Some Wisdom from Wisdom

John Wisdom (1904-1993)

“My dear, it’s the Taj Mahal.”  That is what the 20th century British philosopher John Wisdom imagines one woman saying to another, a friend who is trying on a hat and who is “studying the reflection in a mirror like a judge considering a case.”  After a pause, her friend says (“in tones too clear,” writes Wisdom) the remark about the Taj Mahal.  “Instantly the look of indecision leaves the face in the mirror.  All along she has felt there was about the hat something that wouldn’t quite do.  Now she sees what it is.”

According to Wisdom’s analysis, talk of God has important similarities with such everyday uses of metaphor.  What he is saying is not that the things people say about God (such as that God is all powerful or all knowing, for example, or that God is love) are said of God metaphorically (as the woman in Wisdom’s story says metaphorically of the hat that it’s the Taj Mahal).  That idea—that the things believers “predicate” of God are predicated metaphorically—is an ancient one.  But that is not the point that Wisdom is making.  

Instead, Wisdom is making the point that people use sentences such as “God exists” or “God does not exist” in much the same way that the woman in his little story uses the remark about the Taj Mahal.  By his thinking, the way the woman in the story uses that line is not at all to convey any new information.  It’s not to tell anybody anything they didn’t already know, or already see clearly enough.  As Wisdom is careful to note, “the hat could be seen clearly and completely before the words ‘The Taj Mahal’ were uttered.”  He goes on:  

And the words were not effective because they referred to something hidden like a mouse in a cupboard, like germs in the blood, like a wolf in sheeps’ clothing.  To one about to buy false diamonds the expert friend murmurs “Glass,” to one terrified by what [s]he takes to be a snake the good host whispers “Stuffed.”  But that’s different.  That is to tell somebody something [s]he doesn’t know—that that snake won’t bite, that cock won’t fight.  But to call a hat the Taj Mahal is not to inform someone that it has mice in it or will cost a fortune.  It is more like saying to someone “Snakes” of snakes in the grass but not concealed by the grass but still so well camouflaged that one can’t see what’s before one’s eyes.  Even this case is different from that of the hat and the woman.  For in the case of the snakes the element of warning, the element of predictive warning, is still there mixed, intimately mixed, with the element of revealing what is already visible.  This last element is there unmixed when someone says of a hat which is plainly and completely visible “It’s the Taj Mahal.”

Wisdom suggests that a lot of religious discourse, including “There is a God” or “God exists,” is just like that.  It doesn’t tell anybody anything new.  Nor does it (at least it doesn’t have to) mix the issuing of warnings or similar things with just letting something be seen.  Instead, all it does is just that:  to let something be seen.  But what’s most interesting about such religious discourse that just lets something be seen is the same thing that’s most interesting about his Taj Mahal hat example.  What is most interesting about all that is that what’s said—what’s revealed or opened up to be seen by such discourse—is nothing that isn’t already clearly visible and completely evident and seen even before anything’s said.  It’s a matter of revealing what was never covered over in the first place, but was hiding in plain sight all along, like telling someone who’s looking for her glasses that she’s wearing them already.  Such remarks, such discourse, let’s those who have the eyes for it, see, or those who have the ears for it, hear.  

Often times, what most needs to be pointed out is not what’s hidden away or disguised, but precisely what’s there in plain sight for everybody to see.  It’s something so obvious that we need special attention or help not to overlook it.  What we overlook is not what’s glaring and showy, what’s flashy and fresh, what calls attention to itself one way or another.  It’s what’s right there in front of us but does not call attention to itself, what’s inconspicuous and unobtrusive.  That’s what trips us up most easily and often.

What’s obvious, so inconspicuous and unobtrusive that we almost always overlook it, is sometimes what’s most important.  Sometimes it’s what’s really most striking and wonder-provoking--what’s most riveting of our attention, once it is pointed out.  Like pointing out the snakes plainly visible in the grass all along, but for that very reason unnoticed until someone says “Snakes!” and lets what’s so plainly visible be seen. 

Wisdom is suggesting that religious discourse is at least often like that (except, as he is careful to note, that the element of warning that goes with the example of the snakes need not be present—though, I would add, it can be).  It doesn’t so much tell us anything new, convey to us any information that isn’t already readily available and even, in one clear sense, already known by everybody, as it does let us see it again for the first time.  It is like the line in the poem by T. S. Eliot about how we finally, after all our journeying, come back again to the same place we started, only now we know it for the first time.

“God is dead in Salem!”  John Proctor, the central character in The Crucible—Arthur Miller’s drama about the Salem witch-trials, written during the same period that Wisdom made his remarks, and occasioned for Miller by the McCarthy witch-hunt for “communists” everywhere in the United States—cries out at a critical juncture in the action of the play.  In some ways that statement is less about God than about Salem—or, rather, so far as that goes, than about the United States during the McCarthy period.  Or, rather, it is about God, but no less about Salem, about the U.S. in the nineteen-fifties—and about much more, which is finally beyond cataloguing.  

God is dead in Proctor’s Salem, which is and is not the United States in the Eisenhower years, or the United States (and elsewhere) even today.  But the Devil is alive and well there.  

Note to readers: The above post is most of a section from “Hushed Talk of God,” a chapter in my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life (available in the “Shop” at the top of this blog site). All the quotations from John Wisdom are from his piece “The Modes of Thought and the Logic of God,” contained in John Hick, editor, The Existence of God (New York: Macmillan, 1964). 

Neglecting Ourselves

To neglect ourselves is to fail to gather ourselves together. Such failure most often derives from ignorance. In turn, that ignorance itself is sometimes imposed upon us, in which case we are not to blame for our self-neglect. Even then, however, once we become aware of our self-neglect, we are responsible for our own recovery from it. No one else can do it for us; we must do it ourselves.

At other times, the ignorance at the root of our self-neglect is not imposed upon us but is instead a manifestation of our own stupidity. Then our self-neglect derives from our own willful refusal to let ourselves see what is in front of us. It derives from our own motivated blindness, as I call it in my book The Irrelevance of Power (available in the “Shop” at the top of this blog-site). When that is our situation, then we are indeed to blame for our own self-neglect; and we add greatly to our own blameworthiness by refusing to assume responsibility for recovering from our neglecting of ourselves.  

In either case, whether our self-neglect is imposed upon us or is our own fault, to recover from neglecting ourselves is always a matter of self-recollection. That is, to recover from neglecting ourselves is always a matter of collecting ourselves back together from out of the dispersal of ourselves.  Recovery from self-neglect is always and only such self-recollection. If we are ever to recover from neglecting ourselves, whether by our own fault or by the fault of others, we must glean the fields wherein the seeds of ourselves have taken root and then grown.

In short, to recover from neglecting ourselves we must — either once again or for the very first time — harvest our very selves.  

*     *    *

neglect (v.): from ne- as negative prefix, plus PIE root *leg- “to collect, to gather.” 

recollect (v.):  from Latin recollectus, past participle of recolligere "to take up again, regain," etymologically "to collect again," from re- "again" + colligere “gather” (see collect (v.)).

re- (prefix): directly from Latin re- an inseparable prefix meaning "again; back; anew, against." Often merely intensive. 

collect (v.): from Latin collectus, past participle of colligere "gather together," from assimilated form of com "together" + legere "to gather," from PIE root *leg- "to collect, gather."

glean (v.):  "to gather by acquisition, scrape together," especially grains left in the field after harvesting, but the earliest use in English is figurative, from Old French glener "to glean" (14c., Modern French glaner) "to glean," from Late Latin glennare "make a collection," of unknown origin. 

harvest (n.): Old English hærfest "autumn," as one of the four seasons, "period between August and November," from Proto-Germanic harbitas (source also of Old Saxon hervist, Old Frisian and Dutch herfst, German Herbst "autumn," Old Norse haust "harvest"), from PIE root *kerp- "to gather, pluck, harvest."

All the above entries have been collectively harvested from the Online Etymology Dictionary. If one does not neglect them but keeps them firmly in one’s recollection and then rereads the preceding section of this blog, one may well glean more from crossing back over that section than one did from one’s first crossing.

Concepts, just like individuals, have their history and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time, but in and through it all they nevertheless harbor a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (trans. Howard V. & Edna H. Hong)

*     *     *

Now my head was like permanently located halfway between being bummed from no dope and unconscious from too much, only it was like my true self that I’d locked onto there, the self that hadn’t been fucked up by my childhood and all and the self that wasn’t completely whacked in reaction. 

                                                                        — Russell Banks  

As Faulkner once famously said, well-crafted fiction is truer than the most accurate journalistic account. If one wants to experience the truth of neglecting oneself, and the truth of then hearing and obeying the command to assume responsibility for one’s self-neglect by pulling one’s self together from out of one’s scatteredness, one can glean a rich harvest from reading Russell Banks’s fine novel Rule of the Bone, first published in 1995, from which I have myself harvested the quotation at the beginning of this section of today’s post. 

That novel is the story told through the voice of a teenager who. . .  

Well, read it yourself and find out!

Russell Banks at the 2011 Texas Book Festival

The End of Education

The title of this blog post is polysemic, as I often make my post titles. It can mean more than one thing. Taken one way the phrase “the end of education” would mean what education aims to achieve, its goal or purpose. In another way of taking the same phrase it would mean the point at which all education is brought to a stop, frustrated of ever reaching its goal. 

I will address each of those two senses of the end of education in turn, one at a time in each of the following two sections of this post.

*     *     *

 Education’s end, its goal or purpose, lies beyond all mere acquisition of accurate information concerning what one is being educated about. The goal of education is not the acquisition of such information, which is at best only one tool of use in some cases, though far from all, for attaining that goal. Since such information is what is often called knowledge, we could put the same point by saying that the end of education, in the sense of its goal or purpose, lies altogether beyond all mere acquisition of knowledge. 

Instead of aiming at any increase in knowledge, education aims at imparting vision, at giving one eyes to see. The goal of education is to induce insight.

In-sight is still sight. However, it is a seeing into rather than a seeing that remains only on the surface, gaping at the spectacle of whatever comes before the eyes like an image on a screen. 

Insight brings understanding. The seeing of those granted insight is anything but mere sight-seeing, the sort of seeing in which we often indulge during travel-vacations. The seeing that is insight and brings understanding is not like such sight-seeing. Instead, it “puts things in proper perspective,” as we say. That is, insight lets us see things in their own proper places. Thus, insight is a placing vision: it lets us see the place to which belongs whatever we are encountering.

Such insight goes far beyond the mere beholding of any spectacle. There is in that sense nothing at all “spectacular” about insight. Insight displays nothing to view that has not been open to view before. Rather, it lets us see clearly at last just what has been displaying itself before us, but that we theretofore lacked the eyes truly to see. 

Insight, then, gives nothing new to see. Rather, it gives us new seeing, letting the scales fall from our eyes. It is not seeing anything new; it is seeing things newly.

If you want to store a bunch of information, it would be wise to use a computer. That way you can keep yourself open for gifts of insight into what all that information is about in the first place. 

The end of education is to open the mind to receiving such gifts.

*     *     *

When schooling becomes no more than a process of training and imparting new information, schooling works against education. All too often in our contemporary global consumer society, schooling becomes nothing more than such training and such conveying of information. Where that occurs, openness to insight is not fostered. It becomes at best accidental, a matter of pure chance, rather than what the schooling aims to accomplish. Education ceases to be what schools impart when the imparting of information and the provision of training become paramount. 

When that occurs, it is the end of education.

Argh! An Argument!

“Don’t let arguing get in the way of the argument!” 

I used to say that to the students in my philosophy classes from time to time.  Sometimes, I would explain what I meant along the following lines:

Our word argument eventually traces back to the presumed Proto-Indo-European root *arg-, which meant “to shine,” like the white metal we call silver, the archaic name of which was argent. Keep that in mind as you go on to consider two very different sorts of conversations, in both types of which we have all been engaged many times, I’m sure. Reflect upon how the two sorts differ from one another. Let that difference itself shine forth!

First, there is that sort of conversation in which the parties involved exchange information concerning their respective views or opinions about the topic under discussion. This is the sort of conversation in which all the parties involved more or less patiently and politely — typically less and less of either, the longer the conversation goes on — tell one another what propositions they hold for true about the given topic. 

In this first type of conversation, listening is often at a minimum, whereas talking is at a maximum. Before the conversation even begins, everyone participating already knows what they think; their individual opinions are already formed before the conversation begins, and what’s at issue is simply to vocalize those opinions. In such a conversation, the real topic of the conversation is those opinions themselves, rather than that about which the communicants have those opinions. 

For example, imagine a small group of people at a cocktail party who fall into conversation about current United States policy toward Russia and the Ukraine. In such cocktail party chatter that policy itself is not really what the chatter is all about. Rather, it focuses on the exchange of the party-goers’ opinions of that policy. When the party is over, everyone comes away knowing quite a bit that they did not know before. Everybody now has new information about what everybody else holds for true. 

However, it is only accidentally, if at all, that any of the cocktailers comes away knowing anything new about US policy. What one essentially acquires from such conversations is just new knowledge of the opinions of the other cocktailers—“new” if one didn’t already know all that even before the start of the conversation, thanks to prior conversations of the same type with the same co-partyers. (We will leave it up to information brokers to determine the exchange-value of such knowledge.) 

In contrast, consider a different type of conversation, one in which the parties involved do not already cling to any cherished opinions about the matter ostensibly under discussion and in which, therefore, the real matter at issue is not the exchange of opinions but is, rather, the genuine exploration of whatever is being addressed. The focus of this second kind of conversation is not, in fact, acquiring any new information at all, most especially any information about the opinions of the other communicants. The focus is instead precisely on exploring the topic at issue in all such opinions, exploring that topic in an effort to acquire new insight into it, rather than information about anyone’s opinions on it (or anything else). 

In sharp contrast to the first type of conversation, the cocktail-party sort, for this second type of conversation what has premium status is precisely attentive listening rather than talking. However, what one is focally listening to is not so much the other persons present as it is what, following the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of 20th century phenomenology, could best be called “the thing itself,” whatever that thing under discussion might be. 

In conversations of this second type, we let whatever we are talking about, that thing itself, hold our attention. We grant it room to unfold itself like a flower at bloom in and through our conversation, building its own case, making its own argument, shining in its own brilliance. 

Arguing with one another just dulls the shine of the thing’s own silvery argument. 

Philosophy? What's That?

Das eigens übernommene und sich entfaltende Entsprechen, das dem Zuspruch des Seins des Seienden entspricht, ist die Philosophie.

That’s a line from near the end of a talk Martin Heidegger gave in August 1955 in Cerisy-la-Salle, France. Here’s my own translation: “The expressly adopted and self-unfolding corresponding, which corresponds to the appeal of the Being of beings, is philosophy.”

Heidegger used both a French and a German lecture title. The German title he used Was ist das — die Philosophie? Given his audience, he tried with that title to approximate as closely as possible the French title of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?   A corresponding English effort matching the German title would be What is that — philosophy?

The English translation of the essay by Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, which came out early in 1958, less than three years after Heidegger first delivered his address, bore the more standard English title What Is Philosophy? However, I prefer the less standard English version, and have even tweaked it a bit more to use as the title of this post.  

Don’t take that to mean this post is about Heidegger. It isn’t. It’s about philosophy. Or rather, at least at the deepest level this post isn’t even so much about philosophy itself as it is simply about thinking. That, too, is in accord with Heidegger’s own way, and serves to acknowledge how indebted my own thinking is to his work.

Heidegger aside, perhaps the most descriptively accurate title I could have given this post would have been:

Philosophy? What’s that got to do with thinking?

The answer, I fear, is that all too often what has come to be called “philosophy” in academic circles has all too little to do with thinking—and in fact that remark comes closest to telling you what this post is about.

*     *     *

ladder (n.): Old English hlæder "ladder, steps," from Proto-Germanic *hlaidri (source also of Old Frisian hledere, Middle Dutch ledere, Old High German leitara, German Leiter), from suffixed form of PIE root *klei- "to lean." 

                                                            — Online Etymological Dictionary

You might say that this post is about the degeneration that already long ago now began to beset philosophy in such a way as to separate philosophy from thinking. That was done above all by the academicization of philosophy, that is, by making philosophy into just one more academic specialty among all the others from algebra to zoology. 

However, once separated from thinking, philosophy in fact ceases to be philosophy at all any longer — at least in my own philosopher’s judgment. It ceases to be anything resembling “the love of wisdom,” which is etymologically and originally the meaning of that word, derived as it is from the Greek philo- “loving” plus sophia “wisdom.”

 A few decades ago, I had the unmitigated audacity to foreground a discussion of that etymology of the term philosophy to begin An Introduction to the History of Philosophy. That is what I entitled a two-volume work I wrote back in the mid-1980s. I wrote it solely for the purpose of using it as the text for the general education introductory philosophy courses I was regularly assigned as a faculty member in the philosophy department of the University of Denver. Two of my department colleagues also found my text to be worth using in their own introduction to philosophy courses. 

The text worked so well for all three of us that I decided to send it to a book publisher. The editor of that press followed standard procedures and sent my manuscript on to some other philosophy professor for review for possible publication. That reviewer recommended against publication, and the publisher accordingly declined to publish it, then attached the reviewer’s negative comments to my rejection letter.

The academically certified professor of philosophy who wrote the negative review of my two-volume work haughtily dismissed my guiding use in my text of the etymology of the word philosophy by writing that the etymology of that word was no more enlightening than was that of the word ladder, which ultimately derives from a root that means “to lean.” 

I remember thinking, when I read that comment, how revealing, in fact, that etymology of ladder actually is, contrary to what the reviewer was saying. After all, anyone who has ever used a straight ladder knows perfectly well that using it requires one to lean it against the structure up which one is trying to climb. Thus, only thoughtlessness would lead anyone to dismiss the etymology of ladder as irrelevant to that term’s current meaning.

I cannot speak for that reviewer or others of the same ilk, but I am happy to attest that in the way I have always used the term, philosophy is the provoking — literally, if I may be permitted reference to the etymology of that word, “the calling forth” — of thought, including any provocation thereof by exploration of the etymology of a word. For me, the answer to the question “Philosophy? What’s that?” is that philosophy is indeed the friendly love for, or loving friendship toward, wisdom. 

Such love always seeks the good of whom or which it loves for that beloved’s own sake — as Aristotle, for one, knew and said — and gladly communicates such loving friendship to others, also for the sake of the beloved as such. As I use the word, anything that truly provokes thought is indeed “philosophical”:  it is “of,” or “pertaining to,” philosophy itself, precisely in the etymologically original sense of that term. It is only in that original and originary sense of the word that philosophy has ever attracted any love from me personally, at any rate. 

So much for academic certification, I guess.     

Hoping for Hopeless Hope

Hope, now, is an exercise to see if I still have it in me to hope, despite all the reasons not to that are staring me in the face. The effort of hoping yields its own rewards, no matter the outcome and as intangible as they may sometimes seem. [. . .] Right now, it’s all we’ve got as we stand like Pippin waiting for the next battle, hoping to have hope.

                                                             — William Rivers Pitt

Pitt is senior editor and lead columnist for the online alternate news source Truthout. The lines above come from his opinion piece “Two Years of COVID Have Forced Us to Recalibrate Our Concept of Hope,” which was published in Truthout on Christmas Day, 2021. 

Nor is Christmas, that time of the fulfillment of expectant awaiting, a bad time to think hope all the way through. Perhaps we can thereby even learn better how to think—by learning something of how to let hope call thought forth.

However, any hope that could initiate thinking by calling it forth would have to be a thoroughly hope-less hope in one important sense. It would have to be authentic hope—hope that has clarified itself entirely, freeing itself from every bit of in-authentic hope that clings to it.

Such hopeless hope is what is truly most worth hoping for.

The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.

— G. K. Chesterton

*     *     *

 In reality hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs our torments.  

                                                                        — Friedrich Nietzsche

Waiting is more initiating and far-reaching than all hoping, which always counts with something on something.

                                                                        — Martin Heidegger

Any hope the fulfillment of which counts on some specific outcome to a given situation tends to denature hope. Such hoping for a pre-defined outcome robs hope of its full power, its infinite capacity to keep open the way to whatever the future may bring. It turns hope from an open and opening willed expectancy that can never be extinguished into a closed and closing wishful expectation that is always doomed to eventual frustration — something that, as Nietzsche says in the line from him above, always just prolongs an underlying torment. 

Authentic hope accepts with gratitude whatever is given, and then communicates such grateful acceptance to others. True hope refuses ever to let itself be closed off and shut down, and it always extends itself broadly.  It is infectious. 

In contrast, false hope is no more than a disguised wish, the mere simulacrum of genuine hope. Such false hope is selfish, self-centered, and easily shut down. It remains incommunicable. 

Sartre famously said that life begins the other side of despair. Given the etymology of the word despair (from Latin de- “without” plus sperare “to hope”) that means that life begins the other side of hopelessness. 

It is only there, too, that true hope is born.

*     *     *

Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.”

                                                                        — Romans 4:18 (NRSV)

True hope does not prolong one’s torment, as does the false hope Nietzsche addresses. Instead, true hope overcomes torment. It continues without reservation to trust that the promises it has received will be fulfilled, regardless of how desolate things may appear at any given moment. Only such persistent, unfathomably faithful trust is authentic hope, freed from all the tormenting illusions of false hope. True hope simply trusts. It is filled full of nothing but faith. 

True hope does not count on things turning out in some given way at some given time, if only one manages well — manages, for example, to have the luck to place one’s bets on the winning number in some game of roulette. True hope opens out beyond all issues of efficacy and expectation, as Heidegger knew and said in the second epigraph to the preceding section of this post.

True hope also has nothing of selfishness or the calculation of private interest about it. In contrast with all such self-centered concern, true hope opens beyond itself, embracing everyone, oneself included, with pure love.

In Christian scripture, Paul knew all that; and let it be known to others, as when he wrote in the following famous verses:   

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

                                                        — 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NRSV) 

*     *     *

To live without hope is to cease to live.

                                                — Fyodor Dostoevsky 

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

                                                                        — Walter Benjamin

Dostoevsky and Benjamin are speaking of true hope in the lines above.

They knew what they were talking about.

A hope-inspiring picture.

Our Disconnection

Typical U. S. commuters in the 1950s

The purpose of newspapers is to paper over what’s new. News-casts—whether over the radio, on TV, or through the internet—are a great way of casting the new away. In general, processing information, however it’s done, can always be relied upon to keep us blind and bewildered. Staying connected to our cell phones and computers is especially effective for fostering our disconnection. 

Diversion is everywhere to be found.

Diversion from what?

From ourselves—and from one another.

Wherever you go, be sure to take numerous selfies. Then post them on Facebook, to make sure all your FB “friends” feel jealous. How entertaining! 

What’s more, taking pictures of yourself on your cell phone when you are in Venice or Prague or at the Eifel Tower in Paris keeps you from having to be wherever you are, connecting with that place itself. What a pleasure!

That way you can even visit Auschwitz and pretend to remember the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust, without having to concern yourself with doing anything to bear witness to their suffering or to change the underlying societal conditions that produced genocide then and continue to produce it today—perpetrated especially by the United States of America, as has always been our country’s wont. Who needs connection with such horrors, when posturing ourselves before the cameras of our cell phones is such a painless and self-inflating way to divert our attention from anything that really calls for attention?  Is it any wonder that everyone does it?

*     *     *

A simple sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the paper. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

 That line is one Albert Camus puts in the mouth of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the fictional and always ironical narrator of The Fall, published in 1956, the last novel Camus completed before his death in an automobile accident in 1960 when he was only 46. 

Reading newspapers is so exhausting of attention that it puts readers to sleep even when their eyes stay wide open, just as fornicating also tires one out while saving one the bother of loving.

In They Thought They Were Free: The German 1933-1945, first published in 1955, Milton Mayer quotes a German scholar he interviewed as speaking to him about “those who understand what is happening—the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments”. In fact, though neither Mayer nor his interviewee make note of it, devoting oneself to the latter is an effective way of keeping oneself ignorant of the former: the more informational “news” one processes, the less one has to bother with such a messy thing as history. 

After all, if one allows oneself to come to an understanding of history, one will not be able to avoid experiencing the call to take part in history. Any Germans who made the mistake of letting themselves experience such a thing in the 1930s and 1940s either had to protest against the Nazi regime, which was a dangerous thing to do, or experience the shame of failing so to protest, which was humiliating. It was much easier for them just to read the papers, losing themselves in the plethora of “reports of single events or developments.”  A model to be followed!

 Günther Anders, who escaped Nazi Germany with his then wife Hannah Arendt, captured well the advantage of such life lived in the oblivion of history, when he wrote in the first volume of his work Die Antiquitertheit des Menschen, which I would translate as “the antiquation of humanity”: “When the world comes to us, rather than we to it, then we are no longer ‘in the world,’ but rather no more than its consumers, denizens in a dreamland of milk and honey.”

Sweet deal!

Our Current Crisis and the Potency of the Archaic

Image by Andonix

PREFATORY NOTE: The following post is a short portion of the new afterword I wrote at the end of 2020 to a set of four lectures on “postmodern” philosophy I originally delivered by invitation at Renmin University in Beijing, China, in the fall of 1998. My four lectures were subsequently published in Chinese translation, along with all the other lectures belonging to the same series. I wrote the new 2020 material—which consisted of the afterword already mentioned, as well as a new foreword, preface, and acknowledgments—for a planned new Chinese edition of the whole lecture series. Those original 1998 lectures along with the new 2020 material are now available in English for the first time — in a paperback edition on Amazon.com, under my name and the following title: After Postmodernity: The Impotence of the Modern.

_________________________________

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

                                                                         — Vandana Shiva[i]

As world-renowned ecofeminist Vandana Shiva herself goes on to explain a bit later in the same source from which I have taken the lines above, the crisis of the current global coronavirus pandemic is also inseparable from the ever-spreading replacement of small-scale farming by massive corporate agribusiness, including the entire complex apparatus of global marketing that inseparably goes with it. It is just such global processes of food production and market distribution that create both the conditions in which parasites continue to mutate into ever more virulent forms, such as Covid-19, and the conditions that generate maximum speed and extent for the spread of such new germ-forms around the entire globe.

Thus, the massive, underlying iceberg of crisis that breaks the surface of global awareness with the coronavirus pandemic is in reality not just a health crisis, nor even just a nexus of multiple health crises, as Shiva addresses in the lines cited above. It is, rather, a Gordian knot of multiple crises, not only medical but also ecological, political, economic, psychological, social, and existential, all tied up tightly with one another. 

As the breaking above the surface of that great complex of interlocking crises, the coronavirus pandemic manifests not only as a great danger, but also as an at least equally great opportunity. In its very danger, it invites us at last to see and say the fundamental truth that underlies the entire network of interconnected crises that face us today.

What is that massive, underlying truth? 

It is the truth of our common and definitive human dispossession.

*     *     *

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

                                                — Ecclesiastes 1:19

We are all radically dispossessed. 

It should never be forgotten that such common human dispossession weighs far more heavily on some of us than on others. It weighs — still, even after years of feminist protest and action — far more heavily on women in our society than it does on men, for example. It weighs far more heavily on members of minorities of the human population than it does on members of the dominant majorities. So, too, does it weigh far more heavily on gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexual, queer, asexual, and transgender individuals than it does on those who are cisgender. The daily suffering of all of those subclasses in our society today is far greater than that of those in the dominant classes.

Nevertheless, it is not only the oppressed who are dispossessed. It is also the oppressors. All of us alike — whether we belong to the segments of the population who are oppressed or belong (as I, a white, cisgender male, do) among those segments who do the oppressing, and irrespective of individual preferences and desires — are oppressed. 

Marx and Engels long ago realized that clearly when they argued that, by their own liberation, the oppressed would also effect the liberation of the oppressors. That is true only because we all, oppressed and oppressors alike, share the same underlying common human dispossession. That is also why psychoanalysts such as Eric Fromm and, above all, Frantz Fanon—both of whom belonged among the oppressed, Fromm as a Jew and Fanon as a Black—argue that universal human liberation can only occur with the help of such aid as psychoanalysis or its equivalent provide, both at the level of the individual and at the level of society.    

That is the same fundamental truth that today, in the global Covid-19 pandemic, has broken above the surface of the ocean of lies, illusions, and delusions that have inundated us all for so long. The pandemic is just the tip of that iceberg. 

If we are not all to continue to find ourselves constantly shipwrecked by it, we need to attend to the much greater part of that same iceberg — that far greater part only the tip of which breaks the surface of our shared delusions with the coming of the current pandemic.

Thus, it is not the truth of our universally shared human dispossession that is new today. What is new today, this day of the coronavirus crisis, is merely that that truth may be at last breaking clearly above the surface of our shared, common awareness. 

The truth at issue is not itself new at all, however. Rather it is an ancient truth, indeed, an archaic one, in the original sense of that term — the archaic sense of archaic, as it were. 

The truth of our common human dispossession is, in fact, the originary truth that defines us all as human: the truth that we must first be sprung free from the illusions that blind us before we can at last for the very first time truly be given ourselves to be. That originary truth is that we are finally fully born only through a sort of second birth or re-birth, as Christianity calls it. 

That is the iceberg of truth that finally breaks the surface of our universally shared human delusion with the current pandemic crisis. 

[i] Vandana Shiva, “Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life” (Independent Science News, 9/21/20), excerpted from the appendix to her book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedoms (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020).

The Centrality of the Margins and the Claim of Authority

How slippery the paths on which you set them;  you make them slide to destruction. How suddenly they come to their ruin, wiped out, destroyed by terrors. Like a dream one wakes from, O Lord, when you wake you dismiss them as phantoms.  

         — Psalm (72)73: 18-20 (Inclusive Grail translation)

Those set on such slippery paths and sliding down to destruction are all those who lay claim to power. They are those who posture pompously as though they were powerful, so posing themselves to others but also and above all to themselves. Despite all their posturing and posing, however, they are the very weakest of the weak, if truth be told. Could they but be honest, they would be forced to admit that they do not even succeed in fooling themselves with all their grand costumes and customs.

In contrast, whoever intones the above lines of Psalm (72)73 with full understanding and appreciation has awakened from dreams along with “the Lord,” and accordingly dismisses all such foolish posers, such pompously posturing impostors, as no more than phantoms of dreams—nightmare figures at worst.  

*     *     *

author (n.): mid-14c., auctor, autour, autor "father, creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates" someone or something, from Old French auctor, acteor "author, originator, creator, instigator" (12c., Modern French auteur) and directly from Latin auctor "promoter, producer, father, progenitor; builder, founder; trustworthy writer, authority; historian; performer, doer; responsible person, teacher," literally "one who causes to grow," agent noun from auctus, past participle of augere "to increase," from PIE root *aug (1) "to increase.”

 — Online Etymology Dictionary

Those who truly have authority feel no need to claim it. Only those who lack authority feel any need to claim it. 

Genuine authority speaks for itself. It does not need to be propped up with any certificates, degrees, or other credentials. It justifies itself by speaking justly, proves its truth by speaking truly. In its humble honesty, it resounds loudly in all ears that have been opened to hear it.

There’s the rub! 

The rub is that to hear the voice of genuine authority, as opposed to the voice of what falsely lays claim to authority, one’s ears must have been opened.

However, there, too, is the healing of the very same rub. 

In all our distraction, there comes to us from time to time a call from the very margins of all our preoccupations. It is a call to stop all our busy-ness and just to listen, no more. 

When we do just that, nothing more—just listen, free and apart from all distractions by our own apparently all-important central interests and concerns—then suddenly, in “the still, small voice” to which Elijah finally attends, we hear genuine authority speaking. That is the quiet, undemanding voice of an authority that always and only speaks our liberation from all the chains with which those who lay claim to authority would distract and bind us. 

*     *     *

            Beyond all this, there was a vivid conviction regarding the importance of the world’s margins for the development of alternative ideas at the moment of universal revolution. [. . .] 

  — Claudio Lomnitz, Neustra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation  

The impotence of all those who lay claim to authority reveals itself in their ever-ongoing efforts to concentrate their forces. Such concentration incapacitates whatever comes under its sway. Far from inviting and inducing growth, as all genuine authority does, such self-concentrating pseudo-authority uproots whatever grows. It strangles growth. 

It is never in what claim to be centers of power that true power — which always em-powers, always creates, always “causes to grow” rather than strangling all growth — lies. Never in such presumptuous centralization can one find any of the authority that always accompanies true power. It is always and only in the margins of such centralization that one can find genuine power and authority. It is always and only there, in the margins of all centralized systems, that the freedom to grow becomes central. Only from the margins does the still, small voice call to us all.

That is the centrality of the margins. 

Life is there. 

Nuclear power-plant cooling towers (Wikipedia)

NOTE TO READERS:  After this post I will be taking my regular holiday break. My next post is planned for January 10 of next year (2022).

International Nations

The United States is an international nation. So is Canada. So, too, is Mexico. 

The map above makes that clear.

Each of the three—the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—is itself a nation in the sense of that word whereby it means “sovereign country,” which is to say an independent “nation-state.”

In contrast, the same word, nation, is being used differently when it is embedded in the first term of the phrase “international nation,” at least in so far as that phrase is illustrated by the above map. In that first of the two terms of the phrase at issue the word nation is being used to mean something such as “tribe” or “people”— that is, “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family and speaking the same language," as the Online Etymological Dictionary puts it—rather than “sovereign country.” 

Thus, by saying that the United States, Canada, and Mexico are examples of “international nations” what is meant is that each is a sovereign territorial state in which dwell a variety of diverse tribes or peoples. 

Indeed, that is one thing the phrase at issue, which I have used as the title for this post can be taken to mean. However, it can also be taken to mean something else as well. 

*     *     * 

My preceding post, “Our Greatest Danger,” began with a quotation from “The End of Imagination,” by Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy that was first published in 1998 and republished in 2019 as the first article in her book My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction (Chicago: Haymarket Books). In another article from that same collection—this time an article that was originally published on October 29, 2001, shortly after the administration of George W. Bush used the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a convenient excuse to begin bombing Afghanistan and preparing to do the same to Iraq—Roy makes the following cogent remark: 

            While we must not allow the fascists to define what a nation is, or who belongs to it, it’s worth keeping in mind that nationalism — in all its many avatars: communist, capitalist, and fascist — has been at the root of almost all the genocide of the twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it is wise to proceed with caution.

*     *     *

Although it was far from the only “genocide of the twentieth century,” the Nazi murder of some six million Jews in the killing fields and concentration camps set up for the purpose across most of Europe remains the most infamous. The murders were not confined to the borders of the international German nation-state, precisely because the Jewish people themselves were not confined to any one nation-state but spread across a multiplicity of sovereign nation-states that the Germans invaded. The Jewish people were thus an international (state-crossing) nation (people).

A bit earlier in the twentieth century, the sovereign international nation of Turkey committed genocide against one of the international nations that dwelt in part within Turkish borders: the genocide of the Armenians (which, of course, the Turkish nation-state still denies ever happened, thus deepening the erasure of so many lives).

Nor did genocide by and within such international nations—nations in the sense of nation-states—as Germany and Turkey have to wait until the twentieth century to occur. As the map with which I began this post itself suggests to anyone who thinks about it, the United States, Canada, and Mexico—to name the three examples pertinent to the map—in earlier centuries already committed just such genocidal acts against the various indigenous peoples or nations of North America. Nor was South American any different: genocide was also committed by nation-states there. 

*     *     *

The Jewish nation is an international nation, and has been for many centuries, wholly independent of the existence of any Jewish state such as Israel today. The Armenian nation is also an international nation, although there has never been any Armenian nation-state. The same is true for many of the indigenous nations of the Americas—namely, any that cross over the borders of two or more of the nation states that were constituted in the Americas consequent upon European invasions of the Western hemisphere. 

Thus, in the second sense of the phrase “international nation,” the noun nation as the second word of that two-word phrase means not a nation-state, as it did in the first sense, but rather a “people” or “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family and speaking the same language.” 

The very word nation derives from Latin natus, the past participle of nasci, "to be born." In that sense, one’s “nation” is the ethnic and linguistic community into which one is born. The people or ethnic-linguistic family into which one is born, it is important to point out, is distinct in most if not all cases from the sovereign nation-state within which one also happens to be born.

*     *     *

Genocide, or “ethnic cleansing,” occurs when an international nation in the first sense I have considered in this post—that is, a nation-state that consists of more than one ethnic family of people—attempts to de-internationalize itself, as it were. That is, it occurs when a nation-state endeavors to constitute a single ethnic identity for itself. 

It is in that way that “nationalism”—the prioritizing of the nation-state—has, as Arundhati Roy remarks, “been at the root of almost all the genocide of the twentieth century.” 

If we were to eliminate all concern with nations in the sense of nation-states, if we were to come instead to think solely in terms of nations in the sense of ethnic families, we could eliminate genocide altogether. What is more, then there would be no “international nations” at all any longer, in either of the two senses at issue. There would only be peoples living together in the same territory, even if that territory is as expansive as the entire globe, without any of those many peoples claiming sovereignty over that territory. 

No nation would then rule anywhere. Instead, there would be a perfect anarchy of nations.

*     *     *

That’s the sort of anarchy everyone should get behind.