s.r. in the Middle East

This photo of the ruins at Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon comes courtesy of Ray Brassier, who is now (as is known) at the American University of Beirut. Lebanon is one of the more beautiful places I’ve seen myself as well, though I’m afraid my last visit there was quite some time ago.

I was in Baalbek myself in December 2001. At the time, I think it was the furthest away from home that I had ever felt. (It has since been eclipsed in that honor by the trip to the Andaman Islands last year– hundreds of miles by air from Chennai means “pretty far away.”)

In any case, I’m always surprised that more Ph.D.’s aren’t more aggressively interested in teaching in places like Beirut and Cairo.

of even more immediate delight

Finally back inside my home. The Horus Hotel era (all 6 hours of it) could have been worse, but if I’m staying in a hotel in Cairo then obviously something unpleasant must be happening (in this case, the lock problem turned out to be completely my own fault).

French book forthcoming

The grant was finally approved… So, my next book that appears after Prince of Networks will appear in 2010– in French before English.

And no, I don’t write lovely French on my own. The grant application was in order to pay the translator, who has already done a couple of English-to-French philosophy translations.

I already know the title of the book (hint: it contains l’objet), the translator, and the French publisher, but had better wait until the contract is signed so as not to jinx it. But the grant application was the only obstacle, so this book will surely be hitting the shelves in 2010, and I hope not too long thereafter in English.

A more “experimental” work ought to be finished at about the same time, and I think people are going to enjoy that one a great deal once they see it.

alternate photo

An alternate photo, stolen from NINA. Same cast of characters as before, sitting in the same order, just a different angle at different distances and in different moods, just like Husserl’s different adumbrations of the same object.

and speaking of Leibniz…

I was thinking on the plane that I may reconsider my demotion of Leibniz to number 5 on the all-time great philosophers list.

That demotion, you may recall, was partly an attempt to correct my own ardent personal enthusiasm for Leibniz, and partly a concession that his major works are too short and leave too many important issues outside the discussion.

However…

On the plane I was thinking, what if someone asked me to teach a sort of metaphysics “boot camp” for graduate students. What would I do?

And I have to say, I think I would just drill them through a whole semester of Leibniz. He can teach you everything you need to know, and with such wonderful brevity. He also teaches the most important lesson, which is the combination of absolute respect for the ancients and medievals *and* the need for a gutsy speculative independence that doesn’t just suck up to Aristotle. I’m not sure who does a better job of that.

The other advantage of Leibniz is that he allows you to practice metaphysics at several different speeds. The great pedagogical dogma of our time is the overestimation of “close reading” as a method. Anyone who write a 500-page monograph on some tiny text of a major thinker is supposed to gain our respect as thorough and painstaking. And I would agree that this deserves respect, but it’s only one of the needed scales.

Imagine that you asked to buy a world map, but the cartographer answered that you are very superficial for wanting such a map. After all, each part of the world is filled with so many details… You really want Turkey, China, Japan, Brazil, etc., on ONE map? Hahahaha. Aren’t you being a bit overambitious? A true cartographer would devote an entire career to just one country, or even just one province of one country, etc. etc.

Perhaps you get my point. The dogma that students should be forced to master one tiny problem in one classic thinker and waste 3 years reading 40 secondary sources related to that tiny topic is about as benighted as claiming that world maps should not be allowed.

In fact, we obviously need both. And in or time, students do not get enough “big picture” overviews. Which is precisely why I enjoyed compressing all of Heidegger’s career into 170 large-print pages. For it CAN be done. I did it. That’s not the whole story on Heidegger, of course. You can write detailed books on specific aspects of Heidegger, just as you can draw up detailed maps of individual Japanese cities. But if there were a ban on “superficial” national maps of Japan as a whole, don’t we all agree that this would be an idiotic stipulation?

The relevance to Leibniz is that you *really can* read most of his major works by spending half a day in a coffee shop and picking 5 or 6 of his key mini-texts out of Hackett or some other anthology. I do it from time to time, for the sheer pleasure of it. No one, and I mean no one, can teach you more metaphysics in 5 hours than Leibniz.

And then, of course, you can go into specific issues in more detail. Leibniz is a peerless crossroads in the history of philosophy… Go back to Aristotle, to Suarez, to Descartes, or forward to Kant or even Whitehead, Deleuze, etc., and Leibniz can provide outstanding access to certain aspects of nay of these thinkers.

By contrast, if you want to approach the key problems of philosophy through Aristotle or Hegel or Kant or Heidegger, you won’t get very far in 5 hours as an overview. Only Leibniz allows you the 5-hour plan, the weekend plan, the month-long plan, the summer plan, the semester plan, and the lifetime career plan to choose from.

I won’t revise my top 20 list right now (it’s a long-term project anyway– one still guided largely mostly by gut instinct and waiting for principles to emerge from lengthier reflection). But I’m starting to wonder if I wasn’t too quick to dock him a spot below Hegel, even though I still agree that “Leibniz is the greatest philosopher of all time” is still slightly shakier than saying “Hegel is the greatest philosopher of all time”.

Horus Hotel

The adventure continues. There was a problem with my door lock in Cairo (second time this has happened to me after returning from Amsterdam!), and since the locksmiths were all closed late on a Sunday night, I get to try the Horus Hotel nearby, which I always wanted to do. The Longchamps upstairs is well-known to European tourists, but always booked. The Horus is a bit less upscale, but hey– I’ll be teaching in a few hours anyway, so what do I care?

Actually, the first such story is worth relating. I was away on sabbatical for five and a half months– literally never set foot in Egypt once during nearly half a year.

Got back on a Saturday at 4 A.M. in February ’08 and found that I was locked out of my own place…. Turns out there had been a major accident in December, with a window falling off the place (9th floor) and nearly decapitating a pedestrian, who luckily called it the will of God and walked away immediately without pressing charges (it would have been the University’s problem, not mine, but still). In any Anglo-Saxon country that would have been a protracted lawsuit.

It did damage a care, however, though as just a tenant I wasn’t on the hook for that either. The point is, they had to break into my place to fix the windows, and had to break the lock to do it. They forgot to e-mail me in Amsterdam to tell me about it. It’s kind of funny now, but at the time was quite maddening to have my homecoming after half a year turned into a weekend hotel stay. The University was classy enough to pay me back for that, even.

This one isn’t the University’s fault– either mine or the building caretakers. Not worth explaining.

Besides, I do like it when circumstances force unusual or unexpected actions. Most interesting philosophy works the same way… You end up with conclusions that would never occur to any sane person, simply because the force of argument pushes you in that direction. It’s a classic Meillassouxian gesture, and in fact my favorite aspect of his work– you can tell he’s really delighted whenever rigorous logical premises force him to say something utterly counterintuitive. That’s all over Leibniz as well.

Bostrom

Just about to leave Europe and get back to my normal life and post-Spring Break duties. And no, I didn’t randomly find anyone in De Jaren, but those who stayed at Drift until 3 AM and then adjourned to house parties later (I presume) would be unlikely to be out on a drippy Sunday morning like I was.

In Collapse V I was just reading the article by NICK BOSTROM. I always enjoy Bostrom’s work: sensible yet imaginative reflections on the future of the human race, or lack thereof. He doesn’t play the cynical pessimism card for easy points, but he’s also no pollyanna.

The article now in question is about how the discovery of any traces of life on mars would be abd news for us indeed. I was going to explain whym but my credit on this machine is about to run out and it’s an incredible pain to buy new credit the way the place has been remodelled. So, read Collapse and find out for yourself.

actually…

Actually, De Jaren is even more likely to contain a random UvA person, so I’ll give it a 10-minute try. See you all in November, anyway, since I’ll be in Maastricht and the vicinity for about a week at the end of that month.

still rainy

The flight was a bit later than expected, so I showed up at the one location most likely to randomly contain an UvA Philosophy person– the Coffee Company on the canal, right around the corner from Philosophy. No one here, but it was only about a 15% chance anyway.

That’s the view out the window of the Coffee Company.

an even more perfect ending

The one genuine risk of an excellent trip is that it might make you sad to return home. But this morning, as if by magic, I get gloomy, drippy weather that reminds me the sun is probably blazing in Cairo at this very moment, and I look forward to that.

However, I did lose my e-ticket somehow, and though e-tickets are not a damaging thing to lose (5 minutes of web research should be enough to find the information) this still may fall into category of a Freudian parapraxis… do I really want this to end, and teach a class tomorrow at 8:30 AM? (And that will be 7:30 for my now Europeanized body clock.)

Another 4 or 5 days in Amsterdam would certainly have hit the spot, but it’s time to return.