tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366537982024-03-08T19:05:06.138-05:00Various ApproachesOverly definitive-sounding essays on culture and politics that are really intended to elicit comments.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-62912242859296791072007-04-15T15:22:00.000-04:002007-04-15T15:57:41.417-04:00Pseudo-KantianismThe chief problem with modern "Kantians" like Korsgaard is that they don't notice the problems that Kant raised but couldn't resolve. Few of us are comfortable with Kant's insistence that morality is a matter of acting according to law, not according to inclination, but Kant had serious reasons for keeping these two so far apart; he had no other way to justify the freedom of the will. If our acts are motivated or even affected by our emotional states, they are implicated in the same system of causality that pervades the phenomenal world, and we've launched ourselves down the slippery slope towards determinism. Human freedom vanishes; we're no more "free" than cockroaches.<br /><br />But Kant's solution has its own problems, as George Di Giovanni sets out in his tough but brilliant book <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=5421">Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774-1800</a> (Cambridge UP, 2005, a whopping $75.00). If freedom exists in the intelligible realm that Kant has carved out, how is it effective in the phenomenal one? Or, as Robert Pippin, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/German-Philosophy-17601860-Legacy-Idealism/dp/0521663814/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/002-9116505-7555247">Terry Pinkard</a>, and others put it, how can "the interest of reason" motivate an action if it isn't a phenomenon itself? And if, as Kant states, the separations between the intelligible world and the physical world and between freedom and necessity are resolved in God, doesn't this mean that freedom is an illusion, that we seem free only because we lack the complete understanding of the divine?<br /><br />The sad thing about modern Kantians is that they use Kant as an authority instead of taking his project seriously. They preserve his distinctions but avoid their implications, as if the extraordinary creativity of the post-Kantian idealists had been some kind of mass delusion.<br /><br />In fact, the idealists were right about Kant; he tried to secure a leading role for philosophy, but ended up showing that <span style="font-style: italic;">no</span> rational elucidation of experience was possible. It's today's scholars who peddle a delusion--the delusion that he got it right, and that our pseudo-Kantian universe of autonomous beings in an objective world is something other than an odd cultural artifact.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-17407962660283677052007-03-28T09:00:00.000-04:002007-04-15T15:22:26.267-04:00Free musicMy <a href="http://www.wnyappeals.com/opera/index.html">Rimsky-Korsakov site</a> is up until further notice, with three complete opera recordings.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-42665346687588851792007-03-27T13:20:00.000-04:002007-03-27T13:59:50.216-04:00Why be moral? Why do anything?I've just finished Frans De Waal's latest book, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8240.html">Primates and Philosophers</a>. De Waal is a primatologist with a special interest in cooperative behavior and conflict resolution among great apes, and the book is a revision of a series of lectures he gave a few years ago. (A generous excerpt is available from the page linked above.) A little under half the book is De Waal's, and in it he sets out his case that human ethical conduct is based on "good natured" animal behavior. Then a number of prominent philosophers and biologists present critiques, to which De Waal responds.<br /><br />It's good to have this kind of dialogue within book covers. As usual with De Waal, he makes a strong case but overstates it a bit. But he comes off better in many ways than his more philosophically-minded commentators.<br /><br />For example, <a href="http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ekorsgaar/">Christine Korsgaard</a> and <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epsinger/">Peter Singer</a> are still so embroiled in the philosophical tradition that they forget to ask themselves one question: How do we decide what to do?<br /><br />Both of these distinguished philosophers hold to the notion that we can act either emotionally or on rational grounds. Singer says, "we can reflect on our emotional responses, and choose to reject them." (p. 149). Korsgaard writes, similarly, that a rational agent "is capable of rejecting an action along with its purpose, not because there is something else she wants (or fears) even more, but simply because she judges that doing that sort of act for that purpose is wrong." (p. 111).<br /><br />But why would we do that? I'm not denying that we act unselfishly--indeed, I try to act that way myself. But I do it because I <span style="font-style: italic;">want to</span>. It's easier to look myself in the mirror that way. I feel that I'm doing something that makes my living less of a waste, and I do it because of that sudden flame of empathetic delight that kindles between two people every now and then. I desire that sense of human contact more than any number of lesser pleasures, and I fear wasting my life more than most really big pleasures. I try to live ethically because I have an emotional need to live ethically.<br /><br />How can people act in any other way? Are mothers selfish because their infants give them such great pleasure? Anyone whose mother felt otherwise and performed her parental duties simply out of a sense of obligation knows better.<br /><br />De Waal cites work by <a href="http://www.uihealthcare.com/depts/med/neurology/neurologymds/damasioa.html">Antonio Damasio</a> and <a href="http://bargh.socialpsychology.org/">John Bargh</a>, among others, suggesting that our actions are motivated by emotion. But we really shouldn't need neurologists to tell us this. It's only many years of telling ourselves that we are rational creatures that blinds us to the obvious truth, which is that at every moment we do whatever we want to do most of all. Morality involves educating the heart, opening ourselves to the pain of others, and learning that certain pleasures are not worth their consequences. It involves wanting to be a certain kind of person and wanting to live in a certain kind of world. Take away the wanting and none of the maxims, rules, and principles of ethics would matter to us at all.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-25587974326956339022007-03-26T20:04:00.000-04:002007-03-26T20:33:27.650-04:00No new posts?Sorry to all those who are reading this and wondering when the next post will come along. Nothing I've been doing recently seems to fit into the blog format, so my visits have been largely limited to removing the "comments" hawking fake Vi-a-qra or linking to porn sites. Some days that's a full-time job.<br /><br />For what it's worth: I'm moving in two directions right now in my work. The myth book is no more, but some of its material is going into a new chain of essays tentatively called <span style="font-style: italic;">The Discipline of the Invisible</span>. Some of that material may get some play here. The main theme of this work is the impossibility of generating a coherent theory that can show us the way out of our current trap. Moving through a study of some other ways of constructing experience, the essays close by suggesting that we view economic activity as a means of structuring time instead of a system of producing and allocating goods. It leads to an all-or-nothing kind of political aporia.<br /><br />The other work is going to be longer in the preparation, though I may post a detailed outline some time soon. It's titled <span style="font-style: italic;">The Forgotten Question, or, The Birth of Modernity out of the Spirit of Reaction.</span> The central figure in this piece of intellectual history is the late-eighteenth-century philosopher Fichte, and its theme comes from Marx's famous maxim that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is, to change it." The odd thing is that Fichte and those closely influenced by him were determined to change the world, and they were so moved by the critical philosophy that they were developing out of a radicalized Kantianism.<br /><br />My argument, in a couple of sentences, is that Fichte and the Jena romantics brought the Enlightenment project to its completion, as they turned Kant's self-critique of reason to critique consciousness itself. The restoration in 1815 and the transformation of idealism from a matter of "seeing" to one of "being" in Schelling and Hegel helped conceal this breakthrough so thoroughly that Marx didn't seem to have heard of it at all. Modernity claims to inherit the Enlightenment project, but Fichte's activism and commitment to practice were its real heirs. Our world is not the fruit of the Century of Light; it's a shallow imitation of that period, founded on the fear of its unsettling and liberating energies.<br /><br />And I'm also preparing a small site on the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov, so I can post dubs of two old Soviet-era recordings which have never been widely available.<br /><br />If anyone is interested, I'll be speaking at Symposium Books in Providence, Rhode Island, on Thursday, April 26, at 6:30 pm.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1167184814224102162006-12-26T20:58:00.000-05:002006-12-26T21:13:34.660-05:00The perfect metaphor<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5038/4101/1600/518105/watching-deal-web.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5038/4101/320/35231/watching-deal-web.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Ah, Christmas. Time to visit the strange planet Family, where the television set is always on. Where Christmas dinner is followed by hushed attention to --- a special episode of <span style="font-style: italic;">Deal or No Deal.</span><br /><br />I hadn't seen <span style="font-style: italic;">Deal or No Deal</span> before, but it didn't take long to figure out the rules. There's Howie Mandel, once a modestly-famous comic and actor, with a bald head, a tiny beard and one earring, looking a bit as if he were hoping to try out for the Village People. There are about 26 spokesmodel types who stand next to Zero Halliburton aluminum attache cases, each case with a number.<br /><br />There is a sum of money printed inside each case, ranging from one cent to one million dollars. The contestant starts the game by picking one of the cases. He doesn't get to look inside, but whatever sum is printed in that case is what he will win.<br /><br />The contestant then calls out the numbers of several cases, and one by one the spokesmodels assigned to hold those particular cases opens them. The obvious point is that the guy isn't going to win a million dollars if it shows up in one of the spokesmodel's cases.<br /><br />Even with all the dramatic music and lighting that game shows can't do without these days this would still be too lame even for network television, so <span style="font-style: italic;">Deal or No Deal</span> has a twist. A mysterious Banker is said to sit in a booth high above the stage, and he periodically offers a buyout sum--calculated on the basis of the odds that the highest sum not eliminated so far is the one in the contestant's case. The high drama of the show comes as the contestant has to choose between taking the offer or continuing the game: deal or no deal.<br /><br />This is a quiz show in which all knowledge and skill have been eliminated. But the contestants treat it as something far more than a test of luck. One of them kept announcing prayerfully that this was his time to win; he would not deal, determined to "stick it to the banker." Another insisted that he would win because, "If you believe, you can achieve!"<br /><br />As irrational as the whole setup is, it seems oddly powerful to those involved. And this may be because the show, intentionally or not, reproduces the way life now appears to most Americans. Things just happen. Nothing is causally linked to anything any more. Achievement is indistinguishable from luck. It's a hostile world, in which an anonymous agent keeps trying to keep you from getting yours. If your faith and self-confidence are strong, though, you will prevail in spite of the odds.<br /><br />It's a magical world view. In fact, it's far more illogical and absurd than traditional magical world views, which generally incorporate pretty sophisticated ideas of causality. It's the world view of people who can't understand the world or play an active role in it. It's the world of small children or of alcoholics, now on prime time for all to share. Ideological masking can't get much more effective than this. <span style="font-style: italic;">Deal or No Deal</span> is the perfect metaphor for the illusionary world we all live in today.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1162514093125443062006-11-02T19:32:00.000-05:002006-12-26T21:14:50.626-05:00IsmIsmOf course the Democratic Party is being branded as soft on terrorism. Doesn't bother me, any more than it's being labeled soft on crime and soft on communism. I just wish the Party weren't also soft on militarism, chauvinism, American exceptionalism, unbridled neo-liberalism....Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1162263979003718732006-10-30T21:24:00.000-05:002006-10-30T22:06:19.080-05:00Making things vanishYou've got to hand it to Margaret Thatcher. As horrible as the Iron Lady was as Prime Minister of the UK, she was a first-rate magician. David Copperfield gets a TV special for making the Statue of Liberty vanish, and it reappears before the eleven o'clock news. Mrs. Thatcher announces that "there is no such thing as society," and--allakazam!--it's still missing.<br /><br />Case in point: the latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mother Jones Magazine</span>, which features on its cover a piece called <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/13th_tipping_point.html">"The Thirteenth Tipping Point."</a> This is the author's hoped-for moment when humanity "slips from selfishness to altruism." Why are we trashing the planet? Well, we simply don't know enough; children aren't taught in schools about the impact their personal choices have on the environment. If only they realized! And we haven't organized enough to convince the corporate world that there's a market for efficient and green goods. So let's harness the power of the web! Evolution has brought us so far--now let's nudge it along, before we're all either toast or up to our necks in the rising sea level. These little changes will all add up, and then, all at once, human nature will change.<br /><br />Now, human nature changes all the time and is different in different places, and what our author doesn't seem to realize is that the most recent shift (a partial one, to be sure) went the wrong way--<span style="font-style: italic;">from</span> altruism <span style="font-style: italic;">to</span> selfishness. By "only recently" I mean in the past 25,000 years or so, after the beginnings of large-scale agriculture. For the half a million or more years before then people lived in close-knit, supportive, bickering, sometimes violent but generally intimate and supportive communities. And <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> way of life, which some people today still prefer to the wonders of the modern world, was itself the result of a change--what anthropologist Christopher Boehm called the "egalitarian revolution." None of our brother and sister apes shows anything like it, not even the much-romanticized Bonobo.<br /><br />What happened in the part of the world that calls itself civilized was a change in social structure that gave some people power over others. In other words, we undid the egalitarian revolution. From then on everything in social life was a zero-sum game. And in the past 400 years, in one part of the world, a further revolution took place which took almost every decision of any importance out of our hands. Under capitalism these decisions have been turned over to the market, which demands by its logic that production and consumption increase without end.<br /><br />What really changes--and what makes for those changes in human nature--are the rules of the particular game that a culture plays. Capitalism shapes all production to maximize profits and expand markets. People are selfish in that kind of society because it doesn't make sense for them to act any other way. It's not because they're biologically programmed for selfishness. (They're not programmed for altruism, either, to be sure.) All of the carbon set-offs, buying clubs, acts of self-restraint, and other personal efforts we make won't change a thing as long as our interactions and collective decisions follow market logic.<br /><br />Maybe you don't agree with me. I don't know if the author of this article does or not, because she never once mentions capitalism and never suggests that our own culture is anything other than transparent, value-neutral, and totally responsive to unfettered individual choices. In other words, she shares the Thatcher fallacy--thinking that all that exists is a bunch of independent, rational actors moving around in a social vacuum. But every human change throughout time has been a change in social structure, too; individual and social are indivisible. If there is no society, then there is really no hope--except for some mysterious global psychic transformation that overtakes all of us in our sleep. That hasn't happened before. I wouldn't count on it now.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1161983849929701042006-10-27T17:12:00.000-04:002006-10-27T17:17:29.933-04:00Work in Progress, I.<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Here's a description of a short (under 30,000-word) text I'm finishing up. I hope some readers will comment on this synopsis; feel free to ask questions, too. It would be very helpful. If you'd be interested in a pdf of the entire draft and would be willing to send me comments after reading it, please ask me at mlstein <at> rochester.rr.com. Thanks.</span><br /><br />The Truth of Myth and the Myth of Truth</span> explores the kinds of intellectual and cultural moves that are likely in communities where fundamental issues are addressed through the telling of stories. It opens with the tale of an imaginary anthropologist who cannot square his Enlightenment ideals with the apparently irrational and inconsistent ways in which his subjects think. The anthropologist, I argue, understands knowledge as a body of propositions that can render the operations of the world in thought, thus making those operations understandable and controllable. Beginning with the substance/attribute distinction, he hopes to arrive at a series of universally valid statements that specify objective relations among substantial entities.<br /><br />However frequently this model is criticized, it remains folk psychology and is implicit in virtually all academic work. But it is also inadequate, self-contradictory in its social implications, and inconsistent with what we know about the way organisms conduct themselves and even the way we observe ourselves and other animals behave.<br /><br />A sketch of the difficulties with the propositional theory leads to the discussion of myth-centered communities, which operate with a different understanding of what makes statements truthful. This discussion falls into two large sections. The first considers the political and historical implications of the variability of myths and the tolerance generally shown for other people’s stories or versions of one’s own story. Such tolerance is essential if a community is to retain full social equality. To claim a correct version of a foundational story is to assert the right to condemn others as false, and this concentration of power is intolerable in an egalitarian community. Where certain stories are reserved for a specific group there is almost inevitably a degree of hierarchy.<br /><br />Tolerance towards variability also allows the readjustment and renegotiation of foundational accounts with demographic change. The paradoxical result is that communities that claim to preserve the ways of the ancestors have historically been among the most resilient of social units. Ideas of group and individual identity are continually reconstructed through myth-telling (and through ritual); communities remain self-identical without essentializing identity, and experience acquires coherence without positing a unitary or private subjectivity.<br /><br />The following section treats the philosophical implications of the anti-essentialism manifest in myths, which consistently blur such distinctions as life and death, animal and human, and divine and human. In the words of Nahuatl scholar James Maffie, they posit a “dialectical polar monism”—a world at once divided and not-divided. Divisions appear only in order to establish relations of complementarity, and those relations are easily and frequently inverted.<br /><br />Any thoroughly anti-essentialist approach makes being secondary and relations primary. It favors experience over observation, a preference that N. Scott Momaday noted when contrasting American Indian thinking with European models. Dealing with this irreproducible complexity requires attentiveness to all the influences that transform events and to every ramification of every act. The similarity to Chinese thought, especially as François Jullien interprets it, is obvious; but so, too, are the resonances with the picture being drawn by contemporary neurology and social psychology.<br /><br />What appears in myth is the real world, but with the invisible as prominent as the visible. Myths can point to reality, but only because they do not reproduce what our senses can perceive and do not attempt to derive propositional truths from observation.<br /><br />The closing pages of the book consider the survival of many of these elements in literate cultures—the Aztecs, the Chinese, and in Classical Antiquity. The question of a revival of myth in modern times underlines the common misapprehension that it is a kind of sacred story which is accepted as true in the propositional sense. Myth-telling, though, is not a way of transmitting set truths. It is part of a practice that organizes perception and directs activity in certain ways. In the modern world this work is carried out largely by the market, not by retelling foundational stories; there can be no revival of myth in such a world.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1161961867235097722006-10-27T10:13:00.000-04:002006-10-28T17:00:44.806-04:00Asthmatic Kitty and the Thing about ChristianityBecause it's much cheaper than iTunes, more manageable, less annoying, and has heaps of oddities that are hard to find anywhere else (a lot of Harry Partch's own recordings, for example, plus the BIS catalogue, Michael Tilson-Thomas's Mahler, Shahram Nazeri, El Perro del Mar, The Books, etc., etc....) I subscribe to <a href="http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2188148-10364534">eMusic</a><br /><img src="http://www.tqlkg.com/image-2188148-10364534" border="0" height="1" width="1" /><br />Confession: that link pays me if you check them out and get the 25 free trial downloads. <a href="http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2188148-10412420">What's eMusic?</a><br /><img src="http://www.awltovhc.com/image-2188148-10412420" border="0" height="1" width="1" /><br />I recently downloaded a free sampler CD from <a href="http://www.asthmatickitty.com/main.php">Asthmatic Kitty Records</a>. I could hardly resist the name, it was a chance to hear a few cuts by Sufjan Stevens, and it was, after all, free. I found it an excellent bargain. The level of craft is high and the songs ingratiating. The various musicians are all worth my attention.<br /><br />But they are also overtly or obliquely Christian. Not the scary, stereotyped born-again, Bush-loving, panting-for-the-apocalypse type, but the kind of intelligent, open-minded, heart-in-the-right-place Christians you run into at anti-war demonstrations and welfare rights rallies.<br /><br />So why am I still uneasy? Is it simple prejudice that makes me single out an album suffused with Christianity and not, say, one that's Buddhist to the same degree--like <a href="http://www.thebooksmusic.com/living_room/index2.html">The Books' wonderful <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost and Safe</span></a>? Aren't "religions" essentially the same? Doesn't "this is the day the Lord hath made" say the same thing that Zen masters convey by saying, "every day is a beautiful day"?<br /><br />Well, they're <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> all the same. It's true that both of these sayings remind us that the world isn't set up to meet our standards--they can be boiled down respectively to "Thy will, not mine, be done" and "not my will", which are indeed remarkably close. They point to a profound and difficult truth that secular humanists rarely appreciate.<br /><br />But the differences are even more important. Buddhism doesn't privilege humanity. The Bodhisattva takes a vow to release all sentient beings, including cockroaches and poisonous snakes--not just people. There's a kind of chill to its rejection of all of humanity's special pleading. It's summed up in John Cage's answer to a woman who asked him if he didn't think there was too much evil in the world. Cage replied that he thought there was exactly the right amount of evil in it.<br /><br />We surely have the right to recoil from such cold-bloodedness. (No less a Zen character than <a href="http://home.att.net/%7Epaul.dowling/archive/zen/blyth/blyth-all.htm">R.H. Blyth</a> did so.) But the Christian alternative exacts too high a price--not just in its exclusivity and factual absurdity, but in the way it tosses out the baby with the bathwater.<br /><br />The joke in Christianity is that because God is especially concerned with his human children, he wills for us what we would have willed if only we had our heads on straight. Whatever happens only <span style="font-style: italic;">seems</span> to be contrary to our will. We should accept it and embrace it <span style="font-style: italic;">because it's all been set up for our ultimate benefit</span>.<br /><br />In other words, Christianity is the ultimate exercise in bad faith. It only <span style="font-style: italic;">appears</span> to put us in our place. As the Gospels say, he who would save his life must lose it, which means that you get to save your life by pretending to want the opposite. That's where the smart money goes.<br /><br />How does it accomplish this paradox? In part by telling us, correctly, that the appearance of the world doesn't reproduce the real structure of the world--but then, rather than directing us to look attentively and egoloessly at reality, going on to ask us to see it through a particular and very anthropocentric set of glosses. Most of the practices we lump together as "religions" tell us to stop mistaking our ideas of things for the things themselves. The oddity and frightfulness of Christianity is that, more than any other tradition, it places its own set of ideas in front of us and passes them off as the things themselves. In that sleight-of-hand is its real danger.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1161958068330213792006-10-27T10:07:00.000-04:002006-10-27T10:11:18.106-04:00An invitation by way of introductionThe stereotyped blog contains one person's thoughts on all sorts of matters. This one will fit that description--but only up to a point. In my eyes it won't be successful unless it attracts <span style="font-style: italic;">other</span> people's thoughts. I'm looking for a few good correspondents.<br /><br />I'm a writer--what most people would call an independent scholar--who <a href="http://www.wnyappeals.com">works as a lawyer</a> in Rochester, New York. A year ago Monthly Review Press published a book of mine, <a href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/tfoatw.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism.</span></a> I'd worked on this project for some years with very little feedback for others, and I joked with friends that I'd written it to find the people I should have talked it over with before I wrote it.<br /><br />With a few exceptions my hopes remained unfulfilled. I'm still working in almost complete isolation, and that's not good for any writer, or any person. I needed different way to find those same people. This blog may be it.<br /><br />I'm the first to deride the idea of an internet community; putting visual representations of words on a screen is a very inadequate substitute for the complex and multidimensional thing we call communication. But it's sometimes the best we can do.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com1