time to return

The return leg of the ticket is finally here (I’ve been killing time the fun way in Savannah and Charleston). Back in Atlanta now, where it’s uncomfortably cold. Cairo tomorrow, which will surely be uncomfortable in the opposite direction by late April.

Ft. Sumter

A morning boat ride is always a good way to start the day, and today the ride was to Fort Sumter: where the U.S. Civil War began with the Confederate attack on the Federal fortress at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, April 1861.

The fortress is a shadow of its former self, a ruined single storey now, compared with 3 or 4 in its functional heyday.

The network of Atlantic coastal fortresses was apparently built as a response to the shocking ease with which the British Royal Navy was able to attack the coast during the War of 1812. Most of the facilities seem to have remained in service until 1947, including Fort Sumter.

The commentary during the boat ride itself was a bit more balanced than the “War of Northern Aggression”-type things we’d grown used to hearing down here, but then again, it was a recorded talk that seemed to have come straight from the National Park Service office, not from a local tour guide.

For those who might be curious, Ft. Sumter is fairly visible from the Charleston waterfront, and would have been easily visible in the days when it was still a fairly tall building. (Charleston itself is blatantly visible from the fort.) The firing on Fort Sumter came not from the city of Charleston, but from nearby Fort Johnson, already occupied by the Confederates after the Federal forces had evacuated it in favor of the more defensible Fort Sumter, which nonetheless lasted only two days.

One interesting fact form the museum display inside the fort: 75% of blockade runners did make it through, earning profits of as much as $100,000 per run (an immense sum at the time). The blockade runners would often come from Bermuda or the Bahamas, would use relatively quiet steam engines, would be painted grey for low visibility, and would often come and go at times of a new moon or rainfall. One blockade runner still lies at the bottom of the sea, not far from Ft. Sumter.

Onion editorial cartoon

Which reminds me of another good article from The Onion: “Political Cartoon Even More Boring And Confusing Than Issue”

PowerPoint out of control

NY TImes article HERE on the viral spread of PowerPoint through the U.S. military. As an example of an especially ridiculous slide, they give the following depiction of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan:

the best litany ever

And though I just posted it here two weeks ago, it’s worth remembering the true gold standard of Latour Litanies, written by Bruno Latour himself:

“Golden Mountains, phlogiston, unicorns, bald kings of France, chimeras, spontaneous generation, black holes, cats on mats, and other black swans and white ravens will all occupy the same space-time as Hamlet, Popeye, and Ramses II.”

Zizek is funnier as a speaker, but I think Latour is a bit funnier as a writer.

Gratton on Nancy

Gratton defends the realist credentials of Nancy:

“That’s where I first really noticed litanies in philosophy and first defended them, since Nancy uses them to get at his notion of an explosive sense of the world beyond any given signification (take that, people who think it’s all about the play of signifiers). Harman, I think, holds that what Nancy then gives you is something like an apeiron of sense, but I, of course disagree.”

It’s a good step by Nancy, but still a baby step, I’m afraid.

Yes, Nancy does say what Gratton claims he says. But unfortunately, he also does not allow that “explosive world beyond signification” to be articulated into individual pieces. Why not? Because he says he has a strange fear that it would be “Platonism” to think that there is a real dog lying behind the dog we experience.

So, if the real world is not made up of “Platonic” realities, then what is it? Nancy calls it “whatever.” And the “whatever” is articulated into pieces only when relations arise. (Never mind the incoherence of claiming that there is a shapeless whatever that somehow has pre-existing relata that somehow also generate each other through their relations despite also pre-existing those very relations. Interesting, but completely incoherent, and too driven by phobias against ghosts such as Platonism.)

I do appreciate Nancy’s step in the right direction. But that era of French philosophy was simply too distant from any sort of metaphysical speculation, and whenever they try it they tend to make clumsy maneuvers that simply don’t work. I make this remark not out of dislike for Nancy, since I accuse Levinas of exactly the same thing, and Levinas happens to be one of my favorite 20th century thinkers.

Basic point: you can’t just say there’s a world outside signification. That’s a good step, but still a baby step. The teenaged step is to add that the world outside signification is already articulated, and the adult step is to say that the interaction between those articulated parts is of the same ontological kind as our own interaction with those parts.

But I’ll be curious to read Gratton’s essay in the anthology (which he co-edited in his usual hyper-competent and hyper-energetic fashion.)

Brief postscript: Nancy does have some nice Latour Litanies. I quote one in my essay in that anthology. Let’s see if I can find it…

Oh yeah, here it is:

“Ribs, skulls, pelvises, irritations, shells, diamonds, drops, foams, mosses, excavations, fingernail moons, minerals, acids, feathers, thoughts, claws, slates, pollens, sweat, shoulders, domes, suns, anuses, eyelashes, dribbles, liqueurs, slits, blocks, slicing, squeezing, removing, bellowing, smashing, burrowing, spoiling, piling up, sliding, exhaling, leaving, flowing…”

I don’t think “anuses” was really necessary, but otherwise it’s a good litany.

on walking and thinking

Good walking routes are a treasure for philosophy. I’ll say why in a moment.

The best one I’ve discovered in recent years was that stretch of corniche in Malta running from Sliema through St. Julian’s to Paceville, just west of the capital. It’s an unbelievably good route at any time of day.

But tonight I found another outstanding route here in Charleston, down King Street past Broad all the way to the Battery, about 45 minutes in total. Once I reached the waters, I could see them blown swiftly in the wind under a full moon. Fort Sumter lay somewhere off in the distance (Ian and I will be going out there tomorrow morning).

King Street north of Broad is a quaint retail district, mostly deserted at this time of night. After Broad, the street narrows and becomes a row of ultra-expensive homes usually enveloped in absolute silence, with period gas lamps flickering in the darkness. It’s an impressive spectacle, one barely ruined by occasional encounters with some of the most banal drunk tourists you can imagine. I simply pretended they didn’t exist; didn’t want them to ruin the atmosphere.

As for the value of walking for thinking, I would say that walking and writing serve two different thinking functions. The first mines raw ore, while the second polishes the ore into gemstones.

One of the vices of analytic philosophy (continentals have countless other hereditary defects) is the near-total lack of respect the analytics have for vague thoughts. As a rule, they treat vague thoughts as no better than strings of nonsense sounds. If you have anything to say, they hold, you can say it clearly and precisely.

That’s a good rule for published, final thoughts, but a terrible one for the initial discovery stage. If your thoughts appear in words instantly upon conceiving them, then most likely you have begun a long march through a forest of platitudes. A real thought generally begins as sub-verbal, and needs a good deal of work to articulate. My experience has been that 2 to 3 years is not an unreasonable period for polishing a thought. And after spending that much time with it, you have learned to see it from every angle and thus you will have earned a certain moral authority in expressing it. Your thought is no longer just a set of brass knuckles for beating up people of contrary views (the most despicable motive for philosophizing, but by no means the least common).

For me at least, the polishing of thoughts occurs only when writing about them. The initial raw material, however, comes most often while walking. And that’s why I spend many hours walking, by myself, wherever I happen to live or visit. When deprived of that opportunity due to excessive commitments, I can feel my thinking growing weaker by the day, like blood without iron.

most archaic-sounding title?

This afternoon, I was wondering what the most archaic-sounding title for a philosophy essay would be, and eventually gave the prize to “On Thrift.”

Another contender was “On Temperance,” but it sounds just a bit too affected to be taken seriously.

Levi on Latour Litanies

Here is Levi’s take on WHY LATOUR LITANIES ARE PHILOSOPHICALLY IMPORTANT.

He’s actually right. When two posts ago I called them a fairly minor stylistic device, what I meant is that they are one rhetorical tool of a certain philosophical standpoint, not the very intellectual pillar of that standpoint.

Every philosophical orientation has its stock rhetorical devices. For instance, people like Ladyman, Ross, and Metzinger accuse their opponents of “armchair” philosophy ad nauseam. It is seldom noted that this is simply a dig, not an argument (the works of scientistic thinkers are surprisingly replete with digs posing as arguments; if you mention “science” enough times, it’s easy to look rigorous even when you serve up one fallacy after another).

And it always bears remembering: rhetoric is not to be confused with “mere rhetoric,” as in “devious speech designed to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” Rhetoric in the noble sense, which Aristotle defined as an important means of protecting the truth, is simply the art of the background that hides behind every explicit argument or statement.

I distrust all philosophers who are not good rhetoricians. They’re simply bullies who overestimate their own capacity for faultless sequences of remorseless logic.

Charleston, SC

Ian really nailed it when I asked him to describe Charleston beforehand: there’s something almost a bit Caribbean about it. The place is just asking for a hurricane (which it often gets).

It’s a really unique city, surprisingly sprawling for a place this old. We’ve already walked a total of around 4 miles today simply in the course of minor sightseeing over a few hours. Today is also the first day that I have ever set foot in South Carolina. (There are still 11 of 50 states that I have never seen.)

This photo will give you an immediate flavor of the place: