philosophy
>Beyond the individual
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| Greg Salvatori @ GRGphoto |
Alison Powell on alternative paradigms of thinking @ New Public Thinking
I composed many of these thoughts while I was taking a very long walk through the forest last week, and I’ve left this post mostly as it was when I jotted it down on my return. I hope you think of it as a kind of walking lecture, that meanders through some things I thought were important. I was inspired by Andrew’s insistence that we should ‘re-narrate’ our experience, and this is one of the things that I hope public thinking can do.
I was really struck on my walk by the changes in the forest since the last time I’d been there – changes that were all the result of climate change – which is of course, only one of the complex problems that w are faced with at the moment. Climate change is hard because it requires us to consider the interests of people very unlike us, in a historical or geographical moment we can’t understand. So I started to think about the importance of public thinking as being linked to two things:
First: Thinking Beyond the Individual
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Second: Thinking Beyond the Present
>The world no longer believes in suffering
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Atif Rafay, a convicted murderer, reflects on freedom and punishment @ The Walrus.
Once upon a time I saw a documentary featuring black and white footage of Glenn Gould, shot soon after his first recording of The Goldberg Variations, in which he had taken such extraordinary liberties — excessive liberties, some thought — with Bach. Although by then in his mid-twenties, the pianist gave the impression of being still almost a boy, still very much the prodigy. Seated outdoors, he answered his interviewer reluctantly, as if unused to conversation. Shifting around in the chair awkwardly, as if also unaccustomed to furniture, he spoke in quick runs, punctuated with abrupt halts. But gradually enthusiasm overcame diffidence. As he warmed to his theme, he became himself: voluble, playful, precise. The nimble fingers danced his ideas for the camera; the face radiated happiness and confidence. “I’ve often thought that I would like to try my hand at being a prisoner,” he said later in the film. “I’ve never understood the preoccupation with freedom as it is reckoned in the Western world… to be incarcerated would be the perfect test of one’s inner mobility.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I had known Gould’s recordings and writings for more than a decade when I heard this declaration, but though I had been incarcerated for just as long I didn’t think I understood freedom. I felt, rather, that prison had left me bereft. If I had been changed, it was not for the better.
>The quarrel between philosophy and poetry
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| Kennedy James @ Fogged Clarity/ |
Mark Chou considers the limits of our rational lives @ Griffith Review.
Plato tells this story. Set in 433 BCE, it has as its backdrop an Athenian city-state at the peak of its renown and yet facing a precipice; a war of disastrous proportions is brewing across the Peloponnese and, unknown to the citizens of Athens, a plague will soon devour the city and its inhabitants. Plato’s story recounts a quarrel between an elderly sophist by the name of Protagoras, after whom this dialogue is named, and another man we know as Socrates, still a relative unknown at the age of thirty-six.
As it unfolds, the nature of their dispute becomes clear. Protagoras and Socrates are discussing how, if at all, we can attain control over our lives. What, they ponder, would it take for human agency to outfox human vulnerability? Why are some moral laws, for instance, universally capable of guiding life both now and in future while others not? And how might we safeguard the public affairs of the city from the irascibility of private emotions?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In other words, they’re quarrelling over how human beings can actually limit the role that fate plays in our lives and whether we can ever know reality definitively, quantitatively, scientifically?
>All that I cannot understand
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| Adele Holmes @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Gary Presley considers the symbols and mysteries of nature @ Fringe.
I live in a place where the wind blows, not constantly but nearly so. Only on the hottest, most oppressively humid days does it stall. Only on a hard winter morning, all things ice solid beneath the weight of a sagging Arctic high-pressure system do I see branches hold still. In the summer, the wind is from the south and in the winter from the northwest. In the summer, it generally is pleasant enough, sometimes cooling, sometimes like the hot breath of a hair dryer; in the winter, it always hurts.
I have only lived in this particular house for a year. I never thought much about the wind in the other places I have lived. The constant wind here reminds me of my grandmother, a woman who liked the wind, perhaps not liked so much as she felt the wind cradled her in a familiarity. I know she seemed to like nothing very much. My grandmother was a native of the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee, but she lived seventy years or more on the prairie. When I was a boy we lived in the deep hill country. When she would visit, I would listen to her complain of not being able to see the horizon, of being closed in by the hills pressing against Spring Creek valley, a place all the more isolated by its thirty mile distance from the Mother Road, Route 66.
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The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks and vultures. Each day there is a festival of birds riding the wind, sometimes at eye level with my window, lingering, always lingering a hundred feet or more above the ground as they ride the updrafts.
>The task of public philosophy
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| Trey Speegle @ The Morning News/ |
Andrew Taggart on the value of public philosophy to left politics @ New Public Thinking.
On Sunday, February 13, I received an email to this effect:
I enjoyed reading your recent essay [“In the Land of Bloombergia,” Counterpunch, 9 February 2011] critiquing the critique of your Mayor Bloomberg. I have much the same thoughts when I read a lot of left critiques of our cultural and political elites. It usually doesn’t take creative genius to perceive that these elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, whereas it would take some real inspiration to propose something original that we all could do about it.
After running through a list of failures from healthcare reform to the War on Terror to the “corporate welfare scheme,” the writer concludes on a Leninist note, asking “what we can DO about such things.”
The final question resonates on two levels. Like most of us, he is exasperated by what little has been done since the end of the Cold War to fundamentally change the world order, and his words, like ours, are laced with a touch of fatalism as if to say that there is not much that can be done. It feels as if the war against capitalism and statism has been lost on both fronts and as if, in our obsessive criticisms of the status quo, we were expressing—interminably, Sisyphusianly—our sense of collective trauma as well as our acute feeling of resentment.
But there is a second way of interpreting his question. On this construal, his utterance is an accusation, in Kantian terms “a tribunal of reason.” Radical leftist politics, he seems to be asking, what have you done for us lately? But in asking that leftist politics say what it has or has not done to improve our political situation, he is demanding that it give an account of itself.
>What goes bump in our minds
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| Marc Giai-Miniet @ My Mod Modern Met/ |
Richard Wiseman on a theory of ghosts @ New Humanist.
There is an old joke about a university lecturer who asks his class, “Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?” Fifteen students put their hands in the air. Next, the lecturer says, “Well, who here has touched a ghost?” This time only five hands go up. Curious, the lecturer adds, “OK, has anyone actually kissed a ghost?” A young man sitting in middle of the lecture theatre slowly raises his hand, looks around nervously and then asks, “I’m sorry, did you say ghost or goat?”
Thankfully, the results from national surveys have yielded more clear-cut findings. Opinion polls from the past 30 years or so have consistently shown that around 30 per cent of people believe in ghosts and that about 15 per cent claim to have actually experienced one. For well over a century scientists have attempted to explain these strange experiences, with much of the work focusing on the psychology of suggestion.
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In the late 1970s sensory scientist Michael O’Mahony from the University of California took the idea to new heights when he persuaded the BBC to undertake an ingenious version of the study during a live programme. O’Mahony constructed some mock scientific apparatus (think weird-looking large cone, masses of wires and several oscilloscopes), and managed to keep a straight face as he told viewers that this newly devised “taste trap” used “Raman Spectroscopy” to transmit smells via sound. He then proudly announced that the stimulus would be a country smell. Unfortunately, the studio audience interpreted his comments to mean “manure”, resulting in a significant amount of smutty laughter. After clarifying that they would not be broadcasting the smell of shit into people’s homes, the research team played a standard Dolby tuning tone for ten seconds. Just as the bottles in the more pedestrian versions of the study contained nothing but water, so the tone did not actually have the ability to induce smells.
>All morality is of its very nature godless
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| Anna Fox @ Exit/ |
Andrew Taggart considers our post-religious sensibilities @ Butterflies & Wheels.
I admire Richard Holloway for his courage. Here is a religious man who, from 1986-2000, was Bishop of Edinburgh; a man of virtue concerned with his neighbor, with social justice, and with the common good; and, not the least, a contemplative man who somewhere along the way lost his faith but not his desire for transcendence. I don’t know when his doubts became so substantial that they compelled him to leave the Anglican Church, but I imagine that the decision came only after the crisis had become too acute to ignore and too great to bear.
What brought on this crisis, one that emerged, no doubt, over the course of many years only to reach critical mass in the past decade, was the feeling that traditional religion had lost its grip on the modern world together with the sense that the general account offered by evolution could no longer be denied.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The loss of traditional religion is still movingly recorded in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” a poem with which Holloway is all too familiar. Here, the speaker describes his experience of walking into a church and of finding that this hallowed space, a space that had once been suffused with life, meaning, and community, has since been abandoned. And what does he do? He goes through the motions, taking off his hat, signing the guest book, and intoning “Here endeth” too loudly. Is this a museum, a tomb, a ruin? And what does he wonder? Only how we’ll get on after the rituals that in previous epochs had bound us together have ceased to be practiced. He sees that this life-world has lost its sense; that the people have gone elsewhere (but where have they gone?); that the church, for millennia a symbol of communion and love, is now but a relic of another world, one dimly remembered yet still vaguely felt.
>A life we can take pride in having lived
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Ronald Dworkin rethinks what it means to live a good life @ The New York Review of Books.
Plato and Aristotle treated morality as a genre of interpretation. They tried to show the true character of each of the main moral and political virtues (such as honor, civic responsibility, and justice), first by relating each to the others, and then to the broad ethical ideals their translators summarize as personal “happiness.” Here I use the terms “ethical” and “moral” in what might seem a special way. Moral standards prescribe how we ought to treat others; ethical standards, how we ought to live ourselves. The happiness that Plato and Aristotle evoked was to be achieved by living ethically; and this meant living according to independent moral principles.
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We can—many people do—use either “ethical” or “moral” or both in a broader sense that erases this distinction, so that morality includes what I call ethics, and vice versa. But we would then have to recognize the distinction I draw in some other form in order to ask whether our ethical desire to lead good lives for ourselves provides a justifying moral reason for our concern with what we owe to others. Any of these different forms of expression would allow us to pursue the interesting idea that moral principles should be interpreted so that being moral makes us happy in the sense Plato and Aristotle meant.
>Incomprehensible monuments of otherness
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Rob Horning considers the experience of travel as a way out of consumer culture @ The New Inquiry.
It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct. This new global city has no particular prototype; it derives from no universally embraced ideal of what cities should be but instead derives from a capitalist logic of distributing novelties so that they can be conveniently consumed. Cities become a consistent pap of jumbled motifs imported from everywhere else. Culture shock becomes nostalgic.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )If we want it, a cocoon of familiarity and convenience awaits us wherever we go. So when I travel, I have various rationalizations to distract me from it and from the inescapable truth that I am a tourist on vacation. One of these is to adopt the Situationist strategy of the dérive, which reconceives aimless walks as what Debord, in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, labeled psychogeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
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