Two for Tuesday

Two (rambling) thoughts, which I may expand on later.

First, thinking about the purpose of teaching philosophy to undergraduates. I was readings a dialogue by another philosophy adjunct, and I was reminded of the Karate Kid. Not a great movie, and I haven't seen it since it first came out, but one scene has stayed with me: Mr. Miyagi telling the boy to wax his car. The boy is dismayed, but there is a purpose unrelated to the waxing of cars. Similarly, I neither expect nor really want my students to ponder epistemological questions, but there's something important about flexing those muscles. What does it mean to understand someone else's position? Can we be simultaneously critical and charitable when hearing ideas different from our own? (I will probably elaborate on this at length in a future post.)

Second, prodded both by my friend Terry (who doesn't seem to have posted lately) and by Fareed Zakaria, a bit of Ayn Rand bashing. Ayn Rand was a refugee from Communist Russia, and one of her goals was to develop a political philosophy that was the opposite of Communism as she understood it. Fair enough; but in doing so she came up with a dogmatic (as opposed to properly philosophical* position unconnected to reality - which would be fine if members of Congress weren't quoting her in public. (I should have a link for that, but it eludes me at the moment).

*Something I rarely include in my "go read Nozick instead" is that he eventually renounced libertarianism. That's what I mean by "truly philosophical" = willing to follow your premised to their conclusion, and being willing to revise those conclusions.

Saturday Afternoon

Yet another post that mostly features pictures rather than text, although there is a bit of text in the story. And a cheery story it is!

More cartoons

..because you probably don't just want to hear me bash Ayn Rand. (Although if you do, please leave a comment and I will oblige.)

Cartoons!

So, today is the day that I post some cartoons.

I may have mentioned that I'm not drawing as many these days, mostly because I'm not barraged by the constant stream of nonsense as when I started this blog.

Also, I've been reading Paul Krugman, whom I find edifying but not particularly amusing.

Informal fallacies

In a recent post on a blog I don’t usually read, a libertarian accused people who invoke Somalia against libertarians of making a false dichotomy. Well, no.

If I were to say, "if you don’t support President Obama, you hate poor people" – that’s a false dichotomy; perhaps you voted for Kucinich and don't think the President has gone nearly far enough. If someone were to say, "if you don’t support this bill that gives the government far-reaching power to encroach on our freedoms, then you hate freedom" – that’s also a false dichotomy. The Patriot Act has never seemed particularly patriotic to me.

On the other hand, if I say, "if you want to see where libertarian philosophy will get you, just look at Somalia," I’m doing something else entirely. It’s called a Slippery Slope. And the funny thing about slippery slopes is that they’re not always fallacies.

If you look at Ronald Reagan’s attack on Medicare, you can see a slippery slope as a fallacy. But big changes rarely happen overnight: there’s usually an incremental process involved. To identify a small change which opens the way for future (implied, bad) change is to point to a slippery slope, but sometimes it’s true. Martin Luther wasn’t really interested in having everyone reading the Bible for themselves, and I think his concerns about what that would lead to have been borne out: a massively fragmented Christendom.

I will continue to refer to Somalia, with two caveats. First, I don’t tend to listen too much to, say, Ron Paul or other contemporary American politicians who identify as libertarian; but I have read some of what they read, including but not limited to Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Tara Smith. As an political theory, it’s not so much about the size or proper role of government so much as it is about dismantling the social contract. (If you disagree with this, you should say that I'm committing a Straw Man fallacy, and I will counter that you need to go back and reread Anarchy State and Utopia)

The second caveat is that the Somalis aren't really living out the consequences of libertarian political philosophy: things have fallen apart there for many reasons, and none of them can be blamed on Ayn Rand.

On the other hand, the quality of life in the US depends on a number of factors, some of which do have a direct link to libertarians. Freedom is important, but in what kind of society do you want to live?

The Mercatus Institute’s freedom score was significantly linked to (by state)- lower educational attainment (measured by percent of Bachelor degrees or higher), lower population density, lower per capita GDP, increased infant mortality, increased accident mortality, increased incidence of suicide, increased firearm mortality, decreased industrial R&D, and increased income inequality.

I'm sure there are a host of factors, and these statistics can't be reduced to a larger vision of society and the role of government. And yet.... it’s a slippery slope, do you really want to go down it?

So, these aren't exactly cartoons, either...

but I have some, somewhere. I promise. And I'll post them at some point.

These do feature Mr. Miro; they're studies for part of a much larger series that I've been thinking about since I spent four months in Vancouver several years ago.

I've been thinking about Sarah Palin, and an episode of the Simpsons (3F04) where the giant advertisements came alive and terrorized the town

"Are you suffering from the heartbreak of...Monster-itis? Then take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka!
To stop those monsters, one-two-three, Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free.
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee; guarantee void in Tennessee
Just don't look, just don't look..."

I know, it's like a car wreck (involving Paul Revere and gotcha questions by the lame-stream media!), but as the man from the advertising agency said, "if you stop paying attention to the monsters, they'll lose their powers."

I've also been thinking about unemployment, mine in particular but the national figures in general - as I have been since I first drove out to Vancouver, as a matter of fact - and continue to be horrified by the lack of any coherent response from any politicians that I've seen. Where was the Socialist-in-Chief that we were threatened with promised?

Along those lines, during my recent trips to various bookstores I've noticed an uptick in books on Marx and Marxism... perhaps I'm not the only one that's been thinking about this lately. Or maybe it's just an example of confirmation bias - I see what I want to see. Of course, I also see books by Ayn Rand; my recent thoughts (linking Annie Dillard, Martin Buber, and Immanuel Kant - also Hegel and Marx, Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Spelman) are fairly explicitly anti-Rand (as well as, perhaps predictably, anti-Nozick). I'm still chewing on a straightforward way to present a long and complex line of thinking on the subject, but to summarize: we are human only through our connection to others. (I.e., John Galt can suck it.)

Sketchy

So, I promise a more substantive analysis of... something or other... at some point in the relatively near future. And I also promise more cartoons. But today I wanted to follow up on a recent post regarding figure drawing, and show you what I've been up to (when I'm not drawing cartoons and reading various non-required matter): actual people (and a couple animals) rather than a still life!

Not finished drawings, of course, but a way of gathering ideas.

Squares!

I promised squares a while back, fiddled with these and then forgot about them.

Various other things bouncing through my head lately - connecting Annie Dillard to Martin Buber, connecting Martin Buber to Immanuel Kant... there will be more on this at some point, perhaps with illustrations. For today, you just get squares.

Final Exam

Q: Why are empiricists more likely to be Utilitarian in ethics? How does this carry over to their approach to justice?

A: "Empiricists are more likely to be Utilitarian in ethics because of how they see things. Empiricists debate about where knowledge comes from, reason or senses and since this is the same constant debate that is had it keeps them the same. This carries over to their approach on justice because they debate about the justice system and whether or not it is right and fair."

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad to be done.

NT, right?

This is a rough-ish sketch, perhaps a study, and not intended as a finished product, but it stands in contrast to the cartoons you have come to know and love, as well as the more abstract nonsense I post here occasionally - to serve as a brief break from politics, economics, philosophy and complaining about students (I promise more of that in the coming days).

A friend (who teaches art at the college level) suggested I attend a figure drawing thing here in town (she was also excited, so I did not take this as a direct criticism of my doodling abilities), and it turns out I can't go: I will be grading final exams (did I mention that I'd be complaining about students again in the coming days?).

However, I have bought a book on figure drawing, and I've been doing exercises in the evenings; however, this is the one drawing I've done that was relatively complete, and of course it isn't a figure drawing at all, but a sketch of my room. My choice reminded me of my friend Paul, who enjoys personality typing, such as the Myers-Briggs Personality test as well as the Enneagram: he might point out the relative lack of people in this drawing, more of an NT thing than NF (at least some of you were expecting a theology joke related to that, sorry).

So, hi Paul! I hope you and yours are doing well - I have a package I need to mail to you.

The Social Contract

I have a stock response with regard to Ayn Rand: if you haven't read her by the time you're 19, don't bother. (Admittedly, the specific age sometimes changes by a year, plus or minus, depending on my mood - never past twenty, though.) Sometimes I add a second part: if you want to read serious libertarian political philosophy, read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

As it so happens, I was just teaching a bit on Nozick for my intro class. (A bit of background here: this particular intro class has a broader scope than the average one I've taught, so in addition to epistemology and metaphysics, I also deal with ethics and justice - quite a bit to cram into a single course, but I try to make some of the connections between the topics explicit in a way that I don't remember them being explicit when I was an undergraduate.) The "justice" part of my intro class is framed as, "ethics is how we act individually, justice is how we act corporately" (in a direct parallel to, epistemology is how we gain knowledge individually, philosophy of science is how we gain knowledge corporately). (And for anyone out there who misses this: "corporately" does not necessarily refer to business, it here refers to people acting together - this is the kind of thing my students tend to misunderstand.)

We start with Thrasymachus: might makes right. Socrates dissects the argument (I can go over that in the comments if anyone is really interested, and doesn't already know it). We move then onto Hobbes: life in the state of nature, and the social contract. For me, this is an important transition, because, as with most philosophers who don't specialize in political philosophy (and perhaps some who do, I don't really know, or care), there is a direct connection between Thrasymachus' assumptions and those of Hobbes. We then move from Hobbes to Mill - both empiricists - and then on to John Rawls. What I try to make clear in that transition is that Rawls is fundamentally Kantian in his approach, and I go into some detail about what I mean there (again, I can explain that in the comments, or another post, if readers are interested but unfamiliar).

Then we get to Nozick, and the thing to remember in context is that Nozick is also fundamentally Kantian: that is, he shares some basic assumptions with Rawls, but disagrees on point particular point. He calls this the principle of fairness, but it's a variation on the social contract. Let me say that again: Nozick doesn't like the social contract. I think this is absurd, personally, but at least the connection between Nozick and Ayn Rand is there for all to see. (I then move from Nozick to Adam Smith, to Marx and onto Peter Singer and Amartya Sen, an admittedly biased place to end not only the section on justice, but the course.)

So, last week a student came up and asked me the name of Nozick's book (which he should have known, since it was named in our textbook!), since I had repeated my "don't read Ayn Rand" line while talking about Nozick - and it just so happened that he had started reading Atlas Shrugged the night before (no link, and I suppose I should be glad that he was reading anything, since he obviously hadn't read the assignment for class). I asked him how old he was and he replied, "Nineteen," so I shrugged.

But the more I think about it, the more I just want to say, "If you're not happy with the Social Contract, go visit Somalia."

Two Thoughts...

...before I teach my final class at RIT. And for that matter, perhaps ever: I am tired of teaching part-time, and although I've been offered contracts for the fall at all three of the institutions at which I've been teaching, none of them can offer any assistance over the summer, and none of them can offer me anything other than part-time work. I don't mean to sound bitter (which is always a bad thing to preface a blog post with), but I'm tired of this, and two particular reasons come to mind. (If you're not interested, please just read the cartoons and ignore the text: you're not my students!)

First, there's this thing about supply and demand. There is a consistent demand for philosophy courses, either generated by the college itself (making one or more courses mandatory for the general ed or core curriculum) or else just by students wanting to take courses outside their majors (that they perceive to be easy, but more on that in a second). So, the demand is there. Unfortunately, the supply is also there: too many people such as myself, running around with PhDs, willing to teach at McDonald's wages (no offense to McDonald's). So the administrators squeeze where they have some leverage, and rather than hiring someone such as myself to teach full time - and please remember, there is sufficient demand! - they continue to hire adjuncts.

Second, it seems to me that fewer and fewer students are bothering with the reading, or coming to class, than when I was teaching twelve years ago; perhaps I was simply naive then, but I don't think so. That seems to be true across all three of the schools at which I've been teaching (and I may have previous linked an article that talked about a lack of preparedness among NY high school graduates - empirical evidence that I'm probably not imagining it). But it makes teaching less fun, less rewarding: I enjoy digging into a topic, having a good debate, getting a response from students. I still get this, to a certain extent, but from surprisingly few students, and it seems, fewer each quarter (here at RIT).

So, this may be the last class I ever teach, and I have some pretty mixed feelings about it. Probably more to follow in the next few weeks.

Misrepresentation, but without taxation

I've seen an odd thing several times recently: people asserting or assuming that socialists want to give unlimited power to the state. (I can come back and find links if anyone cares about the particulars.) That's just a non-sequitur: as a quick perusal of Wikipedia will show (and I will not provide a link), it has nothing to do with the power of the state, only with the relative distribution of wealth and power relations.

(I've railed against Wikipedia in the past, and don't need to include another rant here; however, there are much better sources available, if you care to pursue the topic. I've read Ayn Rand, why don't you go read some

Fredric Jameson?)

It seems that often, when conservatives accuse liberals of wanting something or other, they reveal their own unconscious desires - their shadow, in Jungian terms. (It's become a cliche that guys who spend too much time complaining about/worrying about homosexuals are likely to be gay themselves; mutatis mutandis, concerns about, say, President Obama rounding people up in camps is a projection of people's unconscious desire to round people up.)

In any case, I am not particularly interested in giving omnipotent power to the state (not that I could of course, but I've seen it phrased that way), or signing away my rights in favor of cheap cars and gruel. And I don't even deny that people who work hard, or who are innovative, or perform some vital service, should be rewarded for that; the question is, how much more? Should house painters be eligible for food stamps while investment bankers commute from the Hamptons in helicopters? (That of course doesn't address the question of whether investment bankers produce anything of worth, and it's arguable that they don't.)

The middle is being hollowed out, and I think that's the source of much of the paranoia and extremism that's poking through, e.g. as the Tea Party; but I continue to be shocked at how poor the response is in meeting the actual problems.
There is of course an argument for supporting this: make things worse, make them so bad that the people will finally rise up! I'm not that kind of socialist, though.

Just Cartoons today

I have been, and will continue to be, busy; but I still have some unposted cartoons, even if I'm not drawing many new ones these days.

Squares!

These are preliminary sketches that I've been working on.
There are a number of things on my mind - frustration with students in particular - but I'll save those for another time.

So that explains it…

I just read an article which, taken together with a couple other recent articles, helps me understand what I’ve been seeing in students lately.

The most recent story indicates that New York students are not meeting standards for college preparedness: “just 5 percent in Rochester” meet these standards, to take a non-random example. I look at my students (two different schools, neither of which I need to name here), and say to myself, yes. Most of my students don’t come from Rochester, and of course I have good students in all of my classes. But there does seem to be a lack of preparation for college: do they know what they’re getting into?

The next story is something I read a few weeks back, but was on NPR this morning, regarding student performance. There are two factors here. The first is that teachers seem to be demanding less of their students; this makes sense, given that student evaluation is largely correlated with perceived grade, and there is a large segment of the population (such as myself) who more or less depend on those numbers for continued employment (I’ve never been explicitly turned down for a job based on them, but I worry about it). I suspect the second factor is correlated to the first, because students will complain regardless of what you ask: the second factor being that studying is down by half from a couple of decades ago. (That means the average amount my students are studying really is less than what I was doing at their age: I’m not just being cranky, I have statistics.) And another “correlation-does-not-imply-causation-but…” piece: they aren’t learning as much. Is this because they’re not being challenged, or because they’re not studying, or both? And they’re not measuring general knowledge: they’re looking at critical thinking skills (you know, the reason you not only don’t listen to Glenn Beck, but don’t understand why anyone does). Although a friend of a friend chided me a few months back for lacking “critical thinking” with regard to certain economic policies, this is one of the main things I teach, regardless of the course title. I don’t care if you know what Empiricism is, but I don’t want you to get your information about it from Swami Krishnananda, or a website built by high school students over a decade ago. Which is to say, be able to find out who is putting out the information, then evaluate whether it’s reliable or not. You know, critical thinking. It's a good thing.

What do we have so far? Students are unprepared for college, studying fewer hours and learning less. Where could we possibly go from here? The Chronicle of Higher Education, of course. Students today “give themselves high marks for ambition,” higher than in the past, but also – and they do say these things are linked – report record low emotional health. Well, duh. Perhaps it's the cognitive dissonance catching up, compounded by the realization that they don't really know what to do about it. (That's my job of course, but a surprising number of the students don't seem to recognize it.)

Now you have a snapshot of my classes: they are ambitious, they want to achieve. But they enter college unprepared to actually do the work, don’t do the relatively short reading assignments that I give them, and then are anxious and depressed.

And yet, somehow I still enjoy teaching.

Math and Fairness (and cartoons)

Imagine if you will, Plato after the execution of Socrates. Rather than accosting people in the marketplace, he and his students gathered in a local park, named after a hero, Academus. This is where we get the term "academic" - and the origins of secondary education as we know it. This is the background I want you to have in mind.


Colleges charge tuition; some more than others. Tuition is usually charged with at least some reference to the classes a student takes; thus a part-time student would pay by the credit-hour, and the full-time student pays a certain amount in order to take a full load of classes, whatever that may be for the institution. Tuition - the money paid - covers a whole lot more than the classes, of course: the buildings, the heat and electricity, maintenance and the people to do the maintenance, including janitors and grounds keepers; the administration and the administrative support, which includes the admissions office, the registrar, the bursar, and student services; of course the library and the books and staff; and other things a college student might enjoy, including athletics and those facilities - which were an integral part of the Academy - and probably more things I haven't thought of yet.
Tuition pays for all of these things; but if we think of there being a tuition for each class - as the part-time student pays - then we see that these costs are distributed among all the classes: for instance, every class in the philosophy department has a certain amount of tuition revenue associated with it, and one might reasonably assume that the support staff and office supplies comes straight out of that part of the budget (I don't really care if this isn't how things are actually divided up: they might be, but I'm speaking conceptually here). And all of the Liberal Arts classes can be understood as paying for that college's staff. And all the courses offered pay into the common features, such as athletics and the library. These are shared resources, thus the money generated from every class contributes.

Of course there's another wrinkle, which is that few students (or their parents) write a check for the full amount. Most have loans, many have some sort of scholarships and grants. So, the figures are squishy: I know that. I haven't seen the actual figures, and in some respect they don't really matter. The point here is, for every class, you could take the tuition associated with the enrollment and come up with a figure of what that particular class generates. If tuition for the semester is $10,000, and a full load is 4 classes, then each student is paying roughly $2,500 per class. (If you're wondering, I was inspired to do the math by this cartoon.) I think this is a legitimate way of looking at costs, because if the student wasn't taking any courses, then she or he would not be a student: there's no particular reason for that person to be on campus.

To explicitly connect Plato's Academy, the purpose of college is the instruction and learning that goes on; you don't need the admissions office or the library, or the copy machines and overhead projectors. You just need a quiet place to discuss issues, and someone who knows what they're talking about. I'm not suggesting that we get rid of all the non-teaching elements, but I do think it's useful to focus in on the instruction, because if you take away the instructor, nothing else makes any sense. So: what percentage of the revenue generated by each class ought to go to the instructor? This is not a rhetorical question.

What Would Nietzsche Do?

I haven't drawn anything new recently except this series, which I used as part of a class discussion. As usual, the cartoons are unrelated to the text which follows. An explanatory note: I don't have any of the usual notations about the particular passages, or hyperlinks which (sometimes) explain the references, because it was written to be read aloud rather than as a blog post. (Okay, one link - yes, I have this t-shirt)



In 1897, a Congregationalist minister living in Topeka, Kansas, published the novel, In His Steps; Charles Sheldon’s book continues to reverberate in our culture with the question it posed: “What would Jesus do?” While initially seen as a radical, and possibly dangerous, book, it’s been assimilated into the mainstream as a reinforcement of bourgeois ideals. It’s difficult to imagine it as dangerous today.

In contrast, posing the question, “What would Nietzsche do?” seems like a joke. Or a challenge to the blandness that now surrounds “WWJD,” and maybe a mocking the commoditization of that phrase in bracelets and other tchotkes. Or, if you’re somewhat familiar with the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ, asking, What Would Nietzsche Do might actually seem dangerous: after all, he writes about the blond beast, about master morality – and was the inspiration for the murders Leopold and Loeb (although not, as many think, Hitler).

But why would I want to know what either one of them might do if they were in my shoes? Unlike Jesus, I cannot turn water into wine or make the blind to see- although I often do answer straightforward questions with opaque little stories. The comparison between Jesus and Nietzsche on this count is unfair: Jesus asked people to follow him – to take up his yoke - while Nietzsche explicitly rejects the idea of any followers. “You want to multiply yourself… you want disciples? Look for zeroes!” So the question, “What Would Nietzsche Do?”, if taken literally, misses the point of his teachings.

But setting that aside for a moment, taking the question literally: what would Nietzsche do? It depends. During the late morning hours of spring, he liked to sit on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. During the summer he liked to take walks around Swiss lakes. He played the piano, composed a bit, read voraciously, wrote prolifically, and had a fantastically awkward love-life. So, why would we want to do what Nietzsche would do? We are unique individuals in our own interests.

I still think it’s a good question, though, if taken more broadly. In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes of a popular diet at the time, how he tried to follow the diet and how it nearly killed him. Nietzsche is very particular in the telling, though, that the problem wasn’t so much in the diet itself, as it was in the mismatch between his requirements and the prescriptions of this diet: the person who came up with it had found something that worked for him, and shared. What Nietzsche challenges is the very premise, that someone could come up with a way of eating, or a mode of life, that works for everyone. His ironic punctuation to the story is, crede experto, believe one who has tried – even though the story itself suggests we shouldn’t simply take Nietzsche’s word for it.

He doesn’t want followers: his watchword is, “become who you are!” The notion of finding one’s own requirements in life is as old as philosophy itself, even older: an inscription at Delphi read, “Know Thyself.” As with many things, more easily said than done. In another text, Nietzsche talks about this imperative, Know Thyself, and refers to that which is unteachable in us as the “signposts to the problem we are,” our spiritual fate. He is acutely aware of the dangers inherent in self-discovery, and describes it as a pursuit fit only for the strong. Here we see Nietzsche as a seducer, a flatterer who recognizes that most of his readers will automatically think of themselves as strong, or at least strong enough, certainly a person capable of risking such dangers.

Of course, one might think “becoming who you are” is inevitable, and thus requiring no particular effort, not dangerous at all – yet, too many people try to be things they are not, choose inappropriate roles models, fail to recognize their own spiritual fate.

This makes Nietzsche sound like an individualist in the bad sense, the way Ayn Rand is an individualist, caring only for one’s self-development, finding your own path while planting your boot firmly in the face of others who impede you, or have the impertinence to ask for assistance. That’s not true of Nietzsche, though: who I am has been shaped by my environment, my family, my teachers, my friends, even casual acquaintances – and not just the people. Everything, Nietzsche recognizes, is interconnected, bound up with everything else. There are no pieces of our past that we could change and still remain the same, whether the seeming accidents and coincidences, or the missteps and mistakes we have made – all are integral to who we are right now. He writes, “bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, slander, the absence of a letter, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, fraud” - changing any part would result in a different you, and a different world. He asks: “are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come?” We are profoundly interconnected.

Elsewhere he declares, “there is nothing outside the whole!” No place to step back and evaluate, nothing exempt from cause and effect, no way to avoid ourselves. And yet, we drag our feet, we resist the parts of ourselves that we do not like, we want to go back and change our past as if that would somehow help. This is what Nietzsche is thinking about as he asks us to know ourselves, to become who we are. It’s a daunting proposition, inviting despair: in a very real sense there is nothing, after all, to be done. So, What Would Nietzsche Do?

In The Gay Science he writes, “For the New Year: Today everyone allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so I, too, want to say what I wish from myself today, and what thought first crossed my heart: what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! I want to learn, more and more, how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them – thus will I be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness, I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers: let looking away be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!”

Amor fati: love of fate. Not mere acceptance, certainly not dreary resignation, “Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it… but to love it.” - embracing the past that constitutes oneself and those parts of oneself that are unteachable. But do not be mistaken about what the unteachable means here; he emphatically rejects giving free reign to one’s desires and prejudices, he does not mean toleration of one’s own bad habits and shortcomings.

What Would Nietzsche have us do? “Become who you are!” John Lennon sang, “there’s no where that you can be that wasn’t where you’re meant to be: it’s easy.” I think Nietzsche would reply that it’s simple, but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s hard work. But it’s the only work that’s truly worth doing: we must recognizing the paradox that this is something that we all must do, and do as part of an interconnected whole, and yet we each must do this individually. What Would Nietzsche have us Do? Become who you are, find your place in the cosmos, affirm the past, but resolutely go forward.

Not for Children

Every once in a while I get an idea for a children's book - simple, allegorical story with lots of illustrations. (I have only completed one so far, but I have at least two more sitting at the back of my head for that mythical period "when I have time"). The problem with these, in general, is that they're not really for kids at all; they're fairly adult, not in the sense that American culture often thinks - having graphic violence and/or sexual innuendo - but actual adult themes.*

So, my latest book idea is called "The Selfish Ant."

[Some back-story here: I'm concurrently reading A.S. Byatt's Angels & Insects (thanks, Mom!) and GWF Hegel's Philosophy of Right (for reasons that I'll probably talk about in another post) when I'm not grading essays. Byatt is relevant because there is an extended discussion of ants and their social order, along with "evolution v intelligent design," as part of the narrative; Hegel is relevant because he starts with the assumption that we are essentially social creatures with socially mediated wants and desires - rather than little autonomous creatures with natural wants and desires. This is not - despite the ant analogy - the same as mindless collectivism: it's merely acknowledging that whatever we do as individuals is shaped by the social environment in which we were raised and continue to operate.]

In my story, there's a little ant who doesn't think she is sufficiently appreciated, and despite the fact that she is virtually identical with all of her sisters, thinks of herself as smarter, harder working and all-around just-plain special in all sorts of ways. She comes to believe that the colony couldn't function without her, and eventually "goes Galt." She leaves the colony and doesn't quite realize she can't really function by herself until she starves to death. (I'm undecided at this point if the remaining ants should carry her corpse back to the colony in order to chop her up and feed her to to the larvae or not.) Note here that if the Queen did this, the colony really would collapse ala Ayn Rand; but the Queen not only truly is special, she's also a hereditary monarch - born to her position, rather than achieving it through a combination of genius and hard work. I think a series of pen-and-ink illustrations would be sufficient, but I don't know if there's a market for it beyond a couple friends (which probably excludes both the anarchists and the libertarians).

Speaking of libertarians, a while back I promised a rant: this post may have to suffice.

Oh, and merry Christmas!

*One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons plays with this: "what's an adult movie?" "You know, going to work, paying taxes, that sort of thing." One of the many reasons I like Calvin and Hobbes so much.

To be a philosopher

I've been thinking about Brad DeLong's recent use of Nietzsche to characterize the resistance of some to various economic measures that have a demonstratively positive impact on the economy as a whole (not just the individuals who are the recipients). Some of the pieces work nicely, and others - notably the resistence on tax hikes - do not; I'm still working out how all these things fit together. Along with this, I'm working on a sermon for the UUCR on Nietzsche; I suspect they'd be just as happy, if not happier, if I hadn't gone to seminary. Regardless, in thinking about these things, and trying to anticipate various criticisms, it occurred to me that many people don't understand what I mean when I say that I'm a philosopher. That is particularly true for the people with whom I have had most of my arguments lately. Therefore, it seems useful to state that clearly, even if few people read this, and the people who do read this aren't the people with whom I have been arguing.

When most people think of philosophy, they tend to confuse it with psychology; insofar as they correctly apprehend the subject matter, they seem to think of it as concerning "big questions" and rather fuzzy answers. If they've had a philosophy class, they might even remember what seems to be a pointless philosophical conundrum (or two). But thinking as a philosopher doesn't involve content as much as method. I'm currently reading an introductory text in philosophy which starts with Aristotle's definition of logic as a science - a normative science - and a liberal art (in a similar way that, e.g., arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, grammar and rhetoric are all liberal arts). But I suspect that it won't do to say that I think "logically" even if I can give a very precise definition of that; most people think of themselves as logical (even if I can poke holes in their arguments). So let me tell a story.

When I was an undergraduate, long long ago, I believed various things about the way the world is. This included belief in a material body and a distinct mental self; and the idea that the mental self (I think I would have avoided using the word "soul" even then, but perhaps not) was itself divided into three distinct parts, ala Freud (or, although I wouldn't have identified it like this at the time, Plato). Further, I thought it was unproblematic that we have freedom of will, in the sense that our mental self make decisions and causes the material body to do various things; we are "free" if (this is the way various philosophers phrase it) "in exactly the same circumstances, I could have done otherwise" (for the trivial, such as having oatmeal for breakfast rather than eggs, or for the more serious, such as deciding to go to University of Portland rather than Duke as an undergraduate). In the course of taking various classes in philosophy (and psychology, since they're not completely unrelated), I tried to articulate these positions; finding my own arguments lacking, I tried to find others who had previously defended these positions. What I found surprised me: no one had offered particularly good arguments for either dualism (having two distinct components of the self, physical and mental) or for freedom of will. Even the clumsy arguments for determinism, such as John Hosper's Freudian determinism, were laid out with more rigor than any of the arguments defending the so-called common sense view that we have "free will." And here's the punch line: I changed my mind on these topics.

Etymologically, the philosopher is the "lover of, or pursuer of, the truth," rather than someone who has the truth. I am not dogmatically attached to any of my positions, although, for the things I care about, I am increasingly skeptical that anyone has an argument that would convince me that I am mistaken. My skepticism grows when I ask someone with more knowledge of a particular topic to explain why I might be mistaken, and either I get a condescending "explanation" which ignores my concerns, or I am flatly dismissed. My skepticism also grows when I try to point out how reality seems to match the predictions I have been reading (in a rather Popperian way, whatever reservations you may have about Karl Popper), and again my concerns are dismissed (or deleted). For me, to be a philosopher is to follow the arguments where they lead; if you don't like my conclusions, you're welcome to point out the flaws in my arguments and pose counter argument. If you take me seriously, I will take you seriously; however, taking you seriously includes pointing out flaws in your arguments as well. That includes both structural flaws (since logic is the domain of philosophers) and empirical problems. Pushing back is a sign of respect; dismissing is not.

All of this is to say, I will probably come back to Brad DeLong at some point and talk about his use of Nietzsche in diagnosing the current situation (recognizing that if I wait too long, it will no longer be the current situation).

(I may also post a draft of the sermon in the next couple days.)

UPDATE: I've just had another exchange with one of the people I was thinking about when I wrote this. I posted a link to a blog post about economics, and I got a straw person argument as a comment. I try to be kinder to my friends who aren't academics, but there's just a certain rigor I try to bring to everything I write, and I expect the same from people who would like to join the conversation. The funny thing about this is, the comment was in regard to a portion of the blog post which was poorly thought-out and certainly deserving of criticism; it was also not the main point. There were good arguments to be marshaled; it's not my blog post, fire away! Even if it was one of my arguments, go ahead and fire away - philosophy as a discipline is about building good arguments and finding the flaws in arguments, other people's or your own. If there's a problem, I want to know - can it be addressed, how might I go back and change it, what other factors ought I include? Or was it just poorly thought through? Do I need to scrap it entirely? I'm happy to scrap bad ideas, and I'm happy to let good ideas go through a refining process.

But don't just fling shit at me, and then sulk when I point out, "hey, that's shit!"