Author Archives: Ochieng

Following the Argument Where It Leads, Or What does Conservative Ideology Have to do with Professional Philosophy?

It is striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”
— Omedi Ochieng, “Analytic Moral Philosophy and the Affect of Masculine Reason”

Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when — particularly when — it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded — too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it… A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules — leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative — but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence — and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility — some might say masochism — and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind

I’ve long admired Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s internalized Michael Kinsley’s warning that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, taking his arguments to thought frontiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone service and sometimes barely enough air to breathe. For examples of the Williamson oeuvre, see these National Review pieces arguing against reparations, decrying the mainstreaming of transgender rights, critiquing the “white working class” and dismissing the idea of “white supremacy.”

Every Williamson article contains strong meat, which has led his detractors to dismiss him as a troll. But that’s not who he is. He’s really more of an ogre who loves to take arguments to the breaking point in hopes of shocking readers with his cold, unbound logic. Where other writers might serve 7 percent alcohol in their brew, Williamson likes to up his percentage to 20. Where other writers might stop at mean, Williamson keeps going all the way to cruel.

I never read Williamson in hopes of seeking agreement. And on that score, he has almost never failed me. He’s not interested in building consensus or in gentle persuasion. He reduces all the grays to their black-and-white components. He pushes boundaries and doesn’t stop until he’s gone too far. In a 2014 piece about transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, he dropped bombs when a sling-shot would have sufficed: “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.”

— Jack Shafer, “Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson,” Politico Magazine, April 06, 2018

Professional Philosophy as Ambush

Adrian Piper:

It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership among the privileged few, the intellectual elite, this country’s real aristocracy, my parents told me; full of confidence in our intellectual ability to prevail, to fashion original and powerful views about some topic we represented to ourselves only vaguely. I was a bit late, and noticed that many turned to look at – no, scrutinize me as I entered the room. I congratulated myself on having selected for wear my black velvet, bell-bottomed pants suit (yes, it was that long ago) with the cream silk blouse and crimson vest. One of the secretaries who’d earlier helped me find an apartment came forward to greet me and proceeded to introduce me to various members of the faculty, eminent and honorable faculty, with names I knew from books I’d studied intensely and heard discussed with awe and reverence by my undergraduate teachers. To be in the presence of these men and attach faces to names was delirium enough. But actually to enter into casual social conversation with them took every bit of poise I had. As often happens in such situations, I went on automatic pilot. I don’t remember what I said; I suppose I managed not to make a fool of myself. The most famous and highly respected member of the faculty observed me for awhile from a distance and then came forward. Without introduction or preamble he said to me with a triumphant smirk, “Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.”

One of the benefits of automatic pilot in social situations is that insults take longer to make themselves felt. The meaning of the words simply don’t register right away, particularly if the person who utters them is smiling. You reflexively respond to the social context and the smile rather than to the words. And so I automatically returned the smile and said something like, “Really? I hadn’t known that about you.” – something that sounded both innocent and impertinent, even though that was not what I felt. What I felt was numb, and then shocked and terrified, disoriented, as though I’d been awakened from a sweet dream of unconditional support and approval and plunged into a nightmare of jeering contempt. Later those feelings turned into wrenching grief and anger that one of my intellectual heroes had sullied himself in my presence and destroyed my illusion that these privileged surroundings were benevolent and safe; then guilt and remorse at having provided him the occasion for doing so.

— Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Essays in Meta-Art 1968-1992

George Yancy:

It is so easy to hide behind antiracist rhetoric when one limits oneself to predictable social encounters that are already predicated upon social transactions that do not challenge or complicate the white self. However, in social transactions that do challenge the white self, conditions obtain that are ripe for ambush. As Richards warns, “That’s what happens when you interrupt a white man, don’t you know?” While being ambushed by one’s whiteness can occur in the absence of people of color, as when one deems oneself an antiracist white and yet laughs hysterically at a racist joke while bonding with one’s white friends, actually transacting with flesh and blood bodies of color can function as a powerful catalyst that can trigger an ambush. “You’re a prolific Black philosopher.” And yet, there is the mantra: “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.”

— George Yancy, “Whiteness as Ambush and the Transformative Power of Vigilance.”

On the alleged revolutionary power of philosophical skepticism

“There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”
— J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia

Descartes:

“If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.”

“For what is more self-evident than the fact that the Supreme Being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?”

Kant:

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom — and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: “Do not argue!” The officer says: “Do not argue–drill!” The tax collector: “Do not argue–pay!” The pastor: “Do not argue–believe!” Only one ruler in the world says: “Argue as much as you please, but obey!”

Ecologies of the Mind

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind has mountains, to lift a phrase from Hopkins, even for people who have spent all their lives in the flatlands; and most of us would be dazzled if the mountains turned out to yield sacred texts rather than terrors or an empty, confused landscape.”
— Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence

“My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere.”
— James Joyce

“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

i am a dirty little room
with spiders in the corner of my skull
my mouth a dark pit
into which human droppings disappear
the speck of rust in my heart worries me
many people breathe in and out of me
i am at ease with the world
only the speck of rust worries me
— Wopko Jensma, “Lo Lull” (1973)

The Extraversion of Analytic Philosophy (Variations on a Hountondji theme)

Not for the first time, I’m struck by how much Paulin Hountondji’s critique of African philosophy applies just as forcefully — perhaps, even, more devastatingly — to USian analytic philosophy. The most obvious node of that critique, of course, is that analytic philosophy is largely a variant of ethnophilosophy.

Today, however, a deeper resonance occurred to me as I came across squeals of delight from analytic philosophers whose programs have gotten the nod from the cargo cult PGR report, punctuated by the wounded yawps of those whose programs are — in the dystopian idiom of analytics — “unranked.”

Consider, then, the following passage from Hountondji’s Combats Pour Le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain modified just a tad for the analytic philosophy crowd:

“The quest for rankings is always bound up with a desire for the gaze. It has meaning only in relation to the Other, from whom one wishes to distinguish one’s self at all costs. This is an ambiguous relationship, inasmuch as the assertion of one’s difference goes hand in hand with a passionate urge to have it recognized by the Other. As this recognition is usually long in coming, the desire of the subject, caught in his/her own trap, grows increasingly hollow until it is completely alienated in a restless craving for the slightest gesture, the most cursory glance from the Other.”

Thinking/Thought

Hannah Arendt:

The deals Becher made through Kastner were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew – not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to thinking big.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Factually, my preoccupation with mental activities has two rather different origins. The immediate impulse came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought — literary, theological, or philosophic — about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, “a lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel (“The devil is an angel too” – Unamuno) whose sin is pride (“proud as Lucifer”), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because “the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s “I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted”; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s “barbarian” innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a “depravity according to nature”), or by covetousness, “the root of all evil” (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). .
However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer — at least the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.
In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliche-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
It was this absence of thinking — which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think — that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just “base motives” (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? To be sure, not in the sense that thinking would ever be able to produce the good deed as its result, as though “virtue could be taught” and learned — only habits and customs can be taught, and we know only too well the alarming speed with which they are unlearned and forgotten when new circumstances demand a change in manners and patterns of behavior. (The fact that we usually teat matters of good and evil in courses in “moral” or “ethics” may indicate how little we know about them, for morals comes from mores and ethics from ethos, the Latin and the Greek words for customs and habit, the Latin word being associated with rules of behavior, whereas the Greek is derived from habitat, like our “habits.”) The absence of thought I was confronted with sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend — not even in the sense of “moral insanity” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it? (The very word “conscience” at any rate, points in this direction insofar as it means “to know with and by myself,” a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.”). And it not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a “good conscience” is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only “good people” are capable of having a bad conscience?
–Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Thinking/Thought

Ghazals: Homage To Ghalib
Adrienne Rich
7/12/68

The clouds are electric in this university.
The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you
and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:
the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point where he appears.
Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable
is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me
and of what I have not written here.

Thinking/Thought

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“Thought must be something unique.” When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we — and our meaning — do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this — is — so. But this paradox (which has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what is not the case.

Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.)

Thought is surrounded by a halo. — Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it. — It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete — as it were the hardest thing there is

Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, — to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.

Language (or thought?) is something unique” — this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems.

“But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain — behavior accompanied by pain and pain — behavior without any pain?” — Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.” — Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.
… The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, and evil, or anything else you please.

Thinking/Thought

“Denken tut weh” (Thinking hurts)
— Georg Simmel

“The history of thought is the history of its models.”
— Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language

“Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.”
— Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought”

“I am convinced that there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about.”
— Adrienne Rich

“Thinking, like life, is never complete, it is a possibility that never exhausts itself.”
— Vincenzo Di Nicola

“All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If a man speaks or acts with a harmful thought, trouble follows him as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.”
— The Dhammapada

“Writing is thinking. That means that you won’t think unless you do it.”
— Sarah Beckwith

“We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think.”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“Preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing.'”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Modern Historiography, Narrativity, Moralism

Hayden White:

Historians do not have to report their truths about the real world in narrative form; they may choose other, non-narrative, even anti-narrative, modes of representation, such as the meditation, the anatomy, or the epitome. Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Braudel, to mention only the most notable masters of modern historiography, refused narrative in certain of their historiographical works, presumably on the assumption that the meaning of the events with which they wished to deal did not lend itself to representation in the narrative mode. They refused to tell a story about the past, or, rather, they did not tell a story with well-marked beginning, middle, and end phases; they did not impose upon the processes that interested them the form that we normally associate with storytelling. While they certainly narrated their accounts of the reality that they perceived, or thought they perceived, to exist within or behind the evidence they had examined, they did not narrativize that reality, did not impose upon it the form of a story. And their example permits us to distinguish between a historical discourse that narrates, on the one side, and a discourse that narrativizes, on the other; between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.

…

Once we have been alerted to the intimate relationship that Hegel suggests exists between law, historicality, and narrativity, we cannot but be struck by the frequency with which narrativity, whether of the fictional or the factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system against or on behalf of which the
typical agents of a narrative account militate. And this raises the
suspicion that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized “history,” has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally authority.And indeed, when we look at what is supposed to be the next stage in the evolution of historical representation after the annals form, that is, the chronicle, this suspicion is borne out. The more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law which sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to the law occupy his attention. If, as Hegel suggests, historicality as a distinct mode of human existence is unthinkable without the presupposition of a system of law in relation to which a specifically legal subject could be constituted, then historical self-consciousness, the kind of consciousness capable of imagining the need to represent reality as a history, is conceivable only in terms of its interest in law, legality, legitimacy, and so on.

Interest in the social system, which is nothing other than a system of human relationships governed by law, creates the possibility of conceiving the kinds of tensions, conflicts, struggles, and their various kinds of resolutions that we are accustomed to find in any representation of reality presenting itself to us as a history. Perhaps, then, the growth and development of historical consciousness which is attended by a concomitant growth and development of narrative capability (of the sort met with in the chronicle as against the annals form) has something to do with the extent to which the legal system functions as a subject of concern. If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. Where there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal system, which is the form in which the subject encounters most immediately the social system in which he is enjoined to achieve a full humanity, the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past, whether it be a public or a private past, is lacking. And this suggests that narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine.

(Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”)