Contaminations of thought

A few weeks ago I read an article in the Observer about the assassination of a drug baron from Liverpool and found a sentence which announced that 'senior Liverpool criminals' had gathered in a luxury hotel ...', something like that. It was the idea of 'senior Liverpool criminals' that was incongruous, with its implicit tone of respect.

But that is just a random thought occasioned by the fact that I was about to say something about senior university policy makers ... they are more or less forced, out of political expediency, to match the forms of Government discourse and rhetoric in their negotiations about funding, forced, that is to say, to present at least in public an instrumental or utilitarian model of their own activities in the hope that this will sway politicians in their favour. Some of these senior figures do this with a heavy heart and think of themselves, try to think of themselves, present themselves, as providing us academics by this means, by this instrumentality, with shelter, with 'air cover' (as one of them said today), so that we can do what we believe to be genuinely important.

But there is something insidious about the instrumentalism that they thus pay lip-service to (or present themselves to us as paying lip service to: I am a very suspicious person). It starts to infiltrate and infect our own thinking, it leads us to think anyway in instrumental terms, in terms of our competitors, of their vicious competition (a true expression), which is always worse for being global, and in terms of our 'brand' and our 'product', it leads us to think in terms of quantities.

The point is that when we (the infantry) challenge this whole way of thinking then there is the rhetorical move I mentioned a moment ago, viz that this language provides us with air cover and shelter, even though we have just been urged in effect to think in just these terms: it doesn't have that function, it is how we are required to think, and there is an unspoken ambivalence and troubled uneasiness about it all, and to resist or question is merely 'unhelpful'.

And the point and problem of all this is that it is easy to think instrumentally and difficult to think, how? non-instrumentally? Well, that very phrasing itself, the use of the negative, shows the difficulty. What is difficult is to think. And this is what universities are supposed to be for. In fact what I have called 'utilitarian' or 'instrumental' thinking isn't really 'thinking' at all: it is merely reasoning in which the premises are already uncritically accepted and in place And in this context that is a trahison des clercs.

Gillian Howie has written about all this.

Bad karma

Poor Sharon Stone is no doubt embarrassed by her 'bad karma 'gaffe', which is not to say that she doesn't believe it (like Frank Field apologising for saying in public what he actually believes in private). But here are two kinds of belief, the belief that Gordon is unhappy in his body, whose truth or falsity can be established, and the belief that the recent earthquakes were a karmic consequence for China's monstrous injustices in Tibet. Stone would probably think that she was much more sophisticated than those fundamentalist evangelists who say that the recent hurricanoes were a sign of God's displeasure at human sinfulness, especially that of the gays. But her own comment is on the same logical footing and both of them give 'religious belief' a bad name. Perhaps I just don't want to think of 'religious beliefs' as providing the terms of a causal explanation of events. To the extent that they seek to do this they are merely superstitious and are precisely not religious beliefs which, if they explain anything, 'explain' no more than the human condition and as such are not causal at all.

Deleuze is done and dusted, the thesis read, examined and passed. As for Deleuze, as the Irishman said, I wouldn't start from here.

Rinansey

Mentally preparing, despite Deleuze, Duns Scotus and Spinoza, for heading North. I just noticed that on Sunday sunset in Orkney (2207) will be an hour later than in London (2107) and sunrise (0411) three quarters of an hour earlier (0449).

Here is one of my favourite North Ronaldsay* pictures:

* Once known as Rinansay.

Scott McClellan's criticisms of the Bush White House and its dishonesty in the way it handled the war will be met with ad hominem arguments and innuendo, ie., they will not seek to argue against the substance of what he says but will merely question his motivation, as though hoping by this means to divert attention away from the issue. This is so basic a five year old knows the game and has probably already played it.

A Bergsonian thought

A nice couple of sentences: '"Perception as a whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement". Our perceptions are non-veridical in that they are a reduction of what there is in the world: their sole purpose is to facilitate our actions in the world ... Our perceptions do not fashion 'representations' of the world around us out of sensory data, instead they 'lessen' the 'more' that there really is in the world, in order that we can act upon it.'

The continentals

This is to introduce Molly, the three-legged cat, who takes her pleasures seriously and without self-consciousness.

Interesting enough to read about Deleuze, but these guys are so philosophy finds itself in me, such prima donnas, such breathless prose, which doesn't mean they have nothing to say. In fact I applaud the idea of philosophical creativity that begins to emerge, the idea of a creativity of concepts, which depends, for its sense, on what we are calling a concept ... though it seems to me that we would be talking about an exploration of reality. My main problem is that I am deeply resistant to using their language-in-translation, which is merely barbarous.

But ah! the difference to me.

What is the difference, pray, between a walk in the park and reading a thesis about Deleuze?

Im wunderschoenen Monat Mai ...

Almost by accident we found ourselves down in lower Heswall and walked thence along the beach then up onto the cliffs and through Heswall Fields towards Thurstaston on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of May, a brief interlude, for me, from marking exam scripts and dissertations and so forth ....

.... in the intervals I have been thinking about Humanism again, partly because there was a Face to Faith article in Saturday's Guardian by Andrew Copson:

"Humanists believe that the reality we perceive around us - the world and
universe that we make sense of through experience -is the only reality we can
know and that there is no "second layer" to reality in which gods, demons or the
"supernatural" can exist. It is this conviction that also leads humanists to
believe that this life is the only life we have and that morality as we
understand it is a natural product of our social instincts and not handed to
humanity by some divine source."

Well, yes, but there is something jejune about the account, something is missing, and it's not a divine source or anything like that. I have some sympathy with humanism (and it is interesting to see who has nailed their colours to its mast on the website), but I feel queasy when people start talking about 'what we believe'. The idea that 'the reality we perceive around us' is 'the only reality we can know' is the sort of claim made by those who are anxious to distance themselves from anything that suggests 'the supernatural' but it looks too much like it wants to foreclose on the idea of reality as an open-ended concept, which allows for the possibility of an expansion and extension of the reality that we can know, as we free ourselves from the oppressive narrowness of egocentric self-enclosure, for instance, which precisely limits what we (are able to) perceive. I don't see why humanists shouldn't assent to such a claim as this, but their silence about it is not encouraging. I can also see why they might want to cut off the idea of a divine source for morality, but the danger is that too little is said about the way in which our ethical lives can develop into, for instance, a passion for justice that goes far beyond anything that might be found in 'conventional morality', far beyond what could be captured by a phrase like 'social instincts'. Again, I cannot see why humanists shouldn't go in this direction, and maybe they do. This is work for later, but perhaps, for the moment, the point is that to claim to be a secular humanist is a means of denying something ('the supernatural') as well as seeking to affirm something, and that to call oneself a Buddhist humanist, or a Christian humanist, say, is a matter of wanting to emphasise the particular perspectives on reality that those traditions have highlighted, just as the different religions can be thought of, though there is more to them than this, as asserting truths that depend upon particular histories of experience. There is a distinctively Jewish experience, for instance, a particular form of travail and endurance and there are analogies, say, with Shi'ism, so that there are these repositories of learned experience. And repositories of learned experience need to be preserved, so that our humanism should take account of them, should take account of the moral realities of greed, hatred and delusion, for instance, and the way they vitiate perception and conduct ...

As we walked along the meadows, which were strewn with wonderful buttercups, we could look out over the Dee estuary to the North Wales coast, the mudflats below us and the deep channel beyond.

We could also see Hilbre away in the distance:

In the Mouth

I have finished reading Eileen Pollack's collection of stories and novellas, In the Mouth, and this, I suppose, is a minor plug for an old friend I am proud to know.

The writing is wry and spare and rueful and what she writes about is both funny and sad, as we pass between the subjective impossibility of hope and inevitability of despair, all in the midst of the longing for love, and the memory of it, but in which what had seemed impossible becomes inevitable, and the reversal is not through anyone's choice, but is visited upon them, as in the transforming and unexpected insight in the final paragraphs of Beached in Boca.

I suppose I am inclined to see a philosophical insight here, in the idea of such a transformation of perspective, a perspective which had seemed before no less than an objective description of the facts, but there is no ponderous articulation of a position or doctrine, simply a possibility shown. As Nietzsche remarked, our estimations of the value and purpose of life are simply symptomatologies of the emotions, and Eileen traces the passage and progress of perspectives through the movement of the symptoms, as it were.

And her ear is so acute, not just for the speech patterns of this anthropologically curious little group of Florida Jews that she knows so well, and the subleties of their inflections, but most of all for the failures of comprehension, for the perplexing to and fro and back and forth of inner dialogue and outward demeanour, between old friends, or potential lovers, or father and daughter, who can see in each other only the public demeanour but cannot hear the dialogue, the mutual awareness and insight that cannot be conveyed from the one to the other, except that she has supplied both dialogues in a spirit of irony that makes you weep, and then the swift and nervous little gestures of love and need, and then the desolation of the old widower: wild, old widowers whom you shouldn't really let out of your sight. It's about dentists, there were never such dentists in Britain ... despite what you say.

Cardinals religious and secular

Hard not be irritated by Dawkins, with his smug, killer question about the 'evidence' for 'God'. He must have read the standard theological rebuttals scores of times, that he is still treating the question of the existence of God as though it were a scientific hypothesis in competition with other and better ones. So maybe he doesn't get it. Not that I am persuaded, either, by the rebuttals, I mean.

Some of my best friends want to say that God is an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing? and it is certainly clear that this is not a scientific answer to a scientific question about why things are thus and so and not otherwise. But then, what kind of question is it, really?

It would perhaps be too crude to say something like, well, if there were a God then we should have an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, so long as we assume that God is not as it were a thing among other things. But then there is hardly an independent route by which we establish that there is a God whose existence gives us an answer to the question. It seems to me that talking of God at all here is an expression of wonder and wonder can be expressed in other ways, including by silence, a silence, moreover, within which possibilities present themselves that would not otherwise be available. But the God-talk just looks too like a reading back into Being of our own nature as rational and creative beings, so the mythological story is of rational and creative agency. The Buddhist turn, by contrast, equally following the silence, is to question the causalities of experience and selfhood.

But the fact, if it is a fact, that we can ask the question doesn't guarantee that there is an answer. And anyway, it's not so clear that the question is intelligible. It looks like the most general form of the question why are things like this rather than like something else? which is really the trick that Herbert McCabe relies upon. But there being nothing is not one of the ways in which things are ...

Nor does this leave us with the conclusion that it is 'just a brute fact, then, that there is anything at all' since 'brute fact' gets its sense of arbitrariness from a context in which there are reasons and explanations. How Wittgensteinian.


As for the official Cardinal who properly notes that God is not one thing among others ... the usual things, the Catholic Church can be socially and politically progressive, it stands for justice, is anti-war and against the death penalty, but then there are the no-go areas of the official teaching about homosexuality, contraception. women priests and so forth, about which it is not possible to have a public conversation because these public men and women have to speak like politicians committed to a policy whether they agree with it in private or not. And thank God the Church has no power.

Enough, this is just displacement activity. To the Self Evaluation Document. Once these were called self assessment documents until 'they' noticed what the acronym would be.

The Reunion ...

An intense few weeks lie ahead of marking, reading manuscripts, a doctoral thesis, reviewing another philosophy programme, then committee meetings, examiners' meetings before I am free to head back north and do some of my own work.

I had a luminous time in North Staffordshire over the Bank Holiday, trees, beech trees, beech trees with young translucent leaves, sunlight on the the eerie, on the lurid green of lichen on fallen tree trunks, trees, what shall I do without trees, trees, great trees soaring, filtering the beams of light onto the primeval faery floor of the Valley and memory, running, racing fleet-footed, young, down the Gorge and along the valley path and splashing through the rapid stream, in May-time, in freezing February snow, in blizzards of rain and sleet, and then now, the formality of the Reunion Mass, sung by old men who moved uncertainly like ancient druids of a lost religion painfully across the sanctuary to read a text or recite a prayer or receive the benediction of the thurifer's incense in the Pugin chapel that is the sole remains ....

The sea will compensate for the absence of trees, the trees will be there, though, palpable in their absence.

A postscript

I finished reading Jim Mackey's book, cheering all the way, in both senses of that expression. It makes me want, among many other things, to correct my own impression of the High Priests as 'good men' or 'decent men', as I put it. The whole point lies in our account of what it is to be a good or decent person in the first place, the criteria that we use to make that judgment, and Mackey wants to say that the criteria offered by the Christian perspective are different, are constituted by the metanoia that consists in refusing to return evil for evil, a fundamental re-ordering of priorities ... that makes sense, of course, in the context of an individual's conduct but is ultimately to be expressed in the way in which a community organises itself. The fundamental temptation of self-aggrandisement, as Mackey puts it, and which is the closest he comes to talking of an original sin of the species, is constantly re-asserting itself, just as, to put it in quite different language, the state of nature is always before us as a possibility, and re-emerges in every street gang and every tyrant who wants to be a war-lord.

But 'to put it in quite different language' is perhaps the significant thing here. Once one reads the Bible as myth and metaphor, once one sees it as that, then there is no great need to return to its language, except as a source of metaphors that one draws on because one finds them still fruitful, and not all of them are that fruitful ... This is where I came in forty years ago ...

'This is where we came in' ... refers to the practice of turning up at the cinema without regard to the timing of the programme. We would all go in with Dad and sit down in the middle of the Western, making no sense of the action and then at the end wait until it all started again, only to be forced to leave, despite our hissed pleas of 'Dad!!', at the point where we came in, on the grounds, presumably, that we had everything we needed to fit the whole picture together in our minds. How frustrating was that as they say nowadays. He used to say, 'Come on, kiddos, this is where we came in'.

I've been reading Eileen's book, which is terrific fun. It would help to have a glossary for all the Yiddish, though. The Bris was great, about a man on his death bed insisting that he had to be circumcised ...