Mar 30, 2022·edited Apr 4, 2022Liked by Douglas Glover
My neighbour, your friend Kathy Storring, apparently told my wife about "Out & Back" some time ago, but she (my wife) sent the link to me only this morning. I've been reading here for hours now, and enjoying it all. I was formulating some response to this piece but then got sent off to "Whisky Chasers" by footnote 1 and subsequently forgot what I was going to say about philosophy. So I'll just write here (since I couldn't add a comment to that essay itself) that I found "Whisky Chasers" delightful and even laughed out loud several times. Cheers!
Rick, I remember meeting you and, of course, publishing you in NC. I'm pleased you went and looked at "Whisky Chasers." The two pieces go together in some peculiar and personal way. I get a kick out of the juxtaposition. Great to know you're reading this newsletter.
I appreciated the islands of humour to cling to, woven through the piece, to be able to catch my breath. Even laughed out loud a few times.
I’ve saved this essay and will refer to this foundational map frequently to help understand how philosophy has been the ground from which we have jumped towards…everything else. Until now?
I have no formal philosophy training. Reading this has proven (once again) how narrow my education has been. Despite two scientific degrees, no course ever included a glancing reference to philosophy of science. I have since studied this (superficially) on my own.
From my point of modern privilege, I feel a great sadness and regret about how our thinking and ideas of knowing have excluded (and manipulated) great swaths of perspectives along sex, gender, race, class lines…we know this – will the turn of the wheel change this?
I’ll trade in my reader prerogative by saying that, for me, the most intriguing parts of this essay lie in Footnotes 24 and 25 (and the earlier related sections about language and writing). I’ve been thinking a lot about language as a technology and language as abstract symbol and how it disconnects us so effectively from the wider world of nature around us.
“What ancient (speechless, silent) structures and debates are we still expressing?” This is an amazing question. It makes me think of gesture, facial expression, intonation (which does not have to be tied to words, think laughter, whistling, singing, grunting etc.) By thinking in words, we have become lazy with our powers of attention and observation and our relationships with other people and the other than human world have suffered. Humans think in words and in images. And our sensory bandwidth is so narrow, and certainly different from other animals and plants and rocks etc., we have to assume our lack of knowledge of the Other (an aside: why is the Other so terrifying?) is due to our limited body bound instrument of perception (which we are not leveraging as powerfully as we could, as your last line lays down so eloquently, “In our own minds, we like to pretend we are still the subject of the sentence.”)
Suzanne, I'm grateful for this, glad that you laughed, and happy some of it provoked thought. I guess people tend to ignore "philosophy" because it is often pretty densely written and needlessly difficult. Maybe not needlessly difficult, but difficult because it is trying to say the unsayable. I've tried to provide a context here so you can appreciate the patterns of arguments. Because we generally don't attend to philosophy, it's always surprising how much these ideas permeate the culture in which we live, the words we say. To me that's the kicker. How much do our unconsciously adopted attitudes and ideas depend on arguments we never heard of before. We are mostly receivers and transmitters, not really conscious beings. I like it that Footnote 25 got to you. Of course! We concentrate on the last 5,000 years or so of human history, forgetting that most of human history happened before that. What have we inherited?
Your point about how our thinking has exluded "great swaths of perspectives" is well taken. One of the weaknesses of the essay is that, well, it's short, and I left out more contemporary developments in social philosophy. I was talking to Jacob last night, and he brought this up as well. What about feminist philosophies? What about Foucault and Arendt? I can see the need to add some text about this because it's important and my essayistic shorthand kind of elided the point. My sense is that the philosophies that examine power and domination are branches of the line the comes from Hegel's phenomenology (the master-slave argument) and from Marx's analysis of capital. These are philosophies that turn the tools of critical analysis onto social existence (and away from metaphysics). I meant this to be implied in what I wrote, but I can see that it's not there. More expansion. Sigh.
I very much enjoyed reading that. It reminded me of something that you always insisted on-- thinking about thought and writing about thinking is actually quite playful. I admire your resistance of stodge in favour of puns and wit and pith. You just say 'it'. It's a kind of courage I think to eschew caveat and qualification (which inevitably tighten the crum of the idea-cake) and, instead, you manage to pour in a different kind of richness which smooth and enhance understandability.
Ah, we come full circle on this. After more than a decade of talking and talking together, it does my heart no end of good to read this. You helped and prodded me along the way. Maybe that was the best part of the whole process.
As someone who knows a bit about the history of philosophy--I know all of the names in this piece--but who switched his major from philosophy to literature and creative writing after almost failing a course in Existentialism in my sophomore year, I found this an enormously useful text--trustworthy, easy to read, laying out a cogent line of thought with wonderful illustrations.
I came on the essay in Facebook when I was scrolling through my home feed to see what people are saying about the Russian war on Ukraine, since I have been writing about that, and it was a bit like reaching an oasis, clear cool water and some shade. One thing I try to console my students with is the notion that history is long, and that obsessive attention to the news cycle won't change the news. Stumbling on this essay was like that crack on one's head--I have only heard about this, not experienced it--that one gets from the Buddhist monk if you are out of form.
I have been thinking a lot about the same things you discuss in this piece, though from a different angle. I have not read Levinas, only Kapuscinski in his last lectures on Levinas's concept of the other, which was a human other in the terms that Kapuscinski used. In a way, the same darkness, the same unknowability, the same fear as the lager Other confronts us with, like "how did the universe start?" But this other is knowable, to at least an extent--there are bridges we can build between us.
Postmodernism and deconstructionism give us the notion that from an absolutely logical standpoint, nothing can be known, the author does not exist, that tree is just the word tree, which really is just a sound that doesn't mean anything, etc. You can tear it all down, write poems that deliberately make no sense, and so on. And in a way it is all true. The arguments are hard to refute.
I think that is why I liked the last paragraphs of your piece so much. I am going to link that to the concept of being contained within a body that has a definite, but unknown, termination date. The body dies. We don't know what happens after that. We can turn to gods or face the end with Nietzsche's bravado--like Christopher Hitchins in his book Mortality--but either way "we are but poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name," as Lowell had it in "Elegy."
It seems to me that one thing lost in the dead end that Western philosophy seems to have become--I am not one qualified to make the judgment, but it seems like that--is a sense of the physical, our embodied beings in relation to the embodied, actual world. I am thinking of Walker Percy's essay "The Loss of the Creature" here--the idea that in order to experience the grandeur of the Grand Canyon we have to go take pictures. Our relationship with world is mediated unless we consciously attempt to experience it otherwise.
This is not as logical as I would like to make it, but I want to tie in my sense what Kapuscinski says about the Other with the idea of the body and that we live in bodies that die, with the idea of other gods and the pathways between the Other and the Self.
It is a hard argument to make, since everything in our positivist postmodern world reduces to the subjective self, so that experiences of the Other--like brush ups, small hints--can easily be reduced to a subjective construction of perception or internal experience.
When Shanta Lee and I married our books got acquainted, too, though they sleep in different bookshelves. Reading the texts that she brings to her work, which are ancient texts in many cases, I have thought about the way some wisdom has been scattered along the way, not lost, but disregarded. Dreams and intuition, the research that suggests that motor area of our brain active before the pre-frontal context does, just the mere coincidences and accidents of life, all might suggest something deeper going on than a fragile membrane of self in hopeless distance from an unknowable Other.
I suppose there is an element of William James observation that whether or not there is a God, people who believed tended to be happier than people who didn't. My personal take has always been Nietzsche's bravado, and I won't let that go--a basic kind of stoic nihilism from a guy who was raised by Post-WWII, post-Holocaust Greenwich Village intellectuals in the Church of Existentialism in the 1950s and 60s. But I kind of like the idea of gods and goddesses, nymphs and dryads, Coyote and Wolf and Bear, Christ and Mary, Abraham and Isaac. I think that instead of denying both as subjective fictive constructions, there is also a way to accept each way of seeing as equally true.
MacLean, Thank you for this. That remark about the Buddhist crack on the head just made my day. And, yes, getting this into shape to publish on Substack was a way of turning aside from the news, which I don't want to ignore, but which needs to be balanced. Also a delight to read the line about your books and Shanta Lee's books getting acquainted (but sleeping in bookshelves).
I am glad you picked up on the implications of that last paragraph. The thrust of the essay is not that Western metaphysics is true and the old oral myths, epics, and folktales are untrue, or vice versa, but that BOTH sets of ideas are responses to questions provoked by the nature of experience, which has that strangely dual quality, the conscious "I" looking out at the object, which is always separate and different. The yearning for oneness, for unmediated experience, is part of that strange relationship we have with reality. It's not a yearning that can be ultimately satisfied.
Last year, I published a little memoir about my time in Edinburgh, working on my Kant dissertation. There are many ironies running through it. One has to do with my reading The Teachings of Don Juan and coming to think of Kant as the Yaqui brujo of Koningsburg. The surprise for me came the day I mentioned Don Juan to one of my Cambridge-trained fellow grad students. I meant to provoke him but was surprised when he turned to me and started talking seriously about what that world of shamans and shape-shifting really meant in terms of the theory of conceptual systems and what implications that might have for any theory of truth. That moment reversed a lot of condescending nonsense that had been living in my head. (It doesn't matter, in this argument, that Carlos Castaneda might have been a fraud.)
My neighbour, your friend Kathy Storring, apparently told my wife about "Out & Back" some time ago, but she (my wife) sent the link to me only this morning. I've been reading here for hours now, and enjoying it all. I was formulating some response to this piece but then got sent off to "Whisky Chasers" by footnote 1 and subsequently forgot what I was going to say about philosophy. So I'll just write here (since I couldn't add a comment to that essay itself) that I found "Whisky Chasers" delightful and even laughed out loud several times. Cheers!
Rick, I remember meeting you and, of course, publishing you in NC. I'm pleased you went and looked at "Whisky Chasers." The two pieces go together in some peculiar and personal way. I get a kick out of the juxtaposition. Great to know you're reading this newsletter.
Some impressions from the peanut gallery:
My brain hurts.
I appreciated the islands of humour to cling to, woven through the piece, to be able to catch my breath. Even laughed out loud a few times.
I’ve saved this essay and will refer to this foundational map frequently to help understand how philosophy has been the ground from which we have jumped towards…everything else. Until now?
I have no formal philosophy training. Reading this has proven (once again) how narrow my education has been. Despite two scientific degrees, no course ever included a glancing reference to philosophy of science. I have since studied this (superficially) on my own.
From my point of modern privilege, I feel a great sadness and regret about how our thinking and ideas of knowing have excluded (and manipulated) great swaths of perspectives along sex, gender, race, class lines…we know this – will the turn of the wheel change this?
I’ll trade in my reader prerogative by saying that, for me, the most intriguing parts of this essay lie in Footnotes 24 and 25 (and the earlier related sections about language and writing). I’ve been thinking a lot about language as a technology and language as abstract symbol and how it disconnects us so effectively from the wider world of nature around us.
“What ancient (speechless, silent) structures and debates are we still expressing?” This is an amazing question. It makes me think of gesture, facial expression, intonation (which does not have to be tied to words, think laughter, whistling, singing, grunting etc.) By thinking in words, we have become lazy with our powers of attention and observation and our relationships with other people and the other than human world have suffered. Humans think in words and in images. And our sensory bandwidth is so narrow, and certainly different from other animals and plants and rocks etc., we have to assume our lack of knowledge of the Other (an aside: why is the Other so terrifying?) is due to our limited body bound instrument of perception (which we are not leveraging as powerfully as we could, as your last line lays down so eloquently, “In our own minds, we like to pretend we are still the subject of the sentence.”)
Suzanne, I'm grateful for this, glad that you laughed, and happy some of it provoked thought. I guess people tend to ignore "philosophy" because it is often pretty densely written and needlessly difficult. Maybe not needlessly difficult, but difficult because it is trying to say the unsayable. I've tried to provide a context here so you can appreciate the patterns of arguments. Because we generally don't attend to philosophy, it's always surprising how much these ideas permeate the culture in which we live, the words we say. To me that's the kicker. How much do our unconsciously adopted attitudes and ideas depend on arguments we never heard of before. We are mostly receivers and transmitters, not really conscious beings. I like it that Footnote 25 got to you. Of course! We concentrate on the last 5,000 years or so of human history, forgetting that most of human history happened before that. What have we inherited?
Your point about how our thinking has exluded "great swaths of perspectives" is well taken. One of the weaknesses of the essay is that, well, it's short, and I left out more contemporary developments in social philosophy. I was talking to Jacob last night, and he brought this up as well. What about feminist philosophies? What about Foucault and Arendt? I can see the need to add some text about this because it's important and my essayistic shorthand kind of elided the point. My sense is that the philosophies that examine power and domination are branches of the line the comes from Hegel's phenomenology (the master-slave argument) and from Marx's analysis of capital. These are philosophies that turn the tools of critical analysis onto social existence (and away from metaphysics). I meant this to be implied in what I wrote, but I can see that it's not there. More expansion. Sigh.
really interesting data visualization of the history of philosophy: https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/
I very much enjoyed reading that. It reminded me of something that you always insisted on-- thinking about thought and writing about thinking is actually quite playful. I admire your resistance of stodge in favour of puns and wit and pith. You just say 'it'. It's a kind of courage I think to eschew caveat and qualification (which inevitably tighten the crum of the idea-cake) and, instead, you manage to pour in a different kind of richness which smooth and enhance understandability.
Ah, we come full circle on this. After more than a decade of talking and talking together, it does my heart no end of good to read this. You helped and prodded me along the way. Maybe that was the best part of the whole process.
As someone who knows a bit about the history of philosophy--I know all of the names in this piece--but who switched his major from philosophy to literature and creative writing after almost failing a course in Existentialism in my sophomore year, I found this an enormously useful text--trustworthy, easy to read, laying out a cogent line of thought with wonderful illustrations.
I came on the essay in Facebook when I was scrolling through my home feed to see what people are saying about the Russian war on Ukraine, since I have been writing about that, and it was a bit like reaching an oasis, clear cool water and some shade. One thing I try to console my students with is the notion that history is long, and that obsessive attention to the news cycle won't change the news. Stumbling on this essay was like that crack on one's head--I have only heard about this, not experienced it--that one gets from the Buddhist monk if you are out of form.
I have been thinking a lot about the same things you discuss in this piece, though from a different angle. I have not read Levinas, only Kapuscinski in his last lectures on Levinas's concept of the other, which was a human other in the terms that Kapuscinski used. In a way, the same darkness, the same unknowability, the same fear as the lager Other confronts us with, like "how did the universe start?" But this other is knowable, to at least an extent--there are bridges we can build between us.
Postmodernism and deconstructionism give us the notion that from an absolutely logical standpoint, nothing can be known, the author does not exist, that tree is just the word tree, which really is just a sound that doesn't mean anything, etc. You can tear it all down, write poems that deliberately make no sense, and so on. And in a way it is all true. The arguments are hard to refute.
I think that is why I liked the last paragraphs of your piece so much. I am going to link that to the concept of being contained within a body that has a definite, but unknown, termination date. The body dies. We don't know what happens after that. We can turn to gods or face the end with Nietzsche's bravado--like Christopher Hitchins in his book Mortality--but either way "we are but poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name," as Lowell had it in "Elegy."
It seems to me that one thing lost in the dead end that Western philosophy seems to have become--I am not one qualified to make the judgment, but it seems like that--is a sense of the physical, our embodied beings in relation to the embodied, actual world. I am thinking of Walker Percy's essay "The Loss of the Creature" here--the idea that in order to experience the grandeur of the Grand Canyon we have to go take pictures. Our relationship with world is mediated unless we consciously attempt to experience it otherwise.
This is not as logical as I would like to make it, but I want to tie in my sense what Kapuscinski says about the Other with the idea of the body and that we live in bodies that die, with the idea of other gods and the pathways between the Other and the Self.
It is a hard argument to make, since everything in our positivist postmodern world reduces to the subjective self, so that experiences of the Other--like brush ups, small hints--can easily be reduced to a subjective construction of perception or internal experience.
When Shanta Lee and I married our books got acquainted, too, though they sleep in different bookshelves. Reading the texts that she brings to her work, which are ancient texts in many cases, I have thought about the way some wisdom has been scattered along the way, not lost, but disregarded. Dreams and intuition, the research that suggests that motor area of our brain active before the pre-frontal context does, just the mere coincidences and accidents of life, all might suggest something deeper going on than a fragile membrane of self in hopeless distance from an unknowable Other.
I suppose there is an element of William James observation that whether or not there is a God, people who believed tended to be happier than people who didn't. My personal take has always been Nietzsche's bravado, and I won't let that go--a basic kind of stoic nihilism from a guy who was raised by Post-WWII, post-Holocaust Greenwich Village intellectuals in the Church of Existentialism in the 1950s and 60s. But I kind of like the idea of gods and goddesses, nymphs and dryads, Coyote and Wolf and Bear, Christ and Mary, Abraham and Isaac. I think that instead of denying both as subjective fictive constructions, there is also a way to accept each way of seeing as equally true.
MacLean, Thank you for this. That remark about the Buddhist crack on the head just made my day. And, yes, getting this into shape to publish on Substack was a way of turning aside from the news, which I don't want to ignore, but which needs to be balanced. Also a delight to read the line about your books and Shanta Lee's books getting acquainted (but sleeping in bookshelves).
I am glad you picked up on the implications of that last paragraph. The thrust of the essay is not that Western metaphysics is true and the old oral myths, epics, and folktales are untrue, or vice versa, but that BOTH sets of ideas are responses to questions provoked by the nature of experience, which has that strangely dual quality, the conscious "I" looking out at the object, which is always separate and different. The yearning for oneness, for unmediated experience, is part of that strange relationship we have with reality. It's not a yearning that can be ultimately satisfied.
Last year, I published a little memoir about my time in Edinburgh, working on my Kant dissertation. There are many ironies running through it. One has to do with my reading The Teachings of Don Juan and coming to think of Kant as the Yaqui brujo of Koningsburg. The surprise for me came the day I mentioned Don Juan to one of my Cambridge-trained fellow grad students. I meant to provoke him but was surprised when he turned to me and started talking seriously about what that world of shamans and shape-shifting really meant in terms of the theory of conceptual systems and what implications that might have for any theory of truth. That moment reversed a lot of condescending nonsense that had been living in my head. (It doesn't matter, in this argument, that Carlos Castaneda might have been a fraud.)