Thanksgiving: Ten Things

10. My favorite colors are of this time of year. Being in Texas, I don't get to see them as often as I'd like. But Thanksgiving seems to bring them out in full force.

9. Cowboy bars. I finally found Hillbilly's in McAllen.

8. Cowboy boots. Newly purchased.

7. Good friends.

6. Running. Usually not away.

5. Settling in. I was talking last night with a friend of mine who moved to the Valley when I did about feeling comfortable and settled. I don't have to sell my soul to Texas to feel at home here.

4. Places that are far away where people love me and I feel loved.

3. Good books yet unread.

2. Still having something worth saying.

1. My love.

Out-Fascioning the Fascists or Critiquing Heidegger and Arendt, Take 73

In the last several weeks a number of articles have come out addressing a number of the recent books released that attempt to rehash the extent to which Heidegger was a Nazi and what we should do about his philosophy as a result and whether Arendt is a self-hating Jew who just couldn't get over her dear old professor. What these articles and their partner books suggest is that few people are willing to do the hard-thinking that seems to be demanded by both these thinkers, but also a serious devaluation of the power of thinking.

Emmanuel Faye's new book, as discussed by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times, encourages us to expunge Heidegger from philosophy lest his books "spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as 'the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.'" Faye suggests that we treat Heideger's work like hate speech and put warning labels on them like we do albums of explicit lyrics. Besides the obvious problem of who gets to determine what is called philosophy and the problems of eradicating from the history of letters all books that might offer up fascist and racist ideas (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, for starters -- though certainly careful readings can show the complexity of these texts, as they can for Heidegger), I am troubled by the idea that some ideas are too scary, too powerful, that they must be suppressed. The implication seems to be that some ideas cannot be combatted by equally strong and contrary views so they must be suppressed. Having recently read Dr. J's blog on strong relatavism, we should remember there is human freedom in the determination of values and that the work to defend and fight for ideas is never finished. To suppose that one idea is too powerful and wrong is to set up a kind of dark absolutism, where there is a position of knowledge or claim to truth that can't be combatted by argument and so must be silenced.

At my alma mater, The College of William and Mary, the entrance to Swem library had a quote from Thomas Jefferson that read "Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Jefferson seems right to allow all ideas, even error, to roam free and therefore free to criticism and disproof, otherwise the problem is inevitably a power struggle over who determines which ideas are dangerous (like the vote for the masses was said to be by Aristotle), but also a power struggle regarding who determines what counts as philosophy in the academy, a famed struggle in Emmanuel Faye's home country of France but just as much a struggle in the United States, particularly in philosophy where the question of what counts as philosophy is at times vitriolic and the regularly touted "I don't think what she does is philosophy" phrase gets thrown about. This is especially notable it seems in Faye's effort to disregard all disciplines that rely on Heidegger in any way which is essentially all the many manifestations of continental philosophy in the United States.

A better article on why to read Heidegger can be found in The New Republic. Two new books on Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's some time lover, have also been recently published to a similar sea of indignant reviews, indignant not about the books but the reputation that Arendt has in the United States. The worst, as far as I can tell, is by Ron Rosenbaum, published on Slate.com.

Like the reviewers of Heidegger, the readers of the books on Arendt don't actually appear to know Arendt's work very well at all. Not only are their reviews teeming with ressentiment flavored phrases, "overinflated, underexamined reputations," but they hold Arendt responsible for the at times vapid reception of her work. It is true that people misuse the phrase "the banality of evil;" I have even heard papers at scholarly conferences that do not appreciate the depths of Arendt's phrase. Contra Rosenbaum, Arendt does not think that this phrase covers "everything bad that humans do". In fact, Arendt is responding to a specific doctrine presented by Kant, one of "radical evil" that supposes that human evil is based on a misdirected will or an inversion of the maxims that we recognize when we choose our actions. This will be too summary of an account, but in essence, Arendt challenges the rationalism of Kant's explanation of evil and finds, disturbingly, that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not actively and rationally following evil perverted ways that they could account for (following their own will instead of the good and hence, inserting exceptions for themselves into the categorical imperative). As many said at Nuremberg, they were just doing their jobs. Arendt's great concern is not to celebrate this shift to the "banality of evil," but to cause us to reconsider the often satisfying accusation that these are bad men, evil, and to worry ourselves with the understanding that evil acts can follow from rather mundane persons of rather mundane aspirations. Rosenbaum appears to pay no attention at all to Arendt's concerns when he writes:

"Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."

Nothing in this passage suggests that Eichmann was not a banally evil person. Arendt's concern is that Eichmann was "not even stupid, thoughtless" and hence, his evil deeds did not follow from a carefully reasoned regime and could not therefore be guarded against by challenging such reasoning. Not to say that ideas have lost their force against the banally evil, but rather that such persons, did not think. One could begin to feel this way about Mr. Rosenbaum from his review.

Rosenbaum goes on to discuss Arendt's self-hating Jewishness in an ahistorical and uninformed way, paying little attention to her own discussion of Jewishness most notably in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Rosenbaum is responding to Wasserstein's essay "Blame the Victim—Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis: the Historian and Her Sources" in the October 9 issue of London's Times Literary Supplement so maybe this is Wasserstein's oversight. Regardless, Arendt struggled to think the relationship between human particularity and human universality throughout her work, and one imagines that this was deeply influenced by her own sense of particularity in ways that were both problematic and productive.

I admit that I at times take great issue with Arendt's work, with her analysis of the relation of the private to the public sphere and her reading of the ancient Greeks, but she is a fine and careful thinker and disagreement with her must be accompanied by matching her careful thinking rather than running roughshod over her work as if we cannot afford any error.

SEPTA and the Middle Class Strike

This is not the first time I have blogged about SEPTA and I expect it will not be the last. I've blogged on myspace about SEPTA being a dangerous place with bus drivers pushing passengers out of the door and causing serious injury and about a student who was testifying at City Council about violence on SEPTA and got beat up on the way home. These are only two of many many only slightly more hilarious than pathetic stories about SEPTA which I invite readers to add to in the comment section. SEPTA's tagline for some time has been "We're Getting There" and then "Serious about Change." Many jokes can be and have been made about these slogans and we have to say we appreciate the naked honesty.

So now, SEPTA is on strike, and things must be considered. SEPTA went on strike in the middle of the night on November 2 after the last World Series game that is to be played in Philadelphia. The TWU 234 assured the mayor over the weekend it wouldn't strike, but when the workers agreed that they would not be satisfied with an 11.5 % wage increase over the next five years, a $1,250 signing bonus and increases in worker pensions was just ridiculously low-balling them and their average $52K salaries, the union walked.

Look, I'm sure it is not easy to work at SEPTA. I know this because it is not easy to ride on SEPTA and I imagine this is in large part due to the fact that the people who operate the system are unhappy. I also think repetitive tasks over hours, days and years are alienating. But I think we need to rethink the logic of the strike. Originally, the strike was the workers' last resort to cause pain and difficulty to the capitalists and politicians who would then recognize that they would rather cede to demands than suffer the hardships faced by their workers not working (this is why, I think, the strike is a tool of socialists rather than communists, since there is still an effort to retool the present system rather than change it entirely). In times of strikes, workers of all stripes would support one another. In this strike though, the logic appears to be reversed -- the TWU workers make more than $20K more than the average household in Philadelphia (which comes in at at $30,746). Fifty-eight thousand school children take public transportation to school. And there have been stories of newly hired low wage -earners who have recently re-entered the economy being threatened with loss of jobs since they can't make it to work.

I'd like to hear more from my Marxists friends about what seems to be a shift in the utilization of the strike. If the strike hurts workers more than those in power, can it possibly be effective? Are we expecting those who have bargaining power to actual care about the plight of these persons and by what mechanism? Fear of loss of jobs? SEPTA's board is non-elected. I suppose Mayor Nutter and Gov. Rendell have reasons to want to get SEPTA back on the road, but I'm underwhelmed by the impact it has had on them.

Certainly, we don't want to say that $52K makes you unalienated and happy in your job, but then $62K won't make you unalienated either, so you can't be fighting for unalienation. At some point, I think we should be permitted to turn to the unions and say, you have failed to serve the worker, and now you serve the petit bourgeois and we are not going to support you.

I would like to know what the reading public thinks.

"But You Look So Young," and other failures to take women seriously

So I was recently among a group of people, strangers really, to whom I introduced myself as a philosophy professor and explained that I was sharing time and space with these people because I had given a talk the day before at the university we were all visiting. Upon removing myself from the conversation, I moved to a room not ten feet away and proceeded to hear these people talk about me. Now aside from the surprise and shock of hearing people talk about me, I was and continue to be frustrated with the course their conversation took. They all agreed that I looked very young. Some offered their impression of me when they first met me. Others introduced information to try to guess how old I probably was. But collectively they agreed that I was quite young to be a philosophy professor.

Even before I earned my degree, but especially since, I regularly hear people say "but you look so young." That remark upsets me every time I hear it. I have tried to dismiss it. My friends and sisters have told me that I should be happy -- that it means I will look good when I'm old. Others have told me it doesn't matter. But today at lunch, when I told this story, my lawyer friend of my same age, Emily, made it all clear when she said: "It's not acceptable. These people are just not accustomed to professional women having the authority that they have and being in the position they are in and these people just do not know how to respond. What they are saying is not innocuous, it is an attempt to deny that authority." In fact, she went on to say, men our age rarely get that remark. It's not that we are young, it's that we are women with careers and advanced degrees. We went on to assure one another that neither of us really did look much younger than our peers.

I really do think that women from about age 24 - 38 can look like they fit in any part of that spectrum and the generation ahead of us is less than accepting or acknowledging of the positions that women have achieved. I suggested that the only time I thought I looked young was when I was working out, and Emily took her point even further to say, no, people just aren't used to thinking that women of a certain age should work out.

So that's it. I'm not putting up with it. No more placating the "you look so young" faction, lobby,or heck, generation. I don't look so young. I am a professor. The only thing you need to know about my age is that I have a Ph.d. Thank you.

The Philosophical Politics of the Incommensurate

I have become increasingly aware of the existence of incommensurate discourses and the effects such discourses have or fail to have between one another. When I recently supposed that a response to one such discourse could only be pacificism, I didn't even realize then what I was saying: that there is no conversation, only a winning or a losing and strategies to achieve that. So today, reading Badiou, I was struck with his example of a similar situation which I will here share in its entirety. Before that, let me say that I think philosophy demands certain things, Socratic acknowledge of ignorance for example that makes it particularly incommensurate with other discourses and I think one of the things philosophers are required to do is to consider how to respond to those whose denial of ignorance leads them to violence and tyranny:

From Polemics, "Introduction," by Alain Badiou:

This dialogue (Plato's Gorgias) presents an extremely forceful encounter between Socrates and Callicles. A philosophical situation is created by this encounter, which is, besides, arranged in a totally theatrical fashion. Why? Because the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles have no common denominator. They are two types of thought that are totally foreign to one another. The discussion between Callicles and Socrates is presented by Plato in such a way as to make us understand what it is to have two different kinds of thought that, like the diagonal and the side of the square, remain incommensurable. The discussion consists in a relation between two terms without any relation. Callicles maintains that right is force, that the happy man is a tyrant -- he who wins others over with cunning and violencce. Socrates maintains that the true man, identified with the happy man, is just, in the philosophical sense of the term. Now, between justice as violence and justice as thought, there is no simple opposition, i.e. one that can be dealt with by means of arguments submitted to a common norm. Any real relation is lacking. As it so happens, then, the discussion is not a discussion. It is a confrontation. And what becomes clear to everyone reading the text is not that one will convince the other, but that there will be a winner and a loser. This further explains why Socrates' methods in this dialogue are hardly fairer than Callicles'. Where there is a will there is a way; what is at stake is to win, and especially to win over the minds of the youths who witness the scene.

Callicles is eventually defeated. He doesn't acknowledge defeat, but becomes mute and remains in his corner. Note that he is the loser in a theatrical dialogue by Plato. Here we have probably one of the rare occurrences where someone like Callicles is defeated. Such are the joys of theatre.

As regards this situation, what does philosophy consist in? The unique task of philosophy here is to show us that we must choose, that we must choose between these two forms of thought. We must choose either to be with Socrates or to be with Callicles. In this example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision. Its proper task is to make the choice clear. Hence, we say: a philosophical situation involves the moment in which a choice is proclaimed -- a choice of existence, or a choice of thinking.

****

This raises several important questions, including, can we find ourselves in community with those who have made different choices than we have -- those who choose for Callicles when we choose for Socrates? As philosophers, how can we make the choice clear even for Callicles -- and perhaps this is what Socrates doesn't do, what he finds impossible so he determines to win. But must this be so? I ask these as genuine questions.

Where is Rhodes? Pass the salt. and other philosophical calls to arms.

When I was in my second year of grad school at Villanova University, I took a course on Benedictus Spinoza. Now the work of Spinoza remains interesting and influential to my thinking, but the single most important thing I learned in that class, I think my classmates would agree, was the Latin acronym: QED. Spinoza would make an elaborate and difficult argument and then finish his point with QED to show, that's just the way it is. QED stands for "quod erat demonstrandum," which means "that which was to be demonstrated" and is generally used to mean, "I have now made an infallible argument in support of my position, bow down and acknowledge!"

Over the years when we, my philosophy friends and I, would have arguments that got heated or saw a particularly good television commercial in earshot of one another, we might pronounce QED to show that a good argument had been made and nothing further needed to be said. Until today, there was no other single philosophical term that brought enjoyment even as it contributed to a girl's attempt to show herself to be right.

But all that has changed. Today, rereading Badiou's Being and Event, Meditation 17, "The Matheme of the Event," I found this gem of a philosophical phrase: "hic Rhodes, hic salta," which is Latin for, "Here is Rhodes, jump here." A quick google search led me to the full story. Apparently, the line is the punchline of a fable from Aesop wherein an athlete boasts that he jumped extremely well at Rhodes and he can produce witnesses. A bystander says witnesses won't be necessary since the athlete can show that he can jump there, "Hic Rhodes, hic salta." Hegel uses the term at the beginning of the Philosophy of Right and Germanifies it as "Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze," which can be translated as, "Here is the rose, dance here." This is not even a translation, and it's not even clear Hegel understood the first Latin phrase, but both phrases basically say, don't put off the demonstration any longer, do it now!

So next time you find someone claiming upon claim without any real substantiation, announce, "Hic Rhodes, hic salta." QED

300: An American Movie about America

The other night I finally saw the film, allegedly about the three hundred Spartan citizen-soldiers who held the gap at Thermopylae against the Persians at the beginning of 5th BCE (around 481). I had put off seeing this film because I had been told that it was very violent, made by the same guy who made Sin City. But it wasn't really that violent, at least no more than other war movies like Braveheart.

From the very beginning, I found this movie highly irritating. At first, I thought my irritation was due to the basic errors in the depiction of Sparta. The ephors are depicted as gross and deformed horny old men who are ultimately at odds with what is good for Sparta. The oracle is specifically Spartan and under the control of the ephors. The Spartans talk about themselves defending their freedom and their free way of life. This is a gross misuse of the concept of freedom for the Spartans. I'm not even sure that Athenians at this time thought of freedom as a personal concern. Both Athens and Sparta would consider freedom as something to fight for only in so far as they wished to maintain the freedom of their city from rule by foreign powers. Athens comes to take this position further when it finds self-rule to be rule by the people, but Sparta was just as concerned with holding off the barbarian hordes from ruling over them. Language in the film refers to the Spartans as slaves who had become free and now wished to maintain that freedom. I'm not a Spartan history scholar, but I am an ancient Greek philosophy scholar and I have read a bit about Sparta and the Peloponnese and Arcadia and I think many people (particularly, Athenians!) who describe life in Sparta as somewhat slavish. I guess it's kinda funny that Aristotle thinks of the Spartans as licentious (Pol. II.9) since the majority of the population were brought up in military education that aimed to make them soldiers so that they could be killed at birth if they didn't appear strong. Anyway, the Spartan population was about 80% slaves or helots. So it is even funnier (not in a haha way) that the movie depicts soldiers fighting for the freedom of their city.

But as the film went on, I realized that what annoyed me was that this film is only a thinly veiled depiction of the United States as a militarized nation that needs to defend its constant need to go to war. I think the notion of fighting in order to keep the city free from foreign domination is in some ways difficult for Americans to think (not withstanding Cold War rhetoric) because we don't think of our freedom as collective. Someone actually says in this film, a woman, the queen who is hawkishly encouraging further deployment of troops to the Hellespont. "Freedom isn't free," she says, "it's paid for with blood."

Now I think once we can stop complaining about how this film is not about Sparta or Thermopylae it gives us fresh insight into American militarism and notions of freedom. I think Americans think that we go to war for individual freedoms. I am going to just come out and say it: I think it is logically impossible to defend that position. Even if we are going to say that we go to war to defend a way of life, what we are saying is that we wish to be free of rule from another government (even when we think that means taking over the rule of other peoples over themselves), we are speaking of wishing to be ruled by our own, rather than to be freely ruling ourselves. What we defend is a regime that might support a way of life that we have come to understand to be free. So no foreign power is ruling us, but we are no more free as persons for having prevented rule from other peoples. The citizens of Sparta kept themselves from being ruled by Persia but still had to give up their 7-year olds for military training. Interestingly, there is a moment in the film when the Spartans meet up with the Athenian army and the Athenians ask why they have brought so few and Leonidas makes much of the fact that they are better warriors because that is what they have been trained for (and also that the Persians are not good fighters because they are slaves) while the Athenians are not good warriors because they live lives other than military when not at war. Again, I take this to be a defense of American militarization and a standing army. Now the Athenians took it as a sign of their military and cultural superiority that they were free men fighting for their lives and did so as free persons who would return to non-militaristic lives. As Pericles celebrates, the courage of Athens comes not from the laws (which required Spartans to stand firm and not surrender as the film celebrates too) but from their way of lives.

Finally, one last thing, in the movie (and in Herodotus) the Spartans are eventually betrayed by a Greek, Ephialtes, who is deformed and was supposed to have been killed at birth (this is the film version) but his father raised him as a soldier. He asks to be included, but Leonidas refuses him and so he goes over to Xerxes and tells him about the mountain path. Here is another image of the American concern that our ultimate downfall will come from within so we must be vigilant and not forget those who might wish ill against us (rather than ceasing to do ill).