parts… philia and sophia. Philia is translated as “love” while sophia is translated as “knowledge”, slap them together and you have “love of knowledge” – the perfect cereal box definition of philosophy. Being so vague in describing philosophy is useful for many reasons, the biggest of which is that philosophy is an incredibly difficult subject area to define. It is hard to define the goals of philosophy when these goals themselves are being repeatedly undermined by philosophers.

During my reading today I came across a quote from The Will to Power that Löwith uses in one of his numerous essays on Nietzsche. I didn’t start thinking about it until I was on the bus going home.

“What is the first and last thing a philosopher demands of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become ‘timeless.’”F.N.

What is philosophy? The attempt to overcome the knowledge of the age? Sounds very lofty. Very few philosophers became “untimely” and revolutionized thought but that does not stop thousands of philosophers around the world from trying. Working with students of archeology I sometimes get jealous of the systematic nature of their subject. Clear defined goals and clear defined ways of getting there. Where should I dig for my knowledge?

Philosophers try and change the way people think. I suppose that is the secret desire. Saying that, however, is too embarrassing – so I guess sticking with the cereal box definition is enough for now, lest we be laughed at by students in introductory courses.

I forgot how busy I am during the week – hence the delay.

I’m kind of embarrassed about the content at the end of the last post – “philosophers as storytellers”. Not that I don’t think it is an adequate description, it just betrays a level of sentimentality that one shouldn’t reveal when attempting to be taken seriously. Getting excited about philosophy can be dangerous – like running into a new forest, inhaling new experiences and then wanting to describe them coherently to a group of friends. How do you start? Without going about it methodically (i.e.; types of trees, types of colors, origin of the odors, noises, etc.) it is extremely difficult to make cogent sense of this forest experience. Being excited means wanting to explain it as a whole, as an experience not of the particular elements but of them smashed together. The explanation of this smashed together experience might sound like this: “it’s breathtaking!”, “it’s soothing”, “calming”, “the most gnarly sensory overload!” Not that I don’t think that these are adequate descriptions, they just betray a level of sentimentality that one shouldn’t reveal when trying to be understood by a group of friends. Alone, the exclamations themselves don’t help give a sense of what really was going on. Claiming that philosophy tells the “human story” is to shout out the first thing that comes to mind in an attempt to lump different impressions into one expression.

In Germany I can’t seem to open a philosophy book or sit in on a lecture without either hearing about Hegel or hearing Hegel’s philosophy in what is being discussed. It is more or less accepted that Hegel revolutionized the way we think – a point that isn’t easily understood after hearing it only for the first or second time. The way we think just seems to be the way we think, thinking about others ways to think is not the easiest to do. Hegel gets credited for endowing us with a historical consciousness. My study buddy, Löwith, remarks in his critique of Nietzsche that the Greeks thought of time in a cyclical manner (which he relates to Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same) as opposed to post-Hegelians who think of history in a linear manner. Thinking of history linearly leads one to think of a telos (or goal) of history or to thinking of history as progressive. The French Revolution was such a fascinating event for 19th Century philosophers because they saw it as an event that served the progress of history. Therein hides two ideas that supposedly arrived with German idealism – that one can serve history and that history is progressive.

When Rorty tells Harrison (in the interview I mentioned last post) that to decide between the reformists and the revolutionaries is to decide based on what you want for the future the first thing that came to mind was Hegel (whispy hair, large turned down nose and all). Like the French Revolution was seen (and is seen) to serve history we are told by major contemporary philosophers to choose philosophical allegiance based on how we think it will promote a history of our liking. Where does that leave the queitists and the naturalists (the other two trends in analytic philosophy that Rorty names)? The naturalists’ idea of history is that it servs “truth” as they see their knowledge as being based upon and superior to all prior knowledge – that their work should be to help knowledge move along this path of progress. The queitists are there to make fun of the naturalists by referencing Wittgenstein.

The reformers and revolutionaries don’t accept this notion of “the progress towards truth” and have differing modes of historical thought that motivates their writing. The reformers are utopia builders whose wish it is to “maximize happiness” – this is historical because it struggles to build an ethic and politic that will lead to such a society. The revolutionaries see the history of men and women as the history of self-alienated beings and it is their goal to free men and women from that which binds them. I think this is why the philosophies of the so-called revolutionaries appears to me to be more human. Although the reformers are more concerned about well-being, they talk and philosophize about ideals, not humans per se. Philosophy books from the “revolutionaries” are dialogues with the individual reader – individual challenges in intellectual and personal honesty.

So what is telling a “human story”? I think it is telling the story of our historical position (something which is possible thanks to German idealism), I think it is a challenge to individuals to analyze their lives and it is a constant critique of those forces which constantly invade our lives (the political, the social, technology, etc, etc).

Well, that’s the best I can do right now in attempting to be a little more specific than shouting “it’s the most gnarly sensory overload!”

Returning to Rorty’s distinctions -

I don’t want to go through Rorty’s distinctions thoroughly and question whether or not these categories of contemporary philosophy are accurate. I think it is safe to trust Rorty that these different trends exist, I think sitting a philosopher under these titles is also a helpful tool for understanding different philosophical debates. In my own, still very “young”, impressions of philosophy I want to agree wholeheartedly with Rorty and where he places certain philosophers under the titles of certain trends. I want to have a discussion in this post with myself about my philosophical interests using Rorty’s grid as a background for placing otherwise stray thoughts and confusions. This will most likely mean, however, that this post will not be interesting to the general random person who finds this blog – or to the person who doesn’t give a hoot about what I want to do in philosophy (a most understandable position!).

I liked Rorty’s book Consequences of Pragmatism so much because he explains and exercises what he, in the Stanford interview from 2005, describes as quietist philosophy. The strains in analytic philosophy that I’m drawn to are those strains that attempt to dissolve philosophical problems, “problems” that are given weight and importance by naturalist philosophers. Reading these attempts at “dissolving” philosophy (Wittgenstein and Quine / “web of ideas” comes to mind) is reading an attempt to stop philosophers from treating philosophy as a science. Without giving an (inevitably inadequate) account of what treating philosophy as a science tries to accomplish and why I dislike it I will simply orient myself with the quietists against the naturalists. For me there is nothing more frustrating than having to study logics or a “metaphysics” of language – items that seem to be on the plate of analytic naturalist philosophers. Placing myself comfortably here, in bed with the quietists, however, isn’t something that took much thought. I have always had a deep suspicion of this kind of philosophy and if it were the only kind of philosophy that existed I would not be studying philosophy at all. What is more interesting for me is the distinction Rorty makes within the continental philosophers.

Reformers and Revolutionaries. I can be sympathetic to Rorty’s treatment of Dewey and also find merit in his conclusions regarding the social well-being of societies. I get turned off when Rorty (in the interview and most likely elsewhere as well) talks about the grandeur of western civilization. He is not willing to say that the kind of society we have in the West (he has the US in mind but includes Europe as well) is the best there could possibly be. He says only, that this society is the best there has been so far. When asked about capitalism his response is similar – that it is the worst economic system ever developed except for all the others that have ever been tried. With this attitude of “it isn’t perfect but it’s the best we have” comes the conclusion that (like I said in my last post) the world should be more like America and America more like Norway. The destruction of smaller civilizations / traditions is inconsequent compared to the benefits of adopting a society like the one to be found in the US. This is in contrast to philosophers who have many negative things to say concerning American society – Zizek and Agamben being two of the “revolutionaries” that he names.

Rorty is then a quietist reformer. It sounds boring. A quietist reformer? Yaaawn… During the interview he was asked what shape philosophy should take, he doesn’t have an answer. When being pressed by Professor Harrison that perhaps the task of the philosopher is a more social one Rorty only responds, no – that task is too large. Asking Rorty about the future of philosophy is like asking Nietzsche about the future of theology – there just isn’t any and thankfully so. Having experienced my own nihilistic confrontation (sounds grand and existential, doesn’t it?) with philosophy this attitude of “there is no future of philosophy” is a little worrisome. The books I own are definitely those of the revolutionaries and I don’t (after consideration) mind being a critic of the best society humans have ever made – even if it makes me the spoiled crying child with all the money and leisure one can desire. Isn’t that what Foucault did? Even though he lived very comfortably in Parisian society he was not stopped from criticizing hidden suppressive elements and exposing power struggles taking place around his fancy apartment (not that I know anything about his living conditions in Paris so I’m just assuming that, as a famous professor who could pack two lecture halls while giving only one lecture(!), he made a comfortable wage).

And when I listen to or read philosophers like Zizek, I find something more appealing than just “revolutionary” statements that criticize Bush, the US or western life in general. These people are story tellers – Zizek accused himself last week of not being able to think outside of examples or metaphors. The story they are telling is (I know it’s cheesy) the human story. To put my simple twist on things – There is a kind of Marxist assumption in the thought of the revolutionaries that man/woman is self-alienated. Unlike Marx this alienation is not only related to production but is also tied to political systems, economic systems and societies in general (e.g.; capitalism and materialism as self-alienating). The goal of the revolutionaries is to tell the story about how man/woman is self-alienated and about how certain living conditions alienate individuals from themselves. This is the philosophical problem that I think so many people can relate to that is discussed by philosophers like Zizek. That’s just my impression.

I want to become a story teller and the person living comfortably abroad who complains about hidden suppressive elements in the world. I think the revolutionaries have a much more attractive position because, even if this is the greatest society the world has known, it still needs philosophers yelling at it to become better.

This post isn’t complete but I’ve already spent more than a reasonable amount of time writing so I guess there will be a part three tomorrow or the next day. I’m not done thinking about (or writing about) philosophers as story tellers so it would be best to continue the thought later. (Sorry that there are no distracting pictures, I need to be studying!)

Before I start ranting I want to recommend to anyone who finds this blog to check out the fabulously free educational resources Stanford University has for your consumption. One of these resources that I have been fervently consuming this weekend is the Entitled Opinions radio show by Professor of Italian Literature Robert Harrison – search through the archives on the left hand side and you can listen / download some pretty interesting interviews / conversations. If you have Itunes his show and other talks hosted by Stanford can easily be found by doing a quick search.

I listened to Professor Harrison’s interview of the late American Philosopher Richard Rorty twice. I casually listened to it for the first time last night and decided that it was worth listening to a second time today – this time while taking notes. One of the nice things Rorty does in this interview is categorize contemporary philosophy into four neat “approaches” or affiliations.

He starts off by describing the origins of Analytic Philosophy as an attempt to show that the enterprise of metaphysics was an impossible one – that we are unable to say something True about the world. He goes on to say that these philosophers got “bored” of this attack and decided that they too wanted to make universal claims about the world. Here we are given the two schisms within analytic philosophy: the quietists , or those who want to dissolve philosophical “problems” and show them as nothing more than conceptual confusions and the naturalists, or those philosophers who have returned to a core set up problems in philosophy and see their task as solving these problems.

Rorty describes himself as a quietist and further explains his position with the following clarifications: “there is no such thing as a nature of the world”, “real only has a sense when it is applied to something specific,” “metaphysics is a game without rules”. An example of applying a sense to real through something specific he gives is that of dairy creamer or non-dairy creamer. We have rules that let us determine whether or not the creamer in front of us is dairy or non-dairy – the same thing cannot be done, however, with questions of the world. I share his fear of metaphysics because, as he says, there is no real way to argue against statements that the world is “spirit”, “will to power”, etc. If we want to know the nature of metaphysical terms (calling them such will surely make some people suspicious) such as “Mind”, “God” and “Matter” all that we need to do is learn the history of discourses in which these terms were used. When these discourses or stories are told, everything about the “nature” of “Mind” (as an example) is discovered as “all there is to know is how the words are used.” (If you are actually interested in listening to this interview yourself the current discussion occurs in the 25th minute).

According to Rorty, the problems that the naturalists are fascinated with go out of style within a generation. That they produce a body of literature that is forgotten within 10 to 20 years – thus implying the futility of their efforts and the banality of their subjects.

The next two approaches Rorty places under the Historicist or Continental philosophical Tradition. On the one hand there are the reformers such as Mill, Dewey, Habermas and Berlin. The reformers are convinced that since the French Revolution humans have figured out how life ought to be lived – namely, as much individual freedom as possible under a system that is as democratic as possible. Rorty takes Mill’s book, On Liberty to be the exemplar of such thought.

Rorty names the second branch within Continental Philosophy the revolutionaries and the branch is led by philosophers like Žižek, Agamben and Foucault (Professor Harrison adds Nietzsche and Heidegger to this list with Rorty’s approval). These philosophers think that there is something radically wrong with this attempt to create a utopia on earth (one that the reformers would support), that there is something radically wrong with bourgeois liberalism, modernity and secular society. They think that the “progress” that is accepted by the reformers is nothing more than a form of domination or suppression.

The reformers are contrasted to the revolutionaries via Nietzsche’s conception of the “last man” which Rorty describes as a man without an idea of greatness, who has his “pleasures in the morning and his pleasures in the evening” (i.e.; they are small, fleeting pleasures). The reformers have no problem with this picture and are much happier to busy themselves with maximizing happiness (the utilitarian dictum) than ideas of greatness. The picture of the “last man” is an ignoble one for the revolutionaries which is capsulized by the famous quote from Nietzsche – (which I can’t remember word for word) that man doesn’t live for happiness, just the English (supposedly talking about Mill) and women (supposedly referring to Nietzsche’s awkwardly inadequate view of women). The way to choose sides between these two “camps” is to ask yourself what kind of future you want for humanity. The answer will help you be pulled either towards Dewey or towards Nietzsche… I suppose an answer has to choose between ideas of greatness and ideas of generalized happiness.

Rorty calls himself a quietest and a reformer and shows his support for the success of the US with the statement: “the best we can hope for is a globalization of the kind of society we’ve created in the modern west” (35th minute). And that America needs to be more like Norway (welfare state) and the world more like America.

I think I want to take another night to sit on these ideas before I try and write what I think of the content of this interview. I hope this synopsis will suffice until tomorrow. (Don’t forget to click on the cows – it IS a thumbnail!)

The most useful critique I have ever received on paper was only three letters long (although as an abbreviation). This critique also happened to be a favorite of the professor to hand out to her students. sfw? I received my paper without a grade, only “sfw?” written on the top – the professor announced in class that if we received an “sfw” we were to re-write our paper and hand it in again, this time answering the question at the top of the page; sfw? or, so fucking what? My first reaction to this was, “what do you mean so fucking what? You are the person who made me write this damn paper – you tell me why it was a useful exercise!” I went to office hours for further clarification. Her point was that she didn’t just want us to make observations about a written piece but to say why these observations were important, why they were interesting. If you can’t say why the observations are interesting, they aren’t worth saying in the first place. Now that I’ve already said that this was the most useful critique I’ve ever received, I’ll add that it has hurt my writing in many ways.

The class I took with this professor was a bridging of works from Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Dante (to just name a few). We were reading these stories in chronological order and reading them “through” each other by noting shared motifs. I digested “sfw?” and always made sure to answer this question in all of my papers thereafter. In fact, the answer to “sfw?” is now the most important part of my papers, to my detriment.

I’ve reached over my head in a Wittgenstein paper to say that a metaphysic of modality was only ‘language on vacation’ – an interesting answer to sfw? but getting there was fuzzy. I’ve reached over my head in many Nietzsche papers to draw out many (in my opinion) interesting answers to sfw? but the paper itself – fuzzy. This is a problem. My mind refuses to exert energy on a topic unless I can tell myself that the answer to the “so fucking what” question is one that is entirely and wholly interesting.

I’ve been getting bored in my reading of late. Dear Löwith, I’m waiting for you to tell me why your observations are important. I’m currently reading Löwith’s critique of Heidegger – a critique that was ultimately to be the focus of my dissertation. I get frustrated at the book. Löwith, so fucking what? This man is making tired observations and nothing more. I keep waiting for the hook in Löwith’s thinking that made Heidegger say in a letter: “I have always seen you primarily and authentically as my ‘doctoral candidate’,” even though Löwith was not. I’m given a picture of Heidegger as a priest who divines the nature of Being – it sure makes Heidegger seem silly but that surely isn’t enough to be considered interesting.

I have currently lost my answer to sfw in my project. Right after Zizek inspires us with his story of Hegel, after he tells us that the answer to this particular sfw is an exciting one – I lose my own. Maybe Zizek took it with him, maybe my idea of “interesting” in terms of “philosophy” was slightly altered by this man. For now I can’t speak with Löwith, I’ve desecrated his work with sfw questions at each of his observations.

The talk from Zizek last night lasted over two hours and the discussion this morning also lasted over two hours. The man is a ball of energy who would go on talking without pause unless politely interrupted. The thing I liked best about these two discussions was how excited Zizek was – he is not like many tired academics who have spent their lives repeating the same theories in talks on different campuses. He approaches subjects and his audience like a freshman approaches a new subject they find interesting. This hypothetical “freshman” is struck by something perplexing, researches the hell out of this topic for two weeks and then writes a mediocre paper that he or she wants everyone to read because of its ingenuity and depth (I’ve played the part of this freshman many times throughout my long haul at university). The energy this freshman brings to the topic, although naive, is a reminder that philosophy is studied because it is interesting and can be inspiring.

The excitement from Zizek, in contrast to this freshman, is neither naive nor is the product mediocre. It seems to be the case with some academics that they become so serious and encyclopedic that the initial excitement and interest of their topic is lost – the goal transforming into a repetitive collecting of information. Zizek is a man that does a lot of sweating, that bounces back and forth in his chair to look from one respective audience member to another – he shouts, speaks faster than his ideas coalesce and engages his audience as if to prevent himself (and fellow speakers) from becoming lost in academic obscurity. At the end of the talk he encouraged our group of about 25 to go out and revolutionize how Hegel is thought of, thus theoretically involving ourselves in a “direction” of philosophy that currently has little support and little adherence. I wanted to run out and do just what he said, as if he had drawn out the battlefield and told us young bucks to go fight for this prospectively beneficial interpretation. Then I remembered that the project I have in mind is such that I could hardly consider myself to be fighting on the designated battlefield. I’m still too Nietzschean for current philosophical trends, I still secretly want to do a Nietzschean critique of Heidegger, using Löwith as my vessel and mask. I should maybe rethink what I’m “doing” in philosophy if I ever want to claim to myself or anyone else that this “doing” itself is interesting. My continuing problem is that I am still trying to gracefully come out of 19th Century philosophy, making talk of 21st Century philosophy foreign to my ears. Looking for the reasonable continuation or philosophy that survived Nietzsche’s hammer left me in a kind of philosophical nihilism with respect to philosophy itself. This “disenchantment” found support in reading Richard Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism where he discusses the fall of philosophy in the 20th Century as being akin to the fall of theology (as an academic subject, form of inquiry) in the 19th Century. This decay of philosophy as a Fach (the German word that Rorty himself employs which can be translated, in this case, as “academic subject”) justifies his move to Comparative Literature and Theory.

But who knows – Zizek seems to be of the mind that philosophy is still quite alive and that useful conclusions can be pulled from a “metaphysic” (through a reinterpretation of Hegel?). This usefulness is not, however, the “usefulness” that American or analytic philosophy sees in philosophy; namely, philosophy as a science but is “useful” in the traditional continental sense of being able to win a life that is worthy. Needless to say, I am more than pleased that I took this opportunity to educate and introduce myself to Zizek. Last night I had planned on today’s post being a further explanation of Zizek’s interpretation of Hegel – instead the talk left me thinking about philosophy and my relationship to it, thus birthing what is here written.