strangely refreshing

A fellow philosopher sent me this in an e-mail. Somehow I find it refreshing:

“Oh, one other thing I wanted to tell you. With that article getting published, my writing work is done. I know I’ve said ‘read this of mine,’ ‘read that of mine,’ ‘read my two books,’ but there’s a terminus to that. I’ve given you everything now, or a direct reference to it by title, that I’m ever going to write. I’m done and it’s a relief.”

He’s in his 50’s. Most of my “advice” posts have had the flavor of “finish your dissertation so that you can move on and write other things,” but this guy’s advice is far more radical! Finish your life’s work in writing so that you can stop writing altogether.

I can’t see that point from where I’m standing, so I’m not the one to ask. Not only can’t I see it, I’d never even dreamed of it. And I suppose that’s why the e-mail is refreshing. Never before has anyone sent me an article and called it their last one ever.

It’s kind of fun to think that maybe by, say, age 57, I’ll have said everything I will ever have to say. What about after that? Maybe do things at which I am very untalented, such as chess, drawing, and so forth.

Blackberry, R.I.P.

There’s no way to repair that wheel cheaply enough to be worth it. The model is out of date anyway, and even if it weren’t, it is slowly giving me a sprained thumb.

So, other than during my Amsterdam stay, I am now without Blackberry service for the first time in nearly three years. I walked over to Vodafone tonight and shut it down, and will scrape by with a cheap substitute phone (same number, for those of you who call me) until returning to Cairo in May.

I had promised the Blackberry to a friend, but she didn’t deserve a broken thumb to begin with, and now it’s not even a functional device.

These sorts of things change lifestyles in unpredictable ways. I’ll now either be making more trips to fixed computers to check e-mail (as in pre-2006 days) or carrying my laptop around all the time (I know that’s technically what they’re for, but I hate doing it even though Cairo has tiny, tiny robbery rates, so tiny as to be nearly immeasurable).

no one goes over the top like Bruno

For those who have never sampled Bruno’s utterly unique philosophical prose, his arguments are often prefaced with over-the-top anthems of the following sort. (Cause, Principle, and Unity and Essays on Magic. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998. Trans. R. De Lucca, p. 17)

“I have no intention of speaking like a holy prophet, as an abstruse oracle, like an apocalyptic visionary or the she-ass of Balaam beholding the angel. Nor will I discourse as if I were exhilarated by Bacchus or swollen with wind by the sluttish Parnassian muses, nor like a Sibyl impreganted by Phoebus, nor like a prognostic Cassandra, nor as if Apollonian rapture had seized me form my toenails to the hair on my head, nor like the seer illuminated in the oracle or Delphic tripod, nor like wise Oedipus, probed in the riddles of the Sphinx, nor as a Solomon before the enigmas of the queen of Sheba, nor like Calchas, interpreter for the Olympian council, nor as a Merlin possessed, nor as one emerged from the cave of Trophonius. Instead I will speak in common, vulgar language, like a man who has had other things on his mind than to go about distilling the juice of his brain and cerebellum to the point of withering his pia mater and dura mater.”

Imagine submitting something like this to your tenure committee or dissertation advisor!

Actually, we do have a medium that goes this over-the-top even now, and it’s called blogging. I suppose that over time, blogging will become more organized and regulated as well, and some of today’s blogs will look like impossibly colorful relics of the past.

Giordano Bruno and present-day philosophy

I’ve dug out Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity again. It’s always a special treat of literature and of comedy. But reading Bruno immediately after reading Iain Grant and Alberto Toscano and Simondon really sets off bells. (And Grant openly makes the link.)

It can always sound a bit pedantic to point to some past figure, not so widely read, as key to a present-day debate. But Bruno really is a key figure to be considered as numerous present-day ontologies appeal to matter, a pre-individual realm, the non-existence of substantial forms until they are actualized, the existence of a one that is not just a one since it is laden with all sorts of unactualized potentials, and other such concepts. And of course the present-day vague hostility toward Aristotle, mentioned in a post earlier today, can be found in buckets in Bruno, enough so that he nearly had a fistfight with a prominent Aristotelian in Paris and was forced to recant humiliatingly in order to save himself. (He did that several times earlier in life, but then refused to recant before the Inquisition, eventually costing him his life.)

Much is made, obviously rightly, of Bruno’s inheritance from Nicholas of Cusa. But an even earlier ancestor is Anaxagoras.

I’ll also continue to call Bruno the third most talented literary figure in the history of philosophy (after Nietzsche and Plato, in that order) and surely the most colorful character in our discipline since Empedocles. Until the advent of Zizek, Bruno was the last significant philosopher who could have made a career in stand-up comedy if necessary. (Even physics has had more of those lately: Feynman, Pauli…)

on chess

I’m a terrible chess player, one of the worst I know. On my previous laptop even the easiest setting was unbeatable (though in all fairness to myself, even my friends who play well couldn’t beat the lowest setting). On my new laptop the lowest setting is beatable, and I just keep moving it up until I can win 50% of the time– and that’s still not very high.

The odd thing is, I got off to a very fast start with the game. I think I was 4 or 5 years old, and on PBS they had a show where they recreated classic chess matches with the stop-action technique, so that the pieces seemed to be moving by themselves. The whole thing seemed like magic, especially when a piece was captured and would simply disappear from the screen.

From watching that show, I was able to figure out most of the move rules for the pieces. The one thing I really got wrong was the castling. For some reason I thought that it could be used for any two of your pieces to trade places at any time, leading to some pretty wild moves on my part.

I was eventually able to talk my aunt and uncle into getting me a “chess set” one day, though I think they didn’t realize I was serious, and what I ended up with was a $1.99 magnetic type set. But I remember being so delighted that I didn’t even care.

For whatever reason, I gradually lost interest in the elementary school years, without ever having played in child tournaments or anything. When I picked it up again years later, I was so horrible that it’s almost as if there were damage to the chess center of my brain or something. A little kid beat me fair and square the last time I tried a competitive match. Other than things I don’t care to do (such as deer hunting) there are few skills that I admire more despite having less facility at myself than chess. (ADDENDUM: the grammar is quite faulty here. For the record, I do not admire deer hunting.)

All of you talented chess players out there, I salute you. But I’ll have to watch from the sidelines.

on WordPress spam

Though I don’t quite understand why, with comments turned off, spam keeps coming in for the blog, the WordPress spam filter seems pretty impressive. Some of this spam is ingeniously crafted to look like real comments, yet it gets caught every time. And only two or three times in the first six weeks of the blog did real comments get treated as spam. Nice work, WordPress.

another example of tedious contrarianism

I’m sorry, but the following sort of thing annoys me very much. This comes from the Wikipedia article on Deleuze:

“Upon Deleuze’s death, his colleague Jean-François Lyotard sent a fax to Le Monde, in which he wrote of his friend: ‘He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It’s your sadness, idiot, he’d say.'”

It’s those last two sentences that annoy me, in their affectation and their emotional bullying.

Look, Deleuze was widely loved. He died with unexpected suddenness in a manner that shocked most of us. What’s wrong with being sad about his death for awhile? “It’s your sadness, idiot”? In other words– feel sad about the death of Deleuze and you are some sort of “reactive” figure filled with ressentiment.

I’m seeing more and more of this at funerals in recent years– someone’s always striking a pose that it’s no big deal, and always claiming to speak in the voice of the departed, saying “lighten up!”, or whatever.

Clever contrarianism of this sort bothers me in no matter what area of life it occurs. There is a tendency not to want to do justice to the obvious. And the obvious is– death is a painful, frightening, and mysterious thing. Let people deal with it for a few weeks if they need to, or even longer. Why this cruel and affected pose of telling them that the dead person would ridicule them for being sad? This general ethical posture in our time of being above all strong emotion is one that I cannot and do not respect very much.

The sensitive/temperamental personality, in other words, is another of the stock types that is undervalued in the current social arrangements. But these things tend to work in periodic cycles. One hundred years from now, today’s aloof, jaded cynics are likely to be as passé as speakeasys and the name “Myrtle.”

retribution: due for a comeback

It is also true that certain moods or emotions go in and out of fashion with philosophers, just as certain past philosophers do.

One of the obvious examples is melancholia, currently viewed as pathetic and as bordering on a medical condition, though highly respected in France under the Sun King and in certain periods of the Roman Empire.

But another example is retribution, often denounced as revenge. Everyone chants in agreement about how pathetic and ressentiment-laden it is, and think in this way to be a step beyond the vulgar crowd. Nietzsche is often cited as one of the defenders of this view, but that’s a half-truth, since Nietzsche also says not to pretend to be beyond it– if they spit, spit back, etc.

One problem I have with this is that the natural justice-element of retribution is still condescendingly allowed to other cultures, as are many other basic human urges, such as hospitality. I well remember several people I know excusing the Taliban for housing bin Laden by saying that “I’ve heard that hospitality is very important in Afghani culture,” though these same people would be the first to point the finger and shout “Orientalism!” at anyone else who said something similar.

unpopular great philosophers

People go in and out of fashion in social circles, at Court, and in the Dean’s Office, so it is only to be expected that the same must happen with the history of philosophy.

For well over a century, Plato was out of fashion. To “reverse Plato” was the entry price for being one of the hepcats of continental though.

I discussed this issue early on in the history of the first doctorzamalek blog.

ADDENDUM: Somehow the rest of this post was eliminated without my realizing it. The rest of it, which I am now too lazy to reconstruct, said that Husserl and now Aristotle seem to have replaced Plato as the whipping boys of the continental philosophy avant garde.

my new enemy

“the pre-individual”. It’s a worthy enemy, but still an enemy. It seems to me like a heavy price to pay for minimal gains. More on this topic will be coming from my pen/printer over the next year or so.