This chapter contains sections titled: The Excellence of Exploiting Others The Ruler‐as‐Ruler Argument An Objection The Rulers‐in‐Our‐Cities Argument Further Reading.

Mirrors for princes, in general, give advices to the rulers about the subtleties of political art. Another aim of these books is to define and explain the administration of the state and the duties of rulers based on experience. In consequence of this they reflect the practical ethics of the period in which they were written. As such, they resemble practical handbooks written for rulers. Another point regarding the mirrors for princes works in which the (...) class='Hi'>political understanding of the era can be observed is that they generally use sacred texts in order to prove the political legitimacy or invalidity of the power, as well as the rightfulness or the unlawfulness of the claims to the throne. Evidences from the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth literature was almost always used to support such advocated opinions. In fact, during the Middle Ages when religion and politics were considered coupled, it was unthinkable that religious elements should not be included in the works of state administration. The important point here is that the verses and ḥadīths were sometimes removed from their contexts and interpreted and explained in a way to support the ideology of the author or the ruler whom the author presented his work. In this study, we will try to reveal the subjects in which the verses and ḥadīths used in the mirrors for princes, which is a genre that has emerged within the Islamic culture and civilization. Thus, we aim to prepare a background for the future studies, which will focus on a specific verse or ḥadīth.Summary: The first political splits in Islamic history occurred immediately after the death of prophet Muḥammad. These differences were resolved by the agreement of the majority of Muslims on Abu Bakr's name. Until the second half of the rule of the third caliph ʿUthmān, Muslims came together around the unifying power of the idea of conquest. Nevertheless, substantially as a result of economically based problems the period of tranquility in Islamic society came to an end and was replaced by disputes. Disputes turned into conflict and ultimately seperation fused with the massacre of ʿUthmān in the capital Medina turned into a big fire with the Battles of the Camel and Ṣiffīn, the emergence of Khārijīs, the formation of the Shia and the deepening of the intellectual divisions after the all of these. Islamic history has witnessed a clash of different religious views and beliefs. along with deepening of intellectual disagreements as a result of political debatesIn the Islamic political thought, especially the first two centuries process was formed around the views of the jurists, muḥaddiths and theologians. The first sources used by those who tried to justify their opinion in the differences of opinion experienced during this period were the Qurʾān and ḥadīth literature which Muslims accepted as the determining factor in all their acts. The views based on the Qur'an and the hadiths, which are the two main sources of Islamic religion, had been used to influence the people, legitimize the actions and refute the claims of the opponents. On the other hand the sort who gave direction to political thought changed and political thought adhered a new path with Turks and Persians served as bureaucrats and soldiers and took an active position in the state. Especially Persians carried the culture of advice to Islamic thought, which is the product of both Greek and Hind civilization. Such books had brought in the İslamic society with translation movements began in the Umayyad period and peaked with the Bayt al-Ḥikma in the Abbasid period. Together with these books, the ideas of these civilizations on ideal state administration, politics and morality were recognized by Muslim scholars.These type of works, which are famous in terms of Islamic thought as mirrors for princes, have been written by Muslim scholars since the middle of the eighth century. Mirrors for princes are political, moral and religious content books that gives the rulers practical advice to maintain their power in accordance with the religious orders and prohibitions, and to the consent of Allāh’s who grant them this authority and people which appointed for their administration. Mirrors for princes are mostly theoretical books since they are mostly focused on what should be. In addition, since they are written for names that currently hold power, they are centered on how the rulers can maintain and increase their power and with which practices the state will maintain its existence for a longer period. The basic point of political thought and political interpretation are concepts and definitions. When the concept meaning of a word is mentioned, it is generally considered that there is a general definition. However, the concepts reflect the meaning that the user assigns to him in the context of his thoughts, perceptions, criticisms, explanations and analyzes. Concepts such as fair, honest, brave, hero, beautiful, rich, good and clean express what the person imposes on the meaning. In other words, everyone’s experience determines the content of the concept so far. The meaning of the concepts varies with the age and its user of that concept. Even concepts such as justice, merit and consultation can change meaning in different periods and geographies. The concepts, which are often used to facilitate understanding, are sometimes used to judge, to mold or mislead the interlocutor. In this context, it is imperative to enter the mind of the user in order to make concept analysis.In Islamic civilization, the principles of management are explained with concepts. The idiosyncrasies that Muslims expect from an ideal ruler are defined as justice, consultation, merit, trust and legitimacy and a broad corpus has been written about the concepts related to the administration, especially those mentioned. One type of this corpus is mirrors for princes.In Islamic history, there are many Mirrors for princes who are written in different time periods by names coming from different geographies and different backgrounds. Although the advice given in Mirrors for princes indicate a great similarity to each other, the preferred arguments and examples in the foundation of the counsel are different. While the persons in active politics mostly based their opinions on political arguments, scholars with scientific tradition supported their advices with religious arguments.Verses are the leading religious elements highlighted in Mirrors for princes. While explaining the concepts and emphasizing the importance of the advices, many verses have been exploited. Some verses are used only by one author, while some verses are the subject of their work by many authors. In the same way, ḥadīths and the sentences accepted as ḥadīths were also used to reinforce the emphasis and meaning. At this point, sometimes the context of the verses and ḥadīths were not taken care of. In this study, we aim to address the use of religious elements.In the literature, different opinions have emerged about who is ülü’l-emr and the limits of obedience to ülü’l-emr that used describe the names of senior executives and leaders of society. The reason for the difference is that each sect or religious school provides an interpretation on the basis of grounding its own views in explaining the verse. Justice is the most emphasized concept among the advices given to the rulers in mirrors for princes. Justice, which is shown as the most important feature of a sovereign, has been regarded as extremely important for the state to existences until the Doomsday. In addition, justice has been described as the most important condition for the maintenance of the state/sovereign authority. Consultation was important to make the right decision.Verses and ḥadīths were used in the explanations about the personal characteristics of the sovereign. Some features such as being compassionate, keeping promise, controlling anger, patience, honesty, blessing, extravagance, self-esteem, break a promise, revoke a promise and arrogance have become the subject of politics. When the mirrors for princes are considered as a whole, it is seen that religion and state are considered as inseparable twin brothers, taken one step further the understanding that accepts religion and the world as brothers especially is a product of the old Persian tradition. In this understanding, religion was accepted as the root and was given the duty of its patronage to political authority. It is seen that in the Mirrors for princes verses and ḥadīths hold a significant amount. As the reason for this can be said that along with religion takes place on the basis of morality, the authors of the Mirrors for princes, which put deep meanings on the relationship between religion and the state in the period that we are dealing with, consider both institutions to be complementary and integrative. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Several arguments have been put forward about the benefits of young people carrying out their own social science research in terms of empowering their voices and their participation. Much less attention has been paid to investigating the understandings young people develop about the research process itself. Seven twelve-year olds carried out self-directed social science research into a topic of their choice. Towards the end of their six months experience, we used a questionnaire and follow-up (...) semi-structured interviews to investigate, from a sociocultural perspective, what the young people thought about being a researcher. Thematic analysis of the interviews identified three themes and eight subthemes suggesting that they were aware of: the need to demonstrate researcher/research integrity ; the need for good interpersonal skills and standards, and good self-management skills (be resilient, agentic, committed and go... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When the Political Becomes Personal:Circumcision as a Cause and as a Parental DecisionJ. Steven SvobodaAs I prepared for the arrival of my first child, a son, a central activity that I previously saw as political suddenly also became very personal. I had founded a non-profit organization in 1997 devoted to educating the world that genital cutting of a child, regardless of a child's gender, is (...) unnecessary and harmful. This includes male circumcision. In 2001, as part of my non-profit work I led a team that went to the United Nations in Geneva and for the first time, put the issue of male circumcision as a human rights violation in the United Nations record. At the time, my then wife was pregnant with our first child, a son. (I had the ultrasound photo of my son-to-be on my nightstand while in Geneva.) Now the circumcision question would be posed to me!A few months after the Geneva trip, when it came time in early 2002 for my son's birth on the US territory of Guam, I naturally was never going to agree to the procedure. Nevertheless, I was trying not to inject my own beliefs into the arrival of my first child. My children's mother, while Jewish, is a pediatrician who always had some doubts about the wisdom of circumcision and easily agreed with my desire to keep our son intact. No one in either of our families had any serious problems with our decision.The nurse at the hospital in Guam where my wife worked and gave birth asked me a total of five separate times if I wanted my son to be circumcised. Each time, I answered, "No," without saying more, until the fifth time, when I politely added, "You do know that there is no medical reason for this to be done, right?" The nurse replied in a chirpy voice, "I know." I then asked, "Why do you ask parents about it then?" She replied, "Because they want it sometimes." Well, the odd thing about that is there is no other medically unnecessary procedure on their children for which parents are repeatedly solicited. And if I had agreed even one time, I am sure that my child would have been circumcised [End Page 73] without any follow-up questions to make sure I really wanted this done. Besides, at least in the absence of any medical condition making it necessary (which is essentially never the case), it should not be my decision to make, nor his mother's, but rather the child's whose body it is.The oddest aspect of this whole chain of events may be that I was not given a single shred of information explaining why I should support my son being cut. My son had zero issues after being left intact, and how could it be otherwise? My advice, naturally, to parents expecting boys (or girls, or intersex children, for that matter) is to educate yourself. You will learn, the more you look into these issues, that there are thousands of people around the world, including countless physicians and other experts, who believe childhood circumcision is as outmoded, useless, and as harmful a practice as footbinding. Why not leave the choice for the child to make about their own body? No asserted medical reason withstands the most minimal scrutiny. And religious claims must stop at the boundaries of another person's body, even if the person is your child. Parents: you have the right to teach your children your beliefs, but your children may not follow your beliefs, and they have the right to make their own decisions, so please consider refraining from marking their bodies with your religion. Two months to the day after his birth, I was holding my son in Washington, DC, having just traveled halfway around the world from Guam. (I was in DC to receive the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Center's (NOCIRC) Human Rights Award, which I was presented with for my founding of the non-profit.)My own experience with circumcision strongly influenced my decision. For a decade, I felt that no other single... (shrink)

Although Descartes’ characterization of the mind has sometimes been seen as too ‘moral’ and too ‘intellectualist’ to serve as a modern notion of consciousness, this article re-establishes the idea that Descartes’ way of doing metaphysics contributed to a novel delineation of the sphere of the mental. Earlier traditions in moral philosophy and religion certainly emphasized both a dualism of mind and body and a contrast between free intellectual activities and forcibly induced passions. Recent scholastic and neo-Stoic philosophical traditions, moreover, drew (...) attention to the disparity between the material and the immaterial, as well as to the possibility of a retreat into the personal realm of one’s own mind. Yet none of these moral and religious assessments of the relation between mind and body were motivated by the purely epistemological interest that we find in Descartes in setting apart a world of consciousness from the world of physics. The present article explains how Descartes made use of specific theological and moral philosophical theories in his own analysis of mental faculties; how he changed the orientation of metaphysics itself in the direction of a phenomenology of the mental; how he never returned to the naive idea of offering a dualist foundation for ethics; and how his mechanicism may have motivated his epistemological transformation of the science of metaphysics. In all these various ways, Descartes inaugurated an understanding of human mental life on the basis of physiological rather than metaphysical considerations, a view of psychology that is related to the experience of human individuals, and a naturalistic characterization of the mind in terms of a domain of consciousness rather than of moral conscience. (shrink)

This paper is a review of the experiences gained whilst working with the ‘expertise in practice project’. The project was concerned with understanding the complex phenomenon of practitioners investigating and evaluating their own practice. The research intention was focused on making a difference to how those nurses practised, through introducing systematic practice‐based inquiry processes that could enable nurses to think more critically about their work and how their practice affects others. Particular attention is paid to the (...) process of engaging people who use healthcare services, as research participants in the evaluation of nursing practice expertise. We outline how the project incorporated practitioners’ concerns about asking people who use health care services opinions on nursing practice expertise and how a process of discovery emerged that enabled transformation of practice and consideration of the patient‐participants’ role as a sophisticated evaluator of health‐care. As a result, we present a case for transformational qualitative research. Such research is values‐driven and uses inclusive, collaborative and facilitative processes. It contributes to human flourishing, not only through its ‘ends’ (i.e. research products) but also, intentionally, through its ‘means’ (e.g. research processes and stakeholder involvement). Thus, transformational research is complex and requires that researchers engage in reflexivity (deep self‐reflection) to examine and critique their personal values. (shrink)

Plato noticed a sizeable problem apropos of establishing his republic—that there was always a ready pool of zealous potential rulers, lying in wait for a suitable opportunity to rule on their own tyrannical terms. He also recognized that those persons best suited to rule, those persons with foursquare and unimpeachable virtue, would be least motivated to govern. Ruling a polis meant that those persons, fully educated and in complete realization that the most complete happiness comprises solitary study of (...) things unchanging, would have to compromise their happiness for the wellbeing of their polis and of the people in it. Plato’s solution, in effect that the aristoi would merely recognize their duty to sacrifice personal happiness for the happiness of the polis, has perplexed and continues today to perplex scholars. Like Plato, Jefferson recognized that there was always a pool of eager sharks, ready to govern. His republicanism, comprising a ward system and general education, was founded on the fullest participation of its citizenry, suitably educated and a governing aristoi. The true aristoi, the “natural aristoi”, are the intelligent and virtuous and that government is best which allows for a “pure selection” of the natural aristoi into the governing offices. Nonetheless, as Jefferson’s own life shows, non-parochial governing meant being rent from domestic tranquility, being forced to leave behind one’s personal affairs to decay, and being tossed willy-nilly into the coliseum of nonstop political wrangling. Why would anyone, particularly one wanting to be happy, wish to govern? Thus, Jefferson faced the same problem that Plato faced. How could a state be structured so that the wisest and most virtuous would be motivated to rule? In this paper, I argue that Jefferson, in full recognition of the problem of encouraging the most intelligent and virtuous to govern, the problem of public service, offers a solution that is remarkably Platonic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Compelling ReasonsTim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt (bio)There are many compelling reasons to have an interest in the philosophy of/and psychiatry. In 1994, when persuaded by Bill Fulford to walk down the corridor at Warwick University to join in his teaching of what seemed a newly developing subject—against my protestations that I knew nothing about mental health care—my main interest was in the irreducibility of meaning to the 'realm (...) of [natural scientific] law,' in Sellars's phrase. This had the bonus of complementing Bill's championing of the irreducibility and centrality of values in psychiatry. (It was only later we realized we disagreed about the not inconsequential issue of whether norms and values were subjective preferences or objective features of the world.) It seemed plausible to me that the irreducibility of the space of reasons to the realm of law might have interesting consequences for psychiatry. But mine was a purely disinterested academic interest. This is perhaps the usual approach to what is in part a professionalized academic subject with its formal rules for publication and dissemination of research.It has only been in the last decade that I have experienced things in a more personal way, following what I would term, though psychiatry would not, a nervous breakdown. My image of a breakdown came from reading Saul Bellow's novel Herzog. The titular Herzog has been left by his wife, cruelly, and retires from academic life to write letters. For example, to Heidegger. "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" I thought I would be able to maintain some sort of inquiring mind and write experientially grounded philosophy of psychiatry as a catharsis. I could study my own illness. This immediately proved a ridiculous hope.As a philosopher with a cognitivist bent—language, thought, and intentionality being guiding interests—I had always assumed that madness was only really a matter of what Jaspers calls 'primary delusions,' belief-like states that strain their belief-status, are hard for others to make sense of, and occur only with particularly severe forms of mental illness. But madness is also a matter of doing, saying and feeling as well as pure reasoning. What I would, previously and disinterestedly, have described as a dysregulation of emotional reactions turned out to transform my entire experience of the world and my ability to think rationally about it. I lost the ability to put my experiences into words. In truth, I lost all interest in that project. Only when not distressed could I take a view on my loss of world. Distressed, I did not understand myself.This is a neat illustration of epistemic disjunctivism. But it also highlights a challenge for, and some of the brilliance in those who have contributed to, the philosophy of mental health care, through their expertise by experience. While experience may be a necessary condition for particular forms of expertise, my own case reveals that it is not sufficient. Further, even an everyday and familiar mental illness (like my own) can render the articulation of experience, in a way that makes sense to others, very much harder. Hence the fact [End Page 11] that there is a thriving mental health service and patient movement, making their own experiences available to others combining first-person narratives with conceptual and phenomenological insight is both admirable and helps to set a part of PPP's future agenda: bringing first-person experience within a philosophically and clinically informed discipline. [End Page 12]Tim Thornton Tim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt, is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health and Mental Health and Deputy Head for Research in the School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire. As well as contemporary philosophy of thought and language, his research concerns conceptual issues at the heart of mental health care. He has published research papers on clinical judgement, idiographic and narrative understanding, the interpretation of psychopathology and reductionism and social constructionism in psychiatry.Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the (...) political state occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives (...) does through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Buddhism and the Modern World Need Each Other:A Buddhist PerspectiveDavid R. LoyThe mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.—Gary Snyder1Another way to make Snyder’s point would be: The highest ideal of the Western tradition has been the concern to restructure our societies so that they are more socially just. The (...) most important goal for Buddhism is to awaken and (to use the Zen phrase) realize one’s true nature, which puts an end to dukkha—especially that associated with the delusion of a separate self. Today it has become more obvious that we need both, not just because these ideals complement each other, but because each project needs the other.As far as I have been able to determine, the Western conception of justice largely originates with the Abrahamic traditions, particularly the Hebrew prophets, who fulminated against oppressive rulers for afflicting the poor and powerless. Describing Old Testament prophecy, Walter Kaufmann writes that “no other sacred scripture contains books that speak out against social injustice as eloquently, unequivocally, and sensitively as the books of Moses and some of the prophets.”2 Is there a Buddhist equivalent? The doctrine of karma understands something like justice as an impersonal moral law built into the fabric of the cosmos, but historically karma has functioned differently. Combined with the doctrine of rebirth (a necessary corollary, since evil people sometimes prosper in this life) and the belief that each of us is now experiencing the consequences of actions in previous lifetimes, the implication seems to be that we do not need to be concerned about pursuing justice, because sooner or later everyone gets what they deserve. In practice, this has often encouraged passivity and acceptance of one’s situation, rather than a commitment to promote social justice.Does the Buddhist emphasis on dukkha (suffering in the broad sense) provide a better parallel with the Western conception of justice? Dukkha is arguably its most important concept: According to the Pali Canon, Sakyamuni Buddha said that what [End Page 39] he had to teach was dukkha and how to end it. Historically, Asian Buddhism has focused on individual dukkha and personal karma, a limitation that may have been necessary in autocratic polities that could and sometimes did repress Buddhist institutions. Today, however, the globalization of democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech opens the door to new ways of responding to social and institutional causes of dukkha.On the other side, the Abrahamic emphasis on justice, in combination with the Greek realization that society can be restructured, has resulted in our modern concern to pursue social justice by reforming political and economic institutions. This has involved, most obviously, various human rights movements (the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, feminism, LGBT liberation, etc.), which have not been an important concern of traditional Asian Buddhism. As valuable as these reforms have been, the limitations of such a institutional approach, by itself, are becoming evident. Even the best possible economic and political system cannot be expected to function well if the people within that system are motivated by greed, aggression, and delusion—the “three fires” or “three poisons” that Buddhism identifies as unwholesome motivations that need to be transformed into their more positive counterparts: generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom.Today, in our globalizing world, the traditional Western focus on social transformation encounters the traditional Buddhist focus on individual awakening. This essay addresses why they need each other in order to actualize their own ideals and uses the example of our present economic situation to explore some of the implications of this interdependence.good versus evilThe difference in focus can be traced back to different paradigms. One way to draw the contrast between the Abrahamic and Buddhist traditions is to consider their dissimilar attitudes toward morality. The Abrahamic religions are (the primary) examples of “ethical monotheism” because they emphasize most of all ethical behavior. God’s main way of relating to us, his creatures, is instructing us how to live by giving us moral commandments. To be a good Jew, Christian, or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirit and Politics: Some Thoughts on Margaret Watkins’s The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Andre C. Willis (bio)Margaret Watkins’s elegant text, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (2019),1 is marked by a Humean approach: it fosters philosophical consideration of both the faculties of the mind and the affective features of experience in ways that bear on practical, moral issues. Ever-attentive to the meaning of Hume’s various nuances and strategic ambiguities, (...) Watkins’s even-handed approach guides us into a broad swath of Hume’s ideas and marches us through a trajectory of secondary interlocutors. It also establishes Watkins as an integral part of Hume’s lineage, in the sense that she understands that thoughtful writing itself is an intellectual virtue. Her “unusual sensitivity, not to life’s daily vicissitudes but to beauties and deformities” (193)2 richly textures her overall argument that positions Hume’s Essays as a filter for his vision of “true philosophy:” that reflective turn towards nature and common life that openly challenges abstruse reasoning, fluently embraces historicism and perspectivalism, and deftly foregrounds the usefulness of ideas over their logical certainty.As much as Watkins reveals Hume’s vision for philosophy, she also extends it; for, among other things, her consideration of Hume’s unique endeavor in philosophical literature (ultimately collected under the title Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1758]), makes an important twofold contribution to Hume studies. It brings greater attention to Hume’s notion of “public spirit,” a distinct mode of human excellence that combines “benevolence” with “greatness of mind.” And, it aestheticizes some practical dimensions of human life (noted in chapter titles, for example, “Working,” [End Page 143] “Thinking,” “Loving”) without losing track of their socio-political valences. I shall return to these two main points below. As an introductory gesture, I want to note that Watkins’s writing both nicely elaborates Hume’s philosophical vision and thoughtfully broadens his literary insights. It does “the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art,” what literary critic R. P. Blackmur identified as “the job of intermediary.”3Generally speaking, Watkins’s mediation filters salient themes and terms from Hume’s corpus through a particularly close reading of the Essays. Cast through her richly stylized analysis, Hume’s foundational ideas of “sympathy,” “convention,” “impressions,” “association,” “imagination,” “artifice,” the “passions” (and more) find fresh interpretive air. An example of this in her first chapter tracks Hume’s use of both “artifice” and “convention” from the Treatise through the second Enquiry to the Essays. For Watkins, a through-line for Hume is that “governing” can be thought of as repeated actions that bridge institutional policy to individual character. To think about governing in this way is to open ourselves to new ways of conceiving potential overlaps between nature and artifice (say, in the instance of a moral virtue like courage [50]). To link categories in the Essays back to their antecedent texts along the lines that Watkins does is to situate them in the context of Hume’s larger thought-project and, indirectly, confirm connections between the individual essays. These conjoinings, for Watkins, suggest Hume’s Essays can be treated together, without either blending their disparate themes or diluting their individual subject matter.4This point stands in opposition to Hume’s own semi-admonishment (1741) that “The Reader must not look for any connexion among these Essays but must consider each of them as a Work apart.”5 Watkins’s response—indicative of the graciousness of her overall tone—is to warmly acknowledge Hume’s reproach and affirm the distinctiveness of each of the essays. She proclaims: “The Essays are not unified” (5). Her thinking about them separately, however, reveals a common practical thread in their form. Watkins characterizes this form as serving “to promote public benefit” (4). I think about this form as being philosophical in the way that Richard Rorty conceives of philosophy as cultural criticism. Watkins, however, wants to emphasize the public character of Hume’s philosophy. She writes: “Hume seeks to benefit the public in two ways. First, he tries to allay irrational attitudes that produce imprudent personal and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto (...) on race, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin passionately urges black people not to retaliate against white people by attempting to debase or dominate them in return. The reason is that doing so would harm black people most of all. As Baldwin (1963, 113) assures his readers,I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads.... I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.Likewise, when Martin Luther King Jr., urged his black church members to love their white enemies rather than return their racial hate, he did so because he believed that “hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the [End Page 21] individual who hates” (King 1957). While Baldwin was an avowed atheist and King a Christian minister, both warned of the devastating effects of white racism on “the souls of white folk,” and they pleaded and preached that black people should not stoop to white people’s debased level.1 Out of all the damage that white racism has done to African Americans and other people of color, the most damaging of all would be for it to turn them into the debilitated, deplorable people that white folk generally are.We might say that on Baldwin’s (and perhaps also King’s) view, white people are the truly “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1965). It has been argued that white racism has cost white people their capability for intimacy, their affective lives, their authenticity, their sense of connection to other people, and their spiritual selves (Segrest 2001, 65). These claims are not an attempt to trump or erase the enormous physical, psychological, economic, spiritual, and other types of pain that white people have caused people of color around the world. They instead are a recognition that white people’s attempts to gain material riches and political power through the domination of people of color have impoverished and depleted their own souls. White people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities.So much the worse for white people, we might think. But although understandable, this response would be misguided since white people’s psychosomatic depletion has implications for the well-being of others. Put succinctly, white people’s unhealthiness helps fuel their abuse and domination of people of color. It thus matters to struggles for racial justice whether white people are psychosomatically healthy and strong. It matters which affects, emotions, and passions fund white people’s actions in general, and their work for racial justice in particular. In this paper, I will draw from Friedrich Nietzsche, Teresa Brennan, and other scholars to explain the ontological and power-full aspects of affect, touching briefly on the toxicity of white guilt and shame and focusing especially on the healthiness of what Nietzsche calls a bestowing self-love. I will argue that in the context of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, a positive effect of their bestowing self-love is that white people will be more likely and better able to clean up their own house... (shrink)

We should now be able to come to some general conclusions about the main lines of Cuvier's development as a naturalist after his departure from Normandy. We have seen that Cuvier arrived in Paris aware of the importance of physiology in classification, yet without a fully worked out idea of how such an approach could organize a whole natural order. He was freshly receptive to the ideas of the new physiology developed by Xavier Bichat.Cuvier arrived in a Paris also torn (...) by many overlapping debates on the nature of classification, and in particular that between the natural and artificial systems. The very validity of the enterprise of classification was questioned in many quarters. Cuvier's achievement on his entry into the Parisian world of science was not simply to establish himself as a highly competent anatomist: far more important, he also began to use ideas from many different specialties to change completely the notion of what was involved in natural history.124 At the same time that he himself swung away from the guiding image of the field naturalist as the ideal of the specialty, he took ideas from the new physiology to answer questions about the order of the animal world, and from comparative anatomy to resurrect extinct creation — and to come to conclusions from that creation about the history of the forms of life and the manner of their succession. He showed himself able to alter the relationships between natural history and many other fields of study in a way that implied, rightly or wrongly, his own complete mastery over such a movement. Partly he was able to do this because the ideas he borrowed were not themselves logically articulated and thus could be easily adapted and refocused for many different specific purposes. The value of the heuristic possibilities inherent in the idea of life, for example, far outweighed its inability to generate full systems of classification. Cuvier also consistently refused to consider in science matters relating to the first causes of events. Freed from the consideration of first-order phenomena, he was able to use second-order explanations across a far wider field of applicability. Personal doubts about the validity of a theology that had used science in order to bolster its own claims were combined here with the strong influence of the Kantian critique of the limits of human reason.125Cuvier's characteristic mode of procedure was that of intellectual appropriation and a bold capacity for altering the relationships between different fields of knowledge, rather than, with the exception of taxonomy, the technique of expanding their subject matter. His claims to originality came, first, from this reappropriation and reorientation and, second, from the sheer scope of his work, which aimed at nothing less than the cataloging and classification of all animate objects.126 They rested also on his acute use of his assertion of a certain relationship with the past of his subject. Very often he would present this history in such a way as to obscure his own intellectual genealogy, and often too he would give differing accounts of the priority of use of an idea in order to distract attention from the questionable exactitude of his own claims to originality. Cuvier came to Paris at precisely the time when society and institutions were most profitably malleable for a newcomer; it was also a time when many scientific disciplines had reached a stage advanced in terms of their factual content, yet relatively inadequate in conceptual organization. They were ripe for takeover by large-scale organizing ideas such as the animal economy and the subordination of characteristics. Paleontology is a particularly good example of a specialty in this particular form of underdevelopment in 1795.Cuvier paid a high price for his initial success. His electic applications of large-scale organizing ideas tended to mean that little of his own work had complete coherence at all levels. Ideas, as we have seen, that proved capable of providing a complete reform of the larger groups of the animal kingdom were incapable of producing its detailed working-out in the taxonomy of smaller groups, which had to be supplied from observed analogical correlations. Further, his physiological approach to classification involved the breakdown of strict correspondence between organs and functions, which left the way open for workers such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire gradually to tilt the balance away from the study of the correlations of hierarchies of functions, and toward morphology as the basis of the order of nature. Cuvier's brilliant appropriations from physiology from the beginning, therefore, contained the seeds of conflict with Geoffroy.Cuvier's eclectic approach made it very nearly impossible for him to present a clear idea of the ways in which the life sciences could be said to be lawful. In spite of his efforts to assimilate them to the position of the physical sciences in this respect, he was forced in the end to accord only an ambiguous status as “laws” to observational correlations. From this area of failure came much of the attempt to give his own two laws — the correlation of parts and the subordination of characteristics — predictive qualities, particularly in relation to paleontological research.It is not surprising that Cuvier's title as the “legislator” of natural history should represent more a claim than a reality. How, then, was he able to emerge as the leading French naturalist of his day? First of all must be adduced the sheer scale of his undertakings. Then comes his expertise as a practical anatomist, and the range of different topics toward which he turned his interest. His collaborators cannot be given credit for his output nor, as we have seen, for slavish adherence to his ideas. Cuvier was able to successfully claim to have dominated the underdeveloped specialties, such as paleontology, and turned them into a major heuristic input into both geology and comparative anatomy; but in other fields, such as physiology, he appropriated concepts and encouraged research but made little impact on the field himself. His attempts in 1812 to head off, or neutralize and absorb the growth of morphological studies landed him in a dangerously rigid position, which despite his encouragement of the new physiological research under the Restoration made further elaboration of his own conceptual underpinnings almost impossible.Cuvier's authority in the scientific world would in any case have been great because of his substantive achievement in taxonomy, but the rest of his work had enough ambiguities and dislocations for it to need the support of his political and social power. Cuvier's detractors seized on a vital fragment of the truth when they accused him of finding the political dimension all-important: it obscured the disjunctions in his theories and at the same time gave him the authority to make new claims for the status of the observational sciences - and for their relations of power with their surrounding specialties. Cuvier's science both thrived on and was halted by the power games of intellectual appropriation, manipulation of the past to confirm the present, and continual claims for hegemony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Machiavelli’s Moses and Renaissance PoliticsJohn H. GeerkenWithin the almost Dantesque array of humanity that populates the pages of Machiavelli’s canon, Moses occupies a special place. He first appears in chapter six of The Prince concerning those who acquire new princedoms by dint of their own virtù and military self-sufficiency. He last appears in the Discourses as one who was forced to kill a host of envious opponents. There (...) is some irony in these representations: in The Prince, with its tyrannical overtones, Moses appears as God’s friend; but in the Discourses, with its republican associations, Moses is an executioner. Machiavelli captures some of the ambiguity that attends on Moses when he declares that “Moses should not be discussed, since he was a mere executor of things laid down for him by God, nevertheless he ought to be exalted, if only for the grace that made him worthy to speak with God.” 1 Are we to exalt Moses, but not discuss him? Then, too, why bother with either God or Moses? Why complicate the search for the effectual truth of things by invoking metaphysical elements or inimitable biblical figures? How are we to understand these references? Are these ironic as sometimes asserted?But what are the heuristic possibilities in a non-ironic approach? If Moses had so great a teacher, what was his curriculum? Since no other figure in the Machiavellian census is so associated with slavery, was Moses a vehicle for making an assertion about slavery and liberation, or about politics and religion, or about the morality of politics? Then, too, how did Machiavelli’s Moses compare to the Moses who was so prominent in Renaissance iconology? These are the questions which this study addresses.I. Of the several references to Moses, the most telling is the last one in the Discourses. Machiavelli writes: “He who reads the Bible intelligently [sensata-mente] [End Page 579] sees that if Moses was to put his laws and regulations into effect, he was forced to kill countless men who, moved by nothing else than envy, were opposed to his plans.” 2A great deal is compressed into this passage: the confrontation of Moses’ virtù with the necessity imposed by his opposition, the need to use violent means to achieve lawful ends, and the implied sanction of sacred Scripture. But the Bible, Machiavelli asserts pointedly, must be read intelligently—presumably not in a devotional, liturgical, or exegetical manner, but in effect politically. Machiavelli wrote that he himself read in order to learn the reasons for human actions. 3 Indeed, one of his reasons for writing history was to convey his conviction that “[i]f any reading is useful to citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and factional struggles within the city, in order that such citizens having grown wise through the sufferings of others, can keep themselves united.” 4In a word reading can be political. References to biblical figures in his works indicate that for Machiavelli the Bible was not exempt from a political reading; it, too, could yield the reasons for human actions and the causes of hatred and factionalism. 5 We can assume, therefore, that he read the Book of Exodus with these concerns in mind even as he invited his own readers to read the Bible. What, therefore, can the Book of Exodus show us?II. The Book of Exodus records at least forty-three conversations between God and Moses, thirty-three of which were initiated by God in order to instruct, command, announce, predict, threaten, remind, warn, and legislate. It records God’s determination to rescue his convenanted people despite pharaoh’s sustained resistance. 6 It records as well the instructional conversations dealing with the plagues, the sacrifices, the Passover, the plundering of Egypt, the escape routes and the encampments. 7 And of course there is the account of the crossing of the Red Sea which no Egyptian pursuer survived. 8Noteworthy, too, is the fact that, for his part, Moses initiated ten conversations with God, declaring his personal doubts and inadequacies, offering his excuses, complaining about the hardships of his mission, reporting on the grumbling... (shrink)

Classical Confucian thought is deeply concerned, on the one hand, with individual moral self-cultivation and, on the other, with the widespread establishment of a moral social order. These twin aspirations find expression in the legends of Yao, Shun, King Wen, and other sage-kings who achieved perfection in both realms. Yet a serious tension arises, because despite Confucius’s and Mencius’s moral purity and devotion, their political impact is marginal. They consistently teach that humaneness and rightness will transform the world, (...) and work energetically to put this principle into action. Yet their own experience is an uneasy fit with this principle, as moral decay remains the norm among the rulers of their.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 167-170 [Access article in PDF] Journey into Emptiness: Dogen, Merton, Jung, and the Quest for Transformation. By Robert Jingen Gunn. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. xiv + 334 pp. Written by a New York psychotherapist who also has Zen training, the thesis of this book is that the experience of emptiness is a necessary precondition to spiritual transformation. "Emptiness" is defined as "an experience (...) of being without, of not having, not having answers, not having property, not having love or power or hope" (1). "Transformation" is described as a path that leads to the realization of our rootedness in a transcendent dimension. Three paths of transformation are discussed through three case studies: Buddhism in the experience of Dogen; Christianity through the life of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; and Depth Psychology as developed in the life experience of Carl Jung. In each case the major obstacle to be overcome is ego and ego attachments. The transformation process, argues Gunn, is often triggered by an initial experience of emptiness such as the early loss of one's mother, an experience of death, divorce, depression, illness, failure, identity confusion, or loss of community. The traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Depth Psychology view a person's pivotal experience of emptiness "not as something painful to be avoided, but a door, leading to a larger vision and experience of connection to all of life" (7). Response to the experience of emptiness can be by either engagement or avoidance. Refusing the path of transformation will add to one's burden of suffering whether understood as karma, sin, or neurosis. Yet this is often the contemporary choice. Afraid to move into the unknown, or to let go of ego control, we hold on to whatever is within our grasp—a house, a marriage, an idea, an identity—and avoid the challenge of realizing our true selves. Choosing to enter the Buddhist Way, to take up one's cross or to make the unconscious conscious, is to adopt transformation from an initial emptiness to a "way of life that consists in ever-expanding awareness, continual letting-go of attachments and increasing freedom and service to all of life, to being itself" (9).The author suggests that three stages in the experience of emptiness and self-transformation [End Page 167] are found in the case studies of Dogen, Merton, and Jung: (1) experienced emptiness in their own lives; (2) used that experience to embark on their own path of transformation; and (3) returned to offer their practical experience as a method for others to use. Although viewed differently by each, emptiness is primary for all, and the self that is let go of remains but is transformed. For Dogen, in emptiness we let go of everything, including self and emptiness itself. What remains is no-thing, an insubstantiality that is neither nothing nor something, but leads us back to the Self, which is everything. For Merton, letting go of everything leaves an empty self experienced as poverty, but a poverty that leads to fulfillment, which finds the true Self hidden with Christ in God—free for God, free for others, free for whatever God wills. For Jung, emptiness is the sacrifice of ego to the larger Self, which transcends individual consciousness.While the analyses of the emptiness/transformative experiences of Dogen and Merton are well done, the presentation of Jung lacks depth and completeness. The author's psychotherapist vocation seemed to artificially force the analysis—as, for example, in Gunn's attempt to show that in each case the major trigger of the emptiness experience was the early loss of the mother.I found the presentation of Dogen's Buddhist experience to be the most fully developed and convincing of the three case studies. Gunn does an excellent job of situating Dogen's experience within the context of Buddhism by presenting a well-researched and well-written summary of Buddha, Nagarjuna, and Bodhidharma; however, the contribution of the Theravada understanding is completely ignored. The presentation of Nagarjuna is especially well done, but the author... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Finding PartnershipThe Benefit of Sharing and the Capacity for ComplexityMichaela Amering (bio)Keywordsrecovery, empowerment, trialog, user involvement, schizophreniaIs There Ignorance and Arrogance? In Psychiatry? In Medicine?Adding insight to injury' is the paraphrase psychiatrist Pat McGorry (1992) coined for his reproach of 'pushing for "insight" or "acceptance of diagnosis"' without carefully taking into account the complexities of the individual situation, context, and needs. That must be about the kind of (...) behavior Marga Reimer has in mind in her paper on treatment adherence in the absence of insight, which depicts mental health professionals characterized by arrogance against the common sense of motivating compliance by perceived or anticipated benefits on different everyday life levels, but instead trying to get people to believe in a mental illness such as schizophrenia and wishing them to want treatment for that in the form of medication.In addition, Reimer presents examples from general medicine to make her point that adherence follows perceived or anticipated benefits instead of being a result of insight into a medical model of illness and McGorry (1992) also suggests that disregard for the active role that patients may play as reflected in psychiatry in terms such as 'case management' and 'compliance' "is a failing which extends to mainstream medicine and probably to most systems of human service delivery." On the other hand, Bill Anthony (2006), one of the most eminent experts on psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery in a personal report on his own medical illness, multiple sclerosis—MS, and the assistance he has been receiving in connection with it, describes the 'MS-Community' as exemplary with respect to instilling courage and hope, continually providing information and opportunities for exchange, and for never questioning a person's ultimate freedom of choice. In contrary, in mental health care he does not experience the medical profession as acting with full respect and support for its patients and suggests a great deal more work and transformation—especially concerning coercive treatments—ahead to follow this example. Similarly, it has been suggested that psychiatry should be better integrated into medicine to overcome stigma and discrimination of psychiatric health problems and interventions. A pertinent example of an initiative in this direction is the proposal of a fusion of mental health and incapacity legislation to arrive at ethically consistent legal situations with regard to involuntary [End Page 77] treatment across medicine (Dawson and Szmukler 2006).Is There Something Called Schizophrenia? and How Much Longer?Reimer's main example—schizophrenia—is the diagnosis that poses some of the greatest problems to the field and to the recognition of psychiatry as a scientific medical discipline. The current concept as well as the term 'schizophrenia' will probably not be around much longer; 'a century of schizophrenia is enough' (Kelly and Murray 2002). Suggested solutions for the problems of the diagnosis of schizophrenia concern the urgent complement of the categorical with a dimensional approach (Allardyce et al. 2007), a change also put forward as one of the essential remedies to undermine the stigma of mental illness that is often exacerbated by clinical diagnosis (Corrigan 2007). Such a move would also clearly help against the still prevalent experiences of users of services and their families and friends, whose hopes and dreams have been crushed and whose resilience has been undermined by clinical situations, which in times of psychotic crises, not only forced diagnoses but also prognoses—often scientifically unfounded—on them (Amering and Schmolke 2009).Is There a Solution? Can We Use Our Talents? And Those of People With a Lived Experience of Mental Health Problems and Care?Clinicians as well as scientists know that health, illness, and recovery occur in complex ways and contexts. People faced with mental health problems clearly realize the complexities of their situation and are especially motivated to appreciate the variety of factors and interactions that need to be integrated to arrive at a valid assessment. Ideally, the therapeutic relationship—essentially a partnership—holds a formidable chance of sharing efforts and creating the wisdom for finding and facing the truths necessary to develop solutions that can uphold and work in line with the complexities of human life.I would argue that psychiatric professionals are certainly part... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.1 (2000) 75-80 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway: A New Basis for Allocating Livers for Transplant Robert M. Veatch The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the private organization with the government contract to manage the national organ transplant program, are in the midst of a protracted dispute over how livers (...) for transplant should be allocated. UNOS, which is based in Richmond, Virginia, has for many years set the national policy for allocating cadaver organs. UNOS had a policy that, in effect, gave healthy local recipients priority over much sicker, more urgent cases beyond the local level. In April of 1998, Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, issued a regulation requiring that organs must be allocated according to uniform medical criteria and that organ sharing must take place over broad enough areas to ensure that organs can reach the patients who need them most. In effect, she sought to overturn the strict local priority in favor of a more uniform national list based on medical need or at least an approach that extended allocation beyond the strict locals-first approach.UNOS has put up great resistance, expressing a strong preference for retaining local priority even though doing so means some desperately sick people at more distant centers almost certainly will die for lack of organs. What sounds at first like a rather esoteric dispute over government regulation turns out to raise some fascinating issues involving questions of ethics and moral epistemology. The Background For several years, UNOS followed a policy of dividing all potential liver transplant recipients into four categories based on how urgently the person needed a transplant. Status 1 patients were the sickest, essentially those in intensive care. Status 2 patients were the next most ill-in the hospital, but not the ICU. Status 3 patients were ill enough to be at home, while Status 4 patients were still up and about. UNOS coordinates 62 local organ procurement organizations (OPOs), each serving a metropolitan area. These are grouped into 11 regions.The long-term allocation rule gave first priority to local Status 1 patients. If no Status 1 patient was available locally, rather than sending the organ to another OPO, it would be assigned to a Status 2 patient in the same OPO where the [End Page 75] organ was procured, then to a local Status 3 patient, and then to one at Status 4. Only if no patients could use the organ locally would it be "exported" to another OPO. It would then be offered to another OPO in the same region, starting once again with patients at the most urgent status. Only if no patients in the region could use the organ would it be offered outside the region. The effect of this policy was that in some cases quite well-off local patients could get priority over more distant patients who only had hours or days to live if they did not get transplanted. (It was because of this policy that Mickey Mantle-who was Status 2-got an organ so quickly. There were no other suitable Status 1 or 2 patients in the Dallas area. He did not have to compete with any of the thousands of liver transplant patients on the waiting lists beyond his local area.)The realization that critically ill patients beyond the local area were dying while healthy local patients got organs even though they still could wait for perhaps months or years led DHHS to issue its mandate. The goal was to get more organs to people who were in desperate need.The response at UNOS has been hostile. UNOS is made up primarily of representatives from the OPOs, which, in turn are often dominated by transplant surgeons. They did not like the idea that locally-procured organs were being shipped to other communities when they had their own patients who needed them.Spokespersons for this position offered two primary arguments. First, they believed that people would be more... (shrink)

At the start of Early Modernity, the notion of raison d’état (reason of state) became a central issue in European politics. By means of that notion politicians and intellectuals reflected upon the legitimacy of violent and unethical means in the service of higher ends. Due, among others, to the nature of modern warfare, the role of the state acquired new significance in human affairs. Therefore, many philosophers and politicians argued that politics might be fundamentally different from other human activities (...) and might require a special rationality and morality. Also, thus my hypothesis, the discourse and history of the raison d’état is throughout history characterized by some recurring themes, such as the consolidation of governmental power. In this study, I want to explore how the raison d’état, in various strengths, has been instrumentalised in the political doctrine of Richelieu and Louis XIII as well in the political ideas of Putin and his ideological right-hand Dugin. It will be discussed how in both political systems; sovereignty is considered to be an undifferentiated body of legitimate power with a firm basis in Christian-Stoic natural law. The stoic ideal of indifference (apatheia) is an important reference in the reason of state rhetoric since the individual is supposed to be prepared to sacrifice his life for the preservation of the State. The common good should be the objective of each person in the society. I will analyse to what extent Putin and Dugin, in defending their war politics, use similar arguments as cardinal Richelieu. By reflecting on the intellectual discourse about the nature and purposes of the State itself, and the element of justice and higher values in the public discourse, it can be analysed how the raison d’état operates in a political doctrine. (shrink)

“Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony” (Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, pg.6, thesis XV) What has proportion to do with humor or irony? And what do either of these have to do with being human? Jokes, laughter, and funniness connote excess, exaggeration, incongruity, dissonance, etc., the opposite of proportion--balance, symmetry, Aristotle’s golden mean. Yet, The Philosopher maintains, the wit has found the ideal moderate (...) position between the deficient boor who seems constitutionally incapable of laughing, and the excessive buffoon who doesn’t know how to laugh at the right time, in the right way, or for the right reasons--buffoonish laughter is indiscriminate. The title, paraphrasing Hume, is consistent with Kierkegaard’s valorization of irony, as philosophical doubt and the confusion induced through Socratic Irony both call for a special sort of proportion: ontological proportion. Put simply, one ought to proportion one’s being, as well as others’, as though along a shifting spectrum rather than essentially and hierarchically. The latter fosters a serious attitude that takes polarities as the rule with no exceptions; black or white, good or evil, with us or against us, one of us or one of them, always seeking the ideal of purity. We see this disproportion in authoritarians who manifestly lack a sense of humor--Hitler’s joke courts, Turkey’s president Erdoğan attempting legal punishment against a comedian who mocked him, and Trump’s thin-skinned inability to laugh at his own expense, a monumental character flaw for the most powerful person in the world. Their views are serious, rigid, closed, and dogmatic about themselves, others, and for each of them excepting Trump, the presumed absolute nature of values--Trump’s unironic pretense toward any value is merely a means to service his own absolute end, himself. The playfully ironic person can cope with reality, with ambiguity and, borrowing from Maria Lugones, “ontological confusion,” the not-fully-settled identity. (shrink)

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains how bare land is formed. Capitalism produces ‘ruins’ by stripping living beings of the capacity to form their own ecological relations, a necessary condition for the reproduction of life. Contemporary capitalism alienates living beings from ecological relations, i.e. capitalism generates “the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter. Through alienation, people and things (...) become mobile assets; they can be removed from their lifeworlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere” (Tsing 2021, 5). Cutting the threads of the web of life through capitalist alienation, however, produces bare land as a side effect, infertile waste deprived of the means to reproduce itself without capitalist support. Alienation is the deracination of living beings from their lifeworld, transforming them into passive cogs for capitalist accumulation. However, Tsing upholds matsutake mushrooms, rare fungi popular among Japa- nese foodies, as exemplars of the resilience of ecological relations. Even amidst ruins, matsutakes successfully form beneficial relations with other living beings, like pine trees, other fungi and human beings. The insistent capacity to regenerate ecological relations is the ineluctable means of reproduction for the matsutake mushroom. Even at the end of the world, the matsutake persists by perpetually co-producing new lifeworlds for itself and fellow living beings (see also Haraway 2016). I claim that Tsing’s approach to capitalist alienation is descriptively convinc- ing but lacks the affective force for ecological class consciousness. Tsing surveys the web of life from the perspective of living beings quite distant from humankind, articulating a theoretical diagnosis rather than a political exhortation. On an affective level, it is challenging to generate ecological class consciousness among the (presumably) human readers of my chapter if they are presented with only the biographies of mushrooms growing far beyond my home. As Chantal Mouffe (2018, 72) argues, the construction of an emphatically political identity requires an appeal to the affects, like hope, indignation or compassion. Latour and Schultz also stress that ecological politics currently suffers from an affective misalignment, with people failing to identify with the fate of their increasingly inhospitable environments (2022, 47). Why would European humans care about these unknown fungi? The reproduction of our CO2-intensive livelihoods largely depends on the emission of bare land elsewhere, so in the short run, we stand to benefit more from putting our heads in the sand. I employ Chakrabarty’s (2021) suggestion of grounding post-humanist politics first in strategic anthropocentrism to subsequently push for a post-humanist expansion of our human understanding. One must first feel personally interpellated by the crisis of the global means of reproduction before one can grasp the need for an ecological class politics beyond human confines. I turn to John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath as a kindred spirit with more mobilising potential. Steinbeck tells the story of a family of impoverished farmers from Oklahoma, the Joads, travelling to California in pursuit of a better life, yet only encountering more poverty, exploitation and anti-immigrant racism. Steinbeck describes in detail the environmental and social devastation, but he focuses on the commodified labour power of migrant farmers rather than commodified mushrooms. Steinbeck’s main characters are also uprooted from their entangled histories in the land and community of rural Oklahoma, but they present a more familiar face of the ecological class deprived of the means of reproduction. Steinbeck’s outcry against alienation-as-deracination is clear, but the shift in perspective facilitates the empathetic outrage required for building ecological class consciousness. Steinbeck’s strategic anthropocentrism helps human readers understand why alienation-as-deracination is a concern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Lauren Kapalka Richerme, "The Diversity Bargain and the Discourse Dance of Equitable and Best," Philosophy of Music Education Review 27, no. 2 (Fall, 2019)Nasim NiknafsI was asked to write a response to Lauren Richerme's convincing research on why and how one should distinguish between "equitable educational practices"1 and what she calls following Ellen Berry the "diversity bargain" where equity as the second-best option has always taken a (...) hit from the more dashing diversity. If I may metaphorically put this conversation into a romantic comedy, equity is always the wingperson of color to diversity as the main protagonist; by the end of the show it is the main protagonist who survives the hardship and reaches salvation, be it a long-lost love, an oasis of sorts, or making it to the finish line. The rest of the cast have the function of complementing and highlighting the main actor but never substituting for it; or they are as Homi Bhabha would say, "almost the same but not quite."2 For the sake of filling in the blank of let's-add-more-color-into-it, the genuine conversation over the nuances of equitable practices gets undermined and diffused of its poignancy. And this is what Richerme is arguing against: let us not forget that a more significant challenge than a mere technicolor presence is at play. In that, my response to Richerme's essay would [End Page 215] not be so much of a response but a grand nod, a body gesture, an embedded signal of approval between two human beings born and raised in two different parts of planet earth who after years of diverse and perhaps un-equitable educational access ended up in the same room at the same time. Thus, my nod to Richerme also originated from personal experiences and intimate familiarities with unequitable educational access. Yes, people of color can be assets to their institutions and their corresponding fields who add to the diversity of knowledge creation practices, but it is not people of color's project or responsibility to act as the trophy to alleviate the unhappy conscience of educational malpractice or give a helping hand to the main protagonists for whom the scenario has already been written. Undoubtedly, they can take on that role if they want to, but it is only contingent upon where their desires lie not where they should lie.I strongly agree with Richerme's claim that music classrooms and I would add any classroom and learning environment should be a place and space for "sharing stories and insights"3 to not only learn about the content material whatever it may be but to learn to empathize with one another, understand positive and negative human behaviors toward humans and their environment, and act against discriminatory practices, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender prejudices, and to the point of Richerme's essay, unequitable practices that are insistent in today's political climate on a global scale.At this very juncture I diverge not from Richerme's fine thesis and argumentation, but from the larger issue of the premise of her arguments grounded on Thomas Green's educational framework.4 Green argues that the "rank order of political arguments that can be mustered in support of the [educational] system … [is] roughly as follows": (1) the fundamental or compelling interests of the state; (2) the aggregate of individual or parental interests; (3) societal interests; and (4) educational goods for their own sake."5 Following Green's framework Richerme analyzes contemporary music education initiatives in relation to the differing political strengths of each group of stakeholders: the state, parents, society, and educational goods for their own sake.There is a sense of mistrust in the local and national government implied by Green's framework, reminding one of the cumulative mistrust of the elite by U.S. citizens. Years of neglect, condescension, and lack of attention to the real and tangible needs of people amalgamated into what today one sees as white nationalism, plutocracy, and protectionism across borders. Green wrote his book, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System, in 1980; historically the world order was increasingly metamorphosing and establishing itself... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 465-481 [Access article in PDF] The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Catherine Packham The Scottish Enlightenment has been described as uniting a concern with the origins and foundations of knowledge with a preoccupation with the useful application of knowledge in schemes of practical improvement. 1 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (...) of the Wealth of Nations, which combines a theoretical account of political economy with specific proposals on politico-economic matters, might seem to exemplify such a characterization. For some commentators at the time of its publication, however, Smith's lack of practical experience in the field of trade disqualified any claims he might make to authoritative knowledge. Sir John Pringle, for instance, military surgeon and friend of Smith's, thought that a man "who had never been in trade could not be expected to write well on the subject"; and while Dr. Johnson repudiated this, suggesting that all that was necessary was "extensive views," Pringle's opinion was not unusual. 2 Such objections, interrogating the very basis of Smith's expertise, reiterate, in the context of his work, the same kinds of questions regarding knowledge's provenance which preoccupied his age, and which were indeed addressed by Smith himself. Smith's own account of the formation of philosophical knowledge rests not on the authority of experience but on the role of the imagination; he understood systematic knowledge as an imaginative "machine" or work of fancy created to please and soothe a mind disturbed by phenomena which are observed but unexplained. 3 Smith's account of philosophical [End Page 465] knowledge, in which he would include his own Wealth of Nations, suggests that his own expertise should be judged not on the extent of his personal experience of the matters discussed but on the explanatory power and pleasurable nature of the system which he outlines. With its emphasis on the work of the philosophical imagination, his account also suggests that some of the sources for that system might be somewhat unexpected, a suggestion which this paper will pursue.Such questions concerning the genesis and formation of the new discourse of political economy instituted by Wealth of Nations have recurred in our own time, informing some of the more illuminating of recent work on Smith. Rejecting a tradition which assesses the significance of Wealth of Nations in terms of its anticipation of modern economic analysis, revisionist historians of political and economic thought have, since the late 1970s, offered more contextualist accounts of the work, tracing the relations between Smith's moral and economic philosophy and the contemporary discourses of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism. Other commentators have borrowed from literary scholarship to examine the textual and discursive conventions through which Smith's writings construct and sustain their meanings. 4 Such work has given a new emphasis to the textual and discursive nature of Smith's work as a means to understand its derivation, sources, and influences; it has replaced an older perception of Smith as inspired prophet-founder of the new political economy with an effort to interpret his work in the context of other, adjacent and contemporary forms of inquiry. Collectively, such work highlights the varied and disparate discourses which informed Smith's thinking on economic and other matters and seeks to understand how the complex and diverse forms of interaction with and assimilation of aspects of these philosophical and other discourses may have contributed to the formation of Smith's work—and hence, must also figure in our own attempts to read it.This paper, by exploring a strand of physiological language and imagery which runs through Wealth of Nations and considering it in the context of new developments in Scottish physiological research in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, also seeks to understand Smith's work by examining its relations with contemporary philosophical discourse. Where other recent accounts of Wealth of Nations have reassessed its relationship with moral, political and legal discourses, it will... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Integralism and Justice for AllJames Dominic Rooney O.P.Catholic integralism has received a lot of attention recently, promoted by pundits and scholars alike.1 Much ink has been spilled in scholarly venues discussing historical evidence marshaled by defenders of integralism who argue that the Catholic Church has rights to the coercive power of the state in service of its religious mission, notably Thomas Pink.2 My interest in this piece is different. (...) I aim simply to show that integralism is unjust. To prove this, I propose two problems that illustrate the integralist position entails violations of distributive justice concerning the rights of non-Catholics. It is important to highlight that my argument that integralism is unjust will not require denying Pink's controversial views about the power of the Church to direct state policy. In other words, I presume the truth of Catholicism and Pink's controversial readings of Church documents, but show that these readings do not allow us to arrive at the view that integralism is true. What my argument attacks is not that the Church has such powers, but that there is any identifiable "ideal" political arrangement in which these powers are exercised.Pink has attempted to show that—contrary to popular perception—the [End Page 1059] Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae (DH), is compatible with integralist positions. Appealing to arguments given by Francisco Suarez, Pink argues that the Church has rights to the coercive power or authority of the state. On this reading, "the authority to direct and coerce in matters religious...belongs to the Church. It no more belongs to the state than it belongs to private individuals."3 Instead, the Church is a coercive authority which can impose "temporal penalties" on its members.4 Further, the baptized acquire obligations to lend the Church their temporal authority in service of its mission; thus, "rulers and officials of Christian states—[fulfill] their baptismal obligations to the Church in lending her their power and resources to hold other baptized Christians to their baptismal obligations."5 Consequently, the Church has a right, given its coercive authority to impose temporal penalties on its members, to the temporal power which baptized rulers hold, in service of its mission.6Pink's interpretation of what was called the Church's "indirect power" over government therefore involves a strong thesis that the Church has God-given rights to utilize civic coercion for its own supernatural ends. I will refer to this controversial thesis about "indirect power" as the "Suarezian thesis" (but will not be concerned with whether his view accurately represents Suarez). Pink and other integralists claim that this strong thesis about a native or intrinsic right of the Church to the coercive power of the state is doctrinally binding on Catholics.7 But Pink's view of that indirect power is controversial among Catholic theologians. Theologians as noteworthy as Avery Dulles, Joseph Ratzinger, and John Henry Newman explicitly reject this interpretation that the Church has native or intrinsic rights to civil coercive authority.8 For my purposes, I will concede the Suarezian thesis and [End Page 1060] illustrate that it is theoretically independent of integralism. Indeed, I will argue that integralism is false even if the Church did have a claim to temporal coercive power of the state. Integralism is more than the Suarezian thesis, does not follow from it, and does not strictly require it.The essay will be structured as follows. I will begin by providing clarifications on the meaning and nature of the integralist thesis. Then I will propose two arguments to show that, even if the Suarezian thesis were true, it would not entail that integralist states are the ideal political arrangement. What I will show is that there is no good sense in which integralist states are politically ideal. This is not to say integralist states are always impermissible. There are constraints that integralists themselves accept on when integralist states are permissible, and only when these constraints are met is an integralist state supposed to be politically ideal. I will construe the constraints charitably. Then I will show both that integralism lacks any good justification for the claim that... (shrink)

Why should one person obey another? Why (to ask the question from the first-person perspective) ought I to submit to another and follow her judgment rather than my own? In modern political thought, which denies that some are born rulers and others are born to be ruled, the most prominent answer has been: “Because I have consented to her authority.” By making authority conditional on the subjects’ consent, political philosophers have sought to reconcile authority’s hierarchical structure with (...) the equal moral standing of governor and governed. Yet such consent accounts of authority have long been deemed problematic on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that few citizens have given their consent to the state under whose laws they live. So unless we are willing to deny the state’s authority over those who have not consented, or revert to the pre-modern assumption of a natural political hierarchy, we must find another way of reconciling authority with our standing as free and equal moral agents. In recent political and legal philosophy, the most influential solution to this problem has been Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, according to which legitimate authority, while it does not require the consent of the governed, must exist for their sake, or serve them. The normal way to justify someone’s authority, on the service conception, is to show that, by treating her directives as binding, the subjects are likely better to conform to reasons that apply to them anyway. The service conception has, however, recently been criticized (by, among others, Thomas Christiano, Scott Hershovitz, and Jeremy Waldron) for being insufficiently attuned to the significance that procedural, and in particular democratic, features of political and legal institutions have for the justification of their authority. If these ‘democratic critics’ are right, then two commitments that many in the liberal-democratic tradition may find independently attractive turn out to be in tension: the liberal idea that authority is normally legitimate only insofar as it serves its subjects, and the democratic idea that legitimate authority can (and regularly does) rest on fair procedures. In this article I argue that the critics’ arguments rest on a misunderstanding of the service conception; yet their worries point the way to an under-appreciated and interesting view of democracy as an authoritative arbitration procedure. After introducing the service conception’s view of justified authority, I briefly distinguish a broad and a narrow interpretation of it, and suggest that we should embrace the latter to make sense of the idea that political authority serves its subjects (Section I). Next I turn to the objection raised by the democratic critics: the service conception, they say, cannot make room for the intrinsic fairness of democratic procedures because it is preoccupied with the quality of outcomes (Section II). But, I argue, the objection rests on an illicit identification of two different kinds of outcomes: the outcome of the decision-making procedure on the one hand, the outcome or result of treating that first outcome as authoritative on the other. Distinguishing between these is crucial for an adequate understanding of democracy’s authority. While the service conception is indeed organized around the latter, this does not commit it to an exclusive concern with the former; yet it is a singular commitment to the former that is problematic from a democratic point of view (Section III). To bring home this point, I sketch a model of authority as arbitration that is frequently overlooked in recent discussions of authority even though it is centrally concerned with procedural (and ultimately democratic) values and fits squarely into the service conception of authority (Section IV). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth (...) century. Relatively few works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Origins and Evolution of Bioethics: Some Personal ReflectionsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio)AbstractBioethics was officially baptized in 1972, but its birth took place a decade or so before that date. Since its birth, what is known today as bioethics has undergone a complex conceptual metamorphosis. This essay loosely divides that metamorphosis into three stages: an educational, an ethical, and a global stage. In the educational era, bioethics focused (...) on a perceived “dehumanization” of medicine by the rising power of science and technology. Remedies were sought by introducing humanities, ethics, and human “values” into the medical curriculum. Ethics was one among the humanistic disciplines, but not the dominant one. In the second era, ethics assumed a dominant role as ever more complex dilemmas emerged from the rapid pace of biological research. As such dilemmas were applied to medical practice, the need for a more rigorous and more formal analysis of their moral status was clear. Philosophically-trained ethicists had an obvious role. They began to teach, write, and profoundly influence medical education and practice. In the third—and present—period, the breadth of problems has become so broad that ethicists must, themselves, draw on disciplines well beyond their expertise—e.g., law, religion, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and the like. The era of bioethics as a global enterprise is upon us. The original hope for humanizing medicine has not been overtly successful; however, much has been accomplished of value to patients, the profession, and society. Medical morality has been transformed into a formal, systematic study of a whole range of issues of the greatest significance to humanity. Now the major challenge is one of identity, or inter-relationships and connections between the theoretical and the practical. Bioethics has outgrown its beginnings.I have been invited to give a “personal recollection” of the early development of bioethics. Such invitations are notoriously hard to resist, but also problematic when they are the recollections of a participant [End Page 73] in the events to be described. We need only be reminded of the vagaries common to the plethora of memoirs on the book stands today. Few have escaped the perils of selective memory, self-promotion, or the settling of old scores. Yet their perils notwithstanding, memoirs may serve some useful purpose. They are the raw material—verbal kitchen middens so to speak—out of which historians can later sift fact from fancy. They enable “tribal elders” to give witness to the past from which the present can fashion some sense of continuity.I will organize my reflections around three very arbitrary time periods that represent my own way of thinking about the evolution of bioethics: (1) an era of “proto-bioethics” (1960–1972), (2) an era of philosophical bioethics (1972–1985), and (3) an era of global bioethics (1985-present). Each era, of course, overlaps with the others, and the dominant strand of each runs through the others as well.In the proto-bioethics period, the language of human values predominated; in the era of bioethics philosophically construed, it was the language of philosophical ethics; and in the era of bioethics globally construed, the social and behavioral sciences have gained greater prominence. In each period, interest in the traditional humanities other than philosophy waxed and waned. In the earlier years, religion and theology predominated. Beginning in the 1970s, philosophy took a dominant role. In the last two decades, other disciplines, like law, literature, and the social sciences, have exerted more and more influence (McNeur 1963; Pellegrino 1997; Barker 1987).I make no pretense here of writing any part of the formal “history” of bioethics. Works of this nature are beginning to appear (Rothman 1991; Jonsen 1998 ; Dell’Oro and Viafora 1996). Thomas McElhinney and I are preparing our own account of the work and influence of the Institute on Human Values in Medicine, one of the influential programs of the Society for Health and Human Values (Pellegrino and McElhinney, n.d.). Space limitations as well as prudence preclude any attempt to do justice to all the events, institutions, and people who have made the field of bioethics what it is today. I apologize for these omissions, for any unintentional lapses of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leibniz’s Political and Moral Philosophy in the Novissima Sinica, 1699–1999Patrick RileyThe Preface to Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica 1 contains an important but highly compressed and abbreviated quintessence of his theory of justice or jurisprudence universelle—a version so compressed and abbreviated that one must have a broader and fuller understanding of this universal jurisprudence before one can entirely appreciate what Leibniz has to say about Christian charity, Platonism, and geometry (...) in the Novissima Sinica itself. Above all, one wants to know why Leibniz, in the key paragraph of the Preface to Novissima Sinica, should describe the Chinese emperor as just and charitable and as a (more or less) “Platonic” geometer who is as wise as he is charitable. And why should Leibniz contrast this “wisely charitable” Chinese ruler with the Pontius Pilate who irresponsibly asked, “What is truth?” and then permitted the judicial murder of the very Christ who did most to make charity and justice coextensive by saying, “A new law I give unto you, that ye love one another”? 2 The wise course, therefore, is to throw enough light on Leibnizian universal jurisprudence in general to make his moral-political utterances in Novissima Sinica intelligible in particular.In 1693, four years before the publication of Novissima Sinica, Leibniz revealed the outlines of his jurisprudence universelle in the Codex Iuris Gentium:a good man is one who loves everybody, so far as reason permits. Justice, then, which is the virtue which regulates that affection which [End Page 217] the Greeks call philanthropy, will be most conveniently defined... as the charity of the wise man, that is, charity which follows the dictates of wisdom... Charity is a universal benevolence, and benevolence the habit of loving or of willing the good. Love then signifies rejoicing in the happiness of another..., the happiness of those whose happiness pleases us turns into our own happiness, since things which please us are desired for their own sakes. 3Slightly later, in La véritable piété, Leibniz indicated what this view of justice entails:those who... reduce justice to [mere] rigor, and who fail altogether to understand that one cannot be just without being benevolent... in a word, not only those who look for their profit, pleasure, and glory in the misery of others, but also those who are not at all anxious to procure the common good and to lift out of misery those who are in their care, and generally those who show themselves to be without enlightenment and without charity, boast in vain of piety which they do not know at all, whatever appearance they create. 4The central idea of Leibniz’s “universal jurisprudence,” which aims to find quasi-geometrical, eternal moral verities equally valid for all rational beings, human or divine, is that justice is “the charity of the wise” (caritas sapientis), 5 that it is not mere conformity to sovereign-ordained “positive” law given ex plenitudo potestatis (in the manner of Hobbes); nor is it mere “refraining from harm” or even “rendering what is due” (the neminem laedere and suum cuique tribuere of Roman law). 6 The equal stress on “charity” and on “wisdom” suggests that Leibniz’s practical thought is a kind of fusing of Platonism—in which the wise know the eternal truths such as absolute goodness (Phaedo 75d), which the gods themselves also know and love (Euthyphro 93-10e) and which therefore deserve to rule (Republic 443d-e) 7 —and of Pauline Christianity, whose key moral idea is that charity or love is the first of the virtues (“though I speak [End Page 218] with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal”). 8 Historically, there is nothing remarkable in trying to fuse Platonism and Christianity. Augustine’s thought (particularly the early De Libero Arbitrio) is just such a fusion. 9 But Leibniz was the last of the great Christian Platonists, and left the world just as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant were about to transform and “secularize” it.I. If one decomposes caritas sapientis into its parts, charity and wisdom, the provenance of both elements is clear enough... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2003) 308-311 [Access article in PDF] Joseph Hamburger. John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 239. Cloth, $35.00. C. L. Ten, editor. Mill's Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1999. Pp. xxiii + 498. Cloth, $180.00. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is commonly viewed as the classic defense of individual (...) liberty, and Mill himself as the grandfather of modern liberalism. In John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control Joseph Hamburger seeks to dislodge this orthodox interpretation [End Page 308] of Mill. As the title of the work suggests, Hamburger, who died shortly before this work came to press, seeks to convince the reader that a proper understanding of Mill's account of individual liberty needs to be nuanced by an appreciation of those substantial controls that Mill was willing to place upon individuals.Hamburger suggests that the association of Mill with modern liberalism results from viewing the arguments presented in On Liberty in isolation from the context in which they were written. Hamburger argues that Mill's real purpose in writing On Liberty is neither self-evident nor is it one that is easily assimilated to modern libertarian ideals. Hamburger interprets "Mill as making an esoteric argument in On Liberty" (xvii). There are two additional pieces that Hamburger claims one needs in order to properly decipher the puzzle, and thus grasp the true import of Mill's claims concerning liberty. First, Hamburger argues that Mill's desire to bring about cultural reform was dependent upon his rejection of Christianity. Mill's unpublished writings reveal that he was far more antagonistic to the influence of Christian religion than is often recognized. Hamburger argues that for Mill initiating true moral reform depended upon overcoming the old social order of which Christianity was a primary constituent. In order for this to occur, one needed "to establish liberty for those who would implement his plan for moral reformation" (86). Second, Hamburger argues that we must also grasp Mill's view of history if we are to properly understand his project of moral reform and the place of On Liberty within this project. Hamburger claims that Mill's vision of history was strongly influenced by thinkers such as Comte and St. Simon. From them, Mill adopted the view that societies alternate between transitional and natural states, and that the values that are applicable in these states are quite different. Hamburger claims that "Mill easily recognized his own age as being transitional," and that this influences all of his arguments in On Liberty (111).Putting the above together, Hamburger concludes that Mill's arguments are specifically directed toward securing the liberty of those who would combat the influence of Christianity and the old moral order, and that "the liberty recommended in On Liberty was especially valued because it would hasten the undermining of old doctrines and institutions which occurred in transitional periods" (212). Hamburger argues that the liberty that Mill meant to secure in this work was not intended to apply equally to all persons or in all periods. Thus, Hamburger argues that Mill was quite willing to advocate strong forms of social control in other contexts.The latter claim, which Hamburger argues provides a more coherent interpretation of On Liberty, does not necessarily follow from Mill's view of religion and history. Here, I think there is room for two distinct judgments regarding Hamburger's achievement in this book. Hamburger has undoubtedly provided a great service in examining the often neglected areas of Mill's corpus and their relevance to his more prominent works. Philosophers who view On Liberty as an isolated piece of argument, or at best only consider it in relation to Mill's Utilitarianism, thus would profit much from reading this work. I am less convinced, however, of Hamburger's claim that heeding these aspects of Mill's thought will lead one to form a radically different understanding of Mill's claims concerning... (shrink)

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) argued that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups, and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He, like those who were to follow, was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in the light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and (...) political idea of personhood. Douglass’s version of this vision was formed by natural law theories, and a Protestant Christian conception of universal human fraternity, as it was for much of the abolition movement in the US and Britain. His vision and his fierce commitment to abolitionism, moreover, were characterized by his own experience of slavery. His political and ethical vision, his moral universe, generated his conception of America, his interpretation of the US constitution, and his solution to the Nation’s race problem. Unpacking Douglass’s vision will help us understand those positions that follow his legacy. Just as those who argue that race ought to be conserved turn to the figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, those who disagree with the conservation of race need to consider Douglass’s arguments, and their relationship to Douglass’s assimilation-amalgamation solution. Moreover, those that work under the long shadow of Douglass would do well to carefully consider the historical reasons why Du Bois’s and Booker T. Washington’s strategies for racial justice eclipsed Douglass’s. This chapter reviews Douglass’s religious and political ideals, his application of them to the issues of race, black American identity, and constitutional interpretation, and how his ideals and positions developed into his projection about the future of race in the US. All of these matters are guiding features of the anti-race and racial nominalist positions in the contemporary conservation of race debate. Additionally, this paper asks that we consider the cognitive and emotional conflicts that arise within us as we reflect upon Douglass’s vision and this Nation’s contradictions and failures in its long racial history. Douglass, of course, frequently referenced this conflict; it was at the center of his experience of being American. In his first narrative, Douglass characterized this conflict as his “soul’s complaint.” As a slave he yearned for freedom, and came to understand the liberal political and religious ideals that surrounded him. God’s justice or the ideal of American justice were not immanent; this gave him much pain and caused in him a good measure of moral disorientation, yet he resolved to make up for the absence of divine and natural justice through his own and other subaltern resources. And as a freeman and abolitionist he yearned for a greater reconciliation of the Nation: between black and white, and between the Nation and its ideals. In both instances the obstacles to his desires, the enormity of the task, and the elusiveness of Justice often left him somewhere between madness and reconciliation to his misery. His turmoil, a reaction of moral indignation and disorientation, a reaction to bondage in the putative land of liberty, is ours as well. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:400 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. L. Ayu Saraswati People, Professionalization, and Promises: Navigating the Politics of PhD Programs in Women’s Studies I have been housed at four different universities—all in women’s studies. My PhD is from the University of Maryland, College Park. I completed a postdoctoral program at Emory University. My first tenure track position was at the University of Kansas. I (...) am currently a tenured associate professor and graduate advisor at the University of Hawai’i. All of these places have strong women’s studies graduate programs. Yet, each program has its own vision of what a women’s studies doctoral program should look like. Some define their interdisciplinarity by asking students to master at least two disciplinary methods and methodologies as they focus on a particular major field; others offer “tracks” in other disciplines that the program has formally approved and collaborates with; and yet others ask students to credential themselves in two disciplines—the goal being students can then get hired in other disciplines, rather than simply banking only on getting a job in women ’s studies. Which model is best, one may ask? The answer, of course, depends on what one wants to do with a PhD in women’s studies. Hence, in what follows, I will lay out several factors to consider when deciding which program to choose. Then, I will share some challenges we have experienced as faculty members building women’s studies PhD programs so that university administrators can L. Ayu Saraswati 401 further build on and engage in this important conversation of shaping the future of women’s studies PhD programs. For Future PhDs: What I Have Learned as a Women’s Studies PhD Graduate The good news is that not all women’s studies PhD programs are the same. It is up to students to choose which one fits their goal. If students are wholly invested in being interdisciplinary scholars and willing to put all of their eggs in one women’s studies basket, then doctoral programs structured around areas of study or major fields may work better. The University of Maryland, for example, offers five major fields: Gender, Race, Racialization, and/or Diaspora Studies; Art, Culture, Technologies, and Social Change; Bodies, Gender and Sexualities; Gendered Labor, Households and Communities; and Women’s Movements, Global and Local. If none of these major fields fits perfectly—as the fields often reflect the faculty members’ expertise, students can create their own. After choosing or creating a major field, students will then take classes— in theories and methods—that will solidly ground their expertise in their chosen field. In this setup, students may take classes from many departments, such as history, anthropology, ethnic studies, and English, for example, that are centered around their field. The assumption (or the hope) is when students travel through and take these classes in different disciplinary locations, they will then synthesize and transform the knowledge they learn in each department to produce truly interdisciplinary knowledge. The drawback of this model, however, is that it may be harder for the students to land a job in a traditional discipline or in a discipline other than women’s studies. This may be because it is not uncommon that students end up crafting or adopting a more avantgarde method of analysis that does not simply sit neatly in one discipline, such as “literary ethnography,” for example. Many times, however, new and avant-garde methods that students design may not be perceived as innovative. Rather, they may be seen as incoherent. Indeed, as Mary Margaret Fonow and Sally Kitch argue in their article “Analyzing Women ’s Studies Dissertations: Methodologies, Epistemologies and Field Formation,” not devising and discussing a solid feminist methodology that would clearly link the argument and the evidence is one of the main 402 L. Ayu Saraswati problems found in many of these dissertations.1 Their suggestion, therefore, is to strengthen the “fundamentals of research design and writing.” (I will return to this issue later.) In cases where students would like to entertain the possibilities of securing a job in disciplines other than women’s studies, programs that offer concentrations based on... (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"To make a difference...":Narrative Desire in Global MedicineByron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio GoodIf, as Arthur Frank (2002) writes, "moral life, for better and worse, takes place in storytelling," this collection of narratives written by physicians working in field settings in global medicine gives us a glimpse of some aspects of moral experience, practice, and dilemmas in settings of poverty and low health care resources. These essays are written (...) from the midst of practice, in diverse settings in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The majority of the writers are practitioners of contemporary 'global medicine'—physicians from North America or Europe who spend part of their lives flying into settings of poverty or special need to practice medicine and work with on-going collaborative clinical and public health systems—while a smaller number are working in the societies in which they were born. Although a few work for classic humanitarian organizations or have developed their own local NGO's, the great majority are engaged in the 'hybrid life' described by Robert Riviello and noted by Renée Fox, moving between academic medical centers and distant health care systems that are supported by local governments, major international organizations and funding agencies, and international NGO's like Partners in Health. These diverse forms of practice have become a common model for contemporary clinicians engaged in what has emerged as a new discipline of global health or global medicine, and these narratives give us a glimpse of some of the enduring, as well as newly emerging, forms of moral practice and ethical dilemmas characteristic of today's global medicine.Many of these stories are filled with the tension and pathos that makes clinical narratives powerful to read. Physicians are forced to make unfathomable decisions about whether to resuscitate and keep a baby alive, using all means available, or to let the infant die, whether to carry out a procedure that will save an infant in birth but would put the mother at risk, about how to deal with a cancer found in a very advanced state. However, virtually all of the stories transcend these classical stories of the decisions physicians are forced to make by being placed in settings of great scarcity of resources, which stand in particular contrast to the academic medical settings in North America or Europe where many of these global medicine specialists have trained and many continue to practice. The unspeakable inequality of resources emerges throughout these narratives as a kind of master theme, as the underlying moral, as opposed to plot, which gives meaning and sense to the stories. For those who practice medicine in such settings, global inequalities and scarcity of medical resources are deeply felt. They produce the rage that Jeffrey Deal describes. ("I learned to despise American churches during that time, a time when my world encompassed a dying newborn in Sudan, as well as the air conditioned padded seats [End Page 121] of our affluent suburban church.") They produce the distinctive experiences of helplessness and pain felt by clinicians who cannot separate how they would be able to treat such a patient at home from how they have to practice in these settings. For those clinicians working in their own societies, scarcity of resources often produces deep anger at the corrupt governments that fail to support basic human services for the great majority of their population. ("We were temporary actors performing in the cynical play of scarcity on permanent display in Port-au-Prince," writes Haitian physician Paul Pierre about his experience prior to joining Partners in Health.)But for those who regularly travel back and forth across the divide between rich and poor, whether across national boundaries or within their own society, the challenge to live a moral life is unendingly complicated. While becoming a part of a struggle for global justice with colleagues and advocates from both sides of the divide, few of the narrators can avoid personal feelings of ambivalence and guilt at being able to easily move from one side of that divide to the other back home. Many fantasize about giving up their lives in the north to devote themselves... (shrink)

This volume attempts to show why ontology matters for a proper grasp of issues in bioethics. -/- Contemporary discussions on bioethics often focus on seeking solutions for a wide range of issues that revolve around persons. The issues in question are multi-layered, involving such diverse aspects as the metaphysical/ontological, personal, medical, moral, legal, cultural, social, political, religious, and environmental. In navigating through such a complex web of issues, it has been said that the central problems philosophers and bioethicists (...) face are ethical in nature. In this regard, biomedical sciences and technological breakthroughs take a leading role in terms of shaping the sorts of questions that give rise to ethical problems. For example, is it ethical to keep terminally ill patients alive on dialysis machines or artificial ventilators? Is it ethical to take someone’s vital organs upon death and transplant them into another person’s body without any prior consent from a deceased person? Reproductive techniques also raise complicated ethical issues involving in vitro fertilization, contraceptives, prenatal testing, abortions, and genetic enhancements. Moreover, biomedical issues raise ethical problems in regards to research on human subjects, stem cell research, and enhancement biotechnology. The beginning and end of life issues bring up their own complicated ethical conundrums involving, among other things, terminating life support and euthanasia. -/- This book approaches such complex bioethical questions by engaging in ground-level debates about the ontology of persons. This is a non-negotiable first step in taking steps forward in seeking a plausible solution(s) for the complex ethical problems in bioethics. Although the contributors in this book advance their arguments in their own ways, they all agree on one crucial methodological point: the importance of taking the ontology of persons for bioethics seriously. This is the spirit that brings the contributors of this book together as they seek to build their case(s) concerning the nature of persons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Call to Arms? —Militarism, Political Unity, and the Moral Equivalent of WarJohn Kaag1. IntroductionIn 1906, William James presented “The Moral Equivalent of War” and turned his attention to a question that has for better and for worse defined the American political landscape, namely, the question of how to maintain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of an immediate and galvanizing threat. Today, even (...) in a time of war, this question remains as pressing as it is perplexing. Indeed, it seems perplexing that the question often appears so very pressing. This problematic seems to warrant a detailed investigation if we are to propose viable and philosophically sound alternatives to the presumed military ethos and the political unity it seems to beget. In developing alternatives, James suspects that instead of jettisoning this unifying ethos we ought to admit the benefits of some of its aspects while owning up to, and mitigating, its destructive tendencies. This task seems challenging, if not wholly impossible, in light of the current geopolitical situation. It seems fair—if only slightly ironic—for American philosophers to explore the possibilities of this project.This paper aims to revisit several key points in James’s “The Moral Equivalent of War” and in his article “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In so doing, it has two related purposes. First, it presents James as an overtly social-political thinker, challenging the notion Cornel West expressed, that “James had nothing profound or even provocative to say... in regard to politics” (West 60). Secondly, and more specifically, I argue that these essays shed theoretical light on the related topics of military action, social-political commitment, and personal virtue. In the first three sections of the paper, I show how James’s comments continue to enlighten our political situation with astonishing, if not disturbing, clarity. As a brief analysis of Cold War [End Page 108] history exposes, James is surprisingly prescient in identifying the perceived relationship between threat and the coalescence of political organization. In the face of an external or internal threat, certain portions of domestic populations tend to “rally around the flag,” committing themselves to protective and military purposes. Echoing James, Randolph Bourne (a student of John Dewey) puts this point nicely when in 1918 he suggests that “war is the health of the state” (James, “Moral Equivalent” 349). James predicts that, in the absence of imminent danger, the health of states and the personal virtues of their citizens will decline. This point has been born out in several historical cases but seems to beg several questions: What sort of political unity might be developed without the threat of the disastrous consequences of military assault and occupation? Is the health of the state a good that we ought to seek? If so, what sort of political unity is best? James begs these questions but leaves it to us to answer in a thoroughgoing way. In the last two sections of the paper, I begin to formulate this answer along Jamesian lines.In “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James makes the seemingly odd suggestion that individuals might sublimate the warrior ethos by waging a “war against nature,” coordinating their energies in order to counteract the natural dangers and deficiencies that jeopardize our projects and purposes. I will examine this argument in light of the political context of collective action and environmental stewardship in the 1970s and expose the argument’s strengths and limitations. This discussion revises the way in which many contemporary scholars read James’s suggestion that we might fight or “war against nature.” I conclude this discussion by turning to James’s thesis in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” namely, that we suffer from the inability to see and recognize the inner meaning of the lives of others. (James, “Certain Blindness” 326). This thesis is at the crux of James’s understanding of political unity and must be brought into dialogue with his 1906 address on the moral equivalent of war. At first glance, the meliorism of “On a Certain Blindness” and the heroism of “The Moral Equivalent of War” seem to stand in marked opposition. I intend to demonstrate the complementary... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 53-71 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Politics Jann Matlock [Figures]The failure of the Second Republic, as we know well, thanks to Marx, was a matter of ghostly politics.1 Successful revolutions succeeded—claimed Marx—in "waking the dead" in order to glorify the new struggles. Unsuccessful revolutions parodied, as in 1848, the old ones. The Second Republic failed to find again "the spirit of revolution" ("den Geist der Revolution"); (...) instead, it made its "ghost walk about again" ["Der 18te Brumaire" 116].2The "conjurations of the dead" ("Totenbeschwörungen") [115] of the failed Second Republic—and of the Second Empire, which crowned its disastrous experiment—were nowhere more apparent than in the obsession that swept France in 1853 within months after Louis-Napoléon declared himself Emperor in the spectral shadow of his great-uncle, as contemporary Louis Figuier described:Suddenly—it was near the last days of April 1853—Paris woke up prey to the [Table-]turning epidemic, and the newspapers, which finally had to break the silence, informed us that [the epidemic] had simultaneously burst forth in Strasbourg, in Marseille, in Bordeaux, in Toulouse, and in all our other great population centers. For the public, it was, at first, only a simple amusement to which people everywhere surrendered themselves amidst great bursts of laughter. Pedestal tables [guéridons], [other kinds of] tables, hats, plates and washbasins—everything that was within reach—were called into service. Some people succeeded. Others—and these were the greater number—failed at the experiment; they accused the successful of deception [supercherie], and the successful, in their turn, accused the unsuccessful of failing to believe. "They turn; they donít turn": that summed up all the debates on this subject, and these were the only two terms through which, among the vulgar, the question of the tables was thrashed about. In our country, always quite frivolous about serious matters, though sometimes extreme in its credulousness and sometimes absurd in its skepticism, the tables were for the larger share of people only an amusement, only a way to kill time in society. Quarrels were frequent [End Page 53] on this subject. People denied. People confirmed. People laughed—when they were not losing their tempers.Nevertheless, the phenomenon soon appeared to make progress, and this was quite another story. Not only did the tables turn, but they spoke and wrote; they rose up and held themselves in the air without any strings—or at least without any visible ones. The tables gave consultations, discovered secrets buried in the most profound mystery, put the world of the living in communication with the world of the dead, and finally, behaved in such a way to let people believe they were haunted by spirits [hantées par des esprits]. [294-95] The Baron Du Potet, editor of the Journal du magnétisme, remarked in the summer of 1853 that "The tables are making one hell of a noise! —Enter into the porter's lodge, you'll see him make his table turn; go to the home of a judge, of a lawyer, of an archbishop even, and their tables are turning—after dinner, of course. It seems that they are even interrogating tables in palaces" [643]. Alexandre Erdan, author of an 1855 book on "the religious excentricities" of contemporary France, denounced the table turning as "a universal monomania" and declared it the "the characteristic event" of the year 1853, "that memorable period of universal mental estrangement" [71]. Daumier honored the trend in May and June 1853 with a series of a dozen caricatures called La Fluidomanie.3 Caricaturist Cham continued to ridicule its believers well into the year 1853 [Fig. 1].4 Louis Huart, author of a series of satirical articles in the opposition newspaper Le Charivari recounted a debate between two scholars on the subject: "Sir, are you for tables turning or for tables not turning," asked the first. The second replied, "It's all the same to me so long as the table is well served and it doesn't turn while I'm eating." Huart's conclusion, not dissimilar to that of most... (shrink)

This paper aims to argue how education might be considered and practised if not under the logic of the formation of childhood. As such, it puts into question the traditional way of considering children as representing adults’ opportunity to impose their own ideals, and considering education to be an appropriate instrument for such an end. More specifically, it considers how the purposes of practising philosophy with children might be affirmed as other than in the service of the social (...) and political education of childhood. This complex issue calls for a redefinition, not only of philosophy and education, but also of childhood itself. Several ancient (Heraclitus) and contemporary (Deleuze, Lyotard) philosophical contributions are offered in order to reflect on new concepts and vocabularies for childhood. What they have in common is a non-chronological concept of childhood—one that considers the child under the sign of aión rather than chrónos, and therefore as something inherently constitutive of human life, which therefore could never be abandoned, forgotten or overcome. As an example of this deterritorialisation of the relation between childhood and education, a practical project undertaken in a couple of public schools in the environs of Rio de Janeiro and its environs is presented, in which a strong emphasis is placed on the concept of the ‘experience of philosophical thinking’. The paper unpacks each of these three terms—experience, philosophy, and thinking—appealing to Foucault, Deleuze and Hadot for conceptual reconstruction. In addition, some basic pedagogical assumptions that informed this project are presented in the context of two philosophers who inspired it—Socrates and Jacques Rancière. The last section of the paper reflects on how the practice of mainstream schooling seems actually hostile to the experience of philosophical thinking, thus challenging the practitioners to encounter the pedagogical space of the mainstream as if it were possible to establish a new educational relationship to childhood there, and to work fully expecting what cannot be predicted. (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a foreclosed (...) home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

Background: The introduction of healthcare AI to society as well as the clinical setting will improve individual health statuses and increase the possible medical choices. AI can be, however, regarded as a double-edged sword that might cause medically and socially undesirable situations. In this paper, we attempt to predict several negative situations that may be faced by healthcare professionals, patients and citizens in the healthcare setting, and our society as a whole. Discussion: We would argue that physicians abuse healthcare AI (...) through their excessive and dependent use of it, and they will focus only on the AI services in their office and patient medical data and information, and forget to observe the patient in their clinical encounters. In the era of AI introduction, data from the wearable terminal or AI advice will become the primary target of the physician’s interest, and could be regarded as a patient surrogate. Paternalism would be paradoxically resurrected by the introduction of state-of-the-art AI. A physician’s conflict of interest related to AI as a commercial product could strongly influence his or her actions in clinical settings. We also worry that the general public will become uneasy and hypersensitive slaves to information, compulsively and uninterruptedly requesting healthcare information concerning their own health and advice from AI. An AI system capable of expressing proper and timely empathy to suffering patients could deprive healthcare professionals of their roles in terms of hospitality and emotional exchange. Finally, entire societies would soon share and consolidate healthcare sensitive information from all in the general public as part of a totalitarian healthcontrolled society where individual privacy and personal secrets could be neglected. The advent of the healthcontrolled society could lead to the metamorphosis of the concept of privacy itself into something completely different. Conclusion: Although AI which surpasses human healthcare professionals may never appear, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst is the best approach to take. To this end, we present some potential countermeasures including conducting clinical research and social investigations concerning problems surrounding the introduction of AI and developing guidelines for its appropriate use. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

What does it mean for an epidemic to end, and who gets to declare that it is over? This multidisciplinary spotlight issue provides 18 case studies, each examining specific epidemics and their ends as well as the methodologies used to measure, gauge, and define an epidemic's end. They demonstrate that an epidemic's end is often contentious, raising issues of competing authority. Various forms of expertise jostle over who declares an end, as well as what data and information (...) should be used to measure and define the end of an epidemic. As a result, it is more accurate to describe multiple endings to an epidemic: the medical end, the political end, and the social end. At the same time, multidisciplinary research into the ends of epidemics highlights the crucial role of information and measurement in an epidemic's end, as well as the ways in which ending forces observers to rethink and reconceptualize time. Whereas the declaration of an epidemic suggests a neatly defined period of emergency, the end is a messy process incorporating competing accounts of what went wrong and fears of the next epidemic, in which cycles of multiple diseases and overlapping social crises disrupt a simple return to normal life, articulating the nature of epidemics not just as medical phenomena, but also as fundamentally political and social ones. The end period therefore looks both forward and backward, often applying “lessons learned” from the history of the ended epidemic to the future, in anticipation of the next outbreak. Re-envisioning the future is a way to analyse and understand the past epidemic, and thereby to restore human agency into society's relationship with disease. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Demise of the Aesthetic in Literary StudyEugene GoodheartAnumber of years ago at an MLA convention I was on a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in Victorian literature in our department. One of the candidates had done a dissertation on Christina Rossetti in which “Goblin Market” played a prominent role. As I recall, the candidate was putting forth a New Historicist or feminist argument about the (...) poem, when one of my colleagues on the committee interrupted her with the question: “But is it a good poem?” The question took me by surprise, for I didn’t remember such a question having been asked of students in years. It dumbfounded the candidate. She had apparently never considered the question. The poem was there as an occasion for... I was about to write interpretation or analysis, but it would be more accurate to say: a placement in a particular discourse—historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, ideological. The candidate’s fluency about the poem came to a halt. She spluttered a few phrases about the power of the poem. She was unprepared to answer the question, having never been asked or taught to ask it by her teachers of any poem or novel or play that she had read.We may not have been fair in our judgment of her. If we had been consistent and asked the same question of all the candidates, I don’t think we would have met with greater success. Our candidate’s disability was, indeed still is, built into the profession of literary studies at the present time. That aesthetic judgment is not one of the current professional practices is clear not only from its absence in the content of literary study but from the styles of the discoursers. No longer written [End Page 139] in a vernacular style, criticism has become a species of sociological prose once held in contempt by literary scholars: ponderous, abstract, obscure, ungainly, jargonish. There are practitioners of New Historicism, ideology critique, and deconstruction who write well, but who seem to regard their own gifts of expression as incidental, and are not in the least discomfited by the bad writing of others.Style is not an incidental matter. Orwell made a compelling case for its political and moral significance. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” he preaches the virtues of plain speech, the transparent and elegant style as a mark of self-honesty. (Transparency makes it difficult to conceal your ideas from yourself.) In Writing Degree Zero and subsequent writings, Barthes deconstructed, so to speak, the Enlightenment myth of transparency as a guarantor of honesty and truth. Reality was not as perspicuous to “natural” plain writing as the Enlightenment believed. Barthes’s own style (rich, inventive, personal, alternately perspicuous, and obscure) is that of an imaginative writer. I don’t want to adjudicate the differences between Orwell and Barthes, but I should note what may not be obvious: they have a shared aesthetic concern with style, a concern that has virtually disappeared from academic discourse.It has become almost an embarrassment to speak in behalf of aesthetic value in the academy. One of the few unembarrassed exceptions is the voice of Harold Bloom whose jeremiad The Western Canon begins defiantly with an affirmation of the aesthetic against its demystifiers. “‘Aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” 1 I take it that Bloom is saying that aesthetic value is an experience and not a theory. Indeed, if we insist on a theoretical justification of the aesthetic, we will end up speaking as does Barbara Herrnstein Smith of its contingent and subjective status (it is in the eye of the beholder and every beholder sees things differently) or we may find that the aesthetic is inescapably contaminated by political, moral, and philosophical interests. “Contaminated” perhaps, but as Bloom says, not reducible to these interests. It is useful to remember that aesthetics has been traditionally associated with the idea of disinterestedness. As Jerome Stolnitz remarks, we perceive beauty when it is the object of a “disinterested and sympathetic attention... (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 102-108 [Access article in PDF] Symposium IntroductionEric Katz's Nature As Subject Andrew Light Can and should we distinguish between nature and culture? The question has become a perennial one in environmental ethics, as well as in allied fields in environmental history, sociology, and politics. And just when we think it is settled—as many did after William Cronon's famous deconstruction of wilderness in 1995—and (...) it feels safe to go back into the metaphysical waters of environmental philosophy, such issues pop up again to send us running.What follows extends this debate in the context of Eric Katz's well-known work in environmental ethics. Brought together here are Katz and two critics sympathetic to his positions, Wayne Ouderkirk and Ned Hettinger. While the occasion for the exchange was the publication of Katz's book, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (1997), which collects his papers from 1979 to 1996, the focus quickly became somewhat narrower, centering on possible problems with Katz's ontological dualism between natural and artifactual entities.Katz has exerted a strong influence on the development of environmental ethics, particularly through his persistent arguments for a distinction between individualist and holist approaches to obligations to the nonhuman natural world and his metaphysical and moral critique of attempts [End Page 102] by humans to create, repair, or restore nature. While these positions continue to be on display here, there is also something more. In this exchange Katz throws down the gauntlet on his nature-culture dualism, admitting at the start that the accusation is true. Like the Protestants in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, he is a dualist—and fiercely proud of it! Despite whatever misgivings I or others may have about this position, I believe that in making this claim, Katz, similar to David Chalmers's open embrace and resuscitation of dualism in philosophy of mind, has done us a great service. For it is arguably true that many environmental philosophers, along with other academics, have settled into a complacent "labeling as argument" pattern. If we can label a position as "dualist" or "essentialist," then our work is done. But surely not every form of dualism is necessarily wrong, even if, as Ouderkirk reminds us in his reading of Val Plumwood's work, the logic of many forms of dualism has tended toward a pernicious pattern. Arguments are needed in both directions. If nature-culture dualism is mistaken or wrongheaded, or leads to unfortunate conclusions, then we must know why; if dualism is the only way to make sense of the hurdles presented to us in coming to a better understanding of the value of nature and culture then we must know why as well. And further, because many in the field have assumed a nature-culture dualism without admitting to it, we can admire that Katz chooses to "fess up" and finally put the issue squarely on the table.If this is the road we are heading down with this particular exchange, then we are off to a good start. Both critics of Katz do a thorough job of pressing home their arguments, rather than only pointing accusatory fingers. Ned Hettinger, in "The Problem of Finding a Positive Role for Humans in the Natural World," avoids using the term "dualism," but nonetheless argues that Katz has a tendency to "rigidly dichotomize the natural/artifactual distinction." Additionally, Hettinger argues that Katz tends to overlook his own admission that the differences between nature and artifacts admit to degrees rather than a strict dualism. Hettinger focuses the bulk of his critique on the unfortunate upshot of such a position: given such a distinction, there is little if any place for a positive role for human intervention in nature, or for a philosophical contribution to the formation of better environmental policies.Wayne Ouderkirk, in "Katz's Problematic Dualism and its 'Seismic' Effects on His Theory," is sympathetic with Katz's intuitions that some distinction is needed between artifacts and natural entities. The problem [End Page 103] he sees is that such... (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)