a noble Egyptian mannerism

Something else they do here, which is utterly charming, is their absolute respect for the sanctity of your home. This too can be found among perhaps 100% of Egyptians, and I have never seen it anywhere else.

Here’s what I mean… A repairman shows up at the door. You greet him. You then turn around and walk toward the source of the problem on the other side of the apartment and assume you are being followed. But you look behind you and find that he hasn’t followed you! He waits to be specifically invited over the threshold. He will often wait even to be invited to enter each successive area of the apartment. It’s charming as can be.

Cairo taxis

Too lazy to take the Metro home from the suburbs, so I returned by taxi. A few things about Cairo taxis…

*the majority are beat-up black and white cars, recognizable from a distance because they almost always have a luggage rack on top. Black and white is only for Cairo cabs– each Governorate in Egypt has its own two-color pattern (black and yellow in Alexandria, for instance).

*the black and white cabs have meters that often do not function, and in any case are simply ignored. The story I’ve heard is that they were all calibrated too far in the distant past to be in any way fair to the drivers. So, you have to know how much to pay for where you are going.

*there is also a small percentage of black and yellow metered cabs now, a recent addition in the past few years. These have a reputation for being more expensive than the black and whites. But since I tend to overpay the normal cabs on purpose, the metered cabs almost always give a significant discount from what I would be prepared to pay.

*if you’re male, it looks goofy to sit in the back seat, and the driver might even give you a mildly strange look. You’re supposed to sit in the front seat next to the driver. For women it is not only socially acceptable, but also a wise idea, to sit in the back.

*if the driver asks you how much you plan to pay him shortly after the cab starts moving, it is almost always a bad sign, and if they keep it up I always tell them to stop the car immediately and I get out. The honorable professional style among drivers is to say nothing about the fare until the end. Once in awhile there’s an argument after you pay them if they feel shortchanged, and a bit more often there will be pouty lips or a stare, but those are a pretty small percentage of the ride (unless you’re a consistent cheapskate)

*Asking how much I plan to pay before I get in is understandable, though not usual, since they might be trying to figure out if it’s worth their while in view of the traffic jams in various parts of the city at various times. Actually, there are two kinds of situations here– the ones who really worry about whether your fare will equal the traffic hassle of a given destination, and the ones who are trying to cheat you. My solution for separating the wheat from the chaff is to force them to tell me how much it should cost, and I judge their honesty from the response they give. If they quote an especially humble fare in these cases, I always make sure to tack on a bit more than they wanted.

*Some smoke cigarettes while driving. And it’s a charming feature of Egypt that of such drivers, 100% offer you a cigarette first before lighting their own. I think in literally every case of a smoking taxi driver that I have seen in 9 years here, they have done this. And whenever I decline and tell them that I only smoke shisha, it’s always good for an easy icebreaking laugh.

*Shortly after I arrived, a new strict seatbelt law was introduced, and the drivers would insist that you put one on (if they had them; not all cabs did). This seems to be less strictly enforced with the passage of time. What’s especially funny are the fake seat belts in some cabs that don’t even work, and in those cases you sort of have to go along and pretend to be wearing one if the driver asks you to do so.

*An estimate: 20% of the taxi drivers are playing Qur’an readings (stunningly beautiful, especially at night); maybe 30% are playing local pop music; the other 50% drive in silence. These estimates might be a bit off; they are a rough guess.

Adams on You-Know-Who

Karim sends the following. And though I hate to end the evening’s posts with more Gibbon, this is a nice passage to read:

“I admire you revisiting Gibbon, for whom I share your admiration. Must read the ‘Vindication’ as I hunted down a copy of ‘Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works’ at the other end of the world and Gibbon apparently insisted that it never be printed together with the ‘Decline’. Here is a passage from ‘The Education of Henry Adams’ with my apologies if you already had it to hand:

Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: “I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of supersition.” Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian, on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his readers — perhaps himself — that he was darting a contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt also the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple. Without malice, one might find it more instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity; their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the force that created it all — the Virgin, the Woman — by whose genius “the stately monuments of superstition” were built, through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cow’s horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the artist.”

“And Billy Ray wrote a song…”

If you have an idea in your mind today, try to write it down. Once it’s written down, it can be developed. In the written word, thoughts can be articulated that are far more complex and subtle than in the spoken word. Furthermore, your struggle with the idea will give you increased respect for what it takes to get things done. It’s a lot of work, no matter how pleasurable.

If you don’t do this, you could begin veering toward the other end of the spectrum– empty, sterile, cut-downs. And I repeat my frequent warning: such people cannot be banished from society in a democracy, but they can certainly be banished from your own life. You have that power.

felucca

Here’s what Cairo looks like tonight. (No, I didn’t take it tonight, or even take it myself, but it’s what Cairo looks like tonight.)

The tower is on the same island where I live. It recently re-opened, and I have never ascended it.

notice

I’ll be removing some recent posts from this blog, not because I think they don’t belong there, but purely out of respect for someone I like.

I reserve, at all times, the right to respond to rude comments in the manner I see fit. Do not hang around the fringes of discussion taking potshots, and then complain about the nature of the response. It’s very simple.

If you want to see how to conduct hardcore philosophical debate without becoming rude, please read Levi Bryant’s LARVAL SUBJECTS blog. There’s a guy who never backs down, but who is nonetheless always a pleasure to debate with.

Cairo passes Chicago

Sorry, it’s probably going to sound a bit frightening that I know this, but… as of today I have spent exactly as much time in Cairo as in Chicago, and as of tomorrow Cairo will be my 2nd most familiar place on earth.

Tiny Mount Vernon, Iowa remains far in the lead, and will for some years to come.

Tonight’s party is not for that reason at all, but it’s more ceremonial than the actual reason, so I’ll pretend it’s in honor of my becoming even more Egyptian.

Gibbon on the barbaric slaying of animals

A hilarious diatribe against Commodus’ love of killing animals in the arena:

“But Commodus, from his earliest infancy, discovered an aversion to whatever was rational and liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace,– the sports of the circus and the amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts… The perfidious voice of flattery reminded him that, by exploits of the same nature, by the defeat of the Nemean lion, and the slaughter of the wild boar of Erymanthus, the Grecian Hercules had acquired a place among the gods, and an immortal memory among men. They only forgot to observe that, in the first ages of society, when the fiercer animals often dispute with man the possession of an unsettled country, a successful war against those savages is one of the most innocent and beneficial labours of heroism. In the civilized state of the Roman empire the wild beasts had long since retired from the face of man and the neighbourhood of populous cities. To surprise them in their solitary haunts, and to transport them to Rome, that they might be slain in pomp by the hand of an emperor, was an enterprise equally ridiculous for the prince and oppressive for the people.”

This reminds me of a good Lingis story, actually… He once visited a private shark-hunting museum in Australia, where the walls showed pictures of all the ferocious sharks killed by the hero owner of the museum.

Later, Lingis was told by knowledgeable locals that the museum owner’s method of heroic hunting was to drag a butchered lamb as bait behind a motorboat and slaughter the approaching sharks by machine-gun.

a general reflection

I’ll have to restrain the impulse to turn this into a 90% Gibbon blog, because he’s even better than I remembered.

One thing that occurs to me is that Gibbon’s speed and allusiveness are things we all need more of in our intellectual lives. Both mainstream scholarship and the postmodern love of textuality have contributed to a vast overvalaution of the method of “close readings” in philosophy. Some of my colleagues brag to me that while I always go through the whole of the Hackett Plato Five Dialogues in a month, some of them will spend 4 or 5 weeks on the Meno alone. One of them generally straightens up, grins, and makes a dismissive joke about my syllabus whenever the issue arises.

One could certainly make a case for this method of teaching, but what is most interesting is that they always seem to assume that I should be the one feeling on the defensive for teaching five short dialogues (well, the Phaedo isn’t so short) in a month. Intellectual fashions rise and fall across the centuries, and we are now very much in a period that assumes that close readings of the details of a text are automatic signs of intellectual seriousness.

I disagree. First, there is the purely accidental fact in the present case that we’re talking about an introductory class. Our 17-year-old Egyptians are encountering philosophy for the first time, and I don’t much see the point in doing either Straussian or Derridean gem-cutting with them. If aliens came to earth from outer space and wanted some idea about life on earth, it would be idiotic to confine them to a “close reading” of Paris for a month while showing them nothing else on the planet. You’d want to give them an idea of the full map, and only then give them some notion of what the details of an individual city are like. Close readings are good for graduate school when training specialists, but nowhere else. Scholarship is already far too bloated with specialists on minutiae who miss the big picture.

This is not an isolated idea in my head, but fits in with my general view that expert specialization and the avoidance of error are not the essence of thinking. The essence of thinking (in philosophy, at least) is differentiating between the important and the unimportant.

Here I would repeat my assertion (Whitehead agrees) that logical errors are the most gratuitous of blunders. They can generally be corrected, and often have fewer ramifications in the rest of our thoughts than one might assume. Here again I cite Whitehead, who laments the oppression of philosophy by the mathematical-axiomatic method of thought since the 17th century. This is not how philosophy works– philosophy is about drawing our attention to ultimate generalities, and these are usually not best discovered by proceeding from a supposedly unshakeable first principle. (And Whitehead, who obviously knew a thing or two about mathematics, observes further that even mathematics is no longer so clear about its first principles.)

It is always possible to pose as ultra-serious by claiming that “Author X is so richly detailed that it is impossible to cover all of his/her works in a single volume.” Anyone who tries to sum it up will tend to look like an amateur when viewed by way of the mainstream professional credo.

Which is precisely why I was so delighted that the chance to write Heidegger Explained came my way. Not only was I forbidden to use footnotes (great rule!) and discouraged even from making quotations in accordance with the series format, I was also given the personal leeway to cover all of Heidegger’s career in a single 170-page book.

And the thing is… it wasn’t hard to do. Heidegger specialists will of course claim that “there is no way to include all of Heidegger’s basic concepts in a single introductory book,” but the counter-proof is found in the pudding: I did it. One reviewer continued to claim that it was impossible, but he was simply paying more attention to his own initial biases than to the accomplished fact.

And, I do believe I wrote the best introduction on Heidegger that one can find– precisely because I didn’t go into pedantic “close reading” mode. Heidegger’s basic ideas are really fairly simple. I did my homework and spent the better part of a decade reading all of the dozens of volumes in the original German, and for doing so I believe I’ve earned the right to say: “Heidegger is not a very complicated philosopher. Anyone who mystifies Heidegger is really just posing as an indispensable mediator of salvation. It is a fundamentally selfish act.”

It is now incumbent upon us, not to wring our hands and talk about how Heidegger is so complicated that it will be decades before we can fully understand what the Master meant, but to try to see what is most important in Heidegger’s rather tiny circle of basic concepts, and to appreciate the genius of those concepts while not groveling before them like courtiers.

In other words, there are limits to Heidegger– not because he “made mistakes” (everyone does), but because any particular set of philosophical theses is bound to be an exaggeration that leaves out much of importance. And it is strange that Heidegger, who was more aware than anyone of the historical rootedness and transient character of all fleeting expressions of philosophical truth, should spur so many to spend entire careers merely trying to clarify his words.

It should be obvious what this has to do to Gibbon. Yes, it’s true, every single chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worthy of a lengthy book in its own right, just as every country on the globe is worthy of a lifetime’s research and scholarship. But no one wants to make globes illegal for being “superficial”, and no one sneers at books that attempt to cover 1,200 years of Roman history.

Why, then, is it still considered so horrific to cover the entire history of philosophy in a single semester? I think it could be done; several good texts exist that could be used for this purpose.

It is valuable to watch events unfold at several different speeds. Slow-motion is fine (and Deleuze recommends it) but I prefer the idea of speeding up a film, so as not to be distracted by passing incidents that obscure the underlying glacial movements.

on the naiveté of philosophers, part two

It’s Marcus Aurelius, again. If he was this credulous in his marriage, it’s less mysterious why he let his son Commodus take over and put the decline of the empire into overdrive. This is almost too brutal to be funny, especially the final sentence.

“Faustina, the daughter of Pius and the wife of Marcus, has been as much celebrated for her gallantries as for her beauty. The grave simplicity of the philosopher was ill calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind. The Cupid of the ancients was, in general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much sentimental delicacy. Marcus was the only man in the empire who seemed ignorant or insensible of their regularities of Faustina; which, according to the prejudices of every age, reflected some disgrace on the injured husband. He promoted several of her lovers to posits of honour and profit, and, during a connexion of thirty years, invariably gave her proofs of the most tender confidence, and of a respect which ended not with her life. In his Meditations he thanks the gods, who had bestowed on him a wife so faithful, so gentle, and of such a wonderful simplicity of manners. The obsequious senate, at his earnest request, declared her a goddess. She was represented in her temples, with the attributes of Juno, Venus, and Ceres; and it was decreed that, on the day of their nuptials, the youth of either sex should pay their vows before the altar of their chaste patroness.”