Samir Chopra's Blog, page 127

The Emperor Has No Clothes Ritual

In ‘Expect to be Lied to in Japan‘ (New York Review of Books, 8 November 2012), Ian Buruma writes:

I decided to go on a little trip to Matsushima this summer because I had never seen this particular “Great View,” even though I had in fact been there once before, in 1975. Then, too, I set out from the harbor in a boat filled with fellow tourists—all from Japan. As we took a leisurely cruise into the bay, a charming guide gave us a running commentary on the islands we were supposed to be gazing at, their peculiar shapes, names, and histories. The problem was that no matter how keenly we craned our necks in the directions indicated by the guide, we could not see a thing; we were in the midst of a thick fog. But this did not stop the guide from pointing out the many beauties, or us from peering into the milky void.

It was a puzzling experience. My familiarity with Japan was still limited. I didn’t quite know how to interpret this charade. Why were we pretending to see something we couldn’t? What did the guide think she was doing? Was this an illustration of the famous dichotomy that guidebooks say is typical of the Japanese character, between honne and tatemae, private desires and the public façade, official reality and personal feelings? Or was it the rigidity of a system that could not be diverted once it was set in motion? Or was the tourists’ pretense just a polite way of showing respect to a guide doing her job?

I still don’t really know. But since then I have seen other instances of Japanese conforming in public to views of reality that they must have known perfectly well were false, to protect “public order,” or to “save face.” Japan is a country where the emperor is rarely seen naked.

The collective participation in an ‘emperor has no clothes‘ ritual is always fascinating to observe: the collective pretense and participation in make-believe, so seemingly irrational on the surface, but which in fact might be an entirely rational response to the perceived threat of a loss even greater than that necessitated by the temporary suspension of disbelief.

Its most interesting current variant might be the responses to works of art that are clearly felt to be too inaccessible by those that interact with them. Here, a group of ‘consumers’ come face to face with an artwork–perhaps a musical composition, perhaps a painting–that is intractable. But no one is willing to admit their lack of comprehension, their distaste for its rendering, their reluctance to submit to its demands. So the mask is slipped on; quiet, polite, murmurs of appreciation emanate; to say much more would be to admit ignorance, to request admission into philistinism; better then, to move on, maintaining the facade of knowledgeable understanding, or if not that, then at least, not active dislike.  The active bullshitter adds his own distinctive flourish to this collective act; loud exclamations of sensitive, nuanced, yet entirely misplaced, insight emanate, which would invite ridicule were it not for the fact that they would break the collective spell.

It seems to me to be a worthwhile venture for some budding social scientist to investigate the phenomenology of participants in such rituals where every participant is aware of the his own inauthenticity and that of the others, but still feels compelled to maintain the charade: what is the felt experience of the cognitive dissonance, the strain of the maintenance of such public artifice.

Sneak Preview: Lance Armstrong to Redefine Douchebaggery

I do not yet know if I have the stomach to watch the Lance Armstrong interview tonight on the Oprah Winfrey show. Not alone at least. If I do, it will be in company so that we can turn it into spectator sport. That’s the least that Lance and Oprah deserve, a chance to be treated like good to honest entertainment, our popcorn ready at hand, ready to whoop and holler and cheer and raise the odd slogan or two, our verbal participation a judicious blend of the caustic and disbelieving. We can then participate in a distinctively American ritual, the public, prime-time confessional with the television anchor subbing for parent, priest, psychotherapist and rabbi all at once.

But in the spirit of another distinctively American ritual–the preemptive strike–let me offer a few thoughts before I reach for the television remote (with barf bag handy).

As has been noted by most commentators on La Affaire Armstrong, what makes Armstrong into the Grand Asshole Sans Pareil, the Dickwad Par Excellence, is not that he took performance-enhancing drugs (on which subject my thoughts continue to remain a trifle confused and to use presidential language, ‘evolving‘), or that he issued several denials over a period of years. Rather it is because Armstrong patented, and perfected through a series of ever-increasing righteous refinements, a genuinely new addition to the armory of Auto Exculpation: the full-blown, vicious, counter-attack on those that ever dared suggest that he was anything less than God’s Benediction to the Benighted World. He didn’t just have a pair of balls that he had rescued from the clutches of cancer, he was going to swing them right in the face and teeth of anyone who raised a barricade against the Armstrong Juggernaut.Even as his castle of defense, denial, and counterattack increasingly gave signs of giving way under the accumulating evidence and testimony, and even as it became increasingly clear that the Poster Child for Courage was a very, very unpleasant person, Armstrong continued to lash out.  The Inquisitor complained of the Inquisition and pressed charges; the rack was reserved for the accusers.

Perhaps he won’t issue any more denials. But one thing remains the surest best of all: Armstrong will not stop being obnoxious. He will whine; he will claim extenuating circumstances; he will continue to vilify and blame; he will grant us all a glimpse into the deluded mind that was capable of constructing the bizarre fantasy world that he chose to inhabit.

In Phillip Kaufman‘s Quills, the Abbé du Coulmier, irked by the grandiose pretension on display,  finally says to the Marquis De Sade: ‘You’re not the anti-Christ. You’re only a malcontent who knows how to spell.’ With that in mind, let me just say the following: Lance, you’re not Moses come to lead us out of the Land of Insufficient Willpower into the Blessed Valley of Anything is Possible. You were just a douchebag that could ride a bike. And as that was the only thing you were ever good at,  do us all a favor, and get on your bike.

Gun Control, Propaganda, and the Susceptibility of Man to ‘Unreason’

In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), William Godwin wrote:

Show me in the clearest and most unambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonable in itself, or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infallibly pursue that mode, so long as the views you suggested to me, continue present to my mind….Render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity…and the whole species will become reasonable and virtuous. It will then be sufficient for juries to recommend a certain mode for adjusting controversies…It will then be sufficient for them to invite offenders to forsake their errors….Where the empire of reason was so universally acknowledged the offender would either readily yield to the expostulations of authority, or if he resisted through suffering no personal molestation he would feel so weary under the unequivocal disapprobation and the observant eye of public judgment as willingly to remove to a society more congenial to his errors.

As noted by C. A. Mace in his introduction to J. A. C. Brown’s Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing (Penguin, London; 1963), these lines by Godwin are a ‘charming, if pathetic expression’ of ‘the belief that man is not only a rational animal but also a reasonable animal.’ They are charming because they are so optimistic and trusting, pathetic because the evidence of history seems to crush them stillborn. 

I write these words on the day that Barack Obama has announced ‘plans to introduce legislation by next week that includes a ban on new assault weapons, limits on high-capacity magazines, expanded background checks for gun purchases and tougher gun trafficking laws’ and signed executive orders ‘designed to increase the enforcement of existing gun laws and improve the flow of information among federal agencies in order to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who shouldn’t have them.’ (‘Obama Unveils Proposals For Toughening Laws on Guns‘, New York Times, 16 January 2012).

The relevance of Godwin’s quote to our current situation should be quite clear. As should the subject matter of Brown’s book. For we are now entering a phase of political discourse where the political subjects of this nation of ours will note just how bizarre the beliefs of political opponents can seem, how their susceptibility to the dark forces of unreason and irrationality can provide such plentiful cause for wonder and befuddlement. And we will be reminded, again and again, of the etymology of propaganda–which was defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘an association or scheme for propagating a doctrine or practice’–in the Latin propagare, meaning ‘the gardener’s practice of pinning the fresh shoots of a plant into the earth in order to reproduce new plants which will take on a life of their own.’ (TOP, p. 10)

PS: A rather facetious aside. As I read Godwin’s quote, I was reminded of my ‘charming and pathetic’ attempts, every semester, to regulate and render more orderly my conduct of the classes I teach by presenting a detailed syllabus–which articulates the course requirements clearly–and by talking at great length about how every student can maximize their chances of getting a good grade in the class.

Against Their Will: Everywhere, All The Time, Drunk, In Packs

I thought I had said everything I wanted to about the horrible gang-rape case in Delhi, but I feel compelled to put down a few additional observations. They center on what made this case notable, and what perhaps needs a little more attention. In no particular order, here they are.

First, the Delhi rape would not have been news had it not included a violent, savage assault with an iron rod on the young woman that resulted in her death. Had she been ‘just’ raped and not suffered more than the ‘usual’ injuries that raped women suffer, the case would have been forgotten rather rapidly. The humdrum announcement of yet another rape, somewhere, sometime, would have been unlikely to have attracted much notice. Something exceptional is always needed to jolt us out of our normal somnolent response to them. Perhaps the number of rapists, perhaps twisted acts of degradation (our social media culture now provides ample opportunity for old-fashioned ‘notch on the belt’ bragging to acquire an added new dimension), perhaps dramatic acts of violence (as in this case), or perhaps the location or placement of the victim (an American raped abroad always makes more news than one raped right here, at home.)

Second, the rape became a cause célèbre because it happened in India’s capital, and because its victim was an aspirant to the better life. She had moved from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, from a small town to the big city; she sought to go even further. She was enrolled in a professional course of education, one that promised her and the family she had left behind a better life. Sadly, had she been a resident of a village in India’s hinterland, perhaps a Dalit set on by ‘high-caste’ goons, her gang-rape would not have made the news. Or if it had, via  a small paragraph not on the front page. it would not have provoked the current reaction. (In Govind Nihalani‘s Aakrosh, the landless peasant Lahanya Bikhu, in the movie’s horrifying climax, kills his sister to ‘protect’ her from the landlord and his foremen who have already raped his wife and condemned him to jail.)

Third, there was an old familiar companion in this story of rape: alcohol, our most beloved legal drug, whose removal from the index prohibitorum ensured that no other drug would ever be legalized. From college campus to invaded town, from frat party to street alley, rape and alcohol often go hand in hand. Sometimes, it seems, there is nothing quite as dangerous as a group of young drunk men. If they aren’t picking fights with each other–possibly the safest outcome for all bystanders–their roving eyes turn elsewhere. Quite often, it’s a woman they fancy. And of course, they attack in packs; nothing quite makes men feel as brave as alcohol and the presence of other conspirators.

Last, as I noted in my previous post, the ubiquity of rape of worldwide (in space and time) should give pause to those keen to turn this into a uniquely Indian pathology. When Susan Brownmiller wrote Against Our Will, she did not subtitle it Indian Men, Indian Women and Rape in India.

Carmen Ortiz Did Not Act Alone in Hounding Aaron Swartz To His Death

No prosecution of war criminals, torturers and mass murderers; no prosecution of those that declare a war on false pretense; no prosecution of those that indulge in  grand larceny and financial fraud, immiserating the lives of many; no prosecuting of the rich and the powerful; but over-zealous hounding of a young, idealistic, brilliant man whose only crime seemed to be the desire to make available accumulated knowledge to all; and as always, the continuing incarceration and punishment of the nation’s dispossessed and underprivileged. This is not the justice system we would like to have, it is the one we actually have.

What could have motivated the prosecutor run amuck, Carmen Ortiz, to seek the horrendously disproportionate jail sentences and fines she sought for Aaron Swartz? Political ambition, perhaps. But focusing on her actions alone would be a mistake. Ortiz took the line she did because she was well aware that she was acting in a very particular context, a time and place in which the penalties she sought stood some chance of being viewed as the appropriate punishment for a baleful malefactor.

Ortiz, you see, was well aware that she lives in a world densely populated by confused, ignorant people, incapable of understanding the legal, economic and utilitarian roots of private property, or the differences between physical property and intangible property, who are too lazy to bother disentangling the idiotic term ‘intellectual property’, who faithfully parrot the lying press releases of media corporations, who cannot be bothered to understand how the creation and propagation of ideas works. These people can be relied upon to childishly shriek and scream at every instance of an action that threatens to upend the neat little black and white world they have constructed of absolute property rights and romantic notions of creativity. They can be relied upon to deploy, with little prompting, an emotionally charged, morally inflected language of ‘theft’, ‘piracy’, ‘robbery’, and ‘stealing’ to describe actions whose descriptions call for considerably more nuance. They are firm and upstanding and self-righteous, full of rectitude and judgment; they imagine themselves defenders of the starving artist and the inventor in the basement, not realizing they are, as usual, corporate shills and defenders of the antitheses of their proclaimed stances. They clog our bulletin boards and blog comments spaces, whining about how ‘artists deserve to be paid’, about how books and poems  will never get written, how movies will never be made, music will never be composed, songs will never be performed  in a world that does not offer as much copyright protection as possible, from the cradle to the grave and beyond.

These howling fools–who include those who work at supposedly elite institutions of learning–had set up a chorus, an applause track that Ortiz craved. Her cruel, over-the-top, inquisitorial sentence of thirty-five years and a million dollars, one would that terminate the career of a man who packed more creativity into his little pinkie than all the hordes who claim to be the faithful defenders of creativity, would ensure her hosannahs from this gallery. She would be enshrined as the Grand Protector of Property. Could there be a higher honor in our society?

So she acted. And pushed Aaron Swartz into his grave.

The Masterpiece Too Horrible To Recommend: Francine Prose on Haneke’s Amour

Francine Prose–(what an excellent last name!)–titles her review of Michael Haneke‘s Amour ‘A Masterpiece You Might Not Want to See’, (New York Review of Books Blog, 7 January 2013) and begins with the following:

Michael Haneke’s Amour is the ultimate horror film. With its portrayal of the shocks, the cruelties and indignities to which old age and disease subject a happily married Parisian couple, it’s far scarier and more disturbing than Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kubrick’s The Shining, or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and like those films, it stays with you long after you might have chosen to forget it.

That pair of opening sentences tells us, perhaps, all we need to know. I have not seen the movie yet but it is clear it is about ageing, the slow downward decline toward death that is the lot of those whose appointments with the Grim Reaper do not occur suddenly, and lastly, perhaps it is about the crowning insult to injury that is often the terrible fate of some: watching your loved ones die in front of you, even as your own body slowly gives way.

Prose suggests Haneke’s vision of this aspect of the human condition is unsparing enough to raise the question of whether he is a ‘sadist’ or a ‘moralist’ or both. Clearly, this is not the kind of movie that one can watch dispassionately. And as Prose suggests, having seen the horrors that Haneke makes available to us, should we warn others away from it? And contrary to the notion that classics demand periodic reconsumption, why would you ever want to watch this horrorshow again?

Why would I voluntarily put myself through the awfulness of watching the scenes in which the couple struggles to navigate the suddenly staggering demands of the wheelchair, the knife and fork, the toilet?

So, several questions then: If a work of art brings us into uncomfortably close contact with an all too well-known aspect of the human condition, are we compelled to pay attention? In all probability, we’ll experience it ourselves in all its frightening immediacy. Can an artist’s eyes be a little too unflinching? Sometimes we should look away, not compel others to look, and if like Prose, it has seared our eyes, perhaps we should warn others to stay away.

These questions are familiar and have not lost any of their intractability over the years. For the present moment, I want to merely point to an addition to some of the expected responses to Prose’s piece. (Such as, for instance, that ‘art should confront all there is head-on’ or ‘let others make up their own mind whether the art they experience is too painful for them.’) That additional response comes those that have already experienced the loss of a loved one, and lived through its extended nightmare, and now disdain this cinematic rendering of their lived experiences. Or from those, like doctors, for whom such scenes of decay and death are all too commonplace. For these folks, the cinematic version of an all-too familiar experience is at best a painful exercise in forbearance and at worst a wilful act of self-directed torture. The trauma sufferer often plays reluctant host to a recurrent, unwelcome guest: the memories and visions that have already left visible and invisible scars. Ripping off the bandages to let the wounds run again might be unwise.

Note: I intend to see the movie.

Copy-Editing and Proofing Nightmares With a Twist

Dreams are revealing and so, I have never talked about my dreams on this blog. And perhaps that struck me as too self-indulgent. But that is a decidedly strange decision because, from time to time, I have indulged in many autobiographical ramblings here. Today, I’m going to recount one from last night, most certainly one of the most singular I have ever experienced, one worth recapitulating because it is about books, writing and anxiety, and so it should resonate with those who write. And those who are anxious. (The intersection of those two sets is huge.)

So, the dream. I cannot quite place the location or time, but the setting is quite clear: I am in a large room with windows and a large desk in front of me. I am working on a manuscript, a book of mine, brought to me for copy-editing and proof correction by, get this, a human messenger. That’s right; this manuscript has not been emailed to me by a publisher for correction. Rather, a large burly man, I think only partially clothed, and I think, glistening with sweat, a cross between a palace guard and a championship wrestler, has personally carried over it to me. I do not remember his features too well, but he is definitely muscular and bare-chested. He resembles more than anything else, an executioner of sorts, someone, who if provoked, might easily turn to violent reprisal or correction. I am to correct it, make all the necessary changes, and then hand it back to ‘Ol Hermes here to carry to back to the publisher. So I get to work; I feel compelled to.

As I work through the book, I make corrections with a pencil. Suddenly, I stop and look at my corrections; they strike me as illegible. Yes, even I, their writer, cannot quite make out what my corrections, strikeouts, and amendments amount to. They need decipherment, and I will have to do so quickly. In an effort to seek reassurance, to assuage a suddenly manifest anxiety, I call over the messenger, and point him to the scribbles, saying ‘I seem to have marked up the book quite badly. What do I do?’ My man merely grunts, and says, ‘Finish it up, and then we’ll go through it together.’ At first, this strikes me as impractical but then I reason to myself that it will not be too bad. Surely, it can’t take more than a day. Reassured, I return to work.

But things get worse. I notice there is new, strange, unfamiliar text in the book. Not just simple typos or text manglings. Rather, there are illustrations I have never seen before, and even worse, entire passages of text that seem to have appeared by magic, inserted by an anonymous hand. Finally as crowning insult or injury, there is an entire new section written in first person describing experiences that I have never had. I stop, unable to continue to any more. Who has done this? I realize that I am not just perplexed or irritated or angry. I am scared. In part, it is because I am anxious. How can I make the required corrections? I don’t have the source file; this is a typeset file; I will have to strike out, replace; it all seems to be bubbling up into a chaotic, irredeemable mess. But even more fundamentally, I feel the fear of the violated. Someone has taken a hammer to my  Pietà; someone has reached out, cuffed me on the ears, slapped me across the face, and told me, bluntly, that they can get change my work, modify its meaning, become its author, without asking me for permission; who, why?

At this point, the dream starts to fade as my fear and anxiety build. This is a normal turn of events in dreams of mine where the anxiety levels become unbearable. I think I call Hermes to show him the mess, to ask him if he knows anything about how this mutilation might have taken place. But—and I cannot remember clearly now—it is not as if he has anything useful to offer. Why would he know? His is not to reason why; it is only to transport the text back and forth. And the dream comes to an end.

I started writing this blog post shortly after waking up in the morning so the details as I can remember them are as clear as they can be.  I’m still perplexed by it. I wonder if the messenger symbolizes the tyranny of the deadline, the fear of contract cancellation, or the implacable inflexibility of the publisher. And copy-editing is hard, tedious work, of course, leaving behind many a scar worn in by memories of endless, iterative checks. But the most interesting emotional response of mine, I think, was the fear that someone had the power to change what I wanted to say before I could say it, to modify my written word before it saw its way into print.

William James on the Selectivity of Consciousness According to Human Interests

A couple of days ago, I noted humanism‘s affinities with pragmatism, and quoted William James to cement that claim. Today, I want to point to James’ treatment of consciousness to show how fundamental human interests are in his philosophy of mind. (This post is cribbed from Patrick Kiaran Dooley‘s Pragmatism as Humanism: The Philosophy of Willam James, Nelson-Hall Publishing, Chicago, 1974, pp. 42-52. All James quotes below are taken from Dooley’s citations from Principles of Psychology.)

For James, our consciousness influences our behavior and our actions by selection from data presented to it (via attention); what guides and regulates this selection and attention are our practical, aesthetic, religious and ethical interests. We first become aware of the world via sensational contact with it (these sensations are already knowledge for James). This data of awareness of the world around us is then enriched by differentiating it and noticing relationships among its different aspects. But these relationships that we notice, the aspects we attend to, are not just those that are presented to us most frequently; they ‘stand out’ because they are of interest to us. We perceive that which we attend to and we attend to that which interests us. In sensory attention:

The only things we commonly see are those which we preperceive and the only things we preperceive are those which have been labeled for us, and the labels stamped on our mind.

In perceiving, consciousness is selective in isolating a group of sensible qualities which, because ‘they are most constant, interesting or practically important, we regard as the most essential constituents of the thing.’ It also selects among these to appoint some as typical or ‘correct’ representatives of the object in question:

Out of all the visual magnitudes of each known object we have selected one as the real one  to think of and degraded all the others to serve as its signs. This ‘real’ magnitude is determined by aesthetic and practical interests.

Some representations are promoted to the status of ‘true’; others to that of ‘signs.’ This follows simply from the fact that ‘true representations’ are perceived from the most practically advantageous positions.

For James there is no such thing as a pure sensation; all is interpreted first. We do not experience the world passively but actively act on the data available to us. Our attention does a great deal of work: by settling again and again on the most ‘useful’ presentations it turns them into ‘experience.’ But it is driven by our interests, which determine the how and the what of our experiences.

And this then further leads to our construction of what is real, of what we consider reality - the ‘common sense world.’ Here objects appear of interest and importance to us. To call an object ‘real’ is merely to indicate a reference to ourselves because our cognitive relationship to the world is ‘affective’, not dispassionately objective:

[We] give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to with a will.

The affective component of our selves thus determines what we consider ‘real’: the objects of our beliefs are related to our interests. This extends to all levels, so that even the most ‘basic’ entities of the world are those that bear an acute relation to our interests, ranging from the most practical to the most sublime. In our conceptions of the world, we are constantly selecting and rejecting according to these:

Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily classify it under, makes me unjust to other aspects. But as I am always classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity–the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me.

   Our purposes determine our conceptions of the world, its so-called ‘essential properties’ but:

Reality overflows these purposes at every core. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize things. 

Thus even in the most basic sizing up of the world, in our determinations of ‘what is,’ we cannot eliminate the human. We are mixed up in the cement of the universe.

No Matter Where You Go, There’s Home: Robert Viscusi’s Astoria

This morning, while out for a errand-laden walk–visiting the pediatrician’s office, shopping, and getting an influenza vaccine shot–in this bizarrely gorgeous East Coast January weather, I ran into my friend and Brooklyn College colleague, the poet Robert Viscusi, with whom I work at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. I admire Bob for his erudition, wit, and writing, have learned a great deal from him over the years, and consider my meeting-time jousts with him among my most enjoyable and intellectually rewarding campus experiences ever, so it is to his work that I devote this brief note.

I own two of Viscusi’s books: the difficult, yet rewarding, quasi-autobiographical novel Astoria, which introduced me to, among other things, the Stendhal Syndrome, and provided an acute, poetic glimpse of the Italian-American experience that seemed to speak directly to me, also an immigrant to the US; and the short collection of poems titled A New Geography of Time.  The inscriptions on the latter reads, ‘To Samir Chopra, From the land of the sphinxes, Bob Viscusi, 10/17/12, Brooklyn.’ But it is to the former that I am paying attention today.

When I began reading Astoria, I found immediate resonances: it is a tale of loss and discovery, of parental connections and sunderings, of new beginnings, and pasts left behind. It is about mothers and sons, and families, transplanted. It is not an easy book; when I first reported this to Bob, his response was to suggest reading it aloud. I complied; it worked. When a poet turns his hand to a novel you must not follow him all the way; continue reading him as you did before. For as Viscusi describes Astoria in the prologue:

It’s sort of a novel in the form of a poem in the form of three essays about the meaning of history.

I mentioned the Stendhal Syndrome above. What role does it play in Astoria? Quite simply this: the narrator of the story suffers from it. He was first afflicted at the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, two years after the death of his mother. He discovers she is, to him, Napoleon. As he moves through this world, he finds that his journeys, no matter how far-flung, never take him beyond Astoria, her home, a Napoleonic empire. He carries her, the strongest and most distinctive imprint on his persona, a ghost in the corpora, with him, wherever he goes. But she is Astoria, so he takes Astoria everywhere. Some of us want to go home but are told we can never do so; yet others, it seems can only go home again and again.  As Buckaroo Banzai might have said, ‘No matter where you go, there it is.’

Home, of course, is our most familiar resting place, where we seek to return, for comfort and succor in times of adversity, when confronted with the world’s strangeness. It sticks to us like a skin. The immigrant’s journey’s are often termed a sloughing off of this cover, but as Viscusi notes, it persists, screening, vetting and transforming, quite uniquely, everything that seeks entrance into our bodies and minds. Astoria  shows us among (many!) other things, how we take our homes and histories with us, wherever we go.

Grazie Professore!

Beware the Easily Defined Philosophical Term

Over the course of my philosophy career, I’ve come to realize I sometimes use technical philosophical terms without an exceedingly determinate conception of their precise meaning. But I do, however, know how to use them in a particular philosophical context that will make sense to an interlocutor–reader, discussant, student–who has a background similar to mine. (Perhaps this is all that is required with just about any word? What more could be required after all? But I digress.) Thus, I muddle through, talking about philosophy, writing on it, teaching it, debating it. Heck, I’ve made a career out of it.

A classic example of an ambiguous, yet useful and widely used term is ‘humanism.’ I made heavy use of it in the first paper I wrote in graduate school, in a paper on Marx and Feuerbach‘s views on religion. I described Marx and Feuerbach (and possibly Hegel) as humanists, referred to the Young Marx as an arch-humanist in distinguishing him from the Later ‘Das Kapital‘ Marx, and so on. Over the years though, I’ve come to sense that I don’t have a real handle on the term other than to say it refers to ‘human-centered philosophies.’ When asked to explicate that term, I launch into various examples: early Marxism, existentialism, secularism–stress its affinities–philosophical naturalism, for instance–and point to other schools of thought that employ the term, like, say, renaissance humanism. Within the context of these examples, I am then able to try to clarify what is meant by ‘human-centered.’ This past fall, when introducing students to existentialism via Sartre–besides the obvious import of the slogan that ‘(human) existence precedes (human) essence’–I stressed his claim that Sartrean existentialism is humanism because it emphasizes, centrally, the human freedom and ability to make choices. And as I’ve mentioned affinities above, it is worth mentioning humanism’s affinities with pragmatism. In particular, William James, who took ‘humanism’ to describe his pragmatism, offers us some wonderful characterizations of it:

[I]t is impossible to strip the human element out from even our most abstract theorizing

[T]o an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products.

The ambiguity of philosophical terms should not be too shocking: many philosophical terms have been employed in a wide variety of disciplinary contexts; they have extensive histories of usage and thus resist precise definition (as Nietzsche usefully pointed out a long time ago); they are used to clarify, extend, and resolve philosophical debates in more than one arena of disputation; sometimes, they are drawn from different languages and then encountered in translation; they often enjoy extensive deployment in non-philosophical contexts, and thus create ambiguities between antecedent and  current usage. Furthermore, philosophical traditions that stress conceptual analysis can sometimes exacerbate the confusion: by emphasizing necessary and sufficient conditions for usage, they risk smoothing out, by force and fiat, the rough, serrated edges of meaning that make the term as useful and ubiquitous as it has been.

A philosophical term that is all too easily defined should make us just a little suspicious about its  usefulness.