Absurdity and the Claims of Others

1. Every once in a while . . . 2. What if everything seems absurd? 3. Louis CK on the web of life — Camus and the dilemma of modernity — Christ? Or fleshy neighbors?; 4. Accepting fragility — The claims of others

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1.      Every once in a while, I receive an email from people who have read one of my Pirsig essays at moq.org, every one of which have an “author’s note” in the header that gives my email and a playful request for all forms of feedback. Often I have to explain that I wrote them many years ago, and no longer think many of the things they contain. [1] The essay, bar none, that I receive the most emails about is one I wrote on Camus for a philosophy class on existentialism, “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.” Usually, the people have no interest in Pirsig because they found the essay by typing in the relevant keywords into google. I have gotten many different kinds of response to this essay. [2]

2.      I recently received a response that touched an interesting chord. It consisted simply of a quoted passage from the essay—a passage from Camus and then my response—and a series of rhetorical questions. (No salutation, no closing signature; one of the oddities of internet life I’ve had to grow accustomed to.) Like so:

“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

In this way Camus seems to be merely pointing out the absurdity of some people’s lives. I can think of several people in my life that don’t fit into this simplistic mold. My sister, for example, prefers to live her life as something of a free spirit. She works when she needs money, sleeps rarely, and parties a lot. This isn’t quite Camus’ point, however. Camus would certainly argue that my sister is indeed in a pattern that could easily be questioned. Why party all the time? Why not work instead? Why anything at all? This last question is what Camus is driving at. [3]

What if we have to support our family?
What if we are bored of life?
What if we have no hope to live?
What if everything seems nothing but absurd?
What if you have no one to love you?

I found this very interesting, because it struck me that there was a tension in the questions. Some of the rhetorical questions point to an answer in the Cosmic Christ, and given my mysterious writer’s email handle, I suspect that was the intended effect. What if you’re bored, what if there’s no hope, what if everything seems absurd, what if you have no one to love you? Jesus Christ can do all of those things for you—He can love you, give meaning to your life, enter you into an exciting project to structure your earthly time. He is the substance of hope, the evidence for things unseen.

3.      The first question, however, doesn’t fit that pattern: “What if we have to support our family?” I like Louis CK’s version:

Whenever single people complain about anything, I really want them to shut the fuck up. First of all, if you’re single, your life has no consequence on the earth. Even if you’re helping people aggressively, which you’re fucking not, nobody gives a shit what happens to you. You can die, and it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Your mother will cry or whatever, but otherwise, nobody gives a shit.
I can’t die; I got two kids and my wife doesn’t fucking work, so I don’t get to die. [4]

I think what this points to is a different pattern of possible answers to those other rhetorical questions: finding a place in the web of life that makes up the connections we have with others is a way of giving meaning, finding hope, and structuring your earthly time. If you’re looking for love, you can find it in your fleshy neighbors.

And this, now, is the philosophical response I would give to Camus. The problem I took up in that paper was produced by the intersection between the seeming absurdity of our day-to-day processes of living and the death of God. Camus saw that there was a problem riven into modern life. God once played the role of framing life, of being the framework in which meaning was constituted—no longer. And the increasing mechanization of life, symbolized (and literalized) by the clock, produces the feeling of a succession of days without success, unending—up goes the boulder, and down it goes for tomorrow. In effect, these two patterns of answer—my interlocutor’s answer of Christ, my answer of fleshy neighbors—are simply two different attempts to grasp one horn over the other of the dilemma of modernity, so structured. He doubles down on Christ, denying God is dead; I double down on day-to-day life, denying it is absurd.

Camus thought the ultimate philosophical question was of suicide: why shouldn’t I commit suicide? Louis CK suggests quite plainly how taking seriously your obligations to others answers Camus’ question—his entire act is almost a concession to the absurdity, which heightens the sense of moral responsibility and obligation we continually flout but must find within ourselves if we are to be good people. Even if I wanted to die, Louis CK says, I don’t get to.

4.      Denying that life is absurd and finding meaning in the arms of others is a much more fragile pattern of answers, given that people can betray you, and no one is entitled to love from any particular person. We might be able to say that every person is entitled to love, but that does not mean that any person is entitled to fulfill that as their unique obligation.

Love from fleshy others takes work. Claiming the attention of others is as delicate a dance as the practice of reason, of the giving and asking for reasons, the exchange of assertions and claims about why you do or think a thing. Jesus’ love isn’t like that; He loves you no matter what. That, I think, speaks to the continued pull of Christian teachings. But it doesn’t speak against pouring your heart into others as opposed to the absurdly easy love of Christ.

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Endnotes

[1] You can find a list of those essays and my grading of them here.

[2]One particularly weird one I had fun with I wrote about in “How Not to Start a Philosophical Conversation.” For an earlier autobiographical reflection on the “Absurdity” essay, in which I rain on my earlier self’s parade, see “Second Thoughts on Existentialism.” It has perhaps the greatest pun I’ve ever made (though “How Not to” has a good one, too).

[3] The Camus is from The Myth of Sisyphus, and the passage is from the beginning of the section of “Absurdity” entitled “Life Is Absurd.”

[4] This is from Shameless. You can listen to a clip of this joke here. I agree with the makers of that website—Louis CK is one of the most philosophically substantive comedians working today.

“I’ve Never Been Modern? Why, that Changes Everything…”

1. We have never been modern — What we thought was modernity wasn’t; 2. Social Darwinism, primitivism, pyrrhonism — Fear vs. lack of imagination; 3. I've always never been modern — The metaphysics of modernity; 4. Does doing require thinking? — Entangled lives; 5. Application: I've always never been human — Conceptual reform; 6. Intellectuals and technical vocabularies — Theoretical decongestants for stuffed up practices

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1.      Latour finds himself in a very awkward position in We Have Never Been Modern: while emphasizing, at the close of his second chapter, the point of his title, he nevertheless wants to historically chart the birth of the modern. The two claims strike me as perfectly commensurable if one sorts out what one is doing and claiming properly (in order to avoid your own paradoxes in your own philosophical Constitution). “Constitution” is, of course, Latour’s idiom for developing his account of modernity. This is the gist:

The hypothesis of this essay is the word “modern” designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of being, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification,” creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance. The first, for example, would link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists; the second would establish a partition between a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society. (11)

Latour’s selection, in 1991, of climate change as a network to be studied is a good indication of why people have found Latour’s work in the philosophy of science increasingly useful. Latour’s formulations, however, strike me as still too paradoxical by half, as in this early formulation (admittedly rhetorical for his dramatic narrative): “And what if we had never been modern? Comparative anthropology would then be possible. The networks would have a place of their own” (10). If modernity is what disallowed a space for networks, and we’ve never been modern, then networks have always had a place of their own. That’s the central paradox Latour awkwardly confronts. He wants to say (rightly, I think) that modernity never existed and to say (also rightly) that realizing this will enable us to do something new, thus ushering in a new moment in our history. But at the close of Latour’s second chapter, he goes to some lengths to say that he is not claiming “that we are entering a new era” (47). Latour’s probably right: “era” would be too strong. Latour, however, is trying to usher something new in, but because of the state of philosophy and politics at the time, he finds it difficult to say so out loud. Latour’s formulation should be: “what we thought was modernity was never actually the case, and realizing this will enable us to do better things we’ve already been doing, and perhaps for some of us something new.”

2.      In order to isolate the context Latour finds himself awkwardly in, we might look at the four-part schematic in its opening pages. After contextually defining the two modern desires as ending humanity’s exploitation of itself and increasing humanity’s control over nature, Latour lists the two different “antimodern” reactions: “We must no longer try to put an end to man’s domination of man, say some; we must no longer try to dominate nature, say others” (9). These are still two recognizable responses, and we might accord them the status of being the radical right and radical left, respectively. However, I think Latour is smart in not so doing. These responses should not be reduced to political orientation (like conservative/liberal, right/left) because political orientations are linked too directly to choices in political action—a “political orientation” can only manifest itself within some local politico-power grid (like the Beltway, or the Democratic Party, or the Arizona 2_nd District, or the Printer Icon Department at Microsoft). So what we need are labels that express a guiding motive, or orienting principle, that can then be transformed into a political orientation (and thence action) given a planting in some local institutional context. [1] The two antimodern reactions might be described fairly easily as, respectively, “social Darwinism” and “primitivism.” [2]

The first two then quite easily slide into a right/left manifestation in most current “Western” political landscapes. But Latour’s second two responses are harder to place, both in their attitude and their potential political manifestation. The third possibility Latour calls “postmodernism” and says it is an “incomplete scepticism” that causes people to “remain suspended between belief and doubt, waiting for the end of the millennium” (9). We might call this “pyrrhonism,” after the ancient form of skepticism about the possibility of making knowledge claims (and thus the problem of basing action on them). But while some (certainly not all) postmodernist theorists behave like millennialists (there were probably more during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the context Latour was confronting), it’s certainly no requirement for a pyrrhonism to so compose itself. This makes Latour’s theoretical art less useful, for its utility is based on the sense of his having placed his finger on the pulse of the times—and so better able to manifest a good alternative. This becomes worse, it seems to me, in his last option: those who double down on modernity and “carry on as if nothing had changed” (9). Latour shapes this option as those who put their head in the sand, willfully plugging their ears to their better angels. But this seems terribly ill-suited as a description for any responsible intellectual. And this also seems to be the only option available for those who, while hearing the angels, don’t have any better ideas than striving for political emancipation and better technological control in order to improve man’s estate (in the Baconian phrase). But sticking your head in the sand seems a very different quality from being out of ideas. The first manifests fear; the other lack of imagination. What I think Latour’s schematic in the last instance hinges on is his implicit definition of modernity as unmitigated, Chicago-style anarchic-market economic expansionism—the “clever trick” (9) the West hopes to export. But this must be considered a narrow definition of the modern, for what do you do if you do think there is some interesting difference between “the West and the Rest” that you yet have an imperfect faith in?

3.      The difficulty here seems to be in denying a plausible position for those who are already behaving as if we’ve never been modern, but just didn’t realize it. Because we should ask ourselves of Latour’s schematic—who is he talking about? Theorists? Intellectuals? Politicians? Educated people? Car mechanics who don’t read newspapers? This is the conundrum for the intellectual—how do I attribute motivations to people who wouldn’t understand what I’m attributing to them? What I’m pointing at, I think, is just a matter of Latour’s rhetoric getting in the way of his real point—he’s staging himself as a revolutionary in a field (which he is) while at the same time saying that everyone is hooked up to this field where he is a revolutionary. But they are and are not—everyone’s hooked into networks, but not everyone is in Latour’s disciplinary field (studying networks). It seems like we must make a distinction between intellectual and plebeian, for this seems a corollary of denying we’ve ever been modern, which was after all an intellectual’s fiction—say, of Boyle and Hobbes (his primary emblem). [4] The “modern Constitution” Latour draws up fills a role in inferential patterns that not everyone might ever stumble down. We have to say this to deny the Platonism of principles ruling practices, rather than practices being summarized by principles: the former idea helps to produce the tripartite structure of separation in Latour’s Constitution (principles rule practices, meaning realms are separate and playing by their own rules, hence all you need to do is isolate a practice and formulate its rules, rather than studying the jumble of practices), and the latter helps to show how discourse, the social, and the real (one of Latour’s several formulations) are wrapped up into each other.

Latour’s graphical representation helps see what the paradox amounts to:

The trick to seeing the paradox is asking what is being translated in the hybrid networks. In the Modern Constitution, it is Nature and Culture. But that means the Work of Translation requires the dichotomy of Nature and Culture. That’s why Latour marks it as “the first” (though if you look at his summarizing paragraph above he calls “purification” “the second”), but where does the dichotomy come from? The Work of Purification—that means all those hybrid networks conceptually require the work we’ve become suspicious of. So what, in the end, does it in fact mean to reject the Modern Constitution?

4.      The way through, I think, is to distinguish the metaphysics of modernity from the practices we are surrounded by. We might think of metaphysics as a kind of conceptual explanation of our practices and how they work. What Latour is saying is that the Metaphysics of Modernity is incoherent, and in fact needs to be to get on with the work the Metaphysics in part is designed to explain. But we shouldn’t go that far—what we shouldn’t do is think that the work requires the metaphysics. It is an explanation and perhaps a justification, but nuclear bombs do not require any particular metaphysics to work. They only require that you do a certain thing, not think a certain thing.

The reason it appears that nuclear power also requires us to think a certain thing is that it seems absurd to think that hunters and gatherers could perform the requisite tasks to create a nuclear weapon without having, for example, learned that e=mc₂. Our ability to do certain things does require us to be able to think or say certain things—we shouldn’t deny that. But what certain things? That is the open question. Latour and many others wish to argue that there is something irrevocably paradoxical about modern life (and sometimes, just human life in general—like Camus). However, this claim requires that the only way to get on with some practice (say, the Work of Translation) is via this other particular practice that actually contradicts the first. But this claim will only ever be justified based on experiment—trying out other ways of getting the good practice to work. In other words, I see no reason to think that the bad metaphysical dualism between Nature and Culture is required to get the Work of Translation done. Much good philosophical work that goes under the banner of “pragmatism” has been trying to work out alternative idioms for understanding the entangled lives we find ourselves thrown into without trying to erase the entanglement. For what pragmatists have learned over the course of philosophical history—a history marked by attempts to purify our categories of understanding—is that some categories are entangled in each other, but that isn’t itself a paradox. Entanglement is okay. It’s only the ghost of Plato that would tell us otherwise.

5.      One way of applying the lesson above is to debates about humanism and posthumanism, especially as Latour has been picked up by many who consider themselves as working out posthumanistic idioms. From a Latourian point of view, I would think the theoretical lesson is that we’ve never been human(istic)—“humanism” never existed in the way it thought itself to. The trouble here, however, seems to be that some posthumanism composes itself as, from this vantage, distinctly anti-humanistic—it doesn’t just wish for the erroneous self-conceptions of humanism to disappear, but for vast tracts of practices that “gave rise to humanism.”

My scare quotes denote the problem of identification that is at issue. For if practices proceed conceptions of practices, then what we are talking about when we want to get rid of humanism is an expulsion of practices—but which are the practices that are at issue? The trouble of cultural evolution is that we are complex to a degree we sometimes forget in analysis. Our conceptions, built out of practices, are only a problem if they double back into bad practices. The problem of institutional reform, as Latour points out, is that if you uproot a practice without uprooting the real cause of the practice—which is another practice—then you will create a “return of the repressed” situation (see 8). [5] So the problem of conceptual reform is the same: identifying correctly a conceptual practice that really does enable a particular bad practice. The trouble of conceptual reform is that a lot of different premises can lead you to the same bad action. Conceptual reform is about disabling the premises in our practical syllogisms that lead us to perform some unwanted action. On this model, there’s a certain slipperiness in conceptual reform. Not only do we sometimes misidentify the culprit, but people have a tendency to replace other premises in their syllogisms if they don’t agree that the object-action is unwanted (the problem we’ve been facing in reforming out of existence racism).

6.      This means the real question for intellectuals is—how much time should we really be spending on haggling over conceptual reform? The stance of both Latour and Shapin is that practices come first, then concepts. [6] So how much dog should we have in the fight over concepts? Who, in fact, are we fighting? Intellectuals have a habit of attributing beliefs and concepts to people who have no idea what they are talking about. This is effectively the same maneuver that physicists perform—do rocks understand the laws of gravity? (If you want to say yes, then you’re simply using a slightly different notion of “understanding”—and how much should we really haggle over this definitional asymmetry?) The real problem is not exactly, it seems to me, bridging back and forth between science, politics, and discourse (which is something like how Latour pictures the problem). The problem is bridging back and forth between experts and non-experts. This isn’t simply a problem of non-experts not understanding technical vocabularies, it is more especially the problem of convincing non-experts that the technical vocabulary should be given authority over our conceptualization of problems (and the experts trusted to be working through the correct inferential consequences—after all, how could a non-expert provide a peer review, or as we used to say in math class, “check your work”?). Latour’s battle is with other experts in his field (which we might label as, in this particular book, philosophers). So how much time should Latour spend in convincing laypersons—scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, politicians, car mechanics—that if they take his perspective, the world will become a little better (i.e., we’ll be able to handle better some of our pressing problems, like climate change)? Because just so long as there are experts resisting Latour, these on-looking laypersons will feel uneasy about giving their trust (this being the very obvious strategy in the debate about climate change). And if there are more direct paths of arguing about these pressing problems, more direct than arguing in a technical field before arguing about the bridge between that field and the public, then this makes Latour look like a detour to action.

So what is the point of all this for debates like those about posthumanism? In turns out not much, because if it is really true that all these systems and practices and networks (or whatever other name one wants to give to the layered and shifting sediment of nature-culture) have always been there, then it doesn’t exactly devalue what the technicians are doing in their respective spheres (even if it is from one vantage seamless). After all, as a layperson, I do tend to think Latour is right in nearly every way as a philosopher of science. If the above is right, then a Latourian revolution in conception just might make the world a little better. Likewise, whatever one thinks of as a “posthuman revolution” just might. But the farther one gets from actuating premises in practical syllogisms—the premise that then kicks out the requisite action—the more nebulous the possible effects changing those farther back premises will have on the object-action one’s eye is really on. All that this suggests is that as scholar-intellectuals, we make a short-term/long-term distinction between the different practices we might take our time up with: practices that will have an immediate effect on the world (voting, teaching), practices a little more distant (writing for newspapers, rabble-rousing), and practices that may only have an effect on the world in the distant future (having babies, writing treatises about conceptual change). As a plea, it is simply about orientation, or about what to remind oneself occasionally while obsessing over one’s area of interest. But it may affect our work as well, for it is possible that a practical orientation like an engulfing messianic fervor might be an actuating principle behind some of our worst practical syllogisms—that our ism-work often looks like silver-bulletism, turning our theoretical work into a practical problem. We have to remain aware of when our theory stuffs up our practical syllogisms, which then requires a theoretical decongestant like Latour.

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Endnotes

[1] These labels are at a remove from this “local” context, but no less contextual for that. I think our theoretical discourse has still not yet come to terms with how to formulate the abstract/concrete distinction across the global/local distinction—for we still too often feel moved to call abstraction a “decontextualization,” when we should rather think of it as moving from one context to another. To think of abstraction as a process of decontextualization is to be modern—and we’ve never been modern.

[2] For a brevity I will already fail at, I won’t elaborate why these two labels. But suffice it to say that at other moments in history, these attitudes might have transformed into different orientations. For example, our great modern primitivist is Rousseau, and he mobilized his in order to emancipate humanity, not to not dominate nature. Rousseau’s screeds against modern luxury and the like had as their priority his project of political emancipation, not the ecological project of nature emancipation.

[3] The “unmitigated” plays an important role here, for the American non-Marxist, Reformist Left’s hope is that European “social democracies” provide a model for how to have market economies whose tendencies for imperialistic expansion are curbed.

[4] Latour uses Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s groundbreaking 1985 book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, to discuss the theoretical implications of the historical digging done in that book: that Boyle, to create the material-scientific “object,” had to deny the framework of thought that allowed Hobbes to create the moral-political “subject,” and vice versa for Hobbes. I do something similar to Shapin’s later The Scientific Revolution in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

[5] What’s a “real cause,” especially in this complex game of interlocking practices? The same thing it is in the physical sciences—the condition that produces the effect. The great problem of cultural reform is that there are a multitude of conditions—in fact, given the problem of redescription in object-conceptualization (e.g., are you talking about the same object if you describe it differently?), there are an infinite number of conditions potentially. This makes our practices of description (i.e., “theory”) terribly important for picking out practices to be reformed, but it also means that a deep theoretical skepticism necessarily abides in all of our attempts at cultural reform—even if we successfully extirpate an unwanted effect (say poor people or greed) by reforming or removing an isolated and defined practice, we will not ever know whether or not that removed practice was really the cause of the bad effect—unless, and only unless, the bad effect returns. Only when we are wrong do we attain certain knowledge (the Hegelian via negativa crossed with Popperian falsifiability—an amusing cross-fertilization). This form of (Cartesian) epistemological skepticism is only debilitating if one hasn’t previously put one’s faith in the “experimental method”—the defining quality of which is the belief that it is only by trial-and-error that we shall apprehend causes, i.e. a real cause can never be found by theoretical fiat (though it will only appear under a theoretical edifice). The trick for making sure this faith in experiment doesn’t turn back into the Platonism that dogmatically, and by fiat, declares it really has found the real cause, and we can therefore cease inquiry, is to combine Baconian experimentalism with fallibilism—the idea that inquiry will never end because we’d never know it if we’d reached it. The trouble, here again, for this sort of orientation toward cultural reform, rather than physics reform, is that when you reform physics, the only losers are physics professors (until a physical discovery blips our universe out of existence—a real fear attaching to the activities at CERN for some). But for cultural reform, more lives are at stake, and hence “inquiry” into real causes of cultural problems has effects we might not always wish to risk. This, and only this, is what provides the intellectual justification for political conservatism, the attitude that a given change will put at risk things we wish to keep.

[6] Following Robert Brandom, I call this Shapin’s “fundamental pragmatism” in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

Second Thoughts on Existentialism

Over a decade ago now, I discovered Robert Pirsig. My first encounter was blasé—I read the first 60 pages of ZMM for a high school class on philosophy and religious studies and faked my way through a paper on it. My interest in Pirsig didn’t surface until the next year, as I took Phil 101 and had ZMM assigned on the syllabus. I groaned inwardly, but—in the context of a semester on Plato, Nietzsche, and Kuhn—I found him much more interesting. I became simultaneously interested in philosophical problems and the life-entanglement that ZMM represented. Here’s a guy who went to the mat for these problems. It was very interesting.

I was on my way up to my 101 discussion group one day in an elevator with my TA, when he asked me what philosophy courses I was taking the spring semester. I looked quizzically at him and kind of shook my head saying, “I’m…not taking any…?” He got a funny look on his face: “Oh—I thought you were a philosophy major.” I said no, I was still undeclared. He said I should think about it, and a month later when our professor asked me to assist her in a class that spring, I thought the least I could do was declare (though it took me till mid-spring—I’m very lazy).

I took three philosophy courses that spring, in addition to the aesthetics course I helped out in (a complete farce: what do I know about aesthe—wait, I’m a literary critic in training now…I love aesthetics! Ha!, and boy do I know a lot about beauty, and stuff!) . They were in Greek philosophy, existentialism, and a random cavalcade of 20th century people, including the existentialists. The deal with the 20th century class was that we could pick out any philosopher we wanted, even if we didn’t study them specifically, and write our final on them. I chose Pirsig, and because he wasn’t well known as a philosopher, my professor suggested I compare Pirsig with someone else. Because I was taking so much existentialism, I picked Sartre. This turned into “Phenomenological-Existentialism and the Metaphysics of Quality.” I read Lila for the first time for this paper, and became enamored with Pirsig’s arguments about needing a new metaphysics for our culture. And because I had so much Pirsig on the brain, when it came to writing my existentialism paper, I couldn’t help but refute Camus with the help of my newly learned Pirsig-foundation called the MoQ. This was “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.”

It never ceases to fascinate me that of all the junk I have lying around the internet, this particular essay sends me the most random readers who feel like writing (all of my reply letters begin “Thanks for reading and writing!”). Having written it a decade ago, though, I have mixed feelings about the arguments. (I have no mixed feelings about the writing—it’s horrid.) At the close, with the help of Pirsig’s theory of static levels, I get to state that Camus’ most pressing of philosophical problems, the question of suicide, of why I should not just off myself, has an easy answer: “It’s simply that Life has Meaning: to live.” Really? Life’s purpose is to be lived? I suggest that this “rather simple ethics” “leaves the door open” for the further development of a teleological ethics, but why on earth should we think that the firm foundation of the ultimate telos of life is “to be lived,” and this because we are cellular beings? At root, life has biological meaning, so now Camus’ full of crap. “Life’s purpose is to be lived” is at best a tautology, and how boring is that? Why on earth would somebody think that that’s an interesting answer to Camus’ problem?

In my estimation, there are two types of 19-year-old philosophy students: 1) people who thought Nietzsche was probably right when he said “God is dead” at 18 and still do and 2) people who thought Nietzsche was right at 18 but now don’t. I was the latter type. Most people who go in for philosophy these days do not make it through their teenage years undisillusioned (saying “illusioned” would be unfair to people for whom it hasn’t even occurred that life might be an illusion—and since Platonism is predicated on the appearance/reality distinction, such an awareness does seem to be intrinsic to philosophy). I, certainly, didn’t make it. However, I also didn’t really care that God was dead. Some people like Camus do. He cared very much, for only somebody that takes Nietzsche far too seriously could take seriously the question, “Why should I not commit suicide?”—let alone as the only truly pressing philosophical question. Passing through Nietzsche makes some people (call them “existentialists”) really pessimistic about humanity, even cynical. I wouldn’t say I was optimistic—I spent much of my time making fun of everything around me and I thought most other people were idiots (it’s hard not to when living in a dorm)—but cynical? It seemed like the perverse twin of the eternal optimism of people who go in for God. I just couldn’t get up the energy for that—it seemed like I’d have to spend just as much energy pissing on God’s grave as I would have had to do propping Him up, and when it comes right down to it, I’m very lazy.

So, what happens to some lazy 18-year-olds who go in for philosophy is that on their way to 19 they discover an easy way out—someone offers them a quick dialectical fix, a cheap but sturdy looking foundation that claims to give more polemical bang for your argumentative buck. (If they don’t find one of these by 20, they either cease to be lazy and declare as political science or sociology majors and try to save the world, or—if still lazy—enter an English department.) That was Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality for me. The trouble is, you still have something you need to prop up, and that’s no fun. It ends up being just as much work as a full-fledged God. Here you are, standing your philosophical ground, and you need something to cover yourself from all those existentialists pissing on you, but you choose a shack with a leaky roof, when at least the God-guy across the street has somebody to talk to for comfort. And so many, by 22, leave philosophical ground and never come back. I mean, shit, you just move a hundred yards south and you can watch all the football you want without ever worrying about the pissing match occurring right up the alley.

True enlightenment happens, though, when you realize that you can avoid the golden shower while still remaining on philosophical terrain. You don’t need a foundation, you just move up hill and let the others piss themselves all they want. Doing this means seeing the need for a house, even a shitty leaky one, as a small problem in a larger landscape. Seeing this, where there’s suddenly a dry hill out back you’d never noticed before, means seeing that not only is the tautology, “Life’s purpose is to be lived,” both true and boring—but it makes you wonder why you thought you should’ve been excited by it. Seeing the larger terrain of life starts to make you wonder about everyone’s motivation for saying and doing certain things, like praying or building houses or pissing on them.

Why did I go in for being a quasi-metaphysician for a time, to want to build some sort of foundation, but not an expensive God-like one? The presupposition in this is: I felt that Camus’ question needed to be answered. I felt that the cynics needed to be answered on their own ground. But once one looks at that dry hill, you have to wonder: why would I want muddy ground that’s been pissed on for 2500 years? I.e., why does Camus feel the need to ask his question? Is every question a good question? Maybe not—maybe we should wonder about Camus.

Once you start wondering about the foundation metaphor, about the need for a knock-down answer to stubbornly stupid questions like “Why should I not kill myself,” you start seeing philosophy as just another mode of articulating yourself. And you notice that you can articulate yourself anywhere, not just at your pissed-on house. So you think about moving up hill. You start to think of philosophy as just another piece of your clothing, that keeps you warm and comfortable, but is mobile and flexible, and if it becomes threadbare, you get something new—because it’s all about having something nice to wear while you wander through the landscape of life. (If anybody’s wondering what expensive, well-worn term of opprobrium to apply to this attitude, if you guessed “aestheticism,” give yourself a serious, stern nod of approval. Sorry, all the gold stars and hot bling are reserved for the people who care about the appearances—you only care about reality, a cold, bleak place which could give a shit if you get it right. So while you shiver in your patched-up hovel, dripping like an R. Kelly wet dream, console yourself—as you watch the carnivalesque, tiki-torch party on the side of the hill—with the thought that all those people are going to hell…or whatever equivalent you’ve dreamed up for them.)

The argument I made in the essay was valid, I think, but it was also—much like my last parenthetical—just silly. Why would one make it? I made it because I thought life needed a big Telos, even if it was a silly one. And, come to think of it, mine was perfect: if Camus is going to ask a stupid question, then I’m going to give a stupid answer. If you demand that the space where the Grand Telos used to be is filled, then in a disillusioned age the only way to fill it is with the inverse of God’s grandeur—tautological insipidness. Some people think that the space does need to be filled. Those who think, for instance, that free will is impossible because Darwin and Newton have proven determinism true, and therefore moral action is in trouble—these people think the hole left by God needs to be filled. They want a Grand Telos.

But why? Why not just have a little telos, or a bunch of little teloses? Why even continue using the Greek? Just say “purpose,” think of all the little things you do and why you do them, and if you like fulfilling these little goals, then keep doing them. If not, then don’t. If you break things into small enough pieces, then odds are that you’ll never answer “no” to all of them and have to start contemplating suicide. Camus’ mistake was to take all the little things as emblems for one big thing, to take riding the subway or going to work as symbols that don’t signify various little purposes, but all signify One Big Purpose. And the only thing he could figure out to fit was Nothing, and hence the absurdity. But if we thought it was a good idea to stop contemplating the big guy named God, maybe the trouble wasn’t God, but the continual contemplation of something big, parenthetical or otherwise.

My attempt to resurrect “teleological arguments” was a short-lived effort to save my leaky roof. In “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life,” I answered for ethics by taking on Kantian deontology. I still think that’s right. Deontology rests on the assumption that the World, or Reason, or Something—Something Big—gives us obligations to be performed. I don’t think that’s true. I think the only reason we have any obligations is because somebody gives them to us, meaning we give them to ourselves, and we can start breaking these obligations off into small pieces and deal with them in terms of the purposes they fulfill—which is to transform “obligation,” and deontology, into a utilitarian ethics of some kind. Not the old teleology, but a pragmatist notion of only being obligated to each other, a notion of solidarity rather than the old, cosmological obligation Kant tried to keep alive (for more on this train of thought, see “Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction”). In a later paper, “Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science,” I tried to give sense to “teleological argument” for science. That failed miserably, as one helpful commentator pointed out ruthlessly, and was the beginning of my suspicions that I should just can the telos talk.

So while I still think Nietzschean anti-Kantianism is right, the whole idea of pressing philosophical ethical questions doesn’t, and that’s because the notion of “philosophy” is typically the “big view.” As my metaphor earlier suggests, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a big view—the problem just seems not knowing when to give it a rest. The big view is necessarily, because of its bigness, abstract—the “high country of the mind,” as Pirsig put it. But some problems are down in the woods, under the canopy, and being up high obscures them. My engagement with Sartre and Husserl brings out somewhat the part of existentialisme français I still think is true. Whatever Husserl’s scientism and Sartre’s decisionism (let alone Camus’ woeisme), the easy slogan we might distill from existentialism is “existence precedes essence.”

The slogan signifies two movements: 1) the movement away from essentialism, the notion that there are set, defined centers to each particular thing that can be discovered rather than fluid, evolving centers created by the thing (any “essence” is created by the way in which we exist) and 2) the movement away from Platonic other-worldliness, away from the Realm of the Forms and back down to the ground-level of life. If there is any utility left in the “Absurdity” paper, it is the slapping around of deontology; if any in the “Phenomenological-Existentialism” paper, it is my playing up of lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” that Husserl wanted us to get back to. (Oh, and Demonstration Stick Man, who finally made an uncredited comeback in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.” What a mysterious person—is he a man who is a demonstration-stick or a stickman used for demonstrations?) The notion of lifeworld is useful in reminding philosophers, people who occasionally think too big for their own britches, that their reflections are rooted in a world that is not itself the world of reflection. This sounds other-worldly again, but perhaps a comparison with fiction may help—the words of a novel serve to create a world in which we can live through the reading of the words. Philosophy does that, too—the only difference is that if the words of philosophy do not connect up usefully enough with the things we do when not reading philosophy, then we might begin to doubt that it is philosophy we’re reading, but perhaps rather fiction (which is what well-read pragmatists think of large swaths of Plato’s dialogues and what most of my dorm-mates thought of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, as much as I tried to persuade them to the contrary).

Longing for the Apocalypse

This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This one was the last one written, and since it was the last, it exploded into a cavalcade of diverse thoughts that I wanted to say, this being my last opportunity. It begins with some unknown German guy summarizing literature about the image of "apocalypse" in theory and slides into my first attempt to pull together a number of threads I've been thinking about lately--primitivism, intellectual influence, and literacy.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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In the most revealing passage in Klaus Scherpe’s serviceable summary of Continental intellectual trends relating to the notion of “apocalypse,” Scherpe says

In Kafka’s stories the exception begins and remains the rule; an idea’s reversal is always implicit in its being thought. Kafka’s literary modernity is a state of emergency, which means that the revolutionary impulse implicit in the notions of “interruption” and the “breakthrough” propagated by Benjamin’s theory of modernity can never occur; the catastrophe can never set any energy free nor provide the stimulus for change. (Scherpe 113)

Benjamin has swallowed the notion that modernity soaks us to the core, that the “‘age of information,’ when norms are purged of meaning and time is characterized by its ‘empty’ homogeneity” (106) requires the notion of a radical break to even conceive of change. After taking both notions on board, postmodernity becomes the last shock available as, for instance, Baudrillard “proclaims a condition of the absolute absence of events.” (100) The question would seem to be: why is such an absurd conclusion taken seriously by smart people? By using Don DeLillo’s White Noise, I would like to trace a path to re-engineer the position so-called postmodern intellectuals have found themselves.

The two positions Scherpe traces have Baudrillard on one side and his “German prophet,” Gerd Bergfleth, on the other. Baudrillard, in effect, pushes the self-directed ironic masks worn by the Romantics to achieve autonomy to its outermost reaches, what he calls “objective irony.” Baudrillard sees quite rightly that a truly all-pervasive irony, when taken out of its normal state of (subjective) context-dependence and amped up into a (objective) reality-rule, becomes an indifference that ultimately denies change: “Everything has already happened.”[fn.1] (100-1) This de-dramatizes reality because by denying change/events, we’ve effectively relieved ourselves of waiting around for something to happen (so-called “drama”). Scherpe says perceptively that the German side of the equation is missing the irony of Baudrillard’s position—whereas from Baudrillard’s position we might as well drop the nukes, from Bergleth’s vantage (a “typically German version of the postmodern condition,” (123) Scherpe says humorously), we need it. Bergleth has an “intense desire for some sort of deadly seriousness” (126) in the midst of French playfulness, a “longing for death” (127) as the last place to find meaning, the true flipside of Camus’ insistence that the only pertinent philosophical question was whether to commit suicide.[fn.2] Bergfleth must re-dramatize the notion of apocalypse to regain Benjamin’s hope for change and (for what ends up resting on the ability to see differences) meaning.

If we turn to White Noise, I believe we can trace the interesting patterns that accrue to the fascination with catastrophe and apocalypse. In Chapter 14, DeLillo shows us Jack and his kids watching television, “floods, earthquakes, mudslides,” “totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death.” (DeLillo 64) The significance, and ultimately the disturbing fascination Jack sees, is that “Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.” (ibid.) The next day Jack asks Alfonse why “people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe”? (65) He replies, not only that “it’s natural, it’s normal,” (ibid.) but that “We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” (ibid.)

I would like to unpack this section in several different ways. First, DeLillo and the postmoderns all take very seriously the effect of technology on our culture and consciousness. This point should not be underestimated, as all other points fall from there. Modern society is not only bombarded with information, but it better stores and recalls that information. If info is blandly defined as our sensory input, then it is flatly false that we get more info now than before—it is everywhere and always the same saturated state. However, the creation of technology, Prometheus bringing the Gods’ fire to us, has expanded exponentially our ability to store and retrieve information and has altered our consciousness accordingly.[fn.3]

One consequence of our ability to retrieve the past more quickly and accurately has been the increasing sense that the past is a burden. This can be seen quite clearly in the evolution of poetry. In Homeric times, oral poetry was the only form of paideia. As this transferred into prose form, written poetry shuttled into a stage of theological instruction (Dante being the great exemplar). Petrarch marked a great change in all this, as the poet turned inwards, towards his own problems, personal and otherwise. By the time of the Romantics, that shift had been solidified—poets had become so self-conscious of the past that the insular search for something new to say began in true earnest.[fn.4] Irony was instrumental in their search for new ways to shrug off the past—as a stance, it put one in a skeptical relation to the past, and as a figure, one could repeat the past while meaning something else.

The last idea to put into play is that of primitivism—the notion that the past was a glorious time, if only we could restore it. This might seem entirely counterintuitive, but as anxiety over contemporary decadence increases, such that things as time goes on are getting worse, it seems natural to suppose that things were better earlier, before they got worse. Primitivism, in a simple sense, is a typical conservative reaction—too much change is bad for the system—and is as old as recorded time.[fn.5] Primitivism takes on a new cast during the Enlightenment, suffused in the form of Rousseau. Rousseau wished to reach back to the past, as a simpler time. But Rousseau realized the almost insurmountability of this problem because the problem was society itself.[fn.6]

Thus enters the fascination with apocalypse. Bernard Yack suggests that Rousseau transmitted to the European intellectual tradition a “longing for total revolution.”[fn.7] By locating the pernicious evil in the very civilizing, socializing process, Rousseau put out of practical reach our ability to change: “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains,” he says famously in the Social Contract. As technological rates increase, the burden of the past chains us tighter and tighter to where we have been, and the more we dream of being released. For the poet, from the great masters of the past. For the political revolutionary or spiritual purist (who, in true Rousseauian spirit, end up being one and the same), from modern society. We become fascinated with catastrophe as our sense of “we’ve seen this all before” increases, and as time goes by, greater and greater catastrophes of greater magnitude are demanded to breach our attention. And as the Mountains of Time begin to blot out the Sun, we begin to pray for the Great Leveler. The turn in DeLillo, in post-apocalypse, is the same turn in Rousseau—a sudden, renewed sense of community as the TVs die away.

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Works Cited

Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 1991.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1997.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 1985, 1999.

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. New York: Universal Library, 1963, 1967.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934, 1997.

Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections From Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Rice, Eugene F, Jr., with Anthony Grafton. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970, 1994.

Scherpe, Fredric. “Dramatization and De-dramatization of ‘the End’: The Apocalyptic Consciousness of Modernity and Post-Modernity.” Cultural Critique. No. 5 (Winter 1986-7), p. 95-129.

Yack, Bernard. The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 1992.

Endnotes

[1] Baudrillard is right about irony because the classic notion of irony is a directed notion, from speaker to audience, author to reader. What irony does is hide the meaning of a statement. Though often thought of as a simplistic “means the contrary of what it says,” Romantic irony has more to do with the irony of Socrates, as when Alexander Nehamas argues, against the traditional “contrary” version that Gregory Vlastos stands at the far end of in Socratic studies, that irony is a “concealment”: “Irony seems to create a mask. It does not show what, if anything, is masked. It suggests depth. It does not guarantee it.” (Nehamas 67) When Baudrillard expands the ultimately faceless mask of irony to a world-condition, he seems to understandably draw the conclusion that, since 1) all depths are created by a concealing mask, 2) everything is a concealing mask, and 3) every mask pulled off finds us with another concealing mask, the very notion of a “reality” to be taken seriously and differentiatedly is suspicious and should be treated indifferently because it can/could/should/has been revealed to be a different, faceless mask (hence his concept of the simulacrum, a representation with no represented—like a signifier with no signified—which means every representation represents the same thing: nothing).

[2] While L’étranger offers a wonderful portrait of a life seemingly devoid of internally generated meaning (and hence careening towards the only thing that would stand out: death), Camus investigates in prose the question of suicide in Le mythe de sisyphe.

[3] Here I would refer to the work of Walter J. Ong and Eric A. Havelock on orality, literacy and the beginnings of Greek (Western) thought. In our Homeric, oral state the only way to store info was in memorable pieces (because they had to be personally remembered) by the instrumental use of hexametric verse, rhyme, formulas, the use of heroic figures. As Ong says,

The new way to store knowledge was not in mnemonic formulas but in the written text. This freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought. Havelock [in Preface to Plato] shows that Plato excluded poets from his ideal republic essentially (if not quite consciously) because he found himself in a new chirographically styled noetic world in which the formula or cliché, beloved of all traditional poets, was outmoded and counterproductive. (Ong 24)

This marked the true birth of what we now think of as poetry—broadly, the attempt to write in an original way. Poetry had previously been involved in reproduction of noetic resources, but writing provided an external way to save these.
Our sense of accuracy has also increased as our technological capacities have. Writing allowed us to record thoughts. It also allowed us to record history, to record events in a more individuated way than ever before (the detailed History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides rather than the amorphously mythic Works and Days of Hesiod). The printing press registers as another significant event in the history of our consciousness. The reproduction of classic texts for the length of the Middle Ages were largely left to the hands of monastic scribes, most of whom were illiterate and were simply trying to copy as closely as possible the marks. The invention of moveable type changed everything:

Manuscripts, totally dependent on the skill, learning, and care of the scribe, had always been inaccurate and unreliable. Furthermore, this inaccuracy and unreliability were becoming increasingly great as successive generations of scribes copied the errors of their predecessors and added their own. The fundamental contribution of printing to learning was that it halted this progressive corruption and made possible the long and continuing effort to restore the great texts of the past to something approaching their original integrity. Printing gave scholars all over Europe identical texts to work on. (Rice 7)

The weight of the past has increased exponentially since that time as more and more is reproduced and preserved, not only the great and vast, but the boring and trivial. We have it all at our finger-tips.

[4] In this Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet is instrumental, as is Harold Bloom’s transformation of Bate’s more historical thesis into a theory of poetry in The Anxiety of Influence.

[5] On this see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas’ Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. One of the many benefits is their distinguishing between various senses of “primitivism.” The sense I shall use it is as a “cultural primitivism.” Lovejoy says, “The cultural primitivist has almost invariably believed that the simpler life of which he has dreamed has been somewhere, at some time, actually lived by human beings.” (Lovejoy 8)

[6] As Lovejoy says of Rousseau’s First Discourse, “The study of the arts and sciences does not contribute à épurer les moeurs [to the purification of mores], and there it is of minimal value, and often actually harmful.” (Lovejoy 274)

[6] Yack says that the “subjective awareness of the inability to produce a desired object distinguishes a longing from a desire….”

In both longing and desire we feel the uneasiness created by the lack of a desire object. But while in desire our uneasiness focuses on the desired object, thus promoting attempts at its acquisition, in longing the awareness of our present incapacity to acquire the object diffuses our uneasiness. The energy produced by that uneasiness has no obvious outlet—thus the vague, generalized feeling of uneasiness which most of us associate with longing. … When we discover the obstacle to our satisfaction we generate a new object of desire: a world without that obstacle to our satisfaction. And if we find ourselves incapable of removing this obstacle, our desire becomes a longing which, in turn, generates the definition of new objects of desire. (Yack 5-6, italics mine)

Compare this to Scherpe’s nice little slap at Baudrillard: “the curious manner in which this form of theorizing constantly creates new objects in order to make them disappear….” (Scherpe 99) On my reading, this is exactly what is to be expected at the long, self-conscious end of Platonic theory. Nietzsche saw Hegel grasp previous generations and drain them of their power for his own, thought it a neat trick and went directly at the main offender—Plato. Heidegger saw Nietzsche invert Plato, and saw the next step as an inversion of Nietzsche. Derrida sees Heidegger and ups the inverting ante, but by now the jig is up and the game of inverting back and forth infinitely becomes increasingly boring.