Andy Gricevich wrote this in regards to my poem "The Usual Life," which appears in my chapbook, Waiting for the Apocalypse. He said that most of my chapbook reveals a fine sensibility, but that this particular poem reveals that "The ass it rides is a frozen corpse." In addition, Michael Andre (attack of the Andre's), said in his blog today that I am virtually the only conservative poet. This may be so. I will argue with both comers in today's blague and also post the entire text of "The Usual Life," and then also explain why it's a Kantian two-kingdom's style poem, which cannot be understood by either the left or the right. The poem reads thus:
The Usual Life
All the gray Seattle music,
lights, flickering streets
along the Arboretum,
everyone in approximately
fitting jeans & Gortex jackets,
everyone carrying umbrellas
going from movie to bookstore
to hot tubs & chocolate
in an all-night pig-trough
along Broadway.
Threading a way
past rich punks
& sleeping bums and leftover
hippies all asking for
25 cents.
(You're not supposed
to feed the birds around
the reservoir, it's important
not to encourage them --
maybe they'll go away.)
$5.25 to eat
a slice of cake,
we drink Espressos
quietly, then into
our cars & back
to the suburbs,
& I wonder if
this is what
my uncle meant
when he said that
after age 25
everything is easier.
(non-paginated, Waiting for the Rapture, Persistencia Press, 2006).
First off, this poem was first published in perhaps 1993 in a Seattle journal edited by a Native American poet by the name of Phoebe Bosche. And the entire poem is an ironic attack on the smug sensibility of Seattle in which I included myself!
( I think Andy believes that I am in favor of mercilessness toward bums. I'm not, and that's not really part of the issue. But I have a complicated attitude toward bums, as I will now attempt to set out.)
Yes, it is especially the middle portion of the poem that has exercised Andy's inner crusader because it more or less waives the notion that one must contribute to panhandlers. I believe that one must not, under any circumstances, ever contribute to panhandlers. However, this isn't because I'm conservative. It's because it is injurious to the soul of the panhandler, as well as to the soul of the one giving out the change. I will explain why, but only later, because first I want to say something to put the entire problem of panhandling into a philosophical (and explicitly Kantian) context.
Lutherans believe that there is a transcendent troika of orders that connect earth to heaven. These are: marriage, government, and the church. These are called orders, and they are meant to bring order into human life so that we are not constantly trying to murder one another. If each person has one spouse and that spouse in turn provides children, this should be enough. This is why gender is roughly 50-50 in every population. God wants every person to have a spouse. And there is ONE spouse for every person. You just have to find them, and then celebrate it in church, and get on with having the children. It is the VERY basis of society. (One could argue by extension that homosexual marriage is bad because it throws off the balance, but it needn't necessarily do this if there are enough "homos" of the two different gender varieties getting married to one another. That might very well balance out, so that, in itself, is not an objection to homosexual marriage. But God explicitly demands that we bring children into the world: Go forth and multiply, and I can't understand how the homosexual contingent is contributing to that, but I haven't nevertheless totally made my mind up on this topic because I have a gay friend and I'm not sure that she is totally out to lunch in terms of contributing to the ethical demands of the polis. In many ways, I think she is probably not. So I am waiting for further information on this front. But I do understand why I am against giving money to bums, but that will have to wait until I trot out a few complex terms.)
The orders are what Kant calls "transcendental ideas" or what he also calls "regulative ideas." These are ideas that are considered "a priori" and that lend to experience a coherence that makes life possible for humanity. Time, space, morality, beauty, God and cosmos, are six such transcendental ideas. They are granted as gifts by God to give order and loveliness to human life.
If the world is to be ordered, it must exist in a regular fashion. Therefore, to promote regularity, Kant walked up and down his street 8 times every day. This allowed his diaphragm to function so that he could remain regular.
In the same way, normal humans marry and attend the church, they practice the ten commandments, and they worship God.
Science tells us that the orders and God Himself cannot be discovered, and that they therefore must not exist. But the empiricists cannot find the orders because they are built-in, like hardware, into the human system. They are the very categories through which we perceive, and are therefore NOT perceptible. We are made by God and we are morally accountable to Him. Judgments of duty (do unto others) is one of the laws that comes into play.
Why should we then not feed the birds around the reservoir? It's because if we do, then they will remain, and their feces will get into our drinking water. St. Francis (that anarchist!) might object, and say, but birds are our neighbors! In fact, they are not our neighbors. Only humans are accountable to the moral laws, and so birds are just birds. Birds are for the birds, in other words, and only humans can be neighbors.
Similarly, there are laws that are on the books against panhandling in Seattle (as there are in most cities). Although these laws are rarely enforced, they ought to be, because they lead to a breakdown in the law. First, if you give money to a bum, you feel proud. You cannot help this. You have something they don't have, and so you feel above and beyond the bum. It is difficult to remember that everything that you have was given to you first by God. And so, hubris sets in, and the giver is almost instantaneously transformed into a sinner and is doomed to spend eternity in hell.
But secondly, you have also harmed the soul of the one to whom you have given money. This person is in the state that they are in because they are morally insane. That is, they cannot understand how or why they should contribute to the economy by doing something for others, and so instead they have decided to panhandle, and simply set up a one-sided economy of mercy which in effect mocks all of those who do work for a living. Work means, you do something for others, and you are in return repaid with something for exchange. This is the basis of capitalism: a work ethic. Without it, our entire system might collapse into socialism. Socialism is itself a symptom of collapse in that it posits a group of people who were formed by God simply to be on the take (blasphemy!), rather than to offer their talents to the polity in exchange for the agape of coinage. Thus, by giving money to a bum, you are contributing not only to the demise of your own soul, and to the soul of that person to whom you are giving money, but also to the destruction of your entire society, by positing that God is a know-nothing or non-existent being and that you must fill in for His absence. In essence, when you give money to a bum, you are spitting directly into God's face. If you really believed in God, rather than in yourself as a deity, then you would stop and talk to the bum, and ask them why they are not functioning in a normal manner. Why don't they apply their talents, instead of lying about in a half-crazed stupor, drunk on some disgusting substance, which drowns their sorrow in terms of no longer having God to believe in. Anyone who actually believes in God will get up and work, contributing to the polity. We should talk to the bum, and try to understand why they are not functional, and if possible, attempt to help them get on their feet. But this is impossible. We don't know them and so we believe that it is possible to turn their lives around. When we have a family member who becomes non-functional (as most of us have) it's not just a question of giving them money to get going. It's a matter of praying for them until they find God in their hearts once more. Then they can function, but not before. This is a matter of urgent, burning prayers in many cases for years before the prayer is answered.
God may or may not exist on some scientist's chart, but according to Kant it is a regulative idea, and it is the motor of the whole of capitalism.
Bums do not believe in God, or else they would not be bums.
So the task with the bum is not to give them money, it is to give them faith. It is not important to kneel before the bum and to pray for them because this might subject them to ridicule, or might cause them to give you a bump on the head, neither of which is needed. But walking past them, one must pray for their lousy souls, and get them to perform their duty thereby by returning to the fold of humanity and to stop being bums. At any rate, I cannot understand this loss of work ethic in any other manner except that they have stopped respecting their duty in terms of the moral law, and the stars above, and have collapsed internally. Now they beg us for mercy. But if you give them money, it only reinforces the notion that there is no God, and instantiates pride in yourself: a double smack in the face of God.
Sin is easy. It is hard to remember the moral law and to care tenderly for it. You must not give money to the "rich punks," who are slumming with the bums. The "rich punks" in the poem also do not believe in God, and they are therefore laughing at the whole notion of the work ethic. Hippies were also like that. They thought that life should be a laughing matter lived outside of a marriage, with no government, and without going to a church. They rarely did their duty. And yet, were we not granted this world at the charge of fulfilling our ethical imperatives of duty to others?
It is probably a sense of inclination that allows so many to wallow in the pig-troughs of Broadway (a very wealthy street of about ten blocks' length filled with stores catering to the selfish liberal of the kind who likes to go out for dessert, especially eating chocolate and thinking about the opera which is often turned on in a muted fashion in the speaker system). It is probably also a sense of inclination that allows still others to wallow by the wayside, begging for coinage. But if we follow Kant, and "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become a universal law of nature," then how can one possibly excuse being a bum? Likewise, how can one excuse eating chocolate -- which as we know is largely harvested by child-slaves on the African Ivory Coast -- who don't even have the rights that we grant to dogs and cats to be free of physical harm -- and who are regularly murdered by their owners when they don't come up with enough chocolate for their owners who treat them solely as means to an end? We violate the principle of dignity either when we give bums change, or when we eat that which has been provided for us by slaves.
The rest of the poem -- looking for things to buy along a commercial street, probably also does not strike the reader as necessarily sinful. "Going from movie to bookstore," probably doesn't sound necessarily outrageous, but it is almost certainly a denial of communal life, an attempt to turn away from the gregariousness that is the hallmark of spiritual life. We are lazy, and after 25, we settle into routines that the communists call the "spectacle," which prevents us from having to be with one another in any real way. We use the images of the cinema to keep us from having to deal with one another. I rarely give money to bums except when I feel terribly sinful, but I do visit the cinema and bookstores. They equally represent a turning away from life (esp. if used to excess, and as an alternative to social life). To sum up, therefore, I'm guilty of being an "ass [that] rides a frozen corpse," but not for the reasons that Andy alleges.
In my own way, I too turn from God. I turn from the face of others, and bury myself in a book. It is easier. In spite of knowing better, I occasionally scarf down chocolate that hasn't been screened by an ethics committee for malfeasance. But I continue to seek for the moral laws that hold society together, and to pray for guidance in this matter. I can do no other. God help me.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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58 comments:
No time right now, Kirby, so I just want to point to three things that won't be transparently obvious to every reader of this post:
1) Your reading of Kant gets the notion of the "transcendental" largely wrong (unsubtle), and misses the unbridgeable chasm between the spheres of the first and second Critiques.
2) The poem you quote here is, in my opinion, also less good aesthetically than most of what's in that book. The "drop-the-subject-of-the-action" sentence structure is workshoppy in a way that's unworthy of the defter lyric condensation of some of the other pieces. It reminds me of the way Pound's writing often gets worse when the bad aspects of his politics come through.
3) The people in the Catholic Worker movement, who devote their lives to helping the poor by feeding and sheltering them, are the least smug, most humble people I've ever met, and also have fine senses of humor.
3a) It's funny that the Sermon on the Mount (to which, again, Catholic Worker folks come closer than anybody else, non-papists that they are) is, according to a comment of yours here, too much for "this kingdom," but Augustine's model is to be adopted. So, no Jesus, but Tommy A., and no Saint Frankie. There's clearly some selectivity going on here--are you doing the selecting, or is it a church authority? In either case, why these selections?
4) I'm glad you quoted my best line. I meant that the foundation of your existence seems to be the frozen desperation that wants only to keep what it has... an iciness that goes well with the description of God you offer here. I'm more inclined to intentional vulnerability, and consider existence bottomless, a chasm over which one is suspended only by one's motion, and the tensile relations, never mutual or exactly equal, with others also so suspended. This leads me to deny that I have an "inner crusader." I leave crusades to the religious (or, if you prefer to include a certain kind of Marxist--not my kind--the "religious").
Oh, that was four things, and long, and I referred to Augustine as "Tommy," a name reserved for Aquinas. It is, after all, 3:30 a.m.
Andy, explain the transcendental of Kant if you get a minute. I'm certainly no expert in that area, and was freely adapting from Lutheranism's notion of the orders, in order to attempt to find an equivalent between the two.
Can you explain where I'm wrong?
This shouldn't take too long, should it?
I think that everyone takes the Gospel and adapts it, often sinfully (I'm not Jesus, so have to understand his words through the prism of my fallen self).
I don't know very much about Catholicism. I can see that the Protestant countries function, and the Catholic countries largely do not. Mexico on down: non-functional. There are a lot of reasons why: perhaps Hernando de Soto is right when he argues that it's because paperwork in many countries is so arcane that only the top two percent can afford it (it takes 19 years and 290 steps to own land legally in Haiti, and then it can all be reversed at any point and for many reasons at any step along the way, including after the final i has been dotted).
But I don't think I said anything about humor here.
I'm at least here interested in the larger picture: that is, the structure of the dysfunction, and I admit, I am struggling.
But I hold to the Protestant work ethic and the Smithian economics of same, and am therefore against ...
I suddenly have to run -- have to put a kid to bed, I'm told.
Where is Carl Sachs when you need him? I'll try to track him down and see if we can get a lecture on transcendentals since Andy doesn't seem up to it timewise.
Meanwhile, I'm going to continue to try to get them to fit into the Lutheran concept of ORDERS, until I am definitively blocked from doing so by a professional philosopher.
Many Lutherans reject Kant utterly as a pagan.
Some few see his coextensiveness with Lutheran thought -- and that's where I'd like to go with this, but don't know if it's really at all kosher.
Personally, I find the most objectionable aspect of my post to be the ambiguity I feel about homosexual marriage and whether or not that action should be sanctioned.
Throughout the OT it is naysayed. In much of the NT it is naysayed.
But in the Sermon on the Mount (which I think most Lutherans see as a reference to the world to come, rather than as a reference to how we can act in this world), you get the notion that any and every kind of love is ok (or at least that's how many activists see it).
But I'm not going to sanction marriage between a goat and a hillbilly no matter how much love they claim to feel.
And if love is the only criterion... then a gradmother who loves her own grandchild, and wants to marry him, will only have to say, but I love him, and whammo, the marriage certificate will have to be forked over.
If God is regulative, then we have to follow the commands of same, as Kierkegaard says throughout Fear and Trembling.
But anyhoo, let me try to track down Carl Sachs for a tiny lecture on the Transcendentals and see if I am allowed to shoehorn marriage and government into them, as part of that which connects earth and heaven.
Calling Carl Sachs! Calling Carl Sachs!
I tried to get hold of Carl Sachs and perhaps he will still arrive and adjudicate the notion of transcendentals that Andy hasn't found time to clarify as of yet.
I looked them up, and was able to find a Wikipedia article on them. This is the tight definition. I try to tie the notion of good, etc., that Kant borrows from Aristotle, or extends, as he links it to an a priori quality of the mind.
I'm making a further assertion that there a priori and natural structures: marriage, government, and church, that God gave to us in the same way that he gave to us the notions of time, space, morality, aesthetics, and God Himself.
Perhaps this is the first time that this has been done. If so, it's something that has needed doing for some time, and so now, I dust my hands, and think to myself, what a job you've done!
As for the poem in question, I think too that it is not as good as the other poems -- partially because it was written at a time before I had my children and was thus much more self-enclosed than I am now.
I don't know anything about poetic technique, and have never been in any kind of workshop whatsoever.
I just proceed by feel.
However, the feeling I had when I wrote the later poems was a much more beautiful one than I had in me when I lived in Seattle, and squibbed the poem that reminds Andy of Pound's fascist elements.
Unlike you, Andy, who believe the world to be without limits, I will argue that this world is very much a limited one. It is finite and our actions in it must be in accord with that finitude.
The world to come will be infinite.
But in this one, all of our actions (circumscribed by the ten commandments and the positive correlates that Martin L. proscribed in the Small Catechism) along with our lives themselves, are finite, and consist of trying to remain within the very real boundaries that God proscribes in the OT and the NT.
Well, Kirby.
That's what You think.
That's right, Brett!!
What does Tom Martin think?
I think Kirby is lonesome.
I wish we could have a real discussion with all these purported Lutheran surrealists and hammer out 95 theses.
I do feel that it's strange that I'm writing these things and sticking my neck out here to try to develop some clarity but ...
I am wondering why this hasn't become a mass movement as I predicted.
You'll get the mini-lecture; I've been out of town performing.
Your last Silliman post was truly off the deep end.
I didn't say the world was without limits. Finitude--yep. I said it was without foundations. No bottom. No ass, frozen or otherwise. No substratum. It's a very different thing.
Andy, I'm tapping my Ming fingernails, awaiting your Maoist critique.
Pass the Mao.
It's my birthday,
It's my birthday.
>I do feel that it's strange that I'm writing these things and sticking my neck out here to try to develop some clarity but ...
>I am wondering why this hasn't become a mass movement as I predicted.
So you are BEGGING for attention and adherents. My heart bleeds for you. Actually, to a certain extent it does. I tend to be favorably disposed towards beggars.
I felt a vibration in the ether, and sensed that I was needed somewhere in the blogosphere.
As Kirby and Andy well know, I'm something of a Kantian socialist. Here I'll be wearing my Kantian hat.
Kirby is right to point out that Kant's response to empiricism is to say that there must be mental representations that are a priori with respect to experience, because they are necessary in order to have any experience at all. (But they are not sufficient for experience, either!)
Kant makes a number of important distinctions, and it can be hard to see how they all fit together. In my reading of Kant, the most important distinction is between "cognition" (Erkennen, Erkenntnis) and "thought" (Denken). Cognition consists of objectively valid judgments about objects and events in space and time. They can be true or false. The basic unit of cognition is "judgment," and judgments come in two flavors: analytic and synthetic. In analytic judgments, only concepts are required. In synthetic judgments, concepts are brought together with intuitions.
The big mistake of the empiricists, Kant thinks, is to think that all intuitions must be "sensible" -- that is, sensations. Kant thinks that there are pure intuitions, without content, purely formal. These are the intuitions of space and of time.
By contrast, the big mistake of the rationalists is to think that analytic judgments alone -- relations among concepts -- can yield objectively valid knowledge of the world. (E.g. the metaphysical systems of Spinoza and Leibniz are all constructed out of a definition of "substance".
So much for cognition. Thought, on the other hand, is the exercise of reason, and here reason displays a capacity to transcend the limits of cognition. Every judgment is conditioned, in the sense that it involves the application of a concept to an intuition. But reason seeks the unconditioned, and because it seeks the unconditioned, it concerns itself with the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will.
God, the soul, and free will are therefore both extremely important and extremely elusive. We can have no knowledge of the existence or non-existence of these things, because knowledge is restricted to space and time, and these concepts -- the Ideas of reason -- cannot be applied to anything spatio-temporal. When we do so apply them, we fall into philosophical traps and paradoxes that are irresolvable.
However, as Andy alluded, the Ideas of reason -- God, the soul, free will -- also have a different status in Kant's philosophy. Although we cannot have any knowledge of them, we can and indeed must use these Ideas as what Kant calls "postulates of pure practical reason." In brief, this means that we are entitled to, and must, use these Ideas in order to have the necessary motivation for morality.
(But, it is also important to note, the practical postulates do not justify morality -- morality is justified on the basis of pure practical reason.)
Let that stand as a rough sketch of what I think Kant is up to in the First and Second Critiques.
Having said all that: (1) I can see how "The Usual Life" is a two-kingdoms poem, but I don't see how it's particularly Kantian; (2) putting on my socialist hat for a moment, I would say that giving money to a bum does offend his or her dignity, but so too does the system of capitalist which produces bums.
Sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge for a passing shot!
Stephen, I don't want adherents so much as I want correspondents and especially opponents.
Carl, your note is quite breathtaking in its breadth and pith.
I don't know if my poem The Usual Life is either Kantian or Two Kingdoms-driven. When I wrote it in 1993, I think I was thinking about PC poetry and how it DEMANDS a link between the PC commie viewpoint (a poem must push it forward), and I was objecting, and finding an instance in which city laws demanded that we not feed the birds, and it was rare that anyone objected, so why did they object so much when it came to the bums, esp. because the PC left doesn't distinguish very strenuously if at all between humans and animals.
Right next to the city reservoir where the signs say please don't feed the birds is the very commercial street called Broadway in the middle of Capital Hill. It's really spelled Capitol Hill, because the Washington State Capitol was once there I believe, but it is now called Capital Hill, because of all the capitalism that takes place esp. along BBroadway which boasts three or four movie theatres, some thirty restaurants including Sushi, Indian, new age, Thai, French, grill, vegetarian, and at least twenty more more. There are also shoe stores, twoo bookstores, a magazine shoppe, several grocery stores, etc. etc., stretched along about 8 blocks zoned commercial.
If you own a bagel factory on Broadway, Carl, and a bum shows up and says, I need a free bagel, and your heart opens and you give him one, you have created a preposterous situation, because the next day he'll show up with a friend. That means two bagels. By the laws of doubling you'll soon be feeding the whole of Broadway for free because not only will the bums arrive but also the ring in the nose crowd who would rather save their money for heroin or whatever else is being illegally sold. Your heart might bleed for the whole mass of humanity but so will your accounting pages because they will all go into the red unless you make them pay dough for your bagels!
Augustine figured out that we need two kingdoms therefore. In this realm we must stay within the law. But the laws of the gospel do not pertain except of course as to whether or not we maintain our institutions in this realm, and are thus rewarded by a ticket into the next.
The problem I see with the leftists is that they do not see what Augustine saw. Two kingdoms means that yes, Virginia, we do need an army, or else we will end up as the slaves of Al Qaida, or whoever else has a gun and a will to enslave us.
Secondly, we need a functioning economy, and we have to protect it, because we are alive in an animal world that is functioning like a giant rotisserie. If we are not to be eaten, we must eat. That is the essence of capitalism. Communism is also capitalism, of course, but instead of individual entrepreneurs it substitutes faceless bureaucrats who run the factories and businesses, and who therefore have no personal stake in how well they function.
I don't like it either, but since this is a fallen world, that's how it is. It's a choice between letting each person take care of their own business, or letting communist bureaucrats take care of business. Invariably the former works better than the latter.
Perhaps the poet in the poem the Usual Life did know all this. It seems I have always known all this. But before 25 I found it very difficult to take. Now I find that it is simply so. Everything is ultimately capitalism whether we like it or not: it's just a question of who is in charge: political chuckleheads, or mom and dad, worried about feeding their kids.
SOME Kantians insist that Kant knew, too, at least that there were two kingdoms, and that therefore you had to function in this one as if it's a fallen world. He was certainly not a utopian, was he?
Btw, can you visit Kant's house in Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) where Russia still owns a big chunk of land between Lithuania and Poland? It is apparently where the Russians stash all the nukes they want to hit Europe with in case Europe gets too uppity, but I've never been there and I don't know anybody who has.
Meanwhile, I did purchase a copy of Hoffe's book on Kant. It's the one from SUNY press. I did read about 15 pages of it yesterday, and it seemed limpid in regards to his Aesthetics.
At any rate, I thank you guys for writing. I find it impossible to think unless I have serious opposition. I thrive in such conditions. I am basically a counterpuncher (pardon the boxing image, but boxing is something I really like to watch -- I guess socialists would find it offensive, but I find that competition is the basis of life in this sphere, so I don't mind it much, as it's only expressing the basic truth).
Rereading this, the notion of opponents probably sounds too aggressive. I mean it in the sense of sparring partners.
I think those guys -- oddly enough -- are also friends after they're done beating each other's heads in for the day.
I see something similar in poetry/philosophy/literature study.
I don't have any problem with it, but I guess people who don't like competition itself would be doubly offended by the boxing metaphor. Body shots, head shots, left and right jabs. To me it all seems to fit.
Or rather, keeping one's ideas fit. That is, I don't see any of this as personal. I only see it as giving one's ideas a workout.
And only that which is fit deserves to be kept in print.
I'm really not at all comfortable with reading Kant's distinction between "phenomena" and "noumena" as a "two-kingdoms" doctrine a la Luther. But maybe it is. I don't know.
Presumably -- though I don't know this one way or the other -- Kant would say that divine knowledge is of noumena. This is because God has "intellectual intuition" rather than "sensible intuition" as we have. Elsewhere Kant suggests that human understanding simply constructs the concepts of things, whereas divine understanding actually constructs the things themselves.
Still, that much said, all there is to bridge the two orders is pure reason in its theoretical and practical uses. Though Kant was basically a defender of bourgeoisie existence, it only comes through his epistemology here and there. And I simply don't know his politics well enough to say anything, one way or the other.
I don't see any basis for re-casting Lutheran orders as Kantian transcendentals, or the other way around.
I see it more in the way that he discusses beauty and the sublime, that there is a connection between this world and that.
But in the C of J when he discusses beauty as an intuition, isn't it an intuition that is similar to the way that we intuit God? [for him?]
I think this intuition isn't purely about itself, but is also about something that has some kind of objective existence, but we can only know it through intuition?
That is to say that God to Kant isn't purely subjective...
This is a difficult thing to understand because it's in the last forty pages of the C of J and everyone at grad school just wanted to pretend that those pages don't exist where he links purposiveness in art and thus in nature (beauty) to the notion that there must be an actual existing author of the world.
There are some articles by theologians such as Mark Wilms which make the case that Kant is a two-kingdom's thinker. But it's been five years since I've read Wilms' article. I think it is online somewhere. I'll try to find it.
This is the link to Mark Wilms' article:
http://www.luthersem.edu/ctrf/JCTR/Vol03/wilms.htm
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
You have another chapbook?
WW
There is another chapbook but it was published in 1976 (I did it myself in college on a letter press by hand) and there were only 45 copies or so and to my knowledge they are all lost except one in Smith College library.
But the poem that is mentioned here is in the chapbook that you have, and that you reviewed!
By the way, WW, I just saw another review of my novel Temping:
http://bookeaterjournal.blogspot.com/
This just came out a couple of weeks back, I think.
Thanks so much for your interest to Ms. Greenberg!!
Damm it, now I'll have to go and read up in my Critique of Judgment!
Here's an off-the-cuff response. Firstly, we do not intuit beauty. The experience of beauty is the experience of the harmonious relationship between intuitions and concepts. In "reflective judgments," as Kant calls them, we don't apply a concept to an intuition, but rather we apprehend some object and seek a concept that is appropriate to it. When we find the appropriate concept, the harmony between concept and object is the consciousness or experience of beauty.
From this, various conceptual distinctions get introduced. But Kant thinks that in addition to aesthetic judgments, there's another class of reflective judgments, and those are teleological judgments. Here's the thing, and it's crucial. Reflective judgments, whether aesthetic or teleological, are modes of awareness of our own conceptual make-up. When I experience something as beautiful, I'm experiencing the relation between my mind and the object as apprehended. Likewise, teleological judgments are experiences about how our own conceptual make-up confronts the world.
It's the awareness that one's own conceptual framework inclines one to experience an organism as if it were a functionally designed whole, and to experience the whole of Nature as if it had a Creator.
But such reflective judgments, while indispensable, do not and cannot have the objective validity that determinate judgments have. (Determinate judgments are the judgments used in science and in morality.)
In other words, the awareness of a God who has created the natural order is a consequence of our having the sorts of minds that find the world orderly and purposive.
Kant does not think, by any means, that one can directly intuit the existence of God in the same way that we can intuit the existence of objects. Our intuitions are necessarily limited to spatio-temporal objects, and God is clearly neither. Or put otherwise, God is an Idea of reason, that is, a concept.
One might with some plausibility want to say that God is intuited by means of some capacity which transcends "sensible intuition" (spatio-temporal). That would be, in Kantian terms, "intellectual intuition." But Kant denies that human beings have intellectual intuition -- our intuition is sensible, i.e. spatio-temporal, and accordingly we cannot have an intuition of anything that is non-spatio-temporal.
Along similar lines, Kant argues vehemently against all "proofs" of the existence of God, and denies that we can know that God exists. He also, of course, denies that we can know that God does not exist.
Nevertheless, Kant argues in the second Critique that without a belief in God, one would lack the necessary motivation for morality. Accordingly, "it is morally required to believe in God."
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
I cannot comment on the philosophical discussion going on here, although I enjoy reading through the assertions.
You asked why you have no mass following. I can speak only of myself. First, I disagree with your assertion that Lutherans believe in the troika you mention.
More importantly, it's your comments such as these:
"Bums do not believe in God, or else they would not be bums."
"If you own a bagel factory on Broadway, Carl, and a bum shows up and says, I need a free bagel, and your heart opens and you give him one, you have created a preposterous situation, because the next day he'll show up with a friend. That means two bagels."
You are wrong. Period.
My church has a member who is homeless. He comes every Sunday. We all know who he is.
I am lucky enough to live in a part of town that is very wealthy. (I am not)
He is intelligent, and obviously believes in God, or he wouldn't show up each Sunday. (the deacons charge money for the coffee and donuts, so he's not coming for any free snacks.)
What he needs is a job and a break. Each Sunday I watch as very prominent business leaders come into our church, who have to power and means to give this man a job. They ignore him. Your argument would make these wealthy doctors and lawyers out to be perfect Christians.
I very much disagree with your bagel shop analogy.
I volunteer at a local soup kitchen. We feed about 100 people on Wednesdays.
But on July 4th, a Wednesday, only 8 people showed up. When we asked where everyone was, we discovered that July 4th, along with Memorial Day and Labor Day, were the most important days for picking up aluminum cans off the beach. The "bums" were staking out their territory. A free meal or aluminum cans???? They chose to work by picking up trash. (and BTW: many of our guests are truly mentally ill....not alcoholics or drug addicts)
So, I am not a bleeding heart liberal, yet your comments seem completely out of touch with reality. Not everyone can "pull himself up by the bootstraps," although I recall very clearly the Lutheran Church I grew up in preached that the downtrodden should.
Didn't Jesus teach us to love one another and to take care of each other as our brother and sister?
WW
Isn't the Good Samaritan a powerful lesson?
WW
I abhor the concept of marriage. I find myself generally opposed to the agenda of the corporate government. I don't believe in god. Oddly, I have managed to not kill anyone. Curious.
-- Tom
Carl, your post was a masterpiece. I read it twice.
WW, I liked your post, too.
Tom, your post was terrible, but I liked it, too.
Quick responses: Carl, I think the terminological lens of "transcendent" is what throws me into a different sphere, when I'm reading about such ideas.
Why call them that, if they don't, uh, TRANSCEND?
WW, I am deficient in terms of others. It's almost comical to me, and I am trying to deal with it, but I do still think that people should teach other how to fish, and not just slap the bum in the head with a fish. I realize this IS fishy, nevertheless.
Tom, if you don't believe in marriage then you are treating your lovers as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves. We've been through this before in regards to you.
So we're all a bit fallen?
Somehow I think helping others runs the risk of ENABLING others to live a bad life. It's a very fine line.
At any rate, we are running to the pediatrician for the annual checkup.
Dear Lutheran Surrealist,
Now that I have reread my posts, I must say I really didn't mean to sound quite so angry. Sorry! It's not an excuse, but I'm a bit on edge with everything going on here in San Diego.
WW
You didn't sound at all angry. Not at all.
ANDY sounds angry.
I'm not sure of the best way to answer your question, Kirby.
My take on it is that Kant denies that we can have knowledge which transcends space and time. But he also turns around and says, in effect, "if there's no knowledge of the transcendent, then why do we have such ideas at all? And what's the significance of these ideas?"
The answer is that the Ideas of pure reason are built into the fabric of reason itself -- as he puts it, it is part of the nature of reason to ask questions that cannot be answered. But that's not to say that the Ideas are pointless or useless -- not at all!
Rather, the Ideas are necessary for morality -- as necessary for morality as they are useless for science.
Actually, come to think of it, I'm not 100% about that last bit -- that the Ideas are useless for science. Kant does think that science is governed by two "regulative ideas" of homogeneity and systematicity, and he might think that these ideas are connected up with with the idea of God as the author of nature. I'm not sure. I haven't gone far enough back into the 1st Critique to know one way or the other.
In a nutshell:
1) humans have only sensible intuition, not intellectual intuition, which means that are intuitions are restricted to space and time.
2) our understanding -- the application of concepts to intuitions -- is therefore limited to spatio-temporal intuitons;
3) consequently, (or Kantsequently?), objectively valid judgments, which comprise all knowledge, are limited to spatio-temporal objects;
4) but reason, which is different from understanding, can transcend the limits of sensible intuition --
5) it does so, not in order to yield knowledge, but in order to provide the necessary cognitive framework within which moral autonomy can be genuinely realized.
Okay, Kirby--I still don't have any spare time, but here's another quickie (by the way--hi, Carl! drop me a line sometime at ndm_g@yahoo.com):
First, two tangential bits that don't get numbers:
--Your assertion (to Tom) that there's no respect for a loved one's autonomy, their status as an end in itself, without marriage, is weird. Why should that be the case? You don't have to answer.
--I'm not actually angry. It's extraordinarily rare that I'm angry, in fact; tone, of course, is hard to read in e-form. I just think that you're ridiculous, and that you often write claptrap to which you're not particularly committed without thinking about how it sounds--or, thinking about it.
More to the point, a distinction I've always found helpful. I think it's there in Kant explicitly somewhere, but it works even if it's not:
"Transcendent" means "out beyond." The sphere of "things in themselves" is, in Kant, transcendent to our field of possible experience. God would be as well (as, in fact, the only being with intellectual intuition, as Carl points out). Transcendence is the condition of our finitude.
In a way, it's the opposite of the "transcendental;" the most helpful way I've found to think about the latter is that is comes "before."
"Transcendental" equals "condition of possibility," and Kant's "transcendental philosophy" deals with "the conditions of all possible experience." (Sorry about all the quotation marks). The transcendental is what everything we experience has already been structured by--otherwise it wouldn't be experience.
In the first Critique, the transcendental field proper is that of the categories. The critical target of the book is a metaphysics that confuses the transcendent with the transcendental, in trying to apply reason (which, though it can't "see" the transcendental, can always catch it out of the corner of its eye, can note the traces of its structuring) to the transcendent (God, etc.), which only leads philosophy into groundlessness and contradiction.
(incidentally, I find this aspect of the CPR a bit disappointing, since the arguments, so step-by-step and reasonable, don't usually end up in very interesting places, whereas the parts of Kant I find most dazzling are those in which he himself is unable to free himself from implicit contradiction and infinite regress--as in, for instance, the stuff on the analytic and empirical "I" and the "highest principle of pure understanding" in identity).
Last note: it's not, in Kant, a matter of "natural," "inborn" ideas. For one thing, the transcendental deals with pure formal structures, eagerly awaiting intuitions and nothing without that awaiting. For another, K would have used the word "nature" if that's what he was talking about. He's working before nature, since it's the categories that make possible the notion of "nature" at all, with its (transcendentally subjectively determined) laws, the foci of the "a priori synthetic judgments."
This is fun; I haven't read Kant in a while, though I just dug up a big chart I made four years ago.
Andy, you made a perceptive comment that the transcendental project (the aesthetic and the analytic) is valid independent of and prior to "nature" (= "all possible experiences"?) -- and so valid independent of discoveries about "inner nature," i.e. empirical psychology.
I'm also enjoying this exchange. It's helping me gear up for teaching my upper-division modern philosophy class in the spring.
Why is my lover a means to an end? I can't even understand this valuation. Is it because God is not in approval, creating a selfish sinful expression of lust? Therefore I am not following the laws? Or is there another bizarre logical twist that is so estranged from any sensible view I cannot perceive it?
The reason that I said that if you're not married then you're treating your lover as a means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves, is that unless someone is married they are not doing God's work when they are making love (which is to make babies). You are simply pleasing yourself, which is sinful.
If you did have a baby out of wedlock, then the baby would be a bastard and you would burn in hell.
I'm partially kidding with this, but some part of me still believes it, too. I can't quite shake it. So I push it at an extreme so that the seams show.
On a slightly more sensible note: I can't understand how anything can come before nature. For Kant, nature itself was made by God (this is most clear in the last part of the CJ, where he talks about how an immaculate sunset helps us to intuit an author of the world.
Nature and God are more or less coterminous (coextensive in scope and duration). Note 40 in section 91 of the CJ just three pages before the end of the book:
"The admiration for beauty and also the emotion aroused by the manifold purposes of nature, which a reflective mind is able to feel even prior to a clear representation of a rational author of the world, have something in themselves like RELIGIOUS feeling. They seem, in the first place, by a method of judging ANALOGOUS to moral to produce an effect upon the moral feeling (gratitude to and veneration for the unknown cause) and thus, by exciting moral ideas, to produce an effect upon the mind, when they inspire that admiration which is bound up with far more interest than mere theoretical observation can bring about."
What I think this passage means is that external to us, the beauty of nature awakens the aesthetic and the moral faculties which in turn make us aware that there is a higher plan within God's nature, and that (circular argument, but nevertheless there) God makes Himself known to us through nature, which when we contemplate it, awakens our higher faculties -- the last two sentences of the CJ (the very last two in the whole book, make it clear that through nature, and through the contemplation of it, we are able to "determine the concept of God adequately for the highest practical use of reason," even though we are unable to make clear all the steps between the practical proof of nature and our highest concept og God.
In other words, we can intuit a connection, but cannot make clear all the steps "unless reason in respect of it is renounced" [this is in the last amazing paragraph]/
As I read the CJ -- it is the capstone to the project to overturn Hume's attempt to scotch all supersensible ideas. K first brings back in time and space, then, morality, then beauty and the sublime, and finally God, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Even though there is no SCIENTIFIC proof, in other words, we can jettison reason in the last stages and still attain a knowledge of God, but it is a knowledge that is not scientific. Once we rebuild the categories of the supersensible that Hume has rejected, we are then able to reconstruct a morality founded on nature (which if we look hard enough appears to be rational or built by God, but reason must be satisfied with glimpses of same).
From that, I think that Kant then rebuilds the Christian world-view replete with marriage as the primary order, and other orders as other aspects of civil life that we can't do without, and that are gifts from God.
I base the last part on his positive remarks in regard to marriage and government (he has a different view of nature than Nietzsche, or other barbarians, who simply see nature as red in tooth and claw). Kant instead finds ORDER in nature, and that the order is godly.
Suppose I am relatively unconcerned with what Kant thinks about god? Kant wrote before much of the scientific evidence was postulated that disallows a rational discourse asserting the existence of god. I wonder what he would have thought faced with mounting empirical evidence suggesting a godless world. Surely he would have a darwin bumper sticker and sympathize more with Sam Harris than with you.
And I don't just please myself; I am to please as well! You can't prove that god exists Kirby. Therefore I am not disobeying the edict of god as the edict is faintly perceivable.
I suppose I read Kant as very much more "Humean" than you do, Kirby.
I think we read Hume much the same way, that is, as arguing that there's no a priori knowledge of the world at all, and also that there's no a posteriori knowledge of transcendent objects (e.g. God, the soul, free will).
But I read Kant as agreeing with much of this! In my view, Kant basically says, "yes, Hume, you're right, there's no transcendent knowledge, neither a priori nor a posteriori -- but we can still talk coherently and legitimately about the objects of faith -- God, the soul, and free will -- because a rational faith -- which is the only kind of faith worth having! -- nevertheless goes beyond the limits of knowledge."
As for marriage, Kant defines it as "ownership of the other person's genitals and the right to use them" -- which strikes me as missing the mark by such as wide margin as to make perfectly intelligible why he never married.
Kant is so Lutheran it kills me. The remark about marriage could have been made by Luther himself.
I see that he's happy with Hume, but worried about Hume, too, which is why he wants to reassert the nonsense of the supersensory: time, space, morals, beauty, God. Why else would he spend so much time on this if he was just a Humean?
On a slightly different topic: the notion that we are must treat each other as an end in itself, but that we CAN treat each other as a means, so long as we remember that we are also ends, is almost a perfect instance of two kingdoms thought.
This world is law, but there is another world looking down through it, and to which we are ultimately also responsible.
Also, I remember reading once that a very pretty young woman wanted to marry him. Kant said he'd think about it. Ten years later he agreed, and wrote her a letter to that effect. She was already married with four children.
I meant to say that in the meantime she had gotten married and had had four children by the time Kant responded to her proposal.
Though space and time are "supersensory" only in a weird sense. It's true that there is no sensation of space or of time, for Kant. But that's because space and time are the forms of sensible intuition -- to which sensations are the corresponding content.
So space and time, as the forms of intuition, really can't be lumped together with concepts (which are used by the understanding) or with the Ideas (which are used by reason).
I also think that the difference needs be to stressed between how the Idea of God is used in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the CPR, objective knowledge in determinate judgments of the Idea of God is emphatically denied. In CPJ, the Idea of God is necessarily given content by the structure of subjectivity in its capacity for reflective judgments of teleology.
In this respect, it's been said, the Idea of God in the CPJ unifies the First and Second Critiques. For in the Second Critique, the Idea of God is given content purely as a requirement for morality, whereas in the Third Critique, the Idea of God is given content, again subjectively, but this time as the Author of Nature.
Carl's comments throughout this are crisp, clear, and (to my mind) right on the money (a phrase appropriate to the mercantilist metaphors Kant often applies when discussing knowledge).
Kirby, to address the confusion you express above:
1) Think of "before" as "behind," like experience and thought come from the back of your head, toward full consciousness at the front--but their becoming experience and thought was due to inaccessible sensations or other impluses passing through some crystalline filter--the filter being the categories, the "transcendental field." Think of "before" as a partly spatial metaphor, and perhaps it'll be clearer.
2) To understand Kant at all, you have to keep in mind the idea of his "Copernican revolution--" the argument that philosophy has to begin with the subject, that any existence that we can possibly experience, reflect on, create or imagine is what it is due to its constitution by our faculties--which themselves are constructed and limited by the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories. The categories are concepts that only find their fruition as intuitions pass through different combinations of them, all conditioned by time. The point of saying all this here is to clarify "nature." We tend to think of nature as what's out there, what's always been there, independent of us. For Kant, however, "nature," with all its physical laws and all its capacity for aesthetic astonsihment--all this nature as we know it, and even as we can imagine it without us--is a product of transcendental subjectivity. To conceive of nature as independent of subjectivity can only, for Kant, lead to incoherence and meaninglessness, since that would mean conceiving of the "in-itself." This is a capacity we lack.
This is not to say that Kant is absolutely consistent with himself--he does, in fact, write phrases like "a mysterious ability inherent in our nature"--but that the main thrust of his philosophy, at least in the first two critiques, would indeed require my statement about the transcendental preceding nature.
I realize from the discussion how much I still need to work on Kant.
I ordered a book called Kant by a German scholar named Hoffe.
I tend to see philosophy as driven by kooks who are in turn driven by other kooks. I saw that Kant had been inspired by Hume, and thought this must be how Plato was inspired by the Sophists, or how I am inspired by the Maoists.
That is, to wreck their project, or to at least place an obstacle in its path.
I think that Carl sees this somewhat differently. Andy, how do you think that Kant is responding to Hume?
I think it's important to look at the core of his motivation and to think: where is he going with this?
It is fairly clear that Plato was so upset by the relativism of the Sophists that he used Socrates as a sock-puppet to build a new absolutism with the Forms.
And when you to Kant, it seems that once again he's trying to rebuild moral absolutes (maxims) while also building the notions of the supersensory that he established: but he isn't just doing it for the hell of it. He is trying to rebuild absolutes, even though he admits that one can't do this scientifically (there is nothing in the noumenal realm that would allow of morality), so instead he builds this secondary realm, that of the phenomenal, in order to posit that morality is specifically human.
About a week ago I found two mole crickets in my house. They appeared to be humping one another outside of the marriage bond so I smashed them with my Kant book. However, one of them escaped, and leaping almost higher than my head. It made me think about how they think in different categories altogether than humans.
I think that Kant wanted to rebuild the Humpty Dumpty of his Pietist childhood that Hume had smashed with his overly reasonable pure reason (I think this is why he calls it The Critique of Pure Reason -- the pure reason being Hume's).
At any rate, I'm working on this entirely from what I perceive to be his motivations. There is a constant struggle in philosophy between relativists and absolutists. The same thing is going on in our society between Democrats (relativists) and Republicans (absolutists). They are two tendencies in human nature.
I am an absolutist, and side with them on almost all issues. One of my great sadnesses of the last week is that Senator Brownback of Kansas dropped out of the race. I was part of his 1%.
Kant is extremely complex, so I feel the only way to get through him clearly is to remember that he is arguing from his teleology like everyone else. I think that some people believe that philosophical knowledge is pure, or unmotivated. I think it's invariably motivated and that this makes it easier to understand.
At any rate, I could be wrong. Perhaps Kant is purely and simply building all these categories and playing with them for his own intellectual delight. I just happen to doubt that that is enough of a motivation.
I read the "reason" in Kant as not Hume's but as Leibniz's, or more specifically, the philosophical system built out of Leibniz's writings by the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679 - 11754).
I just saw that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry: 18th Century German Philosophy Prior to Kant. Looks good!
My take on things is that Kant learned from Hume how the dogmatism of pure reason is vulnerable to skeptical attack. A critique of pure reason is a way for reason to understand its own limits and resources; if it understands its own limits, then it will not over-reach itself, and therefore will not be vulnerable to skeptical challenges.
That said, Kant does think that Hume was simply wrong about the dichotomy between "relations of ideas" (analytic a priori) and "matters of fact" (synthetic a posteriori). But in the Prolegomenon, Kant suggests that if Hume had realized that this dichotomy failed to account adequately for mathematics, he would have also realized that the door is again open for metaphysics. If Hume had realized that, Kant suggests, he would have not only discovered transcendental philosophy himself but he also would have presented it much better than Kant himself is able to do!
Carl, your account of Kant is I'm sure far more grounded in reading through Kant and reading through the criticism, and also taking the necessary courses. I'm so grateful for your input!
I'm late to get home or I would try to stir you further to get more info, but don't have the time to think down through my anxiety right now.
I also don't know either Hume or Leibniz well enough to evaluate what you are saying, much less this foxy Wolff.
But that Kant was delighted that the door to metaphysics was again opened by Hume's attack on Leibniz -- doesn't it mean that he was anxious to begin reconstructing the ladder to God, and so got right after it, and that that therefore was pretty much his abiding motivation since that's where the three critiques more or less end (last 30 pages of CJ)?
Nope.
By the way:
1) Was it actually your birthday, or were you just taunting the Chairman? If it was, happy belated!
2) Again, I can never be sure that you're serious about the Maoist conspiracy thing--but is this the one you pick because you're in the academy? I mean, in non-academic U.S. left-activist circles, the Maoists are generally thought to be kind of crazy, loudmouthed dogmatists, even by the other socialist groups. Pretty minor, very few of them. I don't know if they actually are--only that none of these groups (as groups) fit that well with the Marx I know and (selectively, but in enormous chunks) love.
Anyway, sorry that I can't provide a "Maoist critique." Like Carl, I read Kant on my own and in the UC San Diego philosophy department--by no means a hotbed of cultural Marxism.
One recommendation: Adorno's lectures on the first Critique are remarkably clear and entertaining, full of interesting tangents but largely explanatory. I know you've said that you won't touch Adorno, but I think a bit of investigation would reveal that his discomfort with any of the Party lines was as great (if from rather different angles) than yours. The lectures on moral philosophy are wonderful as well, and address the parts of this stream in which you flounder, though I'm sure you wouldn't be comfortable with his conclusions, if there were any.
I don't know how Maoist academia really is. English departments are pretty well influenced by the French Maoist thought of Tel Quel (Barthes, Sollers, Kristeva, LAcan, Derrida, Foucault), but I think that outside of English departments pretty much everyone else has moved on. It's just that most people in English departments are mono-glot and translations of the massacres of the French pseudo-rebels of 1968 have yet to be translated since there's no ready market for them.
There is an article in the October 19, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education by David Glenn that argues that although there is not one of the 1417 full-time scholars that teach at any of the Ivy League colleges who responded to the survey that voted for Bush (we're talking about 0%!), many younger scholars define themselves as centrist (but centrist itself isn't defined), so this implies that there is nevertheless a groundswell of centrism, if not conservatism. Actually, the more i look at the figures the less I understand what they mean.
I think I am just tired of all the posing and all the French this and French that. People ought to talk about Madison and Franklin and US Grant and Lincoln if they want my ear. I don't hate the French, but I can't understand how we're supposed to be better off if we remake American life on the basis of May 1968, which at any rate was a failure and just a lot of baloney even if it was also a lot of fun in terms of the drugs they took, and the sex they had. But heck, it was just a month and it was forty years ago, and we ought to get over it. It was stupid, and French people are just stupid people when they philosophize or when they sit in their cafes and jibber jabber. They are all style and no substance.
I've read too much Adorno as it is, but I do find him occasionally brilliant, so I might read it anyhoo if I can find a cheap copy. He's at least not French.
I think what I would rather do is turn to the neo-Kantians like Luc Ferry for further clarification if I'm going to read a European and esp. a frog. I enjoyed his book against the eco-fascism of PETA & co. I think it was called The New Ecological Ordure.
Thanks, Kirby, for the directness of that.
I do what I can.
I'd also second Andy's recommendation of Adorno's lectures on Kant. Unlike his published pieces, his lectures are relatively straightforward and well-translated. He gave five lecture courses in the period during which he was developing Negative Dialectics, and all but one of those courses -- on Heidegger -- have been translated into English and published through Polity.
I've become more interested in Adorno -- and in Dewey and in Merleau-Ponty -- because I see in their work some strategies for reconceptualizing the notion of 'the subject' without making the subject originary or foundational. That is, I think that the criticisms of "the French" are more or less right-on -- though what irritates me isn't so much the Maoism as it is the influence of Bataille and Klossowski.
Joel Whitebook, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, draws a distinction between philosophy that "valorizes the irrational" and philosophy that maintains a "dialogue with unreason."
I think that this is the right distinction to make, and I think that 'the French' tend towards a valorization of the irrational. This is clearly true of Bataille and Klossowski, probably true of Deleuze and Guattari.
I'm not sure what to say about Lacan or Derrida -- I haven't read enough of either -- though what little I've tried reading of Lacan has struck me as nonsense. This is probably because he's trying to de-biologize psychoanalysis, whereas it's the biological impetus to Freud that I really like.
In other words, I'm interested in those philosophers who are trying to reconcile, or synthesize, or at any rate hold together with minimal tension, humanism (which means some engagement with Kant and neo-Kantianism) and naturalism. 'The French' don't do this, whereas Adorno does -- or I think he does -- and so do Dewey and Merleau-Ponty -- though I'm not entirely sure what I need to say about Merleau-Ponty for my project.
Sorry to have gone on at such length -- I'm practicing for going back on the job market!
Carl, you're always welcome to go on at any length. I learn a lot from your posts, and am grateful for them.
I'm reading Jung right now -- Psychological Types -- and he makes a few remarks that I believe are germane, but we are about to run over to that bastion of communist capitalism -- Wal-Mart -- which has the cheapest prices in America -- but which is built on the slave labor of the Red Chinese. Turn over any product and it says China, which used to be Taiwan.
The systematic abuses of that country toward its citizens keeps them at any arbitrarily low level of income, which helps us, but really I should have a little more solidarity than that.
I will try to respond at some point if there is a lull on the morrow.
Again I find myself more or less in line with you, Carl. That Whitebrook distinction is a good one--thanks for it.
I love Deleuze, but the parts that irritate me I could characterize with the epithet "French punkiness," that macho bad-boy attitude I see in a lot of writing from France (with exceptions, of course--it's there in Rimbaud and Genet, but for them it's compositional material, and goes in all sorts of strange directions). I definitely see that as connected to the valorization of the irrational.
I've mostly read early Derrida, and quite like it. None of that punkiness there. My skimming of the later stuff makes it seem like he's just playing around, but even that might be good. Lacan interests me. In Freud, I like the mutual conditioning of the biological and the linguistic, the idea of physiological processes being "translated" by mental and social structures. Lacan emphasizes the linguistic side of this, perhaps too heavily... but mostly I find him impenetrable, and I'm impatient with it in a way I'm not with Hegel, Adorno, Heidegger, whose difficulties usually seem to result directly from their attempt to use language against some of its strongest tendencies.
Adorno, I think, does what he says he does--"enters into" the material he's thinking about, letting his thought be motivated by contradictions, tensions, movements inherent to the subject matter. I think this starts to be the case after Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book about which I have mixed feelings (it's pretty full of strong generalizations with little to back them up).
There's supposed to be a new translation of Negative Dialectics in the works; a few years ago, I printed out a provisional translation that's probably still online. What I've read of it is pretty good, but I'm waiting to read the book again until I manage to get through Hegel's Phenomenology, which could take years.
Andy, when you're going through the Phenomenology, you'll notice two jokes. One isn't worth repeating, but the other one isn't bad. Hegel jokes that anyone who believes in phrenology deserves a bump on the head.
It's somewhere around page 200, and might be in a footnote.
When you come across it, would you let me know? My copy of the Phenomenology is in storage in Finland, and I can't find that joke in the new copy I have.
The other joke is actually just a touch of whimsy perhaps -- he says he finds it odd that God chose to procreate and urinate out of the same aperture (meaning he thought that God was Male). I'd like to find that too. I'm almost certain that this second bit is on about p. 212, and is in a footnote.
Also, while we're at it, could anyone explain the thing about "in the night in which all cows are black"?
I know I'm supposed to understand that line, but I don't. He's referring I think to something in Feuerbach, but I don't know what it is, do I, Mr. Jones.
I'll certainly let you know, and I'll think about the cows. I mean, it makes literal sense if you put a comma after "night," but...
The first 150 pages or so, which I read last year sometime, often cracked me up--those absurdly circling sentences--but I have a strange sense of humor.
I wouldn't have been able to read so much Heidegger (whose writings still fascinate me) if I hadn't also found him ridiculous--though in his case I had to make up the jokes myself.
Philosophy is on the big list of serious things that are also funny (like strange art, food, and humor). Or that make me laugh, even when they're not "funny" per se--surprise, etc. (like being visited by sudden tragedy or crisis).
The footnotes in Das Kapital are hilarious at times. Kant hasn't struck me as a barrel of laughs, though.
It may take me a while to get back to Hegel; I'm reading Leibniz now. He's utterly weird.
I once asked a Heideggerian named Marc Froment-Meurice (who is a very funny French guy and is head of French at Vanderbilt) if Heidegger ever cracked a joke. He looked at Daniel Charles -- another Heideggerian. They both laughed, and then looked at me, and shrugged their shoulders, and said, "Non."
Isn't that odd and humorous in itself?
The technical term for a person with no sense of humor is "agelast." This word appears in Bakhtin's work.
Please note when you find the phrneology giggle that it summarizes Hegel's argument: he is arguing that the bumps on our head (material reality) do not influence spiritual reality (which Marx reverses). Hegel argues that consciousness rises above material reality. Marx famously remarks that material reality does determine our consciousness.
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