follow-up on Subtraction and Contraction

Meillassoux wrote yesterday and mentioned that he actually does like “Subtraction and Contraction” a lot. I was apparently reading too much into our conversation about it a few years ago, in which he seemed to distance himself slightly from the article. Apparently he is just mystified that some have taken it as an expression of his own views, when it’s really a “philosophy fiction” exercise. As I’ve said before, it’s a genre that deserves to catch on. The proliferation of reasonably plausible philosophical systems by a single author who doesn’t believe most of them ought to be a fertile field of work.

But it would also be quite tiring. There’s a reason why systematic philosophers are so repetitive. It’s hard to convince oneself even of one’s own philosophy, and so from time to time it is necessary to go back and cover everything from the start, work your way back to where you were last time, and then go a bit further, maybe just 10% further with each book. Over time, you learn to compress your earlier ideas; in The Quadruple Object I managed to compress all the Tool-Being ideas into less than 30% of the book. And then, you try to go a little bit further. But you can’t do a book like that with purely new material, because that’s not how systematic philosophy works. The previous ideas have to be incorporated into their offshoots, and that requires repetition.

With Meillassoux it’s much the same. In the book manuscript the metaphor I came up with was this… Imagine that Meillassoux is trying to cross from western to eastern France on foot, but that he is forced to use the technique of a long jumper. Every time he wants to make another jump, he has to go all the way back to western France and make a running start. Then, when he gets to the chalk line of where he last stopped, he leaps into the air again and lands in a new place we never expected, but a place that much closer to the eastern border of France. He’ll get there eventually; his jumps are pretty long.

mildly weird coincidence

Walking down the street in Cairo this evening, I was sure I recognized a woman on her cell phone as the mother of someone I know from London who works in Washington. And sure enough, it was the mother, and she was on the phone with her daughter. I got on the phone and said hi briefly.

They do have ties to Cairo, so it’s not among the very weirdest of my coincidences over the years, but it was still a bit jarring in the superstitious sense.

I’ve mentioned some of my other strange coincidences on this blog before, of which the simplest is the time I was the first guest of 2003 at a hotel in the Himalayas after the spring snow melt, and Alphonso Lingis was in the logbook as the final guest of 2002. (And the second to last guest of 2002 was the author of Lonely Planet’s India guide, which I happened to be carrying at the time.) I don’t dare to think of who came right after me. Perhaps someone who was equally surprised to see my name right before theirs. I was so early in the season that I never even saw a second guest. Had the whole hotel to myself.

That was my first time at very high altitude, and I found it rough. (I later had a somewhat easier time in the Peruvian Andes, after having been advised to drink lots and lots of coca tea, which worked.) My first day in the Himalayas (at the Lingis hotel) involved sitting motionless in a chair for 8-10 hours, stupefied. I wrote a few postcards in that state, and later saw some of the cards and found the grammar quite poor. There was no internal hot water; a nice gentleman would bring hot water in a bucket to your room with a bit of advance warning. But it was boiling hot, so you had to wait 20-30 minutes for it to reach hot bath level.

One of the great comfort moments of my travels… Walking into town that first night, a cold Himalayan night, and being served a deep, piping hot bowl of vanilla pudding by the Tibetan restaurant owners. I’ve rarely tasted anything that hit the spot so perfectly for its time and place.

The next day I wandered in an area of ruins near the center of town. I entered an abandoned building and remember seeing a shredded-up school textbook for English lessons. It’s always fun to look through the exercises in such books: “I throw the ball,” “Are you happy today?”, etc.

And then, one of the two most dangerous car rides of my life (a taxi in Albania was the other, and for the same reason– mountain roads with steep dropoffs and no guardrails). A couple of guys from the pudding restaurant agreed to drive me as close to the Pakistan border as one can go without a special permit; this was technically Kashmir, so there’s a large Indian military presence in the area. That was the highest altitude I’ve ever reached, but we turned around and returned to town pretty quickly. I was a bit ill by the time we returned. Whatever physiological characteristics you need for professional mountain climbing, I don’t have them. I’m a seaside person, in physiological terms.

the three texts

NICE ESSAY by Levi, and I didn’t disagree with any of it.

And yes, Sartre is ripe for a comeback. I agree with that estimation.

A year or more ago, I was speaking about the “stock price” of philosophers. Some of the trolls in the blogosphere pretended to believe I was saying we should always jump to the hot stock of the moment and buy it, and then there were a number of rather stupid related posts about Ponzi schemes and bubbles qnd so forth.

However, that was precisely the opposite not only of what I meant, but even of what I explicitly said. The point of the stock exchange metaphor was to focus on the stocks that are not hot at the moment. The goal is to look for value, not hot trends.

My educational background is deeply classical, and my view of how philosophy evolves is deeply classical as well– but here I mean the real classicism renewed each century by daring innovators, not the false, dessicated classicism of imaginationless pedagogues and enforcers.

But I do agree with another implication of Levi’s post, which is that shifts in philosophical fashion are a healthy phenomenon. Academia gets stuck in ruts, and every rut is a half-truth, just as every statement of truth is a half-truth. We need to get out of the ruts from time to time. I wouldn’t mind a Derrida revival in about 2030, to see if maybe we’ve been unfair. But as for 2010, he ought to be swept away into the shadows in my opinion. His Reign of Terror is too recent, and incidentally it made us all into laughingstocks, which at least needs to be considered. We need to forget about that horrible period in order to allow for the re-emergence of some of the wonderful things the era of deconstruction suppressed.

I don’t think quite as highly of Sartre as Levi seems to, though I do think it would be interesting to have a mini-Sartre boom right now. If nothing else, people might start to place a higher premium on writing well. He also has a versatile intellect that we could all benefit from.

But the really out-of-fashion great philosopher is still Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle’s stock price is too low. Almost no key Aristotelian thesis can get much traction in continental philosophy these days, unless it’s some pseudo-Aristotelian theme filtered through early Heidegger fanatics.

What has been the least popular thesis in continental philosophy for over 200 years? What will the supposedly “Aristotelian” early Heidegger people never even consider allowing? The existence of autonomous individuals that can bear shifting qualities at different times. This must be retrieved, but in much weirder form than we have seen from Aristotle’s disciples over the centuries. The theory of substance is in no way commensensical, as they have often falsely claimed.

wait till the last line

Just saw this story, and didn’t laugh until the last line:

Wife of Clarence Thomas asks Anita Hill to consider an apology

(CNN) – The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that she reached out to Anita Hill, whose accusations of sexual harassment almost derailed Thomas’ high court nomination 19 years ago.

In a statement to CNN, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas said: “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get past what happened so long ago. That offer still stands, I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.”

Hill, a law professor at Brandeis University, turned the message over to campus security, a university spokesman said.