Benjamin Franklin

And it occurs to me that I’ve picked up all the American Protestant self-improvement genes, found most clearly in Ben Franklin… Just did a quick tally of the early part of the is decade, and it looks like 60%-65% good is the norm. That’s a lot better than it sounds, I think… The excess of matter over anti-matter at the time of the Big Bang was far smaller a percentage than that.

department of optimism statistics

With a day and a half to go, I count 26 good events and 15 bad events in May, with the good ones better than the bad ones are bad. I’ve said this before– we just tend to fixate on the bad ones a lot more. The nearly 2:1 ratio has been pretty typical since I started keeping track about 9 years ago.

I think there was only one month with more bad stuff, as well as another month where 11 trivial good things were crushed by 4 horrific bad ones. And that’s the extent of the badness, in the span of nearly a decade.

it bears repeating

There are really only two kinds of people: those who look for excuses to do things, and those who look for excuses not to do them. You have to cut off the alibi-makers, or they will corrupt and demoralize you. Everything else we might say about a person (such as “brilliant”) is secondary to the question of whether they are moving forward, or rather looking for excuses to delay and sabotage themselves and others.

And to repeat, this is simply a health issue, not a snobbery issue. Probably everyone has a few areas of life where they tend to manufacture alibis rather than dealing with reality, and people who are parasites and obstructors when it comes to academic work could possibly be life-enhancing angels in other areas. (Though the chances may not be very high.)

PDF available

Just seconds ago I was told that my article “Heidegger on Technology, Objects and Things” has appeared in the online version of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. I’m assuming anyone can access this free of charge, but don’t know that for a fact.

This article was submitted by request to deal with a specific audience/theme issue. I’ve probably said most of these things elsewhere; it was a designed as a short, clear, simple summary.

I don’t think the print version will appear until January 2010, but I like this system of putting the articles on the web well before the paper journal appears.

Bloom, Isis, Iowa

This post by Gary Smith was enjoyable. I like it partly because he may be right about the “anxiety of influence” point (I’m well aware that I’ve given a “misreading” in the sense that Heidegger himself would never have signed off on it). But also I like his casual reference to the Herbert Hoover Library. (Smith is from the Iowa City area too, and thus is able to get away with inside references to Iowa’s only Presidential Library. Unfortunately, I only went to the Hoover Library during childhood and haven’t the faintest recollection of an Isis statue. Time to go back, I guess.)

But wow, that was a pretty good “insipid physical bulks” passage. I don’t remember writing that one, but it sounds like something I’d say.

“Graham Harman has given us an interpretation of Heidegger, a good, strong interpretation. And it is, just as Harold Bloom has taught us in The Anxiety of Influence, a mis-interpretation. A mis-reading, a misprision, the whole road. This ‘ephebe’ is thus a good disciple of his precursor. He may think otherwise, as the belated follower always would, but life is life and ‘objective’ scholarship is simply bad scholarship.

He wrote, ‘I will show that objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and insurgencies equaling those found in the most tortured human moods.’ And therein is the rub. The tool-being he so casually speaks of, this insurgency that lies beneath the manifest presence of the object is not the fit subject for a scholar/professor. This Thing is too wild and terrible for the innocent student in a classroom or a journal’s board of directors. Only a rabid poet could rightly depict it. Still, Mr. Harman has pointed to something that is mighty interesting and he has himself blithely and innocently approached the under-thing that we may know that it exists.

I’m sure he has seen the statue of Isis on the grounds of the Hoover Presidential Library. That veiled thing is what he is after. That terrible goddess. Here is a quote from Proust, ‘Quand je voyais un object exterieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince lisèrè spiritual qui m’empechait de jamais toucher directement sa matière.'”

on “being right”

This gives material for a more general thought… In some circles, too much emphasis is placed on being “right”. If there is a real world, then there should also be a correct verbal expression of that world.

But how does Nancy Cartwright put it… something like: she’s an ontological realist but a theory anti-realist. (I may have mangled the wording.) I’m on board with that. Maybe I’d say I’m an anti-pragmatist in ontology but a full-bore pragmatist when it comes to knowledge… We humans are not granted to know the truth. I believe that there is one, but that it cannot survive translation into any particular form of knowledge without distortion.

So, the best we can hope for is to move the ball forward. (This is why I have such visceral contempt for sniping know-it-alls who do nothing but critique. You have to move the ball. You have to have your own position. Ultimately, if not immediately, that means you have to publish. Sorry: publish your idea, or perish.)

Now, I happen to think Braver’s book is wrong about a good number of things. But I don’t care. Why not? Because he has given us a desperately needed consolidation of things that other continental authors have been afraid to say openly: above all, that continental philosophy has been and remains a largely anti-realist movement. The chic way of dealing with this issue has always been to pose as if one were beyond the superficial realism/antirealism dispute. But in fact, continental philosophy has always taken the anti-realist fork in the road, and Braver bluntly admits it. The quality of the debate has greatly improved thanks to his book, and in the end we’re all wrong anyway; only the world itself is right. (Whitehead said this, by the way… If we have to answer whether a given proposition is true or false, then it must be said that every verbal proposition is false. Why? Because every verbal proposition is an abstraction.)

I am “Philosophy Today”

Funny about that Amazon page… This is the first time I’ve ever seen my own words cited under the name of a corporate entity. This is me, on Braver’s book:

“It is the sort of book that everyone working in the continental tradition, and many in the analytic tradition, will want to read… Braver’s real strength is his sweeping synoptic vision of continentalism from Kant to Derrida, backed by triple the needed homework to make this vision tangible. The book deserves great success, and Braver ought to become a household name in continental circles… It would be hard to ask for a more thoroughly researched work on the topic, or for one more honest or more technically precise… A landmark.”–Philosophy Today

I’m not sure if Braver is a household name in continental circles yet, but he really ought to be, because that book needed to be written, and it has “classic” written all over it. (And I say this as someone who, of course, detests continental anti-realism as a mortal enemy.) It will be hard to improve on that book for a good many years.

words from a very effective author

[ADDENDUM: My caution was unnecessary, since the person in question says he does not mind being cited by name. He is Lee J. Braver, author of the wonderful book A THING OF THIS WORLD, an impressively systematic discussion of continental anti-realism. I wrote an article-length review of this book that appeared in Philosophy Today in 2008.]

Someone whose work I like a great deal just wrote in with this. I’m deleting all the personal parts and also breaking it into paragraphs for ease of reading. Otherwise, these are his exact words:

“What I always say about [my doctoral institution] is that I got a great education but a lousy apprenticeship. For one thing, I learned nothing about what it’s like to be a professor, etc. But also, I think of how Heidegger compares thought to a craft (near the beginning of [What is Called Thinking?]) which we must learn & practice (I take his form of writing which frequently hits dead-ends (Holzwege) & has to go back & start over again as giving the reader an apprenticeship in how thinking actually works rather than just presenting us decapitated conclusions on a platter).

If I were ever to teach grad students, I think I’d have each prof in the dept give a half-hour workshop (maybe 1 a week) on tips, tricks, and techniques they’ve developed. I simply would not be able to do what I do without a huge bag of tricks I cultivated over years of grinding it out. I mean the nitty-gritty stuff, like working out a consistent system of abbreviations to write in margins and different forms of underlining that signal different things (recap, thesis of the paragraph, interesting but not all that important to the argument, etc.). I have found it essential to have a set way of marking up my books (I cringe when I see students’ virginal texts).

In fact, I credit a lot of my big-picture perspective in [my book] to the fact that, after repeated slow & careful readings, I was able to skim sometimes a couple dozen texts in a few days by relying on my notations/underlining, etc. This is the sort of stuff no one talks about–the dust & detritus of a scholarly life, but I couldn’t function without it. So I think this is really useful stuff for grad students/young researchers & good on you for taking up the task of e-training.”

I would agree that the right markings in a text can be very useful. The state of my Heidegger volumes means that if necessary I could now write an article in a couple of days on almost any work by Heidegger, simply because I already have them condensed down to “highlights”. Once in awhile you feel like going back and doing a word-for-word reread with the best of them… Being and Time is always worth a cover-to-cover read now and then, obviously. But I agree with the author above that you also want to “process” the great works you read for quicker future use, and the right system of marginal notes is a good way to do that.

carrot-and-stick remix

“Surround yourself with people who have projects, and ruthlessly exclude those who sabotage those projects in even the slightest manner.”

assistance to the suffering

More e-mail continues to suggest that this blog functions as an oasis for the tortured, suffering graduate student population. So I guess I should encourage them even more often. Much of the advice found here will probably be contained and developed in book form in a co-authored work in the near future, but I’ll save the details for later.

But I heard a good maxim this week: “surround yourself with people who have projects.”

You must continue to avoid another class of person, as a matter of life and death: the endless sniping procrastinator, always attempting to sabotage those who are moving forward, while appealing to the alibi of some great Masterwork they are putting together that will reduce the work of others to dust. A good number of masterworks happen to have been written under contract or career pressure (Being and Time, The Phenomenology of Spirit) and if you’ve been working for 18 or 19 years on a supposed masterwork, then it probably isn’t one.

Just figure out what you have to say, and say it. And avoid those who avoid this procedure.

Philosophy is not made up of “arguments”, it’s made up of specific philosophical works, usually written ones. Arguments are one ingredient in those works. The people who sit around refuting everything you do aren’t worth listening to; listening to them is complicity in their blood-sucking anti-libido.

There’s a small part in each of us that is susceptible to corruption by such forces, and it’s your task to conquer that part of yourself.

Remember, you’ll be dead soon. Sorry to be so grim, but it’s the best motivation to not waste your precious years sitting around making up excuses for why you couldn’t develop your ideas. If you don’t develop those ideas, we are all a bit poorer for it.