wrongly trying to move the action elsewhere

Wrongly Trying to Move the Action Elsewhere
by doctorzamalek
January 12, 2009

There are several different ways in which people try to scapegoat or suckerpunch objects in favor of something else.

1. Correlationism. “If I try to think know an object outside of its relation to me, I’m putting it into relation with me, so we can never escape the circle.”

2. Relationism. “An actor is no more than what it modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates.”

3. Bundles of qualities. “You’re a reactionary fool if you really think you’re experiencing an apple. What you’re actually seeing or touching or tasting are a bunch of separate simple impressions bound together through the force of habit.”

4. Laws and tendencies. “Objects are of course fully determinate at all times, but they also have unexpressed tendencies.”

5. The turn to process, becoming, or history. “We have to understand a thing in its genesis, its process of individuation rather than its status as a fully-formed individual.”

6. Virtual genera. “Objects are fully actualized, but the structure of topological spaces is never fully actualized– vertebrate, for instance.”

In each of these cases, individual entities are seen as the real problem with all past philosophy. They are made the scapegoat, and everyone has their own favorite solution for outflanking them.

My own view, of course, is exactly the opposite. Most of the points above represent the strategy of “nothing more than…”– ultimately they are critical debunking strategies. They try to deal with the strange ambivalence in objects by effectively calling it a pseudo-problem.

But what about Socrates in the Meno? My copy of Plato was destroyed in the flood and I haven’t replaced it yet, but early in the dialogue Socrates says something like this:

“But how can I know, Meno, what qualities virtue has, if I don’t first know what virtue is?”

The paradox is obvious, since we normally say what something is by enumerating a list of its qualities. But in analytic philosophy Kripke showed why this isn’t quite true, and in fact Husserl had said the same in Logical Investigations when he said that intentionality is object-giving or nominal (i.e., it functions like a proper name, pointing rigidly at something even when all its qualities change).

In other words, the relation between an object and its own qualities is quite a mysterious thing, just as the relation between an object and how it manifests itself to another object is quite a mysterious thing (correlationism be damned). If Socrates is right, and he is, then these sorts of problems lie at the very heart of Western philosophy. To call them false problems is just to amputate one of Socrates’ legs. It is important for philosophy to be able to think two sides of a problem at once, not just craftily denounce one of the sides.

The sensitivity to a wide range of real and unreal objects is what marks the greatness of humans amidst the animals– our ability to care about distant things that will never affect us in practical terms. Humans are the sincere animals, not the cynically critical ones. The best example of cynical critique is eating or biting everything in sight, and that’s not what we humans do. (Note: I’m an unparalleled animal lover, and a a vegetarian by choice since age 7, the very moment when the truth of meat was revealed to me. But I’m appealing to human pride here as a rhetorical ploy on behalf of objects.)

choose your professor

Jan 13, 2009 5:33 AM
choose your professor
by doctorzamalek

Here’s another party game…

Imagine that you want to be a philosopher, and imagine that you can choose anyone in history to be your teacher/advisor. Who would it be?

One the one hand, the “no-brainer” answer would seem to be Socrates, a historically unique figure. And with Plato as his star pupil, his track record as a teacher is clearly second to none. Alternatively, you could choose Plato as your teacher for similar reasons in both cases. And in fact The Academy was surely a safer learning environment for Aristotle than the streets of Athens were for Plato. However, having Socrates or Plato for your teacher sounds more like the sort of thing worth trying in a virtual reality simulator just to see what it was like– not something you’d actually want to experience for your ten most formative years. It’s simply too remote from us in time; it’d be like wishing you could be Achilles rather than yourself. Too little of your current self would be left after such a transformation to be able to enjoy it.

ALBERTUS MAGNUS might be a good backup option– he obviously gave Aquinas the background he needed, and seems to have supported him against detractors (the famous legend of Albert saying: “someday this dumb ox will roar so loudly that the whole world will hear”). But here as with the Greek examples, it’s simply too different a world– you’d effectively be wishing for the destruction of your current self if you studied with Albert as anything more than a short-term virtual reality prank.

My own choice for ideal advisor would be: FRANZ BRENTANO. Not that it would be fun or easy. Husserl’s memoir of his teacher shows that his feelings were badly hurt at times. Brentano was a ruthless logician with no patience for the sort of groping, unclear intuitions that talented young students often have. Also, he obviously had the capacity to turn on people in a hurry and unleash an acid tongue– Brentano’s late sarcastic remarks about students he should never have trusted are painful to read, precisely because they are lucid and not at all paranoid, even though he was ranting and without eyesight. Brentano simply seems to have lost respect for the ideas and character of Husserl et al. near the end.

And yet… look at Brentano’s track record. The intellectual fertility of his students speaks for itself, and it runs the gamut from Husserl through Meinong through Twardowski and Marty through Freud, and let’s not forget TOMAS MASARYK the founder and President of Czechoslovakia. Husserl may have been roughed up a bit by Brentano in emotional terms, but there was a certain inner core of self-confidence that was never touched.

Now, contrast that with the effect that Heidegger had on his students, and you’ll see the difference. Heidegger’s most successful close students (Levinas and Zubiri weren’t with him long, and seem to have loitered silently in the back row) were Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. And both give me the sense of having suffered genuine psychological damage from Heidegger. Even before I read JEAN GRONDIN’S BIOGRAPHY OF HIM (in which my coming claims are made evident beyond all doubt), I had met numerous people who knew Gadamer, or knew others who knew him. And though he sounded like a nice enough guy, even at third hand I could detect the profound insecurity that Gadamer felt about Heidegger… anecdotes about how Gadamer was really worried (at over age 60!) that Heidegger didn’t respect Truth and Method, and was so relieved to hear such-and-such say that Heidegger had praised the book.

Arendt is obviously a special case, the only documented one of its kind in the history of philosophy with two thinkers of that stature. But I get a queasy feeling whenever reading the older Arendt’s remarks on Heidegger– there’s still something of the “schoolgirl crush” tone in all of her statements about him, even the purely philosophical ones. He somehow managed to infantilize her, despite her obvious successes in the intellectual sphere. And I don’t think it’s just because of the especially close nature of the relationship; I think it’s because of the sort of person Heidegger was.

We all instinctively know the difference between these two kinds of people– Brentano and Heidegger. The “Brentano type” is the really tough teacher who shoots down most of what we say, sometimes angers and frustrates us, sometimes makes us feel we aren’t cut out for the field, and perhaps in future years are never quite satisfied with anything we do. Yet somehow we feel that their criticisms are for reasons of genuine intellectual disagreement. There is a certain healthy distance between them and us… we feel psychologically clean in their presence even when unhappy with their feedback, and ultimately we might find the strength to say “to hell with it” and follow our own Muse and ignore their disappointment. This is Husserl vis-à-vis Brentano, and I can think of one professor I have known myself who fits this category more or less.

Heidegger strikes me as a more sinister type of mentor. I can think of two professors I have known who fit this type, and thankfully instinct told me to keep a distance and learn without speaking much to them, since those who got closer were slowly drained of blood. The relationship in these cases is more corrosive. You can witness these people deliberately fostering insecurities in their students– withholding recognition as a sort of control technique. The students never fully get over it.

So, the choice is easy. I’m prepared to get pounded by Brentano for 7 years, and in the end say angrily “screw it, I’m going my own way,” having had my brain immeasurably sharpened by my time with him. But I will stay far away from Heidegger’s psychological acids, contenting myself with attending a few of his lectures. In fact, I have often been thankful that I was born as late as I was, with Heidegger dead just after my 8th birthday. Anyone basing their careers on Heidegger in a time when he was actively teaching could not be taken too seriously unless they “went to Freiburg to work with” him, and that is not a prospect I would relish. I’ve seen this type of teacher in action, and have seen a number of talented students ruined by them.

travel awards

January 13, 2009

Some quick awards from my previous travels…

Favorite City = ISTANBUL

Favorite Country= INDIA

Favorite Airline= JET (THE ONE IN INDIA)

Most Physically Beautiful Place= RIO DE JANEIRO, SANTORINI (tie)

Most Remote I’ve Ever Felt From Home= BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON

Biggest Change Seen Between Two Visits= EAST BERLIN (from August ‘89 to January ‘91)

Where Money Goes a Very Long Way= SYRIA

Best Hospitality= JORDAN!, easily

Most Dangerous Experience= none, really, except that in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, a giant tarantula-like spider came up from under the desk and onto my computer screen; not sure if it was poisonous or not

Best Food= INDIA

Best-Mannered People= JAPAN

Most Tense Place= KOREAN DMZ

Rudest 10 Minutes= HAMBURG, GERMANY (mocked by a crowd at the train station for how I was carrying my luggage, then immediately shouted down by the taxi driver who was angry that I didn’t go further than I did)

Underrated= SOFIA, BULGARIA

Weirdest question I was ever asked while traveling: “Excuse me sir, are you a Jesuit?”, KRAKOW, POLAND

advice on taking notes

note-taking habits
by doctorzamalek

Alex writes:

“Hi there. A whole post on your note taking habits and marginal symbols would make for interesting reading. Always intrigued to know how others work this kind of stuff. Thanks!”

Sure, though in my case it may be less interesting than you wish.

The major reading project of my life was the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, which set my note-taking habits more or less in stone. Though that’s not what you were asking about, a bit of background may give this some context.

This exercise lasted from ages 23-30, though only about midway did I actually adopt the goal of reading them all; before that it was just “as many as possible”. In a sense it’s a never-ending project, because they keep putting out 1-2 new volumes of Heidegger per year, though it’s fairly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff in most cases by now, with a few key exceptions.

Mentally, I refer to this period of life as “the Manhattan Project,” since it was nearly all-consuming, and there was practically no moment in my twenties when I didn’t have a Gesamtausgabe volume nearby. (I sound like fun, eh?) The first volume (the Beiträge, chosen because I correctly guessed that it would take many years to produce even a flawed English version) was a painfully slow read. High school German (which I was fortunate even to have had) obviously isn’t perfect preparation for Heidegger’s German. But by the second volume (the 29/30 animal life course) I had already looked up all his vocabulary words several times, and any particular author just isn’t going to use a wide range of vocabulary. After about 5 or 6 volumes, you may as well be reading the sports pages, because not only does he repeat the same words– he repeats the exact same ideas. I was literally taking the volumes to Cubs games and reading them during innings breaks by the end. (I’d get dirty looks from the other fans once in awhile for that– especially if I kept reading into the start of an inning and there was a leadoff home run and I’d have to ask “who just homered?” while putting a grey Heidegger volume back into my bag. They’d always tell me the name of the player, but there was always a certain slap in the tone.)

All right, back to the topic…

For the first half-dozen volumes or so, I was for some reason following the ridiculous method of stopping every time I found an important sentence and copying it by hand onto notebook paper. This was an idiotic method, both because it wasted precious time, and also because you then have to make sure you keep track of where the notebook paper is afterward. While reading the German Sein und Zeit, with its countless important sentences, I was the picture of a miserable person, getting through just a couple of pages per sitting until my hand would start to ache.

A friend noticed my misery, and pointed out that I ought to switch to a method of simple brackets around the important passages. So simple, so brilliant. And that begins the list of the basic apparatus I use for note-taking.

1. Simple brackets in the margin. The idea here is that I may want to go back and reread the book in a hurry, if asked to write a fast article on it or something. And I now have all of the volumes other than the first half-dozen I read marked up in such a way that only, say, 20% of the passages in the volume are bracketed. The “Highlight Reel” of the volume. 9 times out of 10, that’s all I will read when rereading the volume, because I’ve found that I can trust the judgment of my younger self. The passages I appreciated in the old days are the same ones I appreciate now. (With the occasional “how did I miss that?” moment added in, of course.)

2. Especially outstanding sentences copied in full at the top of the page. Some sentences are so earth-shattering that I want them boldly visible at the top of the page. That way, I also have the option of the SUPER-fast reread of a particular volume. Let’s say I want to go back through his 1930 course on human freedom, don’t have time to reread the whole thing or even the bracketed parts, and just want to remind myself what the main idea was. In such scenarios I can flip through the pages just looking for the copied-out sentences.

3. Circled page numbers. Once in awhile, Heidegger will get on a roll, and an entire page or series of several pages will be incredible almost without break. In those cases, I tend to circle the page numbers with very thick pencil and maybe put several giant asterisks near the page numbers to call my attention to that fact.

4. Underlined sentences. For stuff that’s slightly more important than just bracketing, but not quite important enough to copy in full at the top or in the margin, there is the underlining option. If I underline the sentence, it’s probably already bracketed.

5. Geometric figures in the margins. I always thought this was a private obsessive-compulsive sort of trait, but have been shocked over the years to see many scholars do exactly this same thing. People always ask whether a triangle means a specific thing and a spiral another specific thing, etc., but I think the only rule is that the more complicated the shape, the more important the passage. And in truth, this fifth option does border on a sort of compulsive, fruitless doodling, though it does make the margins look pretty.

6. Humorous notations. As described in the previous post, I see no shame in using highly visible smiley faces, clown-heads, and abstract clown-toys as visual reminders of especially hilarious passages. In the case of Heidegger, as I mentioned, the “hilarious” passages are all entirely the same repeated jab about “mere” stuff, with the exception of perhaps two regular jokes in all his thousands of pages of output, both of them flat enough that your laughter would be a bit forced if they were told by your boss at a party. Latour is an author I find extremely funny, and I have all kinds of hilarious points marked in his books. In fact, Latour may be one of the funniest philosophers of the past century. Never thought of ranking him that way, but he’d have to be pretty close to the top. Once in awhile Deleuze really knocks one down too. (I don’t find Derrida even remotely funny, ever. He’s kind of like the pedantic showoff rich kid at the grad student party– one who happens to wear chic clothes but is still just a pedant.)

7. End-of-chapter summaries. If a chapter is so chock full of new ideas that I get the feeling I’ve just taken a fork in the road of life, and if there happens to be a bunch of blank space on a page after the final paragraph, I will often make an outline of the key things I’ve just heard, and the pencil scrawls are often quite excited, with most of the writing in block capitals. The best example I can remember of this is Levinas, Existence and Existents, which gets my vote for the most unknown masterpiece of 20th century continental thought. If you say “Levinas” most people will respond with “the other the other the other the other the other the other the other the other the other,” but it’s that early stuff on Heidegger from the late 1940’s that I find endlessly haunting. You can feel a new path of philosophy breaking through the forest, and also know in advance that no one’s going to take it, while also feeling that it’s not too late to go back and try it.

AND FINALLY, sometimes, maybe 30% of the time, I read a book straight through with NO NOTES AT ALL! This is probably a reaction to the excesses of note-taking in which I indulge at other times. And obviously, the note-taking decreases exponentially if it’s history or literature rather than philosophy. In the case of history or literature I’m generally only highlighting passages of stunning literary brilliance, and even for a classic author that might be 5 or so in an entire long book.

Early on while reading a book, I’ll feel that it’s either a “note-taking book” or “not a note-taking book.” And then I stick with that decision, and the rhythm of the read is completely different in the two cases.

Let’s see… science is the other genre in which I read widely, and I guess I mark science books almost as heavily as philosophy books.

Thanks, Alex! Whenever I fear running out of things to talk about in this blog, someone writes in and reminds me of things that haven’t been said yet.

Zizek, Nietzsche, and Language

Zizek, Nietzsche, and language
by doctorzamalek
January 14, 2009

Actually, there’s a lot of stuff I want to say about the philosophy of language, and not in the relatively dull way that analytic philosophers do it. It’s been done too much with meaning and reference in mind, with little or no eye toward the sorts of complaints I’ve made recently about the inherent stupidity of all content.

While on campus today (just got back; a 45-minute ride from our new distant but gorgeous desert compound) I dug out my copy of Zizek’s Ages of the World commentary where the rip on proverbs is, and I’ll think about it a bit more and make some more serious posts about it in February or so.

My other thoughts on the philosophy of language have to do with Nietzsche and Sade, both of them among the finest stylists the world has ever produced (overshadowed in Nietzsche’s case by specific philosophical doctrines that I could often take or leave, and in Sade’s case by all the salacious distractions that are really only a part of who he is, not the whole).

You’ve heard what I want to do with Sade– rewrite parts of him with the focus being on anything but lust, because… well, transgression is getting sort of boring, isn’t it? How many traditional social mores remain in our midst to be desecrated? Hasn’t “innocence” already been violated 70,000 times over? Haven’t we already shocked the clergy and our grandparents quite enough to get a lifetime’s adrenaline rush as intellectuals?

With Nietzsche, the same thing can be done as for Sade (as when I rewrote part of Zarathustra with the same style but in praise of democratic socialism and the virtues of the common man), but I have a different technique in mind… Some years ago, a friend and I tried to debunk jokes by making their enthymemes as explicit as possible. It ruins the jokes, of course, but that in itself can be funny. For instance, does everyone remember all those “blonde” jokes? Here was one of them:

“Q: How does a blonde turn on the lights after sex? A: She opens the car door.”

Get it? He ha ho. But it’s kind of funny to make the enthymemes explicit, one by one, and in doing so you get further and further away from joke territory.

1. “Q: Where do blondes have sex? A: In cars.”

I doubt anyone would laugh at that riddle in isolation, though it’s kind of funny in an exercise like this one.

The next step turns from a riddle into a simple kind of insulting syllogism:

2. “Blondes have sex in cars. Having sex in cars is sleazy. Therefore, blondes are sleazy.”

(My high school friend Michael Herrick is the one who first performed this analysis of the joke.)

But what does it have to do with Nietzsche? One of his best-liked lines is about Shakespeare. I don’t have it with me, but it’s something like: “how much a man must have suffered to find it necessary to play the buffoon!” You know the one I mean; the exact wording isn’t so important.

Here again, there is a tendency to rush too quickly toward a reflection on the content of the statement– scholars will rush ahead to some sort of claim about master vs. slave morality, or “the psychology of the affects,” or whatever. But what makes Nietzsche who he is is the power of his rhetoric, the way he plays games with the ratio between tacit and explicit aspects of the themes he discusses. Nietzsche could easily be rewritten to be incredibly boring and banal– all you have to do is perform a “blondes are sleazy” sort of operation on him.

Instead of doing that, however, I think it would be interesting to place Nietzsche in the company of other figures making neighboring statements to his own riff on Shakespeare, and see what that tells us about Nietzsche. In the following list, each of the imagined speakers damages or ruins Nietzsche’s statement in some way, and from seeing how they do so, we might learn some important things about why Nietzsche’s real “philosophy” lies in his rhetoric– not in the postmodernist antirealist sense of rhetoric, but in the realist sense of rhetoric (found in both Aristotle and McLuhan, and implicitly in Heidegger) as the attention to the unstated background over the visible dialectical figure. Not rhetoric as “language,” but as that which undermines all language.

Here they are, an army of well-meaning people who will manage to ruin Nietzsche somehow.

THE SIMPLETON: “Shakespeare must have been such a happy person to play the buffoon all the time.”

THE TEDIOUS BORE: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. It’s a sort of overcompensation. He really suffers inside, and so he jokes on the outside in order to forget his pain.”

THE MORALIST: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. And personally, I’m a bit annoyed that he feels the need to drag all of us down with him.”

THE PEDANT: “Shakespeare’s plays display instantiations of a ludic affect, which, one suspects, bespeak an inversion of his ‘true’ state of mind. Much work has been done in this area, but a full consideration lies beyond the scope of this essay (but see Johnson 1994a, Miner & Shaltgrover et al. 1997).”

THE CORNBALL: “Whenever he has those comical scenes, I ain’t fooled. I know Ole Billy’s got somethin’ stickin’ in his craw.”

THE SELF-ABSORBED: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. And that’s why I don’t envy him. Personally, I’ve never had those sorts of issues.”

I’ve misplaced my list, but at one point I’d come up with around 25 degenerate rewritings of Nietzsche’s outstanding phrase, and they do give insight into the complexities of any sentence by Nietzsche, which need to be rolled over the tongue like a fine wine.

Actually, while I’m at it, Zizek has a similar discussion in The Parallax View, where he hilariously glosses Hölderlin’s danger/saving power line as: “if you’re ever having trouble, the solution could be closer than you think. Help may be just around the corner.”

The funny thing is, as banal as that sounds, it’s not bad advice. It does contain useful, practical content that would benefit any one of us stuck in a tough situation. So why does it sound so comically stupid when it serves as a rephrasing of Hölderlin?

More on this later. As you can probably all tell by now, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inherent stupidity of content, and the limits of that stupidity.

some criteria for “greatest philosophers”

part 2 of setup for “the greatest ever”
by doctorzamalek
January 15, 2009

Now reclining at home in Zamalek with pistachioes and dates, I turn to the second part of the setup…

What are some of the criteria we should have in mind when identifying the greatest philosophers? There is no simple criterion, like the time on a stopwatch in the 100-meter dash. It’s more like dance or gymnastics, where the judges must consider a variety of factors, and where one or two mistakes are not necessarily disqualifiers. I hope it should be obvious that “great philosopher” does not mean “philosopher who made the fewest intellectual gaffes” (analytic philosophy is far too obsessed with avoiding blunders; sometimes a couple of intellectual pratfalls can actually give a bit of spark to your philosophy). Heidegger is on to something when he says “he who thinks greatly must err greatly,” self-serving though the phrase was in his own case (he applied it to his dealings with the Nazi Party). Philosophy has much to do with depth and comprehensiveness. It is easy to imagine a skilled logician able to defeat everyone in oral dispute, yet also unspeakably shallow and trite in comparison with all those he defeats– not only easy to imagine, I should have said, but easy to encounter such a person.

The best way to structure a list of criteria for greatness in a philosopher is to tie the list candidly to my own philosophical views. Readers of this blog or my printed works may know that I favor a philosophy centered on objects that are real quite apart from their impact on all other objects.

For the purpose of a useful play on words, let’s shift from the word “object” to “substance”, a classical term not entirely unlike my use of “object.” While I do have objections to classical substance, they are not especially relevant for the moment. So, let’s talk about which philosophers are most “substantial,” meaning something like “great.” What are the features of a substance (or object, or assemblage– the latter term being a synonym for “substance” in my usage)?

1. Freedom from relations. What this tells us is that the greatness of a philosopher is not the same as influence. It’s generally true that a greater philosopher has more chance of influencing other, just as a more massive star has more likelihood of attracting other masses– but of course, this can’t happen if no other objects happen to drift near the star! Would we judge its massiveness by how many planets were orbiting it? Of course not. There are too many accidental circumstances involved. A star far more massive than our sun could have far fewer than our 8 planets, or even no planets at all. The same for a great philosopher, who might have no planets in orbit, and for purely chance reasons.

Also, don’t forget the case of Herbert Spencer, referred to earlier as the only philosopher ever to sell 1 million copies of his books in his own lifetime. Are we tempted to call him the greatest philosopher of all time? I don’t think anyone is. Why not? Possibly because we have our doubts about the validity of these judges… They lived mostly at the same time as Spencer, which suggests a passing Zeitgeist… They were at best smart amateurs (a great kind of person!) and at worst they were “cracker-barrel agnostics.”

Or consider the case of some contemporary philosopher invited into the Oprah Winfrey book club and selling 3 million books as a result. I would never despise such a person, who might be an outstanding popular educator. But it is unlikely that such a person would be one of the great philosophers. At any rate, if by some chance they were, we would not say they were great because Oprah Winfrey’s subscribers bought the books.

To take a more serious example, a good case could be made that Fichte is currently much more influential than Leibniz. After all, Leibniz seems stranded in a goofy, out-of-date metaphysics made of tiny, mirrored but windowless soul-like entities, their relations to all other entities loaded in their heart in advance by God. It seems too distant from what we do now. By contrast, Fichte’s “correlationist” stance is very much a mainstream way of looking at things today. But do you really want to claim that Fichte is a greater philosopher than Leibniz as a result? I think this would be a serious mistake.

2. Ability to support different qualities at different times. In the case of philosophers, the analogy would be the ability to support different interpretations at different times, and also to be deeper than their own content. Obviously, you don’t have to be a Nazi sympathizer to admire Heidegger– there are Marxist and liberal Heideggerians by the bucketload, and pehaps relatively few Nazi Heideggerians at this point. You don’t have to despise the masses to like Nietzsche, or be a Catholic to admire Aquinas, or be a Muslim to love reading Avicenna. But there are numerous authors admired for the most only by those who agree with them. This suggests an interesting principle: only if the opposite party wants to claim you as one of their own do you have some sort of substantial greatness. Heidegger is the best recent example simply because he’s the most controversial of all great philosophers. Despite being a to-the-core Nazi, he was an intellectual idol to plenty of Marxists, French thinkers, and Jewish thinkers. There are probably no Jewish or Slavic admirers of Alfred Rosenberg, by contrast. If people can stomach your ideas only when agreeing with them, then you are essentially an apparatchik, an interchangeable spare part useful for achieving some clique’s aims in fighting their enemy clique. But the real philosophers shock both cliques, to such a degree that their own allegiances are in some sense beside the point.

3. Substance is never predicated of something else. There are many average priests who could safely be called Thomists, and many continental philosophy scholars who could safely be called Heideggerians. And there is no shame in this. But the greater the philosopher, the less easy it is to “predicate them of another philosopher.”

For example, if you call Levinas and Gadamer “Heideggerians,” their followers might protest, and it may even be a bit of an oversimplification. But it’s not entirely ridiculous; the classification makes some sense.

But if you call Heidegger a “Husserlian,” without irony, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you’re trying to prove a very specific point. In Heidegger Explained, I did call Heidegger “a heretic among the phenomenologists,” but this was simply meant to show that Heidegger’s core insights are radicalized versions of parallel insights found in Husserl. Calling Heidegger a “Husserlian” clearly makes sense only as an origin story, not as a useful description of Heidegger’s career as a whole.

4. Substance (for me, at least) is never adequately expressible in a logos. Philosophy is not a matter of discovering a greater amount of accurate content, because strictly speaking, there is no such thing as accurate content. Not because everything is relative, but for the opposite reason: because the real is non-relative, and hence not fully translatable into the relation known as knowledge.

I remember a remark of Leo Strauss, saying something like: “among Jewish philosophers, Spinoza may be more original, but Maimonides is greater.” Without weighing in on the Spinoza/Maimonides question, I must nonetheless denounce Strauss’s principle here, since it implies that originality and truth are in some sort of primary opposition. I wouldn’t reverse it and say that originality is more important than truth, because this sounds like the old relativist game again. The problem, in fact, is that people think of both originality and truth as forms of content. In other words, for them truth means “accurate content” and originality means “new content.” I hold, instead, that neither originality nor truth are primarily a matter of content in the first place, since the content of any statement (whether it be Maimonides’ “true” content or Spinoza’s “original” content) is a translation, distortion, transformation, caricature of the real spirit of their philosophies. This spirit may be elusive and hard to define, but so are objects themselves. Socrates: “But Meno, how can I know what qualities virtue has unless I first know what virtue *is*?”

It also follows that we should be especially careful not to overestimate those philosophers with whom we agree and denigrate those with whom we disagree. Catholics should guard against excessive estimation of Aquinas and dismissal of atheist philosophers. French thinkers should beware the temptation to rank Descartes automatically higher than any German (unless good grounds exist for doing so). Melancholic and authoritarian personality types should give Giordano Bruno as much of a fair hearing as Heidegger, and so forth.

Another problem with reducing truth to true content, as discussed in the Platonic dialogues, is that some robotically trained fool spouting right answers would be no different from someone of the greatest depth and wisdom. This paradox is sometimes addressed with the addendum: “well, you can’t just have the right answers, you also have to be able to justify them.” But this solves nothing. For the justifications themselves will merely be further verbal propositions, which can also be memorized (and even believed) by robotic dupes. Content cannot be the source of truth. Originality has something important to do with truth– not originality as “unprecedented content”, but as seeing things first hand with one’s own eyes. And here is the one grain of truth in Strauss’s otherwise cranky-sounding remark. For it is quite possible for Maimonides, or whoever, to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time despite relatively little new content. It’s unlikely, but it’s quite conceivable.

5. A substance has new emergent qualities. This is another “originality” sort of criterion. Despite the imagined case just mentioned of a Maimonides who was deeply original despite little new surface-content in his doctrines, it’s more likely that the new qualities of a great philosopher are to some extent visible. You can replace one hammer with another and nothing much changes. But you can’t replace Nietzsche in Basel with another Greek philologist without having much change.

6. A substance is an assemblage made of different parts. In the present case, this means: (a) the great philosopher weaves unforeseen sets of influences together, and (B) does this seamlessly, not giving us an undigested, eclectic mass. Point (B) is the one where much continental philosophy fails, since the field is filled with doctoral dissertations not fused together with a single powerful theme, but which show the wires coming from the backs of their barely engineered aggregates: “The Question of the Name in Plato, Descartes, Benjamin, and Irigaray,¨ or whatever. (I hope that mortar didn’t land too close to any real person’s actual work! My apologies if it did; it’s a purely invented example.)

7. Substances are marked by redundant causation. This means, for instance, that I would still be the same substance if three of my drops of blood were removed, replaced by other A+ blood, or even replaced (in that tiny quantity) by some incompatible type. (Medically inclined readers are free to correct me if a few drops of the wrong blood type are in fact lethal; I am not aware of this being the case, if it is.)

Redundant causation in the case of a philosopher, although somewhat difficult to verify, would mean that they are not entirely the product of their influences, and that their philosophy is compatible with several different sets of biographical circumstance. But this is a hard criterion to use, in practical terms, for anyone but a shrewd biographer.

8. A substance can have retroactive effects on its parts. Again a hard criterion to use practically, because it sounds too much like the “influence” criterion that we have already discarded.

Finally, a substance is positive. It doesn’t just withdraw behind everything we say about it; it’s a positive reality, though one that is hard to make directly manifest. This point, which has controversial consequences, implies that a philosophy is greater the more reality it allows, not the more reality it critically denies. The controversy is that this criterion systematically punishes figures such as Hume and Fichte for identifying reality more and more with its manifestation to us rather than its reality in and of itself. And this, my friends, is one dogma for which I am willing to go to bat. I do not believe that realism and anti-realism are on the same footing, but hold instead that realism is per se a more philosophical position, although this is not always true on the individual level– I’d rather hang out with Baudrillard and certainly Hegel and Husserl than with 1,000 of the most committed vulgar realists, even though I share more “content” with the latter group.

The 2,100 word mark is again coming into view, this time for this second post alone. So perhaps we have heard enough about criteria, and should go to the actual effort at ranking (after I have had my dinner).

But remember, we [aren’t] judging dance or gymnastics here. Someone might totally flop on 2 or 3 of these criteria, but still be among the greatest philosophers who ever lived.

Shaviro and Kant

Jan 16, 2009 3:20 AM
response to Shaviro
by doctorzamalek

No way I can go to sleep without responding to STEVEN SHAVIRO’S POST , which is on the money and asks several good questions.

First, let me re-emphasize that the question of whether to spin Kant as a hero or villain is a purely tactical one for me, and always has been. Since I like the things in themselves but dislike Kant’s human/world correlate, I am comfortable speaking either well or ill of Kant as circumstances dictate…

*If in the company of Latour and Latourians (who have no interest whatsoever in the Ding an sich but share my frustration with the correlate) I’m happy to share in their anti-Kantian rhetoric.

*But if in the company of “Kantian humility” types who regret the pillaging of the real by German Idealism, I’m happy to call Kant a hero, because here I’m on the same team as they are.

The point is, Kant has a good side and a bad side for me. And while circumstances have generally conspired to make it necessary to focus on his bad side, rhetorical opportunism is in order (for me) when it comes to Kant. No harm is done anyway– he is not some fragile flower whose reputation is in danger from me, but a mighty member of the Western pantheon, his reputation secure for the ages. I just ranked him as the #3 philosopher in history, you know.

But Shaviro raises a valuable question:

“How would Harman’s argument change, if it were to credit Kant instead of Heidegger with the discovery of a subterranean reality beyond, and irreducible to, representation and presence?”

The easiest answer to this point is that Heidegger’s fourfold is not to be found in Kant, and I’m on record as calling the fourfold Heidegger’s most important philosophical achievement– the crowning summation of his career. And though Kant has his 4 groups of categories, it must be remembered that 4’s are rampant in the history of philosophy and they are not all the same. Among other things, Kant’s 4 are all categories, and have nothing to do with the noumenal realm of tool-being where two of Heidegger’s four (earth and gods, in my reading) reside.

You can’t get to Heidegger’s fourfold without passing through Husserl. I still hear lazy assertions that Husserl is merely warmed-over Kant, but there is no distinction between an intentional object and its properties in Kant. Husserl was the first to split the phenomenal realm into object and content. For past thinkers, the “object” role was always played by some real thing outside of experience, and those who focused on experience always saw only bundles of qualities there, not objects. It was a perverse stroke of genius on Husserl’s part to bring Twardowski’s “object” onto the same plane as “content”– so perverse, in fact, that Husserl thought he was doing something else.

However… making the point that Kant misses Heidegger’s fourfold is to dodge the tougher question of whether Heidegger’s withdrawn reality is any different from Kant’s thing-in-itself. How is Heidegger’s hammer different from a Kantian Hammer-an-sich?

No one before Shaviro posed the question to me that clearly, so I’m responding by gut instinct 10 minutes after hearing the question. (But sometimes gut reactions to questions are clearer and more long-lasting than later over-subtlizations). My gut reaction, namely, is that there is less of a rift between the two realms for Heidegger than for Kant.

In other words, Kant’s noumenal realm doesn’t do very much in his philosophy. It’s there for us to have hopes about. Maybe it also “generates” the phenomenal realm, though even in Kant’s lifetime plenty of people observed the paradox of saying that noumenal “causes” phenomenal even though causation is supposed to be restricted to the phenomenal, as a category.

In Heidegger, the relation between being and beings seems far more intimate (and again, I’m working on gut reactions at 3 AM here, now just 15 minutes after reading Shaviro’s post).

For one thing, being sends itself in various historical epochs for Heidegger, so it participates in human history to some extent, whereas Kant’s things-in-themselves say primarily, as Latour brilliantly puts it: “We are here! What you eat it is not dust.”

For another thing, at least in my reading of Heidegger, the causal link between the two realms is beyond all doubt, even if its mechanisms are never explained. The hammer as vorhanden is a translated version of the hammer as zuhanden.

In short, if I were to try to develop my ontology in terms of Kant rather than Heidegger, I’d lose not only the fourfold and the intervening achievements of Husserl (which are profound; have no doubt). I would also have less hope of building the sort of relation between the two worlds that is needed. Kant’s Ding an Sich feels more static in its remoteness: Heidegger’s tools may be “invisible,” but they press up against us with a shocking intimacy at all times.

As for Shaviro’s claim that a Kantian approach might force me to abandon my model of autonomous objects and hence vicarious causation…

First, he cites this passage from Whitehead:

“Such an account… renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing. (Adventues of Ideas, p. 133)”

In order to “get away with” this, Whitehead would have to show us that he’s paying a lesser price than my own. And in fact, Whitehead pays through the nose for his relationism, much more than even Latour does. For Whitehead, one thing prehends another through “eternal objects,” and these eternal objects are found in God. In short, Whitehead keeps the least convincing aspect of classical occasionalism (God is meddling in everything) while abandoning the most convincing aspect (the highly problematic character of relations between autonomous things).

And this is how Latour differs from Whitehead, despite their very close link. For Latour (who as a person may be even more religious than Whitehead was) God is never invoked as a privileged causal medium. Latour’s theory is a strikingly secular one when it comes to relations. A melon or a freight train can be mediators between two other entities, whereas for Whitehead, God is always in the picture. (ADDENDUM: Shaviro admits at the end that he needs to say something about this side of Whitehead, which I like others find refreshing yet also deplorable.)

Latour, in short, is the world’s first “secular occasionalist”– and I think I’m the second! (Shaviro says: “Harman argues, for the very first time, for a non-theistic occasionalism”, a flattering compliment, but credit where credit is due– Latour got there first.)

The problem of links between objects must be handled locally, not with the Ave Maria of the occasionalist God, a trap into which Whitehead falls as much as Malebranche (the difference being that Malebranche believed in substances and Whitehead relationalizes entities completely, but you know I prefer the substances).

A nice block quote from Shaviro:

“Now, substantialism and occasionalism are the aspects of Harman’s thought that most perturb his readers (myself included). One would like to accept his “object-oriented,” anti-correlationist argument, his refusal to place “human access” at the center of things, or to give such access a uniquely privileged status, without thereby having to accept the radically anti-relational consequences that he draws from this argument. To think this way, however, is to do Harman an injustice: his substantialism/occasionalism is not a bug but a feature; it is precisely the creative core of his metaphysics. So what follows might well be just another attempt to evade the full audacity of Harman’s argument.”

A high-minded concession, and a humble masking of Shaviro’s interesting suggestion right afterwards:

“For Kant, noumena lurks inaccessibly behind phenomena, just as for Heidegger, the hidden tool-being of all entities lurks inaccessibly behind those entities’ presence-at-hand. But for Kant (unlike Heidegger?) the limitation which grasps of noumena only their reduced phenomenal profile is not only a loss or a reduction, but also a positive act, a construction, a bringing-into-relation.”

This is probably a fair criticism of Heidegger’s position but an unfair criticsm of mine. Remember, for me it’s never the case that a translation is merely a distortion. I also think that every relation instantly creates a new object! If I perceive a “distorted” tree, this merely occurs in the interior of a real object called “HarmanTree.” It may sound weird, but the basic idea is that it’s silly to claim as Brentano et al. do that my perception of a tree is immanent “in my mind.” Why just in my mind? In fact, I enter into relation with the tree, and the tree-image is not in my mind, but somewhere in between me and the tree. (See my contribution to David Skrbina’s Mind That Abides for a fuller explication of this, and of why this shows that I’m not quite a panpsychist despite a close approach to the position.)

But more importantly– thanks Steven. That was one hell of an attentive reading!

on the Sokal hoax

Jan 16, 2009 6:56 PM
Sokal and Beyond
by doctorzamalek

LEVI MAKES A POST about the scientific fraud case of Schön, and relates it to the famous 1996 “Social Text” hoax of Alan Sokal, when a slew of postmodern gibberish about physics was unthinkingly published by a postmodernist journal. “N Pepperell,” in a comment on Levi’s post, steers us toward A RECENT HOAX IN AUSTRALIA that seems to turn the table on the sciences.

My attitude toward Sokal was somewhat more amused than Levi’s, even though Bruno Latour (one of the most powerful thinkers I’ve ever met) was one of Sokal’s targets, and later his debate opponent on the issue at the LSE.

Unlike many or even most of my friends, I thought Sokal’s hoax was quite funny, though I was unimpressed by his smug self-congratulation for years thereafter (and perhaps it has still not ceased). He’s one of the many people who is regularly “right in what he denies, but wrong in what he affirms” (much like Jacques Derrida, ironically). Sokal’s running post-hoax defense of scientific rationality against the arbitrary fictions of postmodernism struck me as a series of mediocre textbook clichés that undermined the humorous effect of the hoax.

Here’s how I see it… ANY school of thought can be hoaxed. And it won’t surprise readers of this blog when I say that a hoax amounts to a mere repetition of accepted content.

Allow me to explain. While many of Sokal’s hoax-statements about science were manifest nonsense, this seems inessential to the hoax. It was a deliberately bad article. Sokal took this to mean that all postmodernism is of low intellectual quality, but I don’t agree. While I’m no great fan of Derrida, much of his work is undeniably of high intellectual quality, miles beyond the sort of pap Sokal stuck into his article on purpose.

Let’s say that Sokal had managed to write a good postmodernist article (not by his own standards, which do not allow such a thing, but by the standards of those of us who are not 100% dismissive of the postmodernist culture).

*The real Sokal hoax was obvious garbage accepted by an unwitting journal. (Even those angry about the hoax have never defended the quality of the paper; no one could.)

*But my imagined hoax would be a good paper accepted by the journal, with Sokal mocking it anyway in the belief that it wasn’t very good. An accidental masterpiece in the postmodern genre by someone who had no respect for his own creation, but still a masterpiece in the field.

How do the two cases differ? I’m thinking this through on the fly, just after reading the exchange on Levi’s blog, so I hope I don’t ramble…

Parody works when it simulates the underlying spirit of a thing– like a convincing wax figure of Barack Obama, soon to be unveiled at Madame Tussaud’s. Now, I think a parody is different from a caricature. A newspaper cartoon would exaggerate some of Obama’s facial features for comic effect, but it would be pointless for a wax museum to do that. You go to the museum to see a stunning likeness of Obama himself, not a wax dummy of Obama with deliberately caricatured features.

As for the present topic, Sokal’s 1996 article was a caricature. But the alternative hoax I’m imagining would be a parody (like my Lovecraft story about the Nile Hilton, which I proudly regard as good Lovecraftian prose, not a caricature of it… and by the way, and I’m not joking about this, a filmmaker responded to that post, and we are going to make a film of my Lovecraft parody at the Nile Hilton itself– he will be coming to Egypt to do this in the fall, and I am thrilled about it). The only real “caricature” aspects of my Lovecraft piece are its very un-Lovecraftian setting in present-day Cairo, and the fact (known only to those who live here) that the soon-to-be-closed Nile Hilton is really just a decent, run-of-the-mill urban hotel with no trace of anything ominous.

So, we now have a distinction between PARODY (a good, convincing simulacrum) and CARICATURE (a low-quality translation meant to poke fun with bits of excess). If Social Text had merely published a good-quality parody by mistake, I don’t think they would need to be embarrassed by it, even if Sokal laughed anyway. The embarrassment comes from the fact that most of the article was utterly inane.

An android is a parody of a human, not a caricature. If you were tricked (in Blade Runner fashion) into believing that an android was a real person, it might be disturbing or uncanny, but it wouldn’t be embarrassing.

But I see something else even while typing… a successful parody is not a mere bundle of qualities, but somehow captures the style of the thing. You do this by a certain gut “feel,” and once you’ve gotten at someone or something’s essence, you can continue to generate further parody-content at will.

Several of us once went to the Chicago suburbs to hear a highly skilled Led Zeppelin tribute band. The musical identity was so uncanny that my friend Paul Schafer remarked: “for all intents and purposes, that music was Led Zeppelin.” And he was right; I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if I couldn’t see the musicians. It wasn’t a comic caricature, but an attempt at actual mimicry, and one that happened to work. We may have laughed a few times that evening, but the effect was less of comedy than of a kind of superstitious awe.

Let me try to tie these themes together in closing, before the length of this post gets out of control.

ANY genre of art, science, literature, and perhaps even love, can become the object of either caricature or parody.

*Parody is probably neutral as to quality. A convincing parody can be done of anything, no matter how good the original. Instead of Lovecraft, I could have parodied a hack horror writer instead.

*But caricature is, most likely, easier when the thing is of lower quality. Why? Because a caricature is possible when the wires are already showing in the original thing. The person who is easily caricatured is already, in some sense, a bundle of qualities with certain excesses not easily integrated into a unified underlying style.

If you imagine a perfectly beautiful face, for instance, it would be pretty hard to caricature, though quite possible to parody if technology had reached that level (with an android double of the person, for instance). It would give rise not so much to comedy, but to the sort of superstitious awe that we felt when hearing that Zep tribute band. But no face is perfectly beautiful– there are always large earlobes or a mole or a Blagojevich hairdo. And even personalities tend to have caricaturable excesses– there are always excessive quirks of movement or speech that can be pushed even further, as with Tina Fey’s rendering of Sarah Palin.

There is often a tendency to confuse parody and caricature in a way that can ruin good acting with mixed messages, shifting from parody to caricature in midstream. Saturday Night Live once had an actor doing a good Mario Cuomo, nailing the vowels and the logic and the facial expression almost perfectly. But then it was ruined with a punch line: “I… have… mob… ties,” something that was always rumored as the reason for Cuomo not running for President, but obviously not something that Cuomo would ever say in public. The simulacrum was thereby ruined.

I also happen to know a couple of ambitious careerists who work in a highly politically charged environment that leaves no room for dissent. They’ve learned to play the game, despite the utter insincerity of their commitment to the cause. The effect of this is sadly comical precisely because their colleagues don’t see it. All they do is ape a few slogans, and even though I find it transparently faked, the mere repetition of acceptable political content is enough to see them through and earn them advancement within the group. They get away with it.

In a sense, then, I come back to a certain agreement with Sokal in the end. (I wasn’t planning this when I started.) Any school of thought can be hoaxed in the sense of a parody. But caricatures are more easily done once a school has turned into a dried-out husk of its former self. (And I’m afraid it would be quite easy for a good comic actor to caricature Alan Sokal, who is every bit as much a cardboard “type” as those he attacked, just a different type.)

The reason postmodernism was so perfectly caricaturable by 1996 is that the spirit of the thing was dead. Postmodernism had degenerated into a bundle of surface qualities, a kind of professional word salad, and Sokal simply strung a few pieces of acceptable content together, and it worked for him as well as it does for my two careerist acquaintances with their faked political views. Sokal simply had the bad manners to announce in public what he had done.

The moral of the story: if you’re being parodied, take it as a compliment. Bad stuff can be parodied too, but one is less likely to do this. If you’re being caricatured, however, it probably means that something is a bit amiss, and that you’re verging on a bundle of external qualities without an underlying style.

However, no one is immune from caricature. Not even the greats. Recall the parody/caricature of Rilke, which doesn’t prevent me from liking him still…

You are the mouth
but we are only nose.
We are thumbs only;
you are hand.

G. Bruno’s tirade against England

The Nolan’s Tirade Against England
by doctorzamalek
January 18, 2009

You all know I really like England, right? OK, now that that’s on the table, here is the classic rant of Giordano Bruno (a.k.a. “The Nolan” after his birthplace in Nola, Italy). This comes from THE ASH WEDNESDAY SUPPER (pp.120 ff.) in Chapter II, as Bruno is en route from London to Oxford to make his fabled defense of the Copernican theory.

After praising “the many knights and most noble personages of the realm” for their matchless human excellence, he turns more angrily to the English populace in the villages…

“But now, the bulk of the common people presents itself most importunately before my eyes; they are such a stinkhole that, if they were not mightily well suppressed by the [above-mentioned] others, they would send forth such a stink and such an evil reek as would darken the name of the whole population, to the extent that England could boast a people which in irreverence, incivility, coarseness, boorishness, savagery and ill-breeding would yield nothing to any other people the earth might nourish on its breast.

Leaving aside, now, the many subjects who are worthy of some honor, distinction or nobility, I set before your eyes others who, seeing a foreigner, seem, by God, so many wolves and bears and who, by their grim looks, regard him as a pig would someone who came to take away his trough.

This ignoble lot (to whom this applies) is divided into two kinds, of which one comprises the artisans and shopkeepers. These, recognizing in some way that you are a foreigner, make faces at you, laugh at you and mock you, make mouth-farts, and call you, in their jargon, a dog, traitor, and foreigner; and to them this last is a very insulting name which entitles the bearer to be the scapegoat for all the wrongs of the world, whether he be young or old, gowned or armored, nobleman or gentleman. iIf by some misfortune you should happen to touch one of them or lay your hand on your sword, in an instant you will see an army of blackguards gather all along the street. Undoubtedly they come out of the shops, but so quickly that they seem to spring from the earth, even more quickly than (as poets pretend) a multitude of armed men sprang from the dragon’s teeth scattered by Jason.

After giving a most honorific and genteel review of a forest of sticks, poles, halberds, pikes, and rusty pitchforks (which, having been given them by the prince for a good purpose, are always ready for this and similar occasions), you will see them hurl themselves on you with coarse fury, without considering whom, why, where and how, and without a word from one to another. Each one of them, giving vent to his innate contempt of foreigners, will draw near you (if he not be hindered by the crowd of others who are trying to carry out the same idea) and with his own bar he will measure your doublet and, if you aren’t careful, he will permanently pin your hat to your head. And if a nobleman or gentleman happens on the scene, even if he is an earl or a duke who is displeased by such villainy, he, doubting that by joining you in the fray he can help you (even at the cost of harm to himself), will be forced to chafe with anger within and to await on the sidelines the end of the assault (because these ruffians do not respect any person when they have weapons in their hands). Now, at last, when you think it well to seek out a barber and rest your tired and beaten body, you will discover that the very rascals who beat you have become so many policemen and bailiffs who, if they can find a way of pretending that you have touched someone, will make you run, even even if your back and legs are broken as badly as you can imagine, as if you wore the winged shoes of Mercury; or were mounted on Pegasus, or straddled the steed of Perseus, or rode the hippogriff of Astolphus or drove the dromedary of Midian or trotted on one of the giraffes of the three Magi. By force of blows, they will make you hurry; they will help you onward with such fierce knocks as will make you perfer the kicks of an ox, an ass on a mule. They will never leave you until they have thrown you into prison….

The servants of the first rank are poor and needy gentlemen…. Those belonging to the second rank are bankrupt petty merchants or artisans….. [who] have run away or been expelled from school…. Those who belong to the third rank are sluggards who have left a more independent trade in order to escape hard labor: these can be either aquatic idlers from the boats, or earthly idlers from the fields. The last ones, of the fourth rank, are a miscellany of desperadoes who have fallen into disgrace with their masters, or refugees from storms, or pilgrims, or the useless and indolent, or those who no longer have opportunity to steal, or those recently escaped from prison, or those who aim to cheat whomever comes to pick them up where they hang out, that is, the columns of the Exchange and the portals of St. Paul’s….

Among these last classes are those who, in order to show how mighty they are in their own houses and how much guts they have, what good soldiers they are, and how they despise the whole world, [act in the following manner]. Those who do not seem inclined to give way to them, they shove with their shoulders as if with a galley ram, so as to spin them right round, and thus to show them how strong, robust, and powerful they are; strong enough, if need be, to destroy an army. And should they come across a foreigner, let him yield ever so much room, they are bound to show him in every way possible what Caesar, Hannibal, Hector and an ox would do were they to return to fight again….”

so much for inhibitions

from a January 18, 2009 post:

“Occasionally I toy with a manuscript called Circus Philosophicus, or something like that, made up of nothing but myths and Zen-like gags. I suppose some of the inhibitions are purely professional… it’s chilling to imagine the ubiquitous ‘outside referees’ chewing on such a piece of work, and one waits either for a time past all promotions, or for cover from an appropriate pseudonym.”

I still have one promotion to go, but am really starting to relish the idea of dropping Circus Philosophicus on the outside referees.

Furthermore, I have no plans to use a pseudonym for this book.