Saint Anselm Philosophy Blog

A short meditation this week on the nature, history and status of our experience of ourselves:  Most philosophical historians will argue that the experience of ourselves from the first person perspective, that seemingly natural primary identification we have with our ‘I’s, is anything but natural and is, in fact, a historically developed perspective.  This is, of course, a very odd claim and one, moreover, which is mind-boggling difficult to comprehend; but essentially the argument runs as follows: when you study the literature and philosophy of the west you quickly discover that we have not always thought of ourselves in the same way we do now; that in fact, the ‘internal’ viewpoint granted in the first person perspective was developed relatively recently.

To argue this point, these historians will point in part to the nature of narrative (after all, how we talk about ourselves, as the analyst knows, reveals fundamentally how we think of ourselves); and how, in the ancient world, there appears to be a distinct lack of first person narrative.  Think about the epics or the earliest scriptures which seem to always be narrated in the third person impersonal.  What’s more, therein we find human beings portrayed as passive: exposed to and subject to the whims of a cruel world, the impersonal forces of nature or the wrath of the Gods.  Human action is thus not portrayed as the out-working of some interior life, but instead as the effect of seemingly arbitrary happenings in the cosmos.  Moreover, the value and meaning of those actions is always interpreted from a third person perspective, that is on how they can be seen in the eyes of a particular community, if not the actual political community of the character then at least the audience who may hear the tale.  The actions of an individual thus appear to be evaluated in the ancient world on the basis of whether or not they bring shame or valor in the eyes of others.  From this, the historians conclude, the most ancient concept of the self was one that was: a) fundamentally mediated by the social; and b) not seen as separated, distinct or closed off from the world (some interior experience).

The modern experience of subjectivity, wherever one plots its origins, is distinct then in that it establishes the self as a primarily interior experience, something only the subject itself has access to and moreover as a power in the world with its own sphere of influence.  Our actions, we think, are the result of some happening within us, whether conscious or unconscious, and not the whim of any exterior force.  The subject, we think, is primarily active, and not passive – is internally coherent and not at exposed to the gaze or judgment of other.  It is private.   As such, we experience ourselves not in terms of how our actions are seen by a community, but how we think or feel about them ourselves.  This transition in perspective is demonstrated in our employment of the first person perspective, both in literature and in philosophy (think of Descartes’ cogito for a relevant example), but also in how we talk about our own experience and history making the ‘I’ primary.

But it seems to me, and this is the subject I’d like to provoke our discussions this week (if only virtually), we seem to be situated at a watershed moment in the history of the experience of ourselves: another cultural transition akin to the birth of subjectivity (that movement from the third person perspective to the first) – one which is seemingly carrying us back to the third person perspective, but in a new and strange way.  I witness this in the way my students think and talk about themselves and their interests, but I witness this most on Facebook where status updates are narrated in the third person (i.e. “Drew is very ashamed of the quality of his blog post today”), photos are taken from the third person perspective (either through the mirror or held at arm’s length) and always posed (as if those in the photo are already estimating how it will look to others and what their best angle is for those others) and where it seems that something needs to be commented on by the community to have really happened.  Isn’t this, at least to some extent what we see in the culture of blogging: the conviction that for something to have really happened to me it must be share and validated by the community?   Isn’t there a strange blurring between what would traditionally have been deemed the interior realm of the private and the exterior realm of the public online or the suspicion in my students that there is no point in doing something privately, only value in doing something which will be seen publicly, something for which they will be acknowledged and get some credit (like the student I had recently who told me that he kept a personal journal for his imaginary future wife or progeny who may want to read what he was thinking or feeling today and so carefully crafts each sentence worried about how it might appear to them)?  I wonder if anything is done privately by my students (any journals kept not in the hopes they will be read, but with precisely the opposite hopes).  Is this also what I see in their hyper awareness, however justified, of how they are being judged from the outside world (by future employers, peers, or other professors) and their attempt to sculpt themselves and their c.v. (and even to their private extra-curricular activities) in terms of how it will appear to others?  Isn’t this further what we see in the current cult of celebrity and reality TV super-stars where someone is valued solely on their media-friendliness (and not on the merits of their character)?  Is this, furthermore what I witness in people who will take a digital photo of something they are currently experiencing (say the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls) and then immediately turn their back to the actual experience, to look at the photo they just took (seemingly imagining how it will be perceived by others who will later comment on it online)?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not a chronological snob.  I do not lament these changes, offering instead my own nostalgic portrait of the good ol’ days of my youth when we knew what was private and what was public and had a distinct first person perspective.  Frankly, I think there are some real problems with the modern perspective of my generation.  It is not my intention either, however, to praise what appears to be a weakening of the experience of ‘modern’ subjectivity in my students.  Instead, it is simply my hope to raise the very undeveloped and tentative thesis that there is a difference between our two generations which I think can be explained by examining the history of the experience of ourselves (the history of subjectivity) and which I think may explain some uncanny, at least to me, recent social phenomena.  I look forward to your own thoughts and commentary (though I ask you to keep in mind, that though I knew this was to be published and subject to public view, given my generational predilections, it flowed from private thoughts and was composed without really concerning myself with your future judgment – it is therefore not as polished as most of my students Facebook pages are.  I’ll hope for your generosity then with my ‘modern’ limitations).

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)

Do you feel lucky to be here? How lucky do you have to be in order to require a special explanation of that luck? Some philosophers and scientists have argued that the very improbability of our being here, of the universe being constructed so as to allow the conditions for intelligent life, requires a special explanation, a God, or intelligent designer, behind the original conditions of the universe. Part of the impetus for such arguments comes from an awareness of how the development of the universe depends upon certain variables that are not derived from anything else, but which are traced back to certain original conditions within a primordial singularity or big bang. Supposedly, when one looks at the number of such variables and the possible values they could have taken, the possibility of a universe arising in which one gets things such as stars and planets, or any kind of matter of the sort we know, is so small as to defy understanding. Roger Penrose has calculated[1] the probability of a universe that might contain the preconditions for life as 1 in 10 raised to the 10¹²³ power.  (That is 10 followed by more zeroes than there are particles in the universe.) According to this, all of us have pulled out the one lucky ticket out of gazillion-zillion-zillion losers in the cosmic lottery. Do you feel that lucky?

The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, has suggested[2] that this type of line of reasoning makes a simple logical mistake, jumping from a very obvious restriction on the type of things we can expect to observe to a very dubious conclusion about the origin of those conditions. Physicists sometimes call the starting point and ending points of this jump the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle, respectively. The Weak Anthropic Principle is sometimes stated as a recognition of the observation biases we find due to the limited range of possibilities we can observe. Just as we can only expect to see, with our naked eye, the small range of electro-magnetic phenomena that are visible to us; so we can only expect to observe the small range of possible configurations of the universe that are compatible with our existence. If we exist, then the conditions necessary for our existence must obtain. Stated this way, this seems just about as obvious as anything could be. If I am here, then none of the things that could have prevented it have happened: I haven’t been shot, run over by a car, had a heart attack, or any of the other things that could have prevented me from being here. I am not particularly lucky in having avoided these things. That I have avoided them doesn’t require any special explanation. Of course, if I am here, then none of these things happened, but there is no special reason that they didn’t; they might have. The Strong Anthropic Principle suggests that these original conditions, that the universe is capable of supporting intelligent life, are somehow necessary, and it is this necessity that requires special explanation. If, as I was walking over to my office, a car attempted to run over me and mysteriously swerved at the last moment; if no matter how determined the attempts to take my life, they were somehow thwarted (as in a Pink Panther film), then I would be lucky in a way that requires explanation. The question is whether the origin of the universe is like this kind of case. Dennett merely points out that this does not at all follow from the weak version of the principle.

William Lane Craig has suggested[3] that the origin of the universe is, indeed, more like this kind of case, comparing it to a firing squad that misses mysteriously. If 25 marksmen with perfectly functioning rifles all train their guns on a man at 50 paces, it is vastly improbable that they all should miss. If one of them typically misses such a shot only 1 in a 100 times, the probability of them all missing is 1 in 100²⁵ or 10^50. One would not expect a miss if they fired once a second from the beginning of the universe 10¹⁷ seconds ago until now. If such a thing happened, we would most certainly require a special explanation, such as that they all disobeyed orders and missed on purpose.  And, of course, this improbability is small compared to the super-super-astronomical improbability of the original conditions of the current universe according to calculations such as Penrose’s.

The real question is whether the assumptions that allows us to draw inferences in cases such as these apply to the original conditions of the universe. When we calculate probabilities we draw inferences from the formal structure of a situation based upon certain assumptions, chief of which are (1) The choices between the different possibilities are completely random; and (2) We are considering the probability of one unique instance, specifiable in advance. We cannot know to any degree of certainty that either of these conditions obtain in the case of the origins of the universe. Let us consider the second assumption first. When a meteor makes it through the atmosphere, it is certain to hit somewhere; though of all the innumerable places it could hit, it is improbable that it will hit me. After the fact, if we find the unlucky person that it hits, even though they are only one of the millions of people it could have hit, the fact that it hit them requires no special explanation; it had to hit someone after all. When we reach into a hopper full of 1000 white balls, each with a number, and pull out number 367, the odds of pulling that number out were 1 in 1000. Yet surely, I would be silly to thank my lucky stars for pulling off a 1 in 1000 shot. Each of the other indistinguishable possibilities was also a 1 in a 1000 shot, and there were 1000 of them, hence it was certain that I would get some number or other. If, on the other hand, there were one special number, specified in advance, and I was able to choose that and win the lottery, this would seem to require some special explanation. Again, this assumes that this instance is unique. If I repeated my attempt 1000 times, it would be even money that I would get the lucky number at least once. Imagine that in 999 other rooms, unknown to me, there are 999 other identical hoppers with other people choosing 1 of the 1000 balls. I may feel lucky, but the odds were that one of us would pick the lucky ball. Dennett, along with many other thinkers, has pointed out that if this universe is not unique, if innumerable other multiverses are playing the cosmic lottery, odds are that someone had to win, so it is not surprising that we find that we did. But, in this case, the very nature of the singularity from which the universe arose seems to prevent us from knowing whether this roll of the dice is unique or not.

Likewise, we have no way of knowing if the choices between the various different values of the constants in Penrose’s calculation are equally likely and taken at random. It turns out that 81 times 114,839 is equal to 9301959, the exact date of my birth. Is this a lucky stroke? Are the gods of mathematics preordaining the universe to my amusement? After all, there are 10 million other 7 digit numbers that could be the answer to that problem. But just as 2 times 2 couldn’t be anything but 4, so we may think there is nothing else that could be the answer to this particular multiplication problem. Are the different possible values of the cosmic constants equally likely? Could there be something that constrains them or renders them necessary, of which we cannot be aware? Again the very fact that the causal chains, which provide us knowledge, can reach back no farther than the Big Bang, renders it impossible, in principle, to answer these questions. In such cases, the conditions that allow us to draw inferences from probabilities, simply cannot be known to apply.

I am not enthusiastic about the Anthropic Principle as evidence for God’s existence, but I do like to think about it, since it reveals interesting things about how we think about chance and Providence. If this universe is the result of an intelligent agency, the most interesting thing about it will not be its existence, no matter how unlikely: Note that in the above cases there was nothing interesting, requiring special explanation, about me being the one being hit by the meteor or being the one who wins the ball lottery if 1000 others are playing as well. There was nothing about me, specifiable in advance, that made me unique. Yet to me it makes all the difference.[4] There have been about 106 billion human lives in this unlikely universe, of which about 7 billion are going on now, about 5.8 percent.[5] Of these, 80% live in abject poverty[6], with an even larger proportion of those who lived in the past, leading even more miserable lives, subject to the worst kinds of pains, fears, and misfortunes.  So only approximately 5 of 100[7] of the humans ever to have lived has ever been as fortunate as you. As we sit here at our computers, full of belly, warm of foot, healthy and well contented, we can see that there is nothing about us that could have been specified in advance that renders us more deserving than any of the other human souls to inhabit this unlikely universe, sole supporter of intelligent life, the winner of the cosmic lottery. Yet here we are. Do you feel lucky?

[2] Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Ch. 7.

[3] “The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle,” http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/teleo.html#text16 .

[4] I’ve written about this before with respect to the Problem of Evil: http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/evil.htm .

[5] http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx .

[6] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats .

[7] 0.0587 or (.2 x .058) +(.05 x .942).

The latest issue of the LYCEUM is out with articles from authors in Greece, England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States.

The LYCEUM especially invites responses to or discussions of articles in this or past issues. Information about submissions can be found here: http://www.lyceumphilosophy.com/?q=node/37 .

You can click on the link below to go to the new issue or click on the pdf link to download a pdf of the entire issue.

NEW ISSUE Volume 11-1 Now Available!

VolumeXI, No. 1                                                                                        Fall 2009

PDF

LYCEUM

Kim’s Dilemma and Ecological Reductionism for the Mind

Anoop Gupta

Ecpyrosis and Cosmos in Heraclitus

Theodoros Christidis

Paul Ricoeur: The Intersection Between Solitude and Connection

Kathleen O’Dwyer

Regularity Theory and Inductive Scepticism: The Fight Against Armstrong

Benjamin Smart

Inter Fidem et Rationem:
Discerning the Proper Intersection of Philosophical and Theological Methodologies in the Works of Nicholas Rescher and Joseph Ratzinger

Andrew M. Haines

Pacifism and Virtue Ethics

Rebecca Carhart

The Burden Faced by External Norms: A Response to Bartol

Colin Wysman

A Publication of the
Saint Anselm Philosophy Department

Robert Anderson
Department of Philosophy
Saint Anselm College

This paper was presented at a Philosophy Department Colloquium on December 8, 2009.

Robert Anderson: The Value of Human Life. Would you want to be a Brain in a Cyborg?”

Click above to listen or right click to download.

Imagine explaining Christmas to an alien. Surely it would be strange to attempt to explain Santa Claus to someone completely unacquainted with the custom. Even once one got past the difficulty of explaining the religious significance of the holiday that celebrates God’ s redemption of humanity by his being born as a child and the tradition of giving gifts as an imitation of this ultimate gift, there would still remain even more and greater strangeness. We give our children gifts but pretend that they are not from us, but from this imaginary kind-hearted Santa Claus, who watches the naughty and the nice and grants the wishes of all the world’s children. We smile with tenderness at the innocence of our children as they absorb this belief and allow it to tinge the appearance of presents under a tree on Christmas Eve with a magical, mysterious glow. And we grieve, in a way, when the illusion is lost to the inevitable advance of our children’s knowledge of the practicalities that govern our world and the laws that govern the human heart. Why? Why do we do this, and why do we feel a great loss when we come to see it all as humbug?

It is surely no virtue to lie, nor is it worthwhile fostering an ability to be deceived, even about things that we might wish were so. The value of believing cannot lie in a willed ignorance of what is right before our eyes, but in a hope for a deeper truth that lies beneath the surface of things. All magic lies in there being more to things than meets the eye, in there being hidden virtues and powers hidden within the heart of things that cannot be revealed in their appearances without special probing and prompting.

It may seem that there are no two things more dissimilar than scientific knowledge and belief in Santa Claus, but I believe that there is a deep connection between them that reveals the value of belief of this sort. The scientist learns to probe beneath the surface of things, to believe that within the flux and chaos of normal experience there lie hidden laws of nature that exhibit themselves only to the initiated under controlled conditions. The natures of things, as Plato saw, exist eternally and purely, and can only be revealed in things as they come to fulfill them in time, in the absence of interference and impurity. A scientist must see in the complex morass of empirical data, a hidden structure. He must have confidence that at the heart of chaos, lies law; that the random ramblings of the most unruly particle is in the grips of a form, a law that will be revealed by its behavior only over time under pure enough experimental conditions. The scientists who sit and wait in the super-conducting super collider for the particle predicted by the exquisitely beautiful mathematics of their physical theory are waiting for Santa Claus.

Just as the scientists can work only in the hope the mathematical order to which his mind responds is reflected in the order of nature, so in the innocent heart of a child there lie the urgings of beneficence and love. Like the secret forms of the natural world, hidden in its complexity, these seeds lie amongst our passions and the practical requirements of our world, which interfere with their expression. Just as the scientist believes that reality, in the grips of a form, in the fullness of time, will exhibit the actions that mathematical laws prescribes, so the innocent, pure soul in the grips of these most scared urgings of the heart (as Simone Weil calls them) hopes for good rather than evil, that kindness will be returned, that their letters to Santa will be answered.

According to Weil, we grieve the loss of belief, because this ability to feel ourselves in the grip of eternal forms, forms that express themselves in this world only in pure circumstances in the fullness of time, whether these forms be forms of natural law or forms of life and love; this ability is the most sacred part of human nature. I don’t think this has much to do with the gullibility of believing in pleasant things, whether they be religious dogmas or cute fairy tales. There is a rationality to the belief of the scientist and the child. The things that matter, in both science and life, are more than what meets the eyes; they are things whose expression requires the fullness of time and purity of condition. We are sometimes mistaken in our ascription of form to the natural world, but only the man who believes, beyond all hope, in the face of the fear of error, that there is an order at the heart of motion of the planets, will discover it, as Kepler did. Often kindness is repaid with pain, and no unknown stranger provides hidden acts of kindness to delight us, but only those who keep alive the secret urgings of their heart to see the good, and expect it in all men in the fullness of time, will have the courage to build the types of conditions, as rare and difficult as a super-conducting super collider, in which these urgings can come to fruition. Only those that continue to hear the hidden ringing of the bell, inside the hollow metal shell, will discover one day as they sit back exhausted in the silent gleaming, after arranging presents quietly under a magically glistening tree, that there is indeed a Santa Claus, and that it is them.

The human mind has a love affair with the rational.  It constantly seeks to find order, pattern, measure, or whatever intelligibility it can in whatever it beholds.  Think, for example, of well-known perceptual illusions, such as the duck-rabbit diagram or the spinning ballerina circulating on the internet these days.  The mind strains to make sense of visual cues when there is little or nothing to make sense of.  Sometimes when no order, pattern, or measure is to be found, the mind will overreach and attempt to find what is not there.  However, the effort to find rationality when there is not any to be found can itself be irrational.  The better response to the reality of irrationality is simply to accept that some things are just unintelligible and then cope with that fact as best as one can.

Because irrationality is a kind of nothingness, it often can, like other nothingnesses, surprise.  The first time I experienced the sensation of trying to breathe underwater when my scuba air supply was cut off, I was surprised.  In some nebulous and unthinking way, I had presumed that I would still breathe but in a non-oxygenating way.  Instead, of course, I discovered that in spite of all my volitional and mental screams for my lungs to breathe, they just sat by inert, motionless like a body buried under a pile of tacklers in football.  Similarly, the first time I picked the brain of a congenitally blind friend to find out what he thought I meant when I said “I can see objects at a distance” and “I see contrasts of bright and dark,” I was surprised.  I guess I expected that he would have confused or twisted or inchoate ideas of what I meant by these expressions.  Instead, he simply had none.  Rows and columns in his spreadsheet of ideas were empty cells.

One of the first meetings with irrationality face-to-face is in mathematics.  The diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the square’s sides.  Translated into plain English this means that the diagonal and the sides are incomprehensible together.  There is no grasping with precision how the length of the diagonal compares with the length of the side.  To get your mind around the length of the diagonal is to disable your capacity also to get your mind around the length of the side, and vice versa.  The irrationality of the diagonal of a square is astounding.  How can something so simple –the comparison of straight lines which are merely pure length—be beyond our mental powers?  It just is.  In fact, mathematics is full of irrationality.  For example, every curve (if it is truly curved rather than jointed) is irrational with every straight line, no matter how slightly deflected from the straight the curve is.  Thus, even mathematical objects –the most innocent-looking of objects—are bizarre and blemished with the stain of unintelligibility.

A second location of irrationality is in values, particularly moral values.  The fact is that many things are good in ways that are irreducible both one to other and all to one.  They are just different like apples and oranges.  Human life, knowledge, beauty, friendship, craftsmanship, and sport are different kinds of goods, and no measuring stick exists that can compare the amount of goodness in each.  But the mind balks at the prospect that moral values are unintelligible when compared side by side.  And so, a whole theory of morality has been constructed and widely accepted that claims it can measure the immeasurable and grasp the ungraspable.  The theory is, of course, utilitarianism.

A third (and especially distressing) place that irrationality is found is in people.  Besides the irrationalities of insanity and imbecility, there is a kind of deep irrationality that even very smart and sane people can possess.  One of my first encounters with profound irrationality in people was when I was eleven.  My Little League coach had invited me to vacation with him and his family at a Southern Californian beach for a few days.  The first evening into the camping trip, Coach Bob got drunk and enraged.  He then pulled out a shotgun, pointed it at his wife, two kids, and me, and demanded that all of us return to the camper and go to sleep.  For the rest of the night as he lay with the gun beside him and we lay quiet in the camper bunks, I remember thinking: “Why is Coach doing this?  How is this going to end?  Should I have seen this coming?”  A few years later another exposure to profound irrationality rocked my comfy, cozy world.  One morning the front-page story of the Riverside, California newspaper that I delivered reported the story of Mary Vincent.  She was a 14-year old girl that had run away from home and was found wandering naked on the side of a California highway.  She had been raped.  She also had both of her arms chopped off below the elbows.  I wondered then and still wonder now: “Why would anyone do that to another human being?”  I cannot fathom what rational appeal is there in hacking off another person’s arms.  The raping, stripping, and abandoning make a little (very little) sense.  But the mutilating makes none.  Still ten plus years later I found myself in the bizarre situation of being locked in an apartment in Southern Germany for about four hours.  I was locked in with three other young children, a middle-aged woman (their mother), and an American buddy.  My buddy and I had left Cologne and travelled four hours south to earn some money by helping to pack up the estate of the woman’s recently deceased mother.  Not long into the trip, however, the woman announced that she had changed the plans, and instead of packing up the estate we would be visiting the quaint city of Strasbourg, France for the weekend.  When my buddy and I informed her that we weren’t going any further with her and her kids, she locked us all within her apartment.  What was this woman thinking?  Ordering two adult American males around?  Locking us in like little children?  We could have done anything we wanted to her apartment, her stuff, and her.  We were bigger, stronger, and outnumbered her.  Still another ten years later I was the target of a girl’s obsessive infatuation.  My rebuffs were interpreted as convoluted “yes’s.”  Random events in the person’s life were interpreted as orchestrated efforts by me to convey meaning.  My minutest movements were interpreted as encrypted messages to her.  In a strange and sick way, I was the warp and woof in the world of a person whom I hardly knew and who definitely did not know me.  What was this person thinking?

When you come across profound irrationality in people, my recommendation is this.  First, recognize it for what it is.  It is something that does not make sense.  Second, stop trying to make sense of it.  It is something that does not make sense.  Third, resign yourself to the fact that profound irrationality in people is yet another unintelligible datum in a universe which in many ways lies beyond our capacity to understand.  Next, keep profoundly irrational people at arm’s length.  If you can keep a city between you and them, that is even better.  Finally, for your own part, live in a reflective and reasonable way which gives witness to who you really are: a rational being.

I just returned from spending three days in New York on a museum trip with students from the Humanities elective, Paris and New York in the Twenties and Thirties.  Perhaps what I have to offer in this entry is not traditional philosophy, but it might be fun anyway.  We spent some time looking at works by Kandinsky – colorful abstract pieces, intersected by seemingly random lines sometimes forming curved shapes.  These are not at all the rigid tile-floor spaces of color by Mondrian.  Caught among the throngs and jostling for a good view, some caught my interest, others were inscrutable.  I overheard many comments of impatience and the sighs of those who could now say they had witnessed the show, found it silly, but satisfied the obligations to whoever had dragged them there.  I thought about Gertrude Stein, who took upon herself the task of interpreting Picasso’s cubism to any who would listen.  She of “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

In her essay, Composition as Explanation, Stein says, “Those who are creating…authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead…that is the reason why the creator of the new…is an outlaw until he is a classic.”   But she warns us that a first rate work of art becomes a classic precisely because it becomes “accepted.”  And once it is accepted it is possible for people to see its beauty.  But that very process can lead to indolence and dull our perceptions.  Instead, she celebrates irritation.  “Of course it is wonderfully beautiful, only when it is still a thing irritating annoying stimulating then all quality of beauty is denied to it.”   (Note how her bending of grammar and repetition can be irritating.)  We need to pay attention to the way artistic expression and to philosophical ideas irritate us, especially in our time when we are so bombarded with stimulation that it is hard to focus on any one target of significance.  We listen to a song that flooded our ears in high school and now we just need a few bars and we “have it.”  It is a classic, and further attention is not necessary.

When we entered the Museum of Modern Art there was a natural rush to see Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  What could be better than that?  But it is too bad that during his life-time this opinion was not shared.  Look quickly and move on, there are lots of other “classics” to check off of our list.    Stein was motivated by defending Picasso.  Not everyone who is irritating is actually worthy of renown.  But perhaps we need to be more patient with what irritates us.  And perhaps we need to look again at what has become accepted and classic.  Stein cautions, “Of course it is extremely difficult nothing more so than to remember back to its not being beautiful once it has become beautiful.”

Which philosophers of the tradition have become the “classic” ones?  I am still learning to look at Kandinsky.  Which philosophers are worth overcoming the annoying suspicion that they are making things unnecessarily difficult?  Which are worth a new look?  Foucault, Wittgenstein? Aquinas?  Who are your classic classics?

Interview with Prof. Drew Dalton, Department of Philosophy, Saint Anselm College on his new book:

Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire

2009. Duquesne University Press

http://www.dupress.duq.edu/pubDetails.asp?theISBN=9780820704258

http://www.amazon.com/Longing-Other-Levinas-Metaphysical-Desire/dp/0820704253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257810874&sr=8-1

Interview: Longing For the Other

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David Banach
Department of Philosophy
Saint Anselm College

This paper was presented October 23, 2009 a the Conference on the Value of Human Life at the Bioethics Institute of Fransciscan University at Steubenville

Abstract
Powerpoint

The Ethics of Infinite Love

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Lacking the time needed to really develop an extended thought or well composed essay for this month’s blog post, I’ve opted instead to simply share some notes from my personal philosophical journal in the hopes, at the very least perhaps, of sharing with you the reader some of the questions that I’ll be exploring next semester in my preceptorial on Freud and Analysis.  In this way you get a glimpse not only into what promises to be an interesting experiment in the form of a class, but also into the messy naissance of an idea.

What does it really mean to be a subject?  If to be a subject means to be held out before, extended and open towards beings, in a word ex-istent, then isn’t there a sense in which to be a subject is to always already be called away from the self, away from the starting point of one’s own being?  That is, isn’t there a sense, given the trajectory of subjectivity towards beings, that to be a subject is to be living always already beyond the ground of one’s own being, alienated or distended from one self?  Put another way, isn’t there some tragic sense in which one can only fully become oneself/become a subject by loosing or separating from oneself, by cutting oneself off/free from oneself and rejecting the primordial tendency to be absorbed in one’s own being?

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to this strange and seemingly paradoxical reality as the law of castration, the fact that one can only enter into the symbolic order of language, exchange and community (the very order in which the formal structure of subjectivity is achieved), by cutting themselves free from the gravitational pull of and primordial bond to their own being.  For there is no private language, as we all know.  The language we take up in the development of our subjectivity is not our own, but belongs fundamentally to another.  Indeed, initiation into the symbolic order is to be othered in this way – it is to take on the language of the other’s as our own – in a word, to become an Other.  And to be inducted into the symbolic order (a language community) in this way is not only to be welcomed into a society, it is the very naissance of our subjectivity, our ability to think to process.  Cognition and consciousness requires this symbolic initiation.  So it seems that the very process of becoming a subject is the process of loosing one’s primordial way of being themselves, it is to be othered – to abandon that nascent privacy which is one’s original mode of being, and become fundamentally exposed in the public realm.  In other words, subjectivity appears to be a mode of becoming which is inexorably marked by being torn from one’s ‘original’ state and laid bare before another: to be me is to be alienated from myself, as it were.

This means that to be a human subject means to be by necessity ‘out-of-joint’ – it is to dwell in the rupture between a supposed closed off state of primordial being to which you can never return and which you never properly were (as you only fully came to be through the rupture of that totality), and perhaps a state of final fulfillment in which this alienation will be annihilated, and with it you (death).  The being of the subject is thus made fundamentally a way of becoming – inscribed ineluctably by desire.  Hence Lacan’s nomination of the subject as a manqué-a-etre, not so much a being as a want-to-be, a desire or absence of being (double meaning to the word want here).  To be a subject is to become in the disaster (dis-astre) that is the explosion of the singularity of our being, it is alienation, it is to be in want.  This is the law of castration.

The horrible curse, of course, is that we can only become aware of the tragedy that is our being, our want-to-be, from this side of the symbolic order (once we’ve taken up the language of another).  The result is that we all too easily give into the illusion that no gap exits – that we are whole in the symbolic order.  This emerges out of a false identification with the symbolic order (i.e. because we come-to-be in the symbolic order, we find in it our whole identity and being).  Of course this is inauthentic (in the old Greek sense of the word of being other than one’s own, failing to recognizing what is properly one’s own, to use the Latin) as it fails to recognize the ground of subjectivity.  But, more importantly, it leads to all sorts of social problem, such as social conformity and mob mentality, opening the door to totalitarianism.  For others, sensing the trauma of their being, sensing that they are fundamentally in want, will all too quickly attempt to correct the disaster and propose ‘solutions’ (even final ones) to the want in some vain nostalgic attempt to ‘return’ to some presumed primordial unity, a time before the disaster.  We see quickly how the curse of the law of castration leads to holocaust.  This is, of course, a social outworking of the Oedipal drama: the attempt to return to the primordial home (Mother), and it is necessarily doomed to failure and the harbinger or murder.

What we are left with the ethical necessity or recognizing our alienation and embracing it – the ethical imperative of refusing and resisting our inborn tendency towards nostalgia, towards ‘return’ to unity and harmony.  In a word, the ethical necessity of conflict, difference and descent.  Only through such an authentic acceptance and appropriation of our primordial alienation, through such a resistance to and rejection of the siren’s song of absorption and completion, can we mature past the Oedipal drama of totalitarianism and murder and bare our heads freely in the truth.