If there is no further frontier for Metaphysical 'Realism' (which means the opposite of what a lay-person would think. Ideas are real. Reality isn't.) than Plato, then, equally, there is no further frontier to 'critical' philosophy of a Nominalist type than Kant. But Kant in his last days (this is the Opus Postumum) was trying to 'transition from metaphysics to physics'. It is in these 'fascicles' where we find, by a series of redefinitions the notion that, in the final analysis, Transcendental Philosophy is "galvanism" (AA XXI, 133, 135) and its principle is "Zoroaster".
Interestingly, the first volume of Nietzsche's 'Thus spake ' appeared about a year after the first publication of the fascicles.
Previously, even if a canonical text was posthumous or fragmentary, it had a school, or schools of a factional type, of interpretation and transmission. This, the Opus Postumum lacked. To carry forward Kant's project would involve seeking 'galvanism' or a 'daimon' or 'tutelary genius' of one's own- except it could not be, as the daimon of Socrates was, parochial or confined to one self-destined to be a qurban, pharmakos, scape-goat sacrifice carrying off the sins of a particular Polis to which the author was natal. It had to be something vaguer, perhaps, more mischievous.
Christ, of course, is also a pharmakos but his Ascension is the bridge between Metaphysics and Physics and, moreover, the imitation of Christ requires no further scapegoat because it is in essence non-rival. Salva veritate, we may say that Girardian mimetic, only applies to Athens not Jerusalem. As Nietzsche remarked- it was purely Hellenic to say, as did the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodor- ‘Amongst us, nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him be somewhere else, with other people.’ Here, the merely mathematical economics of Tardean emulation demands a homo sacer who, Rene Girard tells us, must be killed again and again so as to prevent the Metropole, like Canetti's anthill, burning itself down in the universal conflagration of its own constitutive mimetic desire.
For working class people in Europe, including illiterate Hindutva nutjobs like me, Socrates is redeemed by Christ as indeed was Greece and many other great Nations. There is a great chain of Being linking the daimon of Desdemona and the qareen of Suqrat and Kant's Zoroaster and Nietzsche's Syphilis and even my own hooligan Socioproctology.
I'm lying. The truth is, it is the bride of Christ- the Church- which does, or did till it got 'woke', the heavy lifting.
I suppose one may say hierogamy- e.g. the ever fractal or else mise en abyme marriage between Cupid & Psyche- is epistemic and 'aspirational'. Sadly, that knowledge is unavailing and those aspirations a but primrose path to pompous vacuity.
As a case in point, consider this New Statesman interview with Agnes Callard, who, having married her student, considers conjugal life in reality to, by some magic, or arbitrary assertion, become univocal with the 'conjugacy class' of some particularly bulimic or coprophagous stripe of Psilosophy.
In the acknowledgements at the end of her new book, Open Socrates, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes: “Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless.”
The context is that writing things down is not enough. You must ensure there is a chain of interpretation, exposition or criticism such that the thing remains intelligible and is used for its proper purpose. Plato has an obvious interest in making this argument because he had set up an Academy. More generally, along with a revealed or otherwise canonical text- e.g. Euclid- there is a class of people eligible to expound or explain it.
“Socrates says in a couple of places in late dialogues: thinking is like having a conversation with yourself,”
Even Socrates wasn't foolish enough to say this to himself. He said it to somebody else. Why? He was explaining that he wasn't just chatting with his interlocutor as a way to pass the time. He was speaking aloud about some internal cogitation of his own which was not connected to the fact that he was talking to an attractive boy rather than some elderly bore with a long beard.
Callard told me when we met at her hotel in London’s Marylebone. “Fundamentally there’s conversation, and then thinking is an imitation of that.
No. Socratic dialogues aren't conversations. They are more like soliloquies or lectures on an abstract topic. The form of that thinking might be dialogic or dialectical- i.e. featuring thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis- and there was an open question as to whether geometry and jurisprudence were what we would call 'natural' deductive systems. What isn't the case is that people think in the manner that they chat with people. Chatting often involves suppressing or dissimulating thinking or the appearance of thinking.
And we can get some way through that imitation.” Writing, too, is an (ultimately inadequate) imitation of conversation.
No. There was a style of writing which was conversational or thrown into the mould of a dialogue. But there were other styles- e.g. the lyric, the epic, the oracular, the mystic, the satirical, the fantastic and the wholly nonsensical.
When it comes to a dogma, it is important that there is both a text and a class of expositors or elucidators of that text. The fear was that 'infidels' or the 'uninitiated' might use the text we hold to be sacred or canonical for their own, very different, purposes. Furthermore, there was often an esoteric doctrine- or the claim that such a thing existed- alongside the exoteric aspect of the text. Thus, it was believed in medieval times that Plato and Socrates had super-natural powers.
It is idiosyncratic to acknowledge, at the very end of a book, that you believe it to be such a limited medium.
No. Agnes is saying that if you spend a lot of money taking her courses at Uni, you will gain something which the mere Amazon customer will not. Agnes is lying.
But Callard is an idiosyncratic thinker.
She is an imbecile.
She began her answer to my first question – about why she chose to be a public philosopher
as opposed to one who could make technical advances and thus gain the esteem of her colleagues.
– with the caveat that “whenever you explain yourself, you’re just giving a theory among many theories”.
No. When you explain why you did something, you are giving a 'privileged' account which can rely on your own knowledge of your internal states and motivations. True, your 'privileged' account may be inconsistent or stretch our credulity. In a Court of Law, a Judge may substitute a more reasonable theory for the one offered by the defendant so as to establish motive.
She described history as her “Achilles’ heel” because it “is not in the right order, it’s just in the order that things happened” –
This isn't a big problem. You can have a notion of the underlying configuration space and specific 'frictions' or 'singularities' with it so as to explain why things did not proceed in their logical order- e.g. abolition of slavery in Indian territory came after its end in the Confederacy even though the Indian Tribes were militarily much weaker.
perhaps the logical order to most. Yet she is frustrated that “it’s not in the order of importance or in the logical order of ideas”.
It seems illogical that Ceylon gave women the vote 14 years before the French did or that Ottoman Turkey was more progressive in its attitude to Homosexuality than 'Liberal' Britain or the USA. However, if we have a grasp of the political configuration space, we can easily understand why such seeming anomalies arose.
Open Socrates is Callard’s second book, but she is perhaps better known
as the tenured Professor with lots of babies who is as stupid as shit. Maybe she is neurologically diverse or was molested as a child.
for her popular essays on topics such as parenting, infidelity and why travel is a very poor means of self-discovery, and for being the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile. In it, the philosopher allowed a considerable level of access to her private life, detailing how she fell in love with, married and had a baby with one of her students, divorcing her first husband and the father of her two eldest children in the process. Eventually, they all moved in together, and Callard and her second husband opened up their marriage.
That's perfectly sensible. People should have lots of babies and Dads should stay close to their kids. That way we won't keep having to import people from faraway countries who look down on us because we are lazy, stupid, and have the morals of an alley cat. Vivek Ramaswamy, this means you. Fuck off back to Palghat instead of lecturing us on our terrible work ethic.
When I asked why she had agreed to do the profile,
publicity. That means selling more books. Money comes in handy when you have lots of kids. We admire Callard for having babies and keeping the Dads around while bringing more and more money into the household. True, she is a cretin but since she teaches a worthless subject, there is no 'opportunity cost' here.
Callard posed a secondary question: “Why didn’t I, when [the journalist, Rachel Aviv] came to questions about my personal life, say: ‘I won’t answer those things?’
The answer is obvious. If you don't talk to journalists they will talk to people who know you. Mums, in particular, tend to dwell on your problems with toilet training even though, nowadays, it is perfectly acceptable to skip that soi disant 'pediatric development goal' and just wear adult diapers all your life. Also, there's no law saying you have to learn how tie your own shoe-laces. I sometimes wonder why I am not a tenured professor of Philosophy. Is it coz iz bleck?
One part of the answer is the questions were interesting, so I was interested to hear what I was going to say. I think that I am probably less inclined to shield my personal life from my interlocutors:
This suggests Agnes doesn't have a lot of skeletons in her cupboard. Even if this isn't the case, she did the right thing. The fact is, she has had babies. We like babies. She has ensured the Daddies are in the picture- indeed, they are in the house. That's great. Kids need parents who get on well with each other. Nobody cares who is fucking who provided the kids get to skool with nutritious packed lunches.
if that’s what they want to talk about then there’s probably something interesting there, something worth investigating.”
That is perfectly sensible. I recall being interviewed by a lady doing a thesis on the impact of 'Art Therapy' on people who had been diagnosed with Depression. It turned out that she wasn't interested in how often I had suicidal ideation and whether this causes me to masturbate while weeping and watching documentaries about large aquatic mammals. Instead, she asked me a very interesting question 'Was I depressed?'. I discovered I wasn't. It's just that I find people cheer up when I tell them I am planning to top myself soon. The general attitude seems to be that it can't be soon enough. As for the stuff about large aquatic mammals, I threw that in just to add a touch of verisimilitude.
This approach to inquiry is at the heart of the Socratic method.
No it isn't. Socrates sets the agenda and manipulates things so as to get to where he wants the dialogue to go. True, smart peeps, like Parmenides, get the better of him but that suited Plato's purpose.
We tend to consider thought a private, insular activity, but, Callard writes, Socrates found that “the key to getting unstuck” is to relocate thought “from its usual home inside one person’s head into the shared space of the conversation that passes between two people”.
No. For Socrates, what was crucial was the 'palinode'. You start of going in one direction, but then find, thanks to the prompting of your daimonion or peculiar genius, that you must reverse course. One can think of this as rowing in one direction because there is no wind, but then, when the wind springs up, you unfurl your sail and though your direction is now different, you are upon an arc which gets to where you want to go faster and with less effort. Socrates says rowing is like categorical thinking. It is sub-optimal but it may be your best option when there is no wind to belly out your sails.
Together, we can answer questions that we could never examine on our own.
No. We can examine things on our own and, if we have one piece of a possible solution and a guy working in some other field appears to have the other part of it, maybe we can answer the question together. Socrates never says that his own 'synoida' is something he gained in conversation. This is similar to but different from Stoic synedeisis and later Christian notions of synderesis or the still small voice of the conscience. It is something inborn or Divinely implanted, or has to do with a particular daemon or tutelary genius, though the realization of it may be catalysed by the right type of cross-examination (elenchus).
To Socrates, there was no shame in being wrong, because being wrong leads to the discovery of what is right.
It is true that discovering you are wrong may involve gaining new information. This does not necessarily mean you know what is right. On the other hand, there is shame in being wrong about a thing on which you claim special knowledge or expertise. Socrates said his own expertise lay in the field of 'love'. Since he was as ugly as shit, this was very funny.
“What kind of person am I?” he asks in Plato’s Gorgias.
This is a rhetorical question. He supplies the answer himself. This shows that he has thought about the matter before he engaged in any conversation.
“One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue.”
But, he also says that Philosophical questions are ones where as good an argument for a proposition as against it can be made. The problem is that conjectures are many, refutations are few and themselves prone to refutation.
“One part of my willingness to answer Rachel’s questions [for the New Yorker],” Callard told me, “is that if you think as I think, that you really can’t think by yourself, then
you are against Socrates. You may be a Social Constructivist who believes 'language thinks us' or some such shite. But, in that case, you have to gas on about Witlesstein.
whenever anyone asks you a question, that’s an opportunity…
for me to quickly mention weeping while masturbating to documentaries about manatees. For some reason, I thought this would enable me to come across as as 'deep'. But people think I'm not just an insufferable bore, I am also weird in a repulsive manner. The truth is, I don't watch documentaries and my sexual tastes are vanilla. The problem with boring people is that they become even more boring and repulsive when they try to make themselves interesting.
Socrates gets that: he gets that we can’t really think by ourselves, and that we’re thrown on other people of intellectual necessity.”
No. Socrates claims knowledge of only thing- love. But this is what in Christianity we term agape, not eros. Solitude may be an 'intellectual necessity'. But Love of a Socratic type can't flourish in isolation. The vital question was, did such Love involve asebia (impiety)? Did it imperil the Polis? Perhaps. Periclean Athens was doomed and maybe Socrates was part of the problem. The fact is 'philia' or affiliation is all very well, but what really matters is fiscal policy.
Agnes Callard was born in 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived until the age of five,
Hungarian 'Martians' enjoyed a certain intellectual pre-eminence back in the Fifties. Callard is right to play up this aspect of her heritage.
after which the family moved to Rome and then New York. Her mother was a haematologist; her father studied law in Hungary but in America worked as a carpet salesman. Callard considers her love for school “an early manifestation of my love for philosophy”;
which would have been killed off had she studied in France where Philosophy is taught at High School.
she once had a German teacher who called her frage frau, “question lady”, because she asked so many.
Frauen frage, means 'the woman question'- i.e. Feminism. I suppose Callard must have studied German as an adult.
Callard was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, but has not yet fully discerned what contribution the condition might have made to her philosophy:
Kant & Parfit may have been on the spectrum. But Kant was smart.
“When you’re at the beginning of thinking about something,
do some research. Separate out what are 'open' questions and in what manner previously open questions were closed by other, more empirical, disciplines.
all you can produce for other people is clichés,
don't produce for other people. Do it for yourself. Alternatively, just tell them about your period or how your addiction to manatee porn wrecked your marriage.
and so I feel like when I try to talk about it… I’m not contributing much.”
If you are teaching nonsense to imbeciles, that is going to be the case even if you are able to prove that only manatee porn can subvert Neo-Liberalism.
She completed her PhD in philosophy at Berkeley, California, and is now an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she leads the undergraduate programme.
There are young people stupider than Callard. That's a very depressing thought. Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy has a point.
It was this, she theorises, that began her interest in public philosophy, as it led her to consider how the department could appeal to students for whom it was not their major.
The answer is spread the word it is an 'Easy A'. Also, you can get credit for watching manatee porn.
Callard refuted my suggestion that public philosophy is inherently controversial because
it is inherently boring and stupid
it requires the philosopher to openly pose contentious questions,
like- why Neo-Liberalism so adamantly opposes compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual males?
on the grounds that “almost all speech right now is inherently controversial,
because dicks haven't been banned. Its totes triggering to me that people keep talking while dicks are prowling around raping the environment.
and so it might not be that peculiar to philosophy”.
In Open Socrates, Callard identifies the “political fictions” of our age as being the “liberalism triad” of freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.
Free speech is part of Classical Liberalism. Some people pretended Rawls had smuggled the other two things onto the Liberal Agenda, but he hadn't really. Economic non-convexities means 'Justice as Fairness' is 'anything goes'.
It is not that these are not genuine ideals to be aimed for,
They aren't. There are prudential reasons for paying attention to them. But, there are also prudential reasons for ensuring that attention is entirely hypocritical.
but that the systems we have designed to achieve them are insufficient.
We have designed shit to achieve them. There is a Hohfeldian immunity for 'free speech' but it is defeasible. Due process or 'equal dignity' is purely formal or procedural and has no substantive content. Social Justice is an oxymoron.
Callard considers free speech to be that which is truly inquisitive,
e.g. guys who want to know your Bank account number and password and so forth.
and none of the structures by which we distribute and enshrine it – such as the First Amendment – truly render it free.
We don't distribute or enshrine it. We tolerate it though we may also bring an action in law for libel or defamation.
Free speech is “an intellectual ideal, and we’ve misconceived it as being a political ideal,
No. Relevant speech may be an intellectual ideal. A Math Professor may respond positively to a hostile speech by one of his students who accuses him of having made a mistake in presenting a particular proof. He will not respond to inquisitive questions about which particular photo of a curvaceous manatee he would most consider masturbating to.
There can be a 'political ideal' of 'parrhesia' and laws can be enacted to protect whistle-blowers or those who have been forced to sign unconscionable non-disclosure agreements etc. But Callard is too stupid to discuss such things.
about like restrictions we place on one another”.
I suppose Callard is getting at her University cracking down on cancel culture.
Our work towards equality is flawed because
Callard is doing no such work.
“we’ve failed to reconcile our love of equality with our love of status”.
Which is like saying 'we've failed to reconcile our love of Putin with our love of Ukrainians his troops are killing'. The fact is, either you love equality or you love status and hierarchy. It is a different matter that you may have to pretend to love equality so as to keep your status. But that is hypocrisy merely.
The fight against injustice is more enlightened than it once was: today, we understand that killing a person – a Russian soldier, for instance – does not kill the idea (such as Ukraine isn’t a sovereign country) we are really taking aim at.
If we are killing Russian soldiers in the present war, we are helping kill the idea that Ukraine isn't sovereign. Why? A country which defeats and repels invaders is de facto sovereign.
Even supplying Ukrainians with guns, because we are too lazy or cowardly to fight Russians ourselves, is part of an attempt to kill the idea that the place can be conquered and thus lose its sovereignty.
“That’s a big human achievement, because through a lot of human history, people were, like: fighting wars is how you, like, fight for ideas.”
What this silly woman means is that when the US and the UK guaranteed the sovereignty of Ukraine, the hope was that we wouldn't have to put our own, treasure, if not blood, on the line. We were wrong. The Ukrainians were fools to give up their nukes. They lost territory in 2014 and, it may be, they will have to concede yet more territory if the Donald pulls the financial plug.
But Callard believes that when, “instead of killing someone, what you’re doing is humiliating your political opponent or denying them a platform, that’s the same thing.
The Rabbis condemn the inflicting of 'social death' on others. But 'social death' isn't the same thing as actually dying.
It’s just a little bit of a gentler stab,
as is shitting yourself whenever you hear mention of that person. True, this may be self-defeating. People may give you a wide berth and flock to the person you despise.
but you haven’t achieved anything idea-wise in lowering the status of your opponents.”
Not if you focus entirely on shitting yourself. On the other hand, if by the use of forensic accounting, you show your opponent is a fucking swindler and this gets him arrested and sent to jail, then you have lowered the fuck out of the status of your opponent.
Protest, too, can fail in its attempt to correct injustice.
More particularly if it involves shitting yourself.
Callard thinks about protest as “a kind of complaint”, and “agree[s] with Simone Weil that the fundamental form of thought inside of a complaint is, ‘Why am I being hurt?’
Nonsense! If I protest against Police inaction in cases of rape, no one thinks I am myself being raped. This is because I am a fat, elderly, black man. Still, everybody understands that my life will be better if rapists are locked up. This is because though I am not in danger of rape, people I depend on or whom I care about are at such risk.
But you could pose that in a couple of different ways. One way you could do it is… ‘I’ve decided ahead of time that there’s no good reason, and you’re my enemy. And what we’re going do is say this as loud as possible to cause you certain kinds of pain, so that we then get certain kinds of benefits.’ What you’ve done, if you see it that way, is you’ve sapped the protest of its potential philosophical import,
Nonsense! There are philosophers, or potential philosophers, who will seize upon the thing in order to write stupid shite. On the other hand, it is true that if you keep shitting yourself, even if is under the rubric of 'dirty protest', philosophers will not scoop your shit out of your pants with their own delicate hands. But this is because philosophers are of no fucking use to man or beast.
because the only way to really ask why you’re being hurt is [to be] open to an answer.”
Nonsense! When Mummy wails 'why are you hurting me by failing your Accountancy exams? Do you really want to drive me to suicide? Will nothing less make you happy?' she is not 'open to an answer' because the reason you failed your Accountancy exam is because you thought 'double entry' meant something pornographic. If you mention this, she will slap the black off you. All in all it is better to put up with a Mum who screeches at you because you don't bring her naches, rather than get beaten to a pulp and have parental controls put on your laptop.
In failing to see protest as a dialogue, rather than a one-sided attempt to air grievances, Callard believes, the possibility of progress is lost.
Negotiation is a dialogue. Protest isn't unless it leads to negotiation. The possibility of progress is predicated on positive sum games which raise productivity.
In Open Socrates Callard defines politicised speech as when a disagreement becomes not an attempt between two people to discover together what is right,
it may have that quality. Reading Hansard shows how 'politicized speech' can yield a consensus on what is right. Consider the Parliamentary debate on Brigadier Dyer- the infamous 'Butcher of Amritsar'. Churchill was on a sticky wicket because he needed the support of Ulster MPs who were pro-Dyer. He diffused their animosity and then asked a practical question- was there any British General willing to give Dyer an appointment? The answer was no. The fact is the Military Johnnies were angry about 'Geddes axe' and were pretending that Dyer had been treated unfairly by the 'frocks' (civilians in frock-coats). But they themselves knew that if Dyer came onto their staff, some crazy Lieutenant would take it as a signal to start shooting striking miners or what have you. As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had said, Britain did not have the troops to hold England in the event of a Bolshevik uprising. Once Churchill had made this point- which he did subtly and without spelling things out- he could then display his oratorial fireworks condemning Dyer without appearing to do so. The House was then able to put the matter behind it. It was clear that Churchill had done his homework. He had talked to the Generals. He had talked to the Ulstermen. He was even ready to talk to Michael Collins. He had the situation under control. There had been some popular feeling that Montague and, maybe, Isaacs (both of whom were Jewish) had stabbed an Anglo-Irish soldier in the back. But, once it was clear that Montague was getting the chop while Isaacs, who was a brilliant lawyer, had gotten the better of Gandhi, Westminster could turn the page on the issue.
but “a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses”:
Nothing wrong with that. Churchill was making it clear that there was no alternative to Geddes axe. But that also meant 'Butchers of Amritsar' were unemployable. Why? If Dyer was re-employed, there would be 'Butchers of Aberdeen' or 'Butchers of Alberta'. Consider the son of a mill-owner who is a Captain in the Territorials. His father's mill hands are on strike. He turns up with a squad of machine gunner and mows them down. He thinks he has personally defeated Bolshevism and Sinn Fein and the machinations of the fucking Elders of Zion. If he is handsome and spends money freely, there may be those in his regiment who idolize him. But what would be the consequence? A labour problem might snowball into an outright insurrection. The King Emperor might go the way of the Kaiser- if not the Tzar.
Some games are 'zero-sum'. It is important that the loser accept the verdict of the umpire. 'Politicized speech' is the speech used by politicians, some of whom have great expertise in making that verdict compelling and binding on all players. In this case, Churchill had appeased the Military Johnnies and the crazy Ulstermen. He had poured oil on troubled waters. True, he did end with a rhetorical fireworks display which, when quoted in India, won back the loyalty of many who had wavered after Jallianwallah Bagh. But, those sitting in the House, felt that this was 'mere puffery'. Churchill didn't really like beastly niggers. He was merely praising Britain for having the bestest Empire ever.
an observer who is not invested in the argument
is not an observer. He is a guy who is thinking about other things
might conclude that “the debaters are not really talking about what they claim they are talking about”.
Whereas, if you are 'invested', you can ask around and soon find out what is really happening. Thus, I am invested in Jallianwallah Bagh and can properly decipher the relevant debate in Hansard by asking around and looking things up.
Does she think discourse can survive the culture wars?
If cockroaches can survive a nuclear winter- sure, why not?
The problem, Callard believes, is that often we’re having conversations in the wrong medium.
This is not the case with important conversations.
She has been reading about sociolinguistics and “what happens mechanically in a conversation”. For instance, she points out that I respond to her in 0.2 seconds; “if you wait longer… that’s an awkward pause”.
Or a pause for effect in an important conversation. Awkward pauses are one's where the 'common knowledge' expected response- e.g. 'You're not ugly! Anyone who thinks so must be...BLIND!'- is long in coming and is accompanied by a furtive averting of the eyes.
But this is less time than it takes for my brain to process the signal that comes at the end of a sentence, which means I am predicting when Callard will stop speaking.
Whereas I am thinking about manatees. I suppose women really do have a different type of brain from men.
Humans are “incredibly sophisticated in how we manage conversational signals and how we navigate tensions inside of a conversation – like, you were having to navigate the tension: do I ask her about autism?”
Do I have to listen to her reply? This is what inhibits our natural inquisitiveness.
But when we move conversations into writing, all that vital information is stripped away.
Unless you are good at writing- which Plato was, at least in places.
“I think it’s a deep, deep problem about Twitter.
No. That's what makes it useful. Trump could take down rivals with a mean tweet. Biden just kept talking and talking.
If you want to know my current theory [about] why things go wrong, [it] is just we don’t understand each other; we’re literally not following what other people are saying. Because human beings are not that good at communicating using written text.
Sadly, the kids are right to prefer texting to talking. It's faster and less ambiguous. Also, you can use poop emojis.
We are, in every way, trained to communicate using spoken language…
This is an American thing. In England, we were trained to keep our mouths firmly shit in the class-room. I recall, during my first week at the LSE, being amazed by the marvellous flow of words that every American exchange student seemed capable of. Then I realized they were as thick as shit. Within a week or two these American students were told, politely but firmly, by other American students of longer standing, not to ask questions or seek to make any sort of contribution. Why? They were making their parent Institution back in the States look bad. On the other hand, the Brits were sometimes wrong about loquacious Americans. I recall an elderly Professor telling me about Baumol, a City College grad, who, at his first appearance in the LSE struck everybody as a cretin. He was denied entry to the Doctoral program. But his performance at Seminars was so stellar that the Brits had to admit their mistake. The man was a genius who made fundamental contributions in almost every subject area. But this was because he wrote even more clearly than he spoke. There were plenty of British academics who were a delight to listen to but who scarcely produced anything worth reading. In the case of Econ or Philosophy, we know why. They were stupid. They just didn't sound stupid because they had been to the right schools and Colleges.
In written text… people immediately jump to bad motives and hostility.”
Not if the written text is up to snuff.
Still, Callard believes the culture wars can be positive in that they “manifest the fact that stuff matters to us and we want to engage with other people on topics that we care about.”
But if all that matters is 'affiliation'- being part of a mob- then the stuff we talk about does not matter to us.
Crucially, she thinks we need to “unearth the question that’s at the heart of a dispute and address it”.
In Academia, that question is tenure and who gets Einstein's office and other such petty stuff. This is Sayre's Law- Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
The penultimate chapter of Open Socrates is about love. An earlier draft did not touch on the subject, but Callard was prompted by the response to the New Yorker profile to consider it more deeply. In the book, she portrays romantic love as an aspirational, intellectual pursuit: meeting a partner is not the end goal, but the beginning of a collaboration through which you prompt and encourage each other towards further discovery.
That's not romantic love. It is the attempt to endow with a glow of romance something which is merely mundane and utilitarian. Still, it may be there was a time when Hilary and Bill were 'in love'. They certainly had aspirations and encouraged each other to rise as high up the greasy pole as they were able. But this really isn't a love-story for the ages.
The extent to which each couple pushes this aspiration is, Callard told me, so personal that it is impossible to say what exactly we should be aiming for.
The Clintons knew what they were aiming for. That's why they are still together.
“The interesting thing about romance is: how big is the project?
Getting to the White House is a big project. Eight years for Hilary as first lady and eight years for Bill as first horn-dog was what they aimed at.
What kind of or how much perfection are you aspiring to with your partner? I think that is going to be particular to [each] relationship.”
It is also the reason more and more people are giving up on marriage. It's not the sex they object to. It's the couple's counselling.
That question – “How big is the size of the project?” – sometimes causes conflict within Callard’s marriage. She is Socratic; her second husband is Aristotelian.
She has tenure. He doesn't. Gassing on about Kant & Aristotle is a safe enough way to stay employed. Sadly, the lad is venturing into Hegel who, while Napoleon was still cock of the walk wrote a short piece titled 'He who thinks abstractly' which praises egalitarian France and condemns the stupidity and brutality of the German speaking peoples who were groaning under the lash of a vast aristo-bureaucratic class of parasites. This causes the proles to class a murderer as simply a murderer without regard to any other qualities he might have had. (Napoleon was certainly the kidnapper and murderer of the Duke of Enghien). Hegel allows that 'polite society' does not 'abstract' away every detail except the salient one in pronouncing judgment. But the common people do. Why? Because they have been brutalized. The problem is that the 'beautiful world' runs away from metaphysics as much as it does from abstraction. Hegel's predicament is that he is like the German prole but moves in better circles. He ends by recommending the example of the French gentleman who listens to and seeks to persuade his servant rather than the German master who will beat the shit out of his servant because the fellow belongs to the beatable class.
Callard's young spouse says of this essay ' it’s not the philosophers who think abstractly, it’s everyday people who think abstractly'. That is not what Hegel said. He too, when worst comes to the worst, thinks abstractly. Napoleon is a murderer but there are things we must learn from France. It isn't that the abstract thesis or its anti-thesis (viz. Napoleon is a reformer and killed the Duke for a political reason) are wrong. It's just that there is a 'concrete universal' which is a synthesis of a superior type. What that is, the 'beautiful world' is not interested in. It prefers fine sentiments and striking poses. Sadly, there were and are no 'concrete universals' or 'World Historical Personalities' who incarnate the Weltgeist or any such nonsense. That's why the abstraction associated with murder is actually a ramified type theory which distinguishes between unlawful killing, justified homicide, manslaughter, premeditated murder, diminished capacity, etc., etc. The proles knew this well enough as did the 'beautiful world'. Even philosophers grasped this. But, at that time, Hegel was part and parcel of a particular political movement or tendency and, to his brutish, Teutonic, brain, Napoleon might still have been a 'concrete universal'. It is best not to inquire too much into the workings of the German mind because its apotheosis, or Himmelfart, is nothing but that fart which, Martin Luther assures us, drives the devil away. Indeed, German political philosophers worked hard to render Satan otiose.
The difference is that “Socrates thinks: aspire forever, out to infinity – not really infinity, until knowledge, but it’s going to be more than one lifetime.
We don't know that. The guy wasn't Pythagorean. I think he did see himself as a pharmakos- at least that is Plato's account.
Aristotle thinks: aspire until you’re around 35 or something, and then enough is enough; now it’s time to take the character that you have and… exercise it.”
Had Alexander, Aristotle's pupil, drank less and lived longer, he might have permanently changed Iranian history in the manner that Hellenization permanently changed Judaism.
Callard often finds herself thinking “we need to be doing more aspiring; we shouldn’t be happy where we are. My husband’s more, like, the point of life is… to be happy, to exercise the knowledge and wisdom that you have, and to enjoy [it].”
Quit nagging me till I've at least got tenure.
Though other, non-philosopher couples might not put it in such terms – Socratic vs Aristotelian –
Platonic vs Aristotelian. It may be that Socrates understood the third man argument in Parmenides. On the other hand, the simplest explanation is best. He was part of the Periclean circle and his care was for his native City.
she believes the divide between wanting more and being content with what we have is common in relationships.
Nagging your husband may be common in relationships but let the boy get tenure first.
In Open Socrates, she mounts an argument that “Socratic love is radically non-exclusive”.
There is nothing 'radical' about such love- unless you think tom-cats are subverting Patriarchy and Neo-Liberalism.
Socrates does not differentiate between eros – romantic love – and philia – friendship love.
Yes he does. That's why he uses different words for the two things.
“In that respect, Socrates isn’t so different from us. In this day and age, most people would say that they are friends with their spouse.”
Socrates doesn't say he was a friend of his shrewish wife.
Socratic polyamory, she writes, “doesn’t distinguish between having many lovers, and having many friends.”
But he wasn't incessantly bumming everybody that he met. Also there was no fucking polyamory back then. Alcibiades had a lot of affairs but the consent of previous or subsequent partners was neither sought nor received.
The “proper activity” for lovers is not sex but philosophy.
Philosophers who fuck their students are engaged in an improper activity. On the other hand, lovers above a certain age might settle for tea and sympathy and give both sex and philosophy a wide berth.
This seems a rather sexless idea of polyamory?
“In the Phaedrus, [Socrates] describes the best relationship as just philosophical, but [in] the second best one, there’s sex,” Callard said. He allows for “some amount of deference to the savage commands of our body”, but he believes that “sometimes the desire for sex is a manifestation of wanting something more, something that sex couldn’t possibly give you… I think that Socrates wants us to reflect on the oddity of our sexual practices and the kind of hopes we pin on sex, and the way it seems like larger than the activity itself.” But this “isn’t the same thing as saying you should never have sex”.
In the Parmenides, Zeno- a handsome middle aged man- has a relationship with the elderly sage which, hopefully, has transcended sodomy. In any case, pederasts tend to prefer beardless youths. Once they are stronger and smellier than you, their charm has worn off. You try to keep them from buggering you senseless by talking metaphysics.
The study of Socrates is well-suited to
philologists.
public philosophy because
the public knows ancient Greek
it makes clear the stakes of philosophical thinking to the average life:
They are zero. The thing is a waste of time.
“If I think about the problems I have in my own life, they don’t look like trolley problems,”
Because 'trolley problems' are silly. If you kill a guy to save some other bunch of guys you will still go to jail unless you were legally obligated to make that decision.
she said, referring to the thought experiments that explore the ethical dilemma of whether to sacrifice one life to save many others. Instead, the “practical upshots” of Socrates are: “How do you conduct your romance?
By doing romantic things not by talking pederastic bollocks.
How do you think about your own death?
The slightly less ancient Greeks decided that Christianity was the way to go.
How do you be political?
By imitating the most successful politicians.
These are real problems that show up for me all the time that I need help thinking through in a concrete way.”
The answer is always 'do what smart peeps are doing even if you aren't smart and are stuck teaching stupid shite.'
What, for those who are not willing to open their relationship in the pursuit of a higher intellectual plane, is the practical application of Socrates’ beliefs about love?
They can lead you to Christianity. Sadly, the Church isn't that keen on 'open relationships'. This is perfectly sensible. There will be tears before bedtime for Callard and the youth she has seduced.
The answer brings us back to the quality of our conversations. “Most of what you’re going to do with your partner over the course of your life is talk to them,” said Agnes Callard.
Which is why nobody wants to get married any more. Melania has the right idea. If your husband is in Washington, don't stray from New York.
“And so, yes, pick someone you can have good sex with, but pick someone you can talk to…
Mexican donkeys are poor interlocutors. Also, they insist on wearing a sombrero in bed.
I think when we think things are going well, it’s because we’re talking well.”
Fair point. It is when you are stabbing each other well that you need to think about calling a Divorce attorney.
No comments:
Post a Comment