Births, deaths and marriages
The new autumn season begins on ParaDoxa
I returned to work this week after a lovely two-week break. Over the years I’ve fallen into the habit of having a fortnights holiday in spring (mid-September for us) and another in autumn (March). It’s the perfect time to get out in the garden and do the heavy lifting needed to prepare the soil for the winter/summer. Everything grows so fast and hard here in Auckland that you have to do a lot of soil therapy to keep the garden engine well oiled.
Suffice to say I thought little about work. But while I was away, some notable things happened that have a connection to ParaDoxa.
James de Llis’s superb Hermitix podcast had a lovely interview with Barry Allen on his book Living in Time, which gives a lay person’s overview of Henri Bergson’s concept of time. Coincidentally, the anarchist Acid Horizon podcast also had a conversation with Jack Bagby on Bergson. Both are highly recommended if you’d like to have your ideas of time radically challenged.
Daniel Dennett died. There’s a lovely obituary by his old friend Doug Hofstadter here which goes a long way to explain Dennett’s contrarian view of consciousness and the many neologisms he coined for his ideas, including heterophenomenology, intuition pumps, Cartesian theater, and his cassette theory of dreams. It’s also an homage to an extraordinarily interesting and diverse human being, as Hofstadter explains;
“Dan was a true bon vivant, and he developed many amazing skills, such as that of house-builder, folk-dancer and folk-dance caller, jazz pianist, cider-maker, sailor and racer of yachts (not the big ones owned by Russian oligarchs, but beautifully crafted sailboats), joke-teller par excellence, enthusiast for and expert in word games, savorer of many cuisines and wines, wood-carver and sculptor, speaker of French and some German and Italian as well, and ardent and eloquent supporter of thinkers whom he admired and felt were not treated with sufficient respect by the academic world.”
It was Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday. Many people believe Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) gave birth to modern philosophy. Kant contradicted the belief that the limit of what humans could know was determined by what existed in the world. Instead, Kant argued that we could only ever know the noumenal ‘world in itself’ through our sensory experience, so the ‘phenomenal’ presented a second barrier to knowledge. And all knowledge must be seen as fundamentally experiential. Lea Ypi wrote a really good critique of Kant’s political legacy in the Financial Times, and Josh Dunigan has compiled quotes from other authors who have themselves written about Kant, including Proust, Derrida, and this from Slavoj Žižek;
‘It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. In a way, one can claim that it is only with this idea of Kant’s that philosophy reached its own terrain: prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such, as a description of the universal structure of entire reality, with no qualitative difference from particular sciences. It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, the a priori network of categories which determines how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality. From here, previous philosophy is readable not as the most general positive knowledge of reality, but in its hermeneutic core, as the description of the historically predominant “disclosure of Being,” as Heidegger would have put it’
Speaking of the phenomenal, I haven’t read it yet but a new book by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson titled The Blind Spot claims that we need to rethink our entire approach to science. Our world-view has become objectivised, reductive and instrumental, they claim, and ‘The Blind Spot turns the tables on the scientific worldview by insisting that experiencing the world precedes being able to practice science’. Take this description from Robert P. Crease’s book review in LARB;
“The authors navigate the difficult task of drawing our attention to direct experience—what allows things to appear and makes the world available to us—without turning it into an object or explainable thing itself. The awkwardness involved sometimes leads them to appeal to wonky terms such as “mindful meta-awareness” and “suchness,” making the book at times sound metaphysical or even mystical. But this struggle to bring the role of experience to light is precisely the point; it clashes with the human urge to explain rather than experience.”
Now this sounds an awful lot like Kant to me, and yet the authors would surely know this. Even though one is a physicist-astronomers and another is a cognitive scientist, Evan Thompson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver whose written a lot about the idea of the self, cognitive theories of human experience, and why he’s not a Buddhist Link. And they do begin with Husserl and the phenemenology of lived time (vs clock time, surely becoming Bergsonian here?), as well as tackling Kant and Whitehead. Their main applied point in doing all of this work is that our scientistic approach to climate change won’t stop the impending environmental cataclysm, but whether the book converts us into continental philosophers when Kant and Husserl and Bergson couldn’t remains to be seen.
The European Graduate School published a cracking talk by Catherine Malabou about her book Stop thief! Anarchism and philosophy. This book has to be one of my favourites of the last couple of years and has been a big influence on my thinking about a more anarchistic approach to health and healthcare.
And while we’re on the theme of interviews and healthcare, Crisis and Critique’s latest interview is with Silvia Federici. (Their interview last month was with Malabou. Before that it was Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek) If you don’t know Federici’s work it’s a wonderful combination of Marxism and feminism applied to real-world problems. Federici came to prominence in the 1980s arguing that housework and childcare should be paid work, and their non-payment worked only to funnel more capital into the hands of men who promulgated the myth that it was a woman’s natural ‘tendency’ to be caring. Here’s an example of her writing. Hugely significant for healthcare work.
Speaking of capitalism, if you’d like a comprehensive account of the failings of neoliberalism and the equal failings of the progressive/leftist response to it, you might try The Roosevelt Institute’s latest report The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism. The authors show the many ways neoliberalism has failed, but then they argue that conservatives have been far more successful engaging in the cultural facets of neoliberalism’s failures (by promoting self-help, wellness, a belief in personal responsibility, or conversely individual withdrawal and misanthropy, and conspiracy-fuelled rebellion against the established order).
But to end on something a bit lighter:
The wonderfully named Gwynna Forgham-Thrift has written a short mockery of the kinds of message mess we are increasingly getting into when someone at work wants to share something with us that’s hiding in the miasma of IT systems universities and workplaces now suffer from. It’s title ‘My comments are in the Google doc linked int he Dropbox I sent in the Slack’ should tell you enough. It’s very funny.
Just in case you had read any of the recent reviews of David Nicholls’ new book You are here (this, for instance) and were curious, be assured that this is not me. I know this because I recently received a $5.38 USD royalties cheque for my last book. I suspect — and I really hope — the ‘other’ David Nicholls makes a better show of it.
And finally, I came across this quote from John Dewey the other day. I don’t know how true it is of Texan history, but it made me smile. How often in life do we do the same;
’The intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They’d search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they’d put that on the other end of the plank. Then they’d guess the weight of the stone.’
Until next time.