In Defense of Lost Causes

I just finished Zizek's "In Defense of Lost Causes"; now the plan is to backtrack and read Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy." I just thought I would share the last page of Zizek's book.

It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

1. strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, namely, one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);

2. terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal "freedoms," technological control of prospective law-breakers);

3. voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development);

4. and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people (the wager that a large majority of people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine rightly celebrated the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the "eternal Idea" of egalitarian terror?

Eian Kantor (and the philosophical discipline)

Metaphilosophy is an interest primarily to two separate demographics: the new and the old. The young student of philosophy, in their unbridled enthusiasm at just recently have been introduced/initiated into a new mode of investigation, reflects on the parameters and qualities of philosophical thought because they (a) find themselves in uncharted territory, and seek to find the coordinates by which they can move forward in their studies, and because they (b) are pressured to articulate their interests and concerns specifically so they can both be identified (in terms of their position) and so that philosophical dialogue can be properly framed (for the addressee of an essay, a classmate, a colleague, etc). The old student of philosophy reflects on metaphilosophical issues because, after having devoted so much time and energy to a field, it behooves her to justify/identify just what the hell she's been doing with her life (see the introduction to "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?" by Deleuze and Guattari).

Eian Kantor and myself are new students, so I can immediately identify with some of his high, drunken, sleep-deprived musings:

I've been thinking a lot about weird issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of language lately. I don't even know if my thoughts can even be classified in either of those two categories, because I don't usually like to categorize the philosophy/thoughts that I hold into such arbitrary categories. Almost all areas of philosophy (in my opinion, of course) can be/are conflated with other areas of philosophy (and other areas of academic disciplines)

This is something that has always rubbed me the wrong way about analytic philosophy: however useful it may be for organizing course offerings or editing coherent anthologies, the separate "branches" of philosophy seem awfully contrived. I have to agree that such areas of philosophy are already conflated, althought--being the proponent of Theory (capital "T") that I am--I have to make a distinction when it comes to the boundaries of philosophy of an academic discipline (and not just a mode or area of inquiry).

How can one study ethics without necessarily presupposing or articulating a metaphysical conception of the ethical subjects and the world they inhabit? Is the philosophy of mind all that separate from metaphysics and epistemology? From philosophy of language? Do not propositions on mind, matter, and language also have strict consequences for the way in which we approach ethics? I'd include the philosophy of religion here, but for the most part I have trouble understanding just what philosophical subject the philosophy of religion is supposed to treat. But if it is legitimate, it seems impossible to conceive of a discussion of god, spirit, etc. without taking the above into account. This is why discussions of "consequentialism" will never impress me--the fact that graduate applicants list "the trolley problem" as an "interest" on their CV's and statements of purpose should embarrass us.

And as far as other, external academic disciplines are considered, I'd like to sum up the paper that our colleague here at Missouri State presented at the Mid-South undergraduate philosophy conference (in regard to his proposed "three placements" of the importance of philosophy as an academic discipline):

Placement #1: Philosophy is the university's most important major and should be preserved.

Placement #2: Philosophy, on equal footing with other academic studies, has insights or advantages that are particular to its methodology and to the content of its conclusions, and should be preserved just as other studies are preserved.

Placement #3: Philosophy's methods and conclusions are covered equally well in other departments. Philosophy departments should be liquidated and the responsibility of teaching what is worthwhile in philosophy be redistributed among faculty in other departments.

I maintain, as I did at the conference, that the second position is undoubtedly the most shameful of these three options, and that due to the nature of philosophy one can only with good conscience choose the first or third position.

Under the second placement, philosophy is deprived its universality--opposed to the alternatives in which philosophy has some meaningful relationship to other academic disciplines--and its utility depends upon it being "unique" from other fields of study. Yet against history, anthropology, physics, mathematics, literature, and various emerging cultural studies, it becomes increasingly difficult to make this sort of "case" for philosophy (at least, to an administrative board charged with trimming departmental budgets). I believe that philosophy has a "unique" method, but that its content is contained (I shouldn't say contained--maybe pertinent) within other fields. However, here the distribution is so broad that dissolving it as a discipline would mean unreasonable demands of professionals in countless specialized fields: would we honestly expect faculty to teach chemistry and Popper? This third placement doesn't cut the mustard because it is all the more likely that philosophy as we know it (be it analytic or continental) would disappear from the university, not just as an official department, but altogether.

My demand for the first placement, in opposition to Biondi's own conclusion, is due to the national trend in universities to emphasize interdisciplinarity--coordinating conferences with other departments, encouraging students to double major or to take a variety of electives or to create their own major, and collaborating on cross-listed coursework and publications, etc. I have heard that this is to continental philosophy's advantage since a many european thinkers and writers have always looked to literature, art, history, sociology, politics, physics, biology, psychology and mathematics for inspiration. However, I'm totally opposed here--this formulation has it completely backwards. It is not that philosophy should strive to become more interdisciplinary in its approach; philosophy should identify itself as the only means by which separate disciplines can enter into dialogue. Theory is the interstitial glue for otherwise disconnected arts and sciences. This is why I chose to apply for admission to a PhD program in philosophy (and not literature, or cultural studies, or what have you); because I believe Theory (capital "T") is what irreducibly belongs to philosophy, and that this is much more than any particular "unique" element among other disciplines with their own "unique" elements. Theory is at the bottom of any such discipline.

I don't know how I got off in this crazy direction, but that's life.

Collingwood and unknown history

[WARNING: When I started this post I had a thesis in mind and began with every intention to argue in its defense; by the end, however, it was clear that argument had collapsed into pure ramble. But it might still be an interesting ramble, in any case.]

This last weekend I attended a lecture titled “R. G. Collingwood’s Idealist Answer to the Kantian Question: How is Historical Knowledge Possible?” I will admit that I had never heard of Collingwood and my familiarity with Idealism is more or less limited to a few dead Germans from the 18^th and 19^th centuries; to be honest, I only attended the lecture at Patrick’s suggestion—and he was only intrigued by the word “history” in the title, the only such paper offered at the Midsouth Conference.

The details of the paper aren’t really relevant here—don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated to learn of an English philosopher who resisted the contemporary (and current, if my meager impression of Analytic philosophy is at all indicative) tendency to restrict epistemological discourse to treatments of scientific knowledge. In fact, his insistence upon the importance of and devotion to considerations historical knowledge are in my eyes characteristic of the sort of territory familiar to continentalists but relatively neglected—even uncharted—in the work and thought of most anglo-american philosophers whom I’ve encountered.

However, it was the Q&A portion of the presentation that really piqued my interest, the aftermath of which I hope to articulate and resolve here. The commentator offered the speaker a thought experiment: did the Rosetta Stone bear a meaningful relation to the symbols inscribed on its surface prior to its having been unearthed? The Kantian commentator, the Collingwoodian speaker, and a Hegelian audience member proposed, respectively, that…

…the Rosetta Stone ceaselessly translates the languages inscribed, with or without the human interpretation of an historian.

…the Rosetta Stone, after being forgotten and prior to being rediscovered, was unable to be interpreted, and thus did not belong to history. No such relation between it and its languages can be determined.

…any consideration of the undiscovered Rosetta Stone is a projection of subjectivity, the introduction of the historian. A history is interpreted and extended over the “gap” in the stone’s past.

While the latter two responses are compatible, the first on the part of the Kantian is problematic. In his comments, the Kantian expressed that, above all, the weasliest account of the Rosetta Stone is the position that the stone remains in-itself interpretable in the absence of an interpreter—the linguistic properties of its surface inward reflected as indeterminate matter indifferent to its particular form or external relation (the presence or absence of a human translator). But what does his own response mean—that the stone continues to translate, even if buried and forgotten—if not that the stone’s interpretability or being reflected into another remains indifferent to its particular external relation? Whether or not this response is correct in the final analysis, it is clear that, by the commentator’s standards, his own position is the weasliest.

The speaker’s reminder that Collingwood distinguishes the history from the past is particularly elucidating for Collingwood’s foremost contention: that scientific knowledge is always also historical knowledge. Well, maybe not so elucidating, because for me it only raises further questions: does he mean that, in the same way that things become historical evidence and signal a new space for meaningful relations, scientific evidence similarly introduces new dimension in what was benign, meaningless space? Does he mean that the logic of scientific discovery is itself historical in its development? Does he mean that—similar to Kuhn, Latour, Foucault—science is no neutral domain, but rather is conditioned and responsive to certain social/historical developments or paradigms? However we understand this relationship between history and science, the past is the real unknowable for consciousness—not because it is noumenal or obfuscated by appearance, but because it has already transpired. Whatever the amount of evidence or intensity of historical research, the angle of approach of thought towards the past is asymptotic. In addition to its capacity or actuality in the present, any given object carries a second capacity to document, to carry a trace of its present by which historical imagination creates a coherent, meaningful story in another present.

But I really like the Hegelian’s response to the Rosetta Stone—the mere speculation upon a buried, forgotten artifact automatically means that the artifact has been unearthed, remembered; to talk about an non-interpreted object is to project a historian into a blind spot in our history. This is what Hegel means when he says that the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, is the most abstract understanding of the thing, and thus the most subjective. In plumbing the depths of a substance, in seeking it as it is noumenally, one is surprised to find subjectivity at the core of this conception of objectivity. This is the best example—the Kantian speculates about the objective relations between things outside of any human involvement, and the Hegelian retorts that such an endeavor is itself human involvement.

But this doesn’t really address the problem; after all, there is a clear point in time in which the Rosetta Stone becomes a part of human history: one day the Stone didn’t exist and the next day it did. Or, more precisely: one day the Stone did not figure into our interpretation of history and the next day it bore a meaningful relation to the languages on its surface, it became evidence. What is thus remarkable about evidence is that it is at bottom a creation ex nihilo—this is why Bruno Latour is justified to talk about Boyle’s development of the vacuum as the creation of an object, not only in the sense of mere invention, but understood as a true Event. The Event is an impossibility, an irrevocable rupture in the present understanding, an unforeseen violent shift in paradigm. The Event is a point of no return. In less obscure terms, the development of the vacuum meant the creation of the laboratory. The laboratory as Event could not be undone—one can’t just return to a moment in which trust was not conferred upon repeatable experiments in controlled environments. Is this what Collingwood means when he says that all scientific knowledge is historical knowledge?

I don’t have the stamina for writing. I had planned on eventually making a case for psychoanalysis (because it takes as its point of departure the “(hi)stories” that we tell ourselves about ourselves). But this post is already getting too far afield—and I’d happily write about psychoanalysis on another occasion.

I don’t feel too bad for not having a conclusion—the whole point of this blog is just to get into the habit of writing, right?