Lady Gaga and the ape

During my TV dinner I just caught a glimpse of Lady Gaga presenting a book of photos (photos of herself - what else?). She mentioned something she had learned. Shame is obselete, she said.

Nietzsche wrote two sentences about the ape in "Thus Spake Zarathustra":

"What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."

Along with Darwin and Lady Gaga we accept with perfect equanimity the idea that the ape is there at the top of our family tree.

The inability any longer to be ashamed of the ape that still dwells within us is nothing to brag about.

"Alas, the time of the most despicable man has come - the one who is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."

Leiter on Nietzsche's Skepticism

Brian Leiter has written a piece about Nietzsche's moral skepticism (and thanks to Unabgeschlossenheit for putting us onto it). It is an odd combination of some very conscientious Nietzsche scholarship, and a lot of theorizing which causes this particular sympathetic reader of Nietzsche to take offense. With some philosophers (I would cite Heidegger or Derrida, since my sympathies are not with them) one tires of reading secondary texts which teeter on the edge of parody as they parrot the pseudo-poeticisms about the clearing, for instance, in order (supposedly) to clear up what Heidegger was on about. One wants someone - someone like Leiter perhaps - to come along and make it plain for us unpoetic types what the hell Heidegger was on about and whether there is actually anything substantial at the core of his thinking or whether it is all just a cry of pain at the absence of God. What one doesn't want, however, is a long academic thesis about whether Heidegger or Nietzsche were skeptics about the existence of moral facts. Rather than clear anything up, that just obscures things further by forcing one set of ideas into a theoretical framework in which they just don't belong.

But let us be scholarly for a moment (despite the unpleasant sensation that that arouses). What is wrong with the talk of moral facts that Leiter uses (and it is not just his discourse, of course)? Perhaps we are not sufficiently familiar with this discourse, and perhaps that is why it strikes us as odd that Leiter can talk so bluntly about moral facts when so much about that talk seems questionable. Leiter does not say that there are moral facts, but the discourse assumes that there might be, and Leiter goes on to reconstruct one possible argument for being skeptical about their existence: the argument from the universal disagreement in the field of moral philosophy.

What would a moral fact be? But that question only makes sense within a larger attempt to understand the phenomenon of morality. What is morality? Leiter's talk of moral facts implies that morality is either a cognition of something objective or simply a projection of the speaker's feelings. This either/or seems to imply that if morality isn't objective then moral talk is just a lot of hot air (with perhaps the further consequence that any moral critique of existing power structures is a priori untenable, which is definitely not what Nietzsche believed).

Let's take objectivity first. Here and there Leiter seems to suggest that objectivity is (or ought to be) as objective as it was for Plato for whom the Ideas are “pure, clear, unmixed—not infected withhuman flesh and color, and a lot of other mortal nonsense”. What we seem to have lost sight of here is the history of our discourse. Unlike Plato we are only too aware of how historical and therefore how opaque our discourse is. We are only too aware that our language is (as it was for Nietzsche) human, all too human. And so there is no way back to a Platonic concept of objectivity (for which language would have to be a perfectly transparent window on the world). Some kind of historical relativism is inevitable. And it's inevitability is evident in Leiter's article, for the way he sets up the problem only makes sense if you begin from an acceptance that the world is what it is for science: either there are facts to be known by one kind of science or there are feelings to be explained by another branch of science, and philosophy presumably decides which phenomena belong in which scientific pigeon hole.

What about feelings? There is something terribly unsubtle in the talk of the projection/expression of feelings that Leiter buys into. Nietzsche has an interesting history of how the bad conscience comes into being. It is a long and tortuous process. This historical and psychological complexity is completely glossed over by the reduction of morality to a projection of feelings. That kind of reductive talk implies (it seems to me) a kind of shrug of the shoulders: I feel this way, but, heck, I guess you feel differently and I guess that's just moral relativism, so let's live and let live. There is a phenomenon here in serious need of a diagnosis, when morality can be talked about with such a shrug of the shoulders; as there is when talk of morality can centre on idle chatter about flaming pussies.

So what of the either/or? For an old Hegelian-Marxist it is tempting to criticize this for being a tad undialiectical. Morality cannot just be feelings, but it cannot just be the stuff Leiter wants to call facts. Instead of the flaming pussy let's take a more pertinent phenomenon: sin. There is no sin without a historically evolved religious discourse maintained by a community that talks of sin and judges the immoral actions of its members, and judges them harshly. But that discourse will cease to have any currency if people do not feel that their actions and those of other are sinful. There is a unity here of history, language, thought and feeling which cannot come into view if we insist at the outset that morality must either be facts or feelings. Those of us who see in theocracy nothing but a dead hand know by its absence how important feeling must be to morality.

Enough on the either/or. Let me comment on why I prefer to read Nietzsche than Mr Leiter. Nietzsche has a burning sense of what is timely. I may disagree with his interpretation of what the epoch needs, but I appreciate that keeness to respond to the historical situation, and respond to it morally (leaving aside for now the difficulty with the word "morality"). We, too, live at a time when there is much of a moral nature to think about. In the West morality is excluded from so much of the public sphere as culture is handed over to commerce. It is almost tempting to talk about this as a form of repression, and then to see the Taliban as the return of the repressed, to whom the response is naked aggression. When thinking about morality, don't we have to begin from some understanding of what morality has become historically - from some understanding of how we (and that is a very historical we) are to narrate that history - and from some response to the present crisis? Philosophy, on this reading, does not begin from wonder (and certainly not from idle academic curiosity) but from a sense of unease - a sense that society is not a whole of which we are contented parts, but rather that it is fragmented. Philosophy should at least help us to delineate the lines of that fragmentation insofar as this touches on the most basic categories of our thinking, even if it cannot come up with a blueprint for a happier whole. However much I disagree with the details, I appreciate that this what Nietzsche addresses. He does criticize a Platonic theory of value, but not because it is a nice topic for an academic paper, but because it is a necessary prelude to a critique of a social self-delusion - a delusion bound up with a negation of what we feel (of what we FEEL) ought to be affirmed.

To put it another way. I like moral thinking to be not just thinking about morality but thinking that is itself moral - thinking that aims to be an intervention with moral purport in a situation (like ours) that cries out for a moral response. In such a context it strikes me that idle talk of flaming pussies is reprehensible.

Post-Modernism as Anti-Humanism? A Response to Reiner Schurmann

Back in 1979 Reiner Schurmann wrote an article entitled "Anti-Humanism: Reflections of the Turn Towards the Post-Modern Epoch." In it he purported to see in philosophy the signs of a move to a new epoch in which the human subject is no longer at the centre. Prior to this there was a "humanistic epochal economy" as Schurmann calls it, but the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger (the three he focuses on in the article) signal its expiration. Beneath the title of the article, a quote from Foucault's "Order of Things" sums up the main idea: "Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

The primary idea which has had its day is that of the subject as a point of origin. Epistemologically, the humanist idea is evident both in Plato and Descartes for whom knowledge can be based on clear and distinct ideas available to the private reflection of the subject. For the anti-humanist, knowledge rests on a historically shifting order of things - a transient order that the individual is subject to, not the origin of.

A similar shift occurs in the conception of the practical subject. As Schurmann puts it, the individual "even less appears as history-making, as a person responsible for his doings, as the initiator of a new order of things - in one phrase, as a moral agent."

Now there is definitely a shift in philosophy away from transcendental subjectivity, but to lump Marx and Nietzsche and Heidegger in the same bag and call them anti-humanists is just too much to swallow. Take Marx: one of the key quotes Schurmann relies upon includes the following comment about the proletariat being a class which "suffers the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity." Clearly, when Marx criticises idealist notions of human subjectivity he does so for the sake of developing a theory to assist the redemption of humanity. Hardly anti-humanism.

Similarly with Nietzsche. On Schurmann's reading, Nietsche affirms "the radical fluidity of inorganic, organic, social and cultural forces, all treated as equal so long as one of them does not impose its temporary order upon the others." He makes it sound as if for Nietzsche human being dissolves completely into a play of forces. Is this so? Admittedly, Nietzsche does recall feeling himself to be "6,000 feet beyond man and time" (while out walking in the countryside in 1881) but does he not mean "beyond the motley humanity of the town square down in the valley" as opposed to "beyond humanity as such"? And was the point of thinking on his feet while walking across the hillsides not to gain a more lively sense of himself - a self more aware of its humanity than the Cartesian subject locked in darkness, imagining itself to be mere thought? Again and again, Nietzsche tries to point to a new type of man - and Zarathustra is meant to be the paragon. As he puts it a few pages after the quote that Schurmann lifts from Ecce Homo: he holds up "the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solenmity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins."

Is there not an opposition to a certain kind - certain kinds - of humanity in the name of...in the name of a better kind of humanity? This is blotted out completely by the term "anti-humanism".

What irritates most of all is Schurmann's apathy - his quiescent fatalism. He refers back to the Stoics in glowing terms, saying that the post-modern anti-humanists manifest the same wise equanimity. He also says that understanding "always comes ... once the battle is over. What gives rise to thinking thus totally escapes our grips." "Totally"! Now this might be true of Heidegger, but surely not Marx and Nietzsche. Doesn't Nietzsche's genealogy of morals aim to come to some kind of grip with the past in order to have a more confident attitude towards the present and the future? And there is a struggle here - hardly equanimity - one that arises out of a disgust with the present and a concern for the future. Similar traits are evident in Marx, although the focus is on property relations and the commodity form instead of psychology. And if Marx ends up being something of an economic determinist it is only because he thinks he can see a crisis brewing - a crisis which is perceived to offer a tremendous opportunity for humanity at last to realise its highest potential. This hardly amounts to equanimity.

What is most repugnant is this equanimity. It reminds us of Richard Rorty, who we saw on stage describing the liberal imaginary and shrugging his shoulders nonchalantly, brushing off our objections that there were things about that fragmentary and contradictory status quo that we couldn't just affirm with equanimity. If equanimity is the prevailing mood of post-modernism, we reject post-modernism. Although there is no simple humanism that we can fall back on, it looks to us as if this talk of anti-humanism, which initially looks like a bold negation, ends up implicitly affirming a world order that is, in fact, anti-human. In a sense, it is because anti-humanism is true that it must be rejected as false - the standpoint of the latter truth being some remnant of humanity that we are still aware of.

For the sake of pity: Why read Nietzsche?

There was a time when I could not stomach Nietzsche at all, but lately I want to read nothing else but Nietzsche (with the possible exception of Stendhal, and that only because I wanted to see if Nietzsche's glowing comments were justified - and they were).

Anyone who believes that our overriding moral obligation is to help the poor, the homeless, the refugees, the malnourished, the diseased, etc, etc MUST read Nietzsche. This is not to say that the morality of pity is defenseless; but it deserves to be challenged. Nietzsche suggests we look backwards at the genealogy of this morality and forwards to what it aims at.

As far as the aim is concerned, where is all this pity heading? Are we just trying to make sure that everyone is comfortable, with a warm meal and a bed and a TV and no sound of gunfire in the vicinity? But obviously it is not enough for those of us who pity to be content with their comfort, their warm meal, their bed, their TV and the absence of gunfire. No, we want there to be a crisis somewhere - a crisis that will be a call to action, that will get us up out of our armchairs and out into the streets knocking on doors to raise money for the moral effort. So if we achieved our goal and everyone was warm, comfortable and well-fed and well-entertained, would we be happy? Would we feel better? Or would we feel that something was missing? Are we do-gooders not ever so slightly parasitic - parasites of the poor and needy?

Am I alone in yearning to help others while suffering from a congenital inability to help myself or to help something that we might call "us" (a word - an object - completely alien to me)? Is this not - as Nietzsche suggests - a little decadent?

The IKEA test of the free spirit

Non-Europeans unfamilar with the IKEA phenomenon will need some background: IKEA is a Swedish manufacturing giant that no has huge warehouses outside every major European city (or so it seems). Hence my mother in a small town in northern England now has exactly (EXACTLY) the same furniture as a Greek family living in a suburb of Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

I went to IKEA. It was painful. I couldn't eat any of the traditional Swedish meatballs they were serving (because the idea is that you don't just go to IKEA to buy cheap flat-pack furniture - it is meant to be pretty much a day out for the family, hence the children's play area and the traditional Swedish meatballs).

What sprung to mind was the IKEA test of the free spirit (for readers of Nietzsche who might be wondering if they are, or are not, free spirits). To take the test you have to need furniture and really want to get it at the lowest possible price. You then go to IKEA, where there is such an abundance of cheap furniture (all so clevely flat-packed that it is virtually possible to furnish an entire dining room for a family of five with stuff that can be fitted into a small hatchback on a single run). And then you must see how you feel. Those who pass the test are those who genuinely feel an achingly deep nausea as horrible images of that Munchean scream come to mind again - a screaming figure on a bridge (as I recall) - a bridge to...nowhere?

Plum Pudding, Communicative Action and the Will to Truth

Apologies for the absence. Understandable, I hope, given the vaguely festive period maintained by the states still under the influence, albeit vestigial, of the Pauline message (and was it really St Paul who was to blame?). I will not waste space on details of the plum pudding for I know that they hold no interest for you. You are beyond them. In any case, plum puddings deserve to be written about in a certain way to bring out their real value. Since that value is nothing more than a dim memory to us, since it is no longer present for us, we must leave the description of it to others (and for some odd reason the name Garrison Keillor comes to mind - apologies for the spelling).

A sign of how bad we are with plum puddings is that even while pouring the burning brandy over them with the lights dimmed so that the kids gasp and others worry that the tablecloth might catch fire, we are mulling over the theory of communicative action. This is no doubt a sickness. Perhaps it wouldn't appear to be so much of a sickness if any progress were being made developing something that might be called a groundwork for the critique of the said theory. But it is not. Nearly 20 years later we are still treading the same stagnant waters while obsessively mulling over the same doubts and the same half-remembered quotations.

Here they are again:

Wasn't Habermas wrong to make everything revolve around speech? When we leave our hillside retreat we see that there really is too much speech. People talk a hell of a lot. From a Habermassian point of view that ought to be good, were it not for the fact that so much of what is said (and perhaps it reaches a few decimal points beyond 99%) is of zero cognitive value. Werther will tell me that Habermas was aware of this, despite being surrounded mainly by intellectuals and despite shunning music, and mentioned this fact in a little known letter to someone on the other side of the world. Doubtless he did, but the observation seems to me to be fatal for the theory. People generally don't give a toss about the truth. Let's not beat about the bush. The problem being, not a lack of speech, but a lack of thinking. People think so very little. Speech is easier. You do it with friends, and it can be very pleasant to get carried away by the back and forth of the banter, and you find yourself saying things that you really don't believe in just because those are things that need to be said to keep the conversation going in an appropriately chummy way. Did Habermas develop - as a sideline - a theory of banter, of chatter? We vaguely remember Heidegger's disparaging remarks about the "They" (and I have this impression that the they are those who are lost in chatter and banter and chanting and flag waving and other such activities). Of course there are a few clearings in society where people do seem to comport themselves in a more authentically Habermassian way - one thinks of law courts and the academies - but this is not the kind of speech that really keeps the whole social show on the road.

Hence, again, our fondness for Theo. For him, the only way forward was not for more speech, but more thinking. And does thinking not presuppose a certain ambivalence about the value of speech - a certain disinclination to say very much - an inclination to leave the room once the banter really starts to get going?

If Habermas believed that all speech implied, presupposed or in any way hinted at a will to truth or somehow obliged the speaker to damn well pay attention to the truth, he was wrong. Speech is much more about putting an end to loneliness - that terrible sense of isolation when one pulls up the drawbridge and remains alone with one's thoughts. And because so much of speech is chatter, rather than open people up to truth it continually reinforces the linguistic walls that block it out.

That pretty well sums up what we have been thinking about for nearly a month. Not a kind of thinking that breaks new ground, that moves things forward. More treading stagnant waters. There were fragments of other ideas (though, again, nothing new). The idea of the Homo Sapiens, for instance. Who the hell thought that one up? Who threw both logic and common sense to the wind by proposing that because people think (sometimes and badly) they are essentially thinking beings? True, Adorno makes a lot of thinking. More thinking is our only hope, but for Adorno there is no obvious ground for optimism about some global upsurge of thinking. Even we who do think (a little and badly) feel how unnatural the process is. We who have a field and like to potter around in it confess that pruning trees feels more natural than the more laborious cogitation. We really do enjoy pruning. Of course, even as we prune thoughts are humming around us like oddly lethargic but terribly persistent flies. We carry on pruning, though, because it is so much harder to stop and really think about and lay out in some sensible order those humming thoughts - thoughts that hint at truth, at some meaningful beyond, but actually contain so little, if anything, of it.

Another fragment: If Habermas had bought into Adorno's line that thinking is more important than speaking, what would he have done? Would he have tried to argue that we are all obliged to think, and to think about the truth, and that we are guilty of some cerebral pragmatic contradiction if we just carry on mulling over the same old cogitative rubbish instead of really and logically thinking about the matter in hand, developing our thoughts in the most extensive and systematic way possible? Instead of Descartes' dumb assertion: "I think", would he have tried to argue that I - that we - are morally obliged to think, and to think well - to think about the Truth, and to subsequently base our whole being on that? If so, it would have been another pointless exercise.

As a postfestive postscript, how about this for a conjunction? We came across this little quote in a book by Deleuze on Nietzsche (a book given to us ages ago that we have only just got round to reading - and a good read, as it turns out). The quote is from the third section of the Genealogy of Morals, and begins with an odd statement about the meaning of life, but the more interesting bit for us is what he predicts about the fate of the will to truth.

"What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not for this: that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness - there can be no doubt of that - morality [and here Nietzsche seems to be thinking of an austere form of European Christianity] will gradually perish. This is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe - the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."

On almost the same day we read that, we saw Lilly Allen's latest pop video on the Polish channel 4Fun TV. Lilly's song (called Fear for some reason I can't fathom out yet) is a wonderfully British, and apparently sincere, expression of the silliness of stardom. It has its witty moments, one of which is the line: "I am a weapon of massive consumption."

It is clear that Nietzsche had no inkling whatsoever that the cultural pacemakers of the future would be the likes of Lilly Allen.