the way some people teach French

Just heard from a new friend that she is teaching a French reading course, and among the recent assignments have been… translations from Meillassoux blurbs and from Collapse.

It might be fun to play that “telephone” game, translating Collapse articles into French and then have someone else do it back into English just to see what the result would be.

On a loosely related note, did I ever tell the story of how my colleague caught a crafty plagiarist? The student submitted an essay on Kant at a level clearly beyond his own. But nothing showed up on either Google or turnitin.com, so the proof was lacking.

After awhile, however, my colleague realized what had happened… The student had found a German article on Kant, then cleverly fed it through a translation program, thus creating the English version of the article for the first time and making it immune to plagiarism detection programs.

Unfortunately, the student didn’t know enough about Kant to realize that the translation program’s suggestion of Criticism of Pure Reason is not the standard English rendering of Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Otherwise, he might never have been caught.

Composition of Philosophy. July 19.

The early part of the day was filled with a number of appointments, and thus it was mid-afternoon this time before I did any work at all. By the time I finish today’s chapter (on occasionalism and empiricism) the dates will have changed on wordpress, and I want to get the July 19 post put up with a July 19 date on it. I’ll let you all know in tomorrow’s post how many pages Chapter 3 ended up being, and how long it took.

Tomorrow’s Chapter 4 is on the fourfold structure that forms the very topic of the book, and Chapter 5 the day after that is on the possible mechanics of inanimate perception. That will conclude the chapters where I know pretty much exactly what I want to say. I’ll take Wednesday and Thursday off to reset my tastebuds, so to speak, and then spend the weekend and maybe an extra day or two polishing up the first five chapters. That will put me several days behind where I planned to be, but I’ve deliberately left so much extra time in the weeks to come that it doesn’t matter. The trick with schedules is not to feel guilty about missing them. And that’s why you have to set personal deadlines that are far in advance of actual deadlines, so that your missed deadlines exist merely in your own mind, and there will be no practical consequences for missing them. If by contrast you feel guilty about missing a real deadline, there is likely a good reason for this guilt. Thus, I choose to arrange my schedules in such a way that the guilt is always purely fictitious and self-imposed and of no consequence to anyone else, which makes it easy to debunk with just a bit of reflection.

Of the three full days I’ve spent dealing with this manuscript, only yesterday (day two) was relatively pleasurable. Today was almost as big of a drag as day one. There are several factors contributing to this, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, I have routines in place now that allow me to do what I couldn’t possibly do at age 25– have productive days even when I don’t feel like it.

Here’s what I mean… I’ve been knocking out 15-17 pages per day this week, and other than yesterday I haven’t really been in the mood to do so. At graduate school stage, there was no way I could have written 15-17 pages in a day unless I was in a nearly euphoric mood. And if your productivity is dependent on euphoric moods, you’re going to have a hard time getting things done, because euphoria is an exceptional case in human experience, occurring only once in awhile. It’s good to be able to write a bunch of pages even when feeling tired or grouchy. The outlines, the techniques for breaking chapters into sections, and the method of simply getting all the content on the page in the right order without worrying about good prose or occasional half-finished arguments, are all ways of ensuring that you can make use of even a subpar day.

good old political video

Here’s one of my favorite political videos from YouTube– a fun 1960 exchange between former President Truman and Presidential candidate Kennedy. Truman asks Kennedy to be “patient” (so that his own friend from Missouri can get the nomination instead) and Kennedy follows some days later with a fairly blistering speech, especially in the final sentence.

on speed in philosophy

I’ve always liked Deleuze’s remark that commentary in the history of philosophy ought to be a kind of slow motion. But with equal justice, commentary can also work at high speed. The important thing is being able to shift between different speeds when considering any topic, because every topic displays different aspects depending on how much or how little detail we want to consider in it.

Is Kant’s Prolegomena really inferior to the First Critique? In some respects, maybe, but the Prolegomena might also be said to be a more lucid work that gets to the point more effectively. And I definitely prefer Hume’s crisp Enquiry to his boated Treatise, as even Hume himself did, and as many readers do.

It is the Scholar’s Disease to assume that everything is so rich and complicated that it can’t possibly be understood without hundreds of pages of detailed analysis. There is a place for this, but also a place for brevity in philosophy, just as we need globes that eliminate the exact street plans of New York and Tokyo.

To give more detail is not always to be more serious. Sometimes detail is superficiality incarnate, a symptom of being too lazy to discover the two or three key points that make a book or other topic so important.

Is Heidegger’s Being and Time worthy of a 700-page commentary? Sure, there’s enough going on in the book to warrant it. But it’s also possible to summarize Being and Time in 20 or so pages. I’m proud of Heidegger Explained, even though at least one reviewer seemed offended by the presumptuousness of summarizing Heidegger’s entire career in a single short book.

What would really be interesting is to do a survey of whoever the 20 top philosophers are in the world at this moment, and ask them to write a one-page history of philosophy. Most of them would probably refuse the exercise, perhaps even scoffing and laughing while refusing, saying that “there is no possible way to do justice to such a rich tradition in one page,” etc. But it would be a serious intellectual exercise, forcing them to lay their cards on the table and reveal what they take to be the handful of key moments in that history.

I’ll categorize this as a “Composition of Philosophy” post, because these thoughts are triggered by my ongoing work on the book. The task of presenting all of my ideas in 43,000 words is in many ways a pleasure. And it’s becoming easier now that a certain rhythm and speed has been established that is appropriate to the project. The outline is working very effectively as a Procrustean Bed, but in a positive sense of the term. If you can see that you only have two paragraphs to deal with a fairly important problem, then you will find a way to deal with it in two paragraphs and no more. Do the problems deserve more space? Sure, just as Paris “deserves” to be more than a tiny dot on a globe. But it’s a globe, after all, and a dot is the proper size of Paris if you are building a globe.

An analogous form of the Scholar’s Disease is found in the usual easy critique of tourism. Some years ago I made my first visit to a very nice place for one week. That’s all I had to spare. An old acquaintance offered to show me around while I was there, which was nice of him in principle. But the price I had to pay for his guidance was listening to a supercilious denunciation of my touristic superficiality in staying there for only one week. (This person was not a native of the place, so patriotism was no excuse in his case.) And to be sure, if I’d had more time and money at that point, the place would have been worth spending several years, studying the culture and language and cuisine. But you can get a certain good basic feel for a city in a week. Not enough to make you an anthropologist of the place, admittedly, but enough to have a basic sense of the geography and the way of life. The wish to denounce others as superficial carries an implied boast of one’s own greater depth. But much truth is contained on the surface of any topic.

This goes well with another of my observations, which is that my first impressions of people are often more accurate than later ones. To meet any new person always involves a mildly traumatic shock, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few days. And I’ve found over time that there is much information contained in that initial shock, if you know how to read it properly. As you get to know the person better, your initial impressions are gradually lost beneath all the detailed experiences you have with them. But quite often, the apparent “surprises” (both good and bad) that come from this person were already faintly legible in the first initial taste of that person’s presence.

To take some bad examples, I once met someone who immediately struck me as unusually selfish, unreliable, and unable to listen. He later became a fun acquaintance and much appreciated, but a few years later did something unconscionably selfish and unreliable that ruined someone else’s life (he never did anything bad of any consequence to me, so this is not personal resentment speaking). It seemed “out of character” until I remembered that first impression of a miraculously self-absorbed person for whom the other people in the room weren’t really present.

In another case, I remembered a distinct feeling of being negatively judged upon first meeting– something about the way I was being looked at. Hard to prove, but a strong feeling. Then that person became an amiable acquaintance as well, but then when the chips were down at a later point, I suddenly heard a torrent of negative judgments coming from this person, as if from nowhere. That too seemed completely out of character, until I remembered the vaguely creepy first impression of being pigeonholed in some hard-to-place fashion.

It’s necessary to look at the good side of this phenomenon as well. Certain people give a strong first impression of warmth and benevolence. Through our exchanges with such people it is later possible to enter into terrible disagreements and outright fights. But then eventually they snap back into showing that original benevolence.

And of course, our first impressions are far more complicated than “good” or “bad.” We have quick, vague impressions of sadness, insecurity, heroism, energy, greed, vanity, and the like. A lot of information is packed into our “superficial” first impressions of people, places, and things.

alarming sports story

Presumably only a small portion of this blog’s readers are interested in American sports, but I was alarmed to read THIS STORY BY LESTER MUNSON about an antitrust case that the U.S. Supreme Court has strangely agreed to hear.

Essentially, the National Football League (NFL) is going to argue that the league is a single entity in competition with other forms of entertainment such as cinema, rather than the current system under which all the teams are seen as being in competition with one another. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the NFL, it will give the NFL and all other American sports leagues a crushing power to restrict player and coach salaries and drive ticket prices sky high. This would be disgusting, essentially reversing much of the progress made by sports labor in recent decades, especially through the heroic struggles of baseball players such as Curt Flood. The results might be so horrible that I could stop following sports altogether.

Munson is one of the best sportswriters in the business. He also happens to be a lawyer, which is why he writes on legal issues for ESPN. I met Munson once in Chicago during my sportswriting days. Even though it was only one meeting, he might well remember me, since he was stunned that I was working on a doctorate in philosophy at the time, and I was stunned in return at his incredible knowledge of small Iowa college sports teams such as Coe and Cornell. (I’m still not sure how he knew that stuff.)

You can read about the case in the article itself, if you’d like. But the NFL seems to be calculating that the four conservative Justices will rule in their favor, and there is the odd fact that liberal Justice Stephen Breyer ruled against the NFL player’s union in a past case. That would be 5-4, if Breyer sides with the league again.

Interestingly, Sonia Sotomayor, now up for confirmation to the Court, played a major role in ending the 1994-95 baseball problems by ruling in favor of the players. (Former pitcher David Cone testified on her behalf before the Senate.)

more birth of the Byzantine

As Poe already observed, Gibbon is unparalleled in his gift for packing decades or centuries of historical drama into a brief passage:

“As the spirit of jealousy and ostentation prevailed in the councils of the emperors, they proceeded with anxious diligence to divide the substance, and multiply the titles of power. The vast countries which the Roman conquerors had united under the same simple form of administration were imperceptibly crumbled into minute fragments; till at length the whole empire was distributed into one hundred and sixteen provinces, each of which supported an expensive and splendid establishment.”

best doctor’s orders ever

From today’s appointment:

“You must eat more almonds and olives.”

What?!

OK sir– if you insist, then I will eat more of two of my favorite items.

He may as well have said: “You must spend more time reclining beneath palm trees receiving massages and smoking apple-scented shisha.”

in response to a couple of questions

I was speaking with Maysoon, a talented graduate student I know in the Boston area, and she raised a couple of interesting questions, one of them touched on in last night’s post and the other not touched on for several months on this blog. Let’s go in reverse order:

1. How can you start writing without knowing all that’s been said on the subject before? Isn’t there a worry of reinventing the wheel?

My own practice is never to read the secondary literature on a topic until I’ve first clarified my own initial thoughts about it, and even done a bit of writing on it. It seems to me that starting with the secondary literature serves both to delay the actual start of the project, and to sap one’s self-confidence about having anything to add to the debate. Moreover, it’s a lot more rewarding to read the secondary literature if you already have some thoughts of your own about the topic.

I’ve told my own story before, but it’s worth telling again for the dissertation writers among us. My big problem with the dissertation came from continually rewriting and polishing the first third of the book, especially the first half of that third. If you go and look at the first 5 sections of Tool-Being, they must have been revised dozens of times, and all told I wasted about three years doing that. I was also reading tons of Heidegger during those three years, so it’s not like I was merely procrastinating. I was just procrastinating on the writing part, the most important part.

At that point in time, I wouldn’t say that I knew the Heidegger secondary literature especially well. In this initial stage it seemed like a better investment of time simply to read Heidegger himself, not what other people were saying about him. (It’s the St. John’s graduate in me. For those who don’t know the College, all readings are primary sources, and secondary sources are even somewhat discouraged. The upside of this strategy is that it gives you a permanent fearlessness about tackling primary literature in just about any subject, including the hard sciences to some extent.)

Then came that point in time when I realized I wasn’t making much progress. The trigger for that realization, as I’ve said, is that my roommate was about to finish up and go on the market. I extrapolated my past rate of speed and realized it would be around 2005 before I finished if I kept going that slowly. And that was a horrifying thought.

So, I finished off the first third, and went on to the second third, which is the part on the secondary literature. I dreamed up a highly unrealistic plan for finishing that part, which was to alternate days: I’d spend one day reading a whole book or numerous articles on Heidegger by some prominent commentator, then spend the next day writing about it. Then turn on the third day to reading another commentator, then on day four writing about that commentator. And so forth.

However, this completely unrealistic schedule was not the least bit unrealistic: it worked. Why did it work? Because in the first third of Tool-Being I had already figured out the basics of everything that I think about Heidegger. Once that was finished, it was actually fun to read the secondary literature, and see where I agreed and disagreed with all the commentators. It was one of the most enjoyable 4-6 week periods of my intellectual life. By the end, I had written so much material that my advisor made me cut about 50 pages of it (a good idea on his part). And most of all, I felt completely at ease in the field. I had attained, very quickly, a good sense of where my interpretation fit amidst all the others.

If I had started with the secondary literature, however, it could have been a disaster. This way of proceeding tends to lead to timid qualifications and overly moderate claims that risk nothing. There can be an excessive deference to existing commentaries if they shape your initial view of a topic. There can be a tendency to quote too much. And this was my advisor’s one bad idea, which I refused to follow: flipping the order of the first two parts of Tool-Being. Never start with a survey of the secondary literature. Among other things, it bores the hell out of readers.

(On a related side note, some of you may remember the controversy surrounding Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which claimed that anti-Semitism is inherent in German culture. I’ve never read Goldhagen’s book and so have no firm opinion about it. But the most preposterous thing I read in any review of the book went something like this: “Goldhagen’s book is a classic doctoral dissertation. Oh, how stupid all the rest of us were! We all missed it!” These remarks were not only sarcastically smug, they were also utterly inaccurate. The “classic doctoral dissertation” is not a brazen, gutsy, controversial claim like Goldhagen’s. The classic doctoral dissertation is a meek, unrisky, deferential, competent piece of analysis. Try not to write a “classic doctoral dissertation.” Try to write something with a backbone, making definite claims in your own name.

But more generally, there is always a danger of reinventing the wheel. It’s a natural hazard of the intellectual professions. That’s why it is good actually to present papers and publish things, because it brings you into contact with more and more people, all of whom have read certain things that you’ve never read. (Everyone has gaping holes in their reading background, though much of it ends up being concealed by bluffing.) It is quite common when reading biographies, as I love to do, that an important thinker comes across an unfamiliar book in old age and pounds the table and says: “Dang it! It would have saved me 20 years if I had read this book in my youth.”

2. How can you start writing before you have each of the steps of the argument perfectly worked out? If you do that, aren’t you taking a risk that you’ll find out one of the arguments is wrong and that will ruin everything that comes afterward?

It’s an understandable worry. We can call it the “domino theory” of argument. One false step means all the later steps are destroyed.

It was Whitehead who observed that philosophy has wrongly borrowed the method of deductive inference from mathematics. One faulty step in a geometry proof does mean that everything later is ruined. But I agree with Whitehead that philosophy doesn’t work the same way. There is a certain autonomy to each level of a philosophy that can partly withstand even faulty reasons given to justify it.

A good analogy would be everyday objects. A table is built of legs and a top. Each of these parts is built of molecules. The molecules are built of atoms. The atoms are essentially built of quarks and electrons. And so forth. But shifting the position of one atom does not destroy the table. This is sometimes called “redundant causation”– many possible arrangements of atoms will give rise to the same table, and there is no cascading catastrophe when one small part is shifted, or at least not most of the time. (There are indeed cases, even in philosophy, where one mistake ruins everything that comes next. But nothing like in geometry.)

A related point comes from Emerson, who says something along the lines of “who cares for Berkeley’s or Spinoza’s reasons?” Maybe it wasn’t Berkeley and Spinoza, and maybe he said arguments rather than reasons, but it was something like that. His point, as I see it, is that when we read someone like Spinoza, even though to some extent we are following his arguments step by step, that’s not all that we’re doing. Many of Spinoza’s “arguments” strike us as laughable. But we play along, seeing what comes next.

And much of what comes next turns out to be of great value, even if we ridiculed some of his arguments along the way. The reason for this is that philosophical concepts are also marked by a sort of “redundant causation,” just as a table is. Many different arguments can be used for the same concept. If someone decimates one of your arguments for something, there will be a tendency to hang onto your concept for awhile and look for new defenses for it. By no means does this show a lack of intellectual integrity. What it shows is a perfectly warranted suspicion against any particular argument for or against that concept. If you uphold a specific idea, it will not be solely because of the argumentative steps that got you there. It will be more because you see a specific power or clarity in that idea, as when Crick, Watson, and Rosalind Franklin all agreed that “the double helix is too beautiful a structure not to be the truth.” That’s not an “argument,” of course, but it’s sufficiently powerful evidence that they would have resisted any initial evidence falling against the double helix.

Normally, we abandon a theory not just because somebody happens to make a single good counter-argument against it. (This does sometimes happen, but it’s relatively rare.) The evidence against a concept has to reach a certain critical mass before we throw it out.

When I think of Spinoza or Hegel, I think primarily of the concepts they ended up with, and only secondarily if at all of the exact chain of reasoning by which they reached it. You don’t have to borrow that exact chain of reasoning in order to borrow the concept and transplant it horizontally into your own thought. When you import an idea, you don’t have to import its entire history as well. An idea is partly “emergent” beyond the arguments that gave birth to it.

So, it doesn’t bother me to leave a few half-formed arguments on pages 20 and 30 while moving on rapidly to page 150. It is a very bad thing to remain stalled on a single problem, because that problem is not necessarily the key to everything else you might be able to do. Being wrong is far from the greatest intellectual sin. And every book has points where it is wrong. Just look at Plato and Aristotle, the two greatest philosophers who ever lived, sliced to pieces by my 16-year-old freshmen a couple of times per year. And yet we do not abandon Plato and Aristotle. Why not? Not because “they had great historical importance in their time.” No, they are great philosophers even now. But their greatness does not consist in making fewer mistakes than other people.

good start

That was the quickest trip I’ve ever made to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo– in and out in 20 minutes, and hardly anyone there. Usually I steel myself for bone-grinding hours of waiting, without entertainment.

The scary thing about renewing driver’s licenses, passports, and the like is that the expiration date always looks frighteningly futuristic. This new passport will take me into my 50’s, which is pretty alarming. There won’t be too many more after that one.

I still remember getting my 6-year driver’s license just after graduating from high school. The expiration date said “1992,” and I laughed at that along with my entire family, because 1992 sounded like science fiction at that point. But now it’s just a distant memory.