Well, he does do a good job explaining the classics and their relevance to “modernity.”

But then I spent the winter, spring and summer — while moving, being unemployed and getting a new job — reacquainting myself with anthropology, including some postmodern thought, brief familiarity with folks like Foucault, and Richard Rorty’s ironism (I still like his peculiarly American, pragmatic version of continental postmodernism), and … well let’s just say, once you start seeing “Western Culture” as just one more possibility within the realm of human existence, just one version of humanity’s attempt to negotiate existence together… you start to think, “huh, a lot of this Western Philosophy, the discourse of the Western world trying to make sense of itself, is pretty parochial. It’s pretty self-referential and kinda irrelevant.”

This week, to take a break between getting CompTIA A+ certified, and then starting to pretend I’m preparing for a graduate education, I decided it might be fun to listen to Rick Roderick’s “Self Under Siege – Philosophy in the 20th Century” audio lecture (also on the previous link), in which he’ll cover Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, and presumably (hopefully) some others like DeLeuze and Baudrillard.

To be fair to him, I haven’t even finished the first lecture yet, but my goodness. I keep finding myself annoyed with him and finding his take, his views, irrelevant. Granted he’s speaking in the early 1990s, and the problems in America, while much the same today, were pretty different, and interpreted pretty differently.

But, so far, it seems he’s clearly coming from a place where he wants to defend the traditions of his discipline. He seems caught in the trap of concerning himself with peculiarly parochial Western questions regarding religion and “the self.” He even name-checks Rorty in the first lecture, as having written a paper with the attitude of, “Those old questions of philosophy haven’t been answered in 2,500 years, so who cares?” And he feels really upset by this.

I happen to agree with Rorty. Maybe the old questions of Western philosophy are just the wrong questions to be asking. Maybe they’re just concerned with ancient cosmologies of the world that aren’t really important anymore. Except I must remind myself, he was a Texan in the late 20th century, and even today, these questions are still so important to so many people because they’re brought up conventionally. These traditions are still very much alive in society, and of course the foundations of contemporary statehood and economics… and that, I think, is part of the problems.

Fundamentally, it seems Roderick wants to address the crisis of meaning to the Self in the modern world. He is suggesting in the start that, once upon a time, folks had “worldviews” (I would say cultural cosmologies) in which they could place themselves and then drive meaning. He is explaining how the classic texts of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche drew suspicion on these worldviews, and how nowadays people find themselves adrift.

I look forward to hearing the rest of his narrative and views, but I can say right now, I think that’s false. I think people are perfectly capable, and always have been, of creating their own meaning. It’s difficult, at first — I think Western culture has certainly had a tradition of “mother/father/authority figure” as the source of one’s cosmology and place in the world, and is still struggling to adjust out of that.

But I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s an advancement. That old stuff doesn’t need to matter anymore. We can deal with each other and create our own meanings. We all are born needing some help, some welcoming into this world and maturing, but we don’t need to be told who we are and what it means to be alive, other than, “Welcome! Here we are, let’s make the best of it!”

(This may also be part of the real major crisis of the contemporary world: the actual globalization going on is empowering non-Western cultures, and the Western world feels afraid of finding its traditions as irrelevant as it once saw those of other peoples.)

As a final note, what really bugs me about Roderick is this constant facade of folksiness, which isn’t really a facade, but is irritating because his dialog is constantly with old philosophers, and modern philosophers, and hypotheticals in everyone’s head. A number of examples he puts forward, and ideas about living in the world, seem very much a projection, and not about the real lived experience of everyday people, hence why the “folksiness” bugs me, because it implies he’s connected to everyday people. But again, he lived in Texas, so mayhap he was.

It’s just, I crave empiricism. “Stop being in your cave looking at shadows and come out here in the world with us.” Rex on Savage Minds recently said of anthropology, “It is surely one of the most unique things about our discipline that we are committed to the idea that being human with other humans is a far more sophisticated way of learning about them than any other sort of method that works from the outside in.” Indeed. In fact, of all disciplines, philosophy seems to me to peculiarly attempt to work “from the outside out.” (Or from the inside in?) Philosophers, go be human with other humans, and write about that. Become anthropologists. We could use your brains.

Mind you, it’s good to study that old stuff, for historical reasons, to inform understanding of how the world got to be the way it is. But it’s also time to step off the “train of history” and start making our world on our own.

Also, clearly the ethics of things like contemporary anarchism have roots in some philosophical musings on how to live and treat other people, and I think that’s a good thing, and am being slightly hyperbolic in this post.

…if there are words and phrases that I use, but haven’t actually thought about — idioms that may be so common that I don’t have a clue about their etymology, but which I find are undeniably rooted in discrimination and oppression when I use the “explain it to a non-native speaker” exercise above (such as the phrase: “I got gypped” — a slur against Romani people that I’m often surprised people don’t know about) — if I continue to use these words and people are offended by them and I say: “Hey, it’s common usage! I didn’t mean it like that” . . .

Well, if I do that, I think that what I’m really saying is:

“I want to use these phrases because they are an easy short-hand for me, and/or they make me sound hep, or edgy, or current — and I want that more than I want to effectively communicate and connect with you.”

Which, when I put it like that, sounds really shitty of me.

Unrelated, this post on “mansplaining” is also good – I’ve definitely been guilty of it.

From this anthro blog post on understanding the people you’re trying to help and helping them in ways that are best for them instead of imposing your own assumptions.

Here is what poor Haitians define as elements of a good society:

1. relative economic parity
2. strong political leaders with a sense of service who “care for” and “stand for” the poor
3. respe (respect)
4. religious pluralism to allow room for ancestral and spiritual beliefs
5. cooperative work
6. access of citizens to basic social services
7. personal and collective security

[...] aid organizations have contested the first two of these: the first is seen as counter-productive to economic progress and the second as counter-productive to democratic principles.

[...] [RE: point 5:] Working in groups is part of rural life. It is accompanied by laughter, songs, jokes, games, and sometimes drinking. Collective play and performance “heat up” labor. Aid agencies often look down on what they perceive as rowdy and undisciplined behavior.

These sound like pretty good principles to me. I’d modify #2 a bit, I don’t think people need strong political leaders, but when such people assert themselves, they should definitely carry a sense of service and humility and be aware of power and consent. And the bit about play & cooperation is just priceless.

I never participated in rave culture. I never made music of my own. I never really knew anyone who made music. No, I acquired recordings and listened to them in the cave of my mind, wishing I could meet others who loved it as much as me. I tried to share my favorite music with others, always believing it inevitable that it would grab them as much as it had me, for clearly, the music I loved was objectively superior and special! And so I also came to admire rave culture from afar, for a represented ideal of “like-minded people coming together spontaneously to just enjoy music and have fun.” Something like that. I admired the implied embedded ideals of basic human decency. Thus I have since had a fondness (from afar!) for things like Burning Man culture.

Of course, I always somewhat ignored the empty part of these subcultures, and the way drugs permeate them. That’s not for me. Just the good stuff is for me. And I suppose that’s why, eventually, Saint Etienne became one of my favorite bands, because their music grew out of the rave culture music, blended perfectly with the grooviness of Sixties London – a combination of selective-memory nostalgia destined to suck me in.

In his somewhat autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Richard Rorty talks about growing up in a socialist family, believing strongly in people basically needing to be decent to each other, and also having an obsessive love of wild orchids, and of going to college hoping to find a way to tie his idiosyncratic loves together with universal moral truths.

For, of course his favorite wild orchids were morally superior to, objectively “better” than, the commercial orchids sold in common shops, right?

He describes his philosophical journey as demonstrating to him that ultimately this search for universal objectivity in everything is futile, if not impossible.

I found this intensely personal.

In a way, I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for a family of people whose social beliefs and moral attitudes will “feel like home,” but I’ve used a strategy of hunting for people who share my cultural tastes. And being repeatedly disappointed, both in the people I find, and in the inability of the things I loved to appeal as much to others.

Rorty’s message is simple, and painfully obvious to me now. I have somewhat learned it on my own over the past few years, and it’s delicious to see it described by another (in a language that appeals to me).

It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, amongst other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).

This means that the fact that you have obligations too other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not … “rationality” or “human nature” or “the fatherhood of God” or “a knowledge of the Moral Law,” or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others.

As I read Rorty, he means to say, basically, that empathy and acting from it is perhaps the best moral view, but there’s no way to objectively argue for it, and everyone who generally comes to agree with that view comes to it through a variety of paths. I think I agree with this. It certainly jives with my experience. People I like on a deep level often share little of mutual casual interest, and people I find who share casual interests can sometimes sport such glaring moral differences.

This has been, at times, quite painful to recognize. But there’s also something beautiful and pleasurable about learning to recognize and appreciate the human in others without sharing all their interests. And it makes those you meet who share more in common all the more special.

But you can still look for philosophical universals if you wish. Rorty suggests “there are still ‘philosophical slop-shops on every corner’” that will confirm your conceits.

But there is a price. To pay the price you have to turn your back on intellectual history and on what Milan Kundera calls “the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood… the wisdom of the novel.” You risk losing the sense of finitude, and the tolerance, which result from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them.

[...] By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence [what Derrida calls "a full presence beyond the reach of play," ...a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision] …is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed, and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel’s and Proust’s books seem optional, orchidaceous extras.

This means that, in looking for community or what I might call “human family,” you have to do two things: look for people who share a reliance on tolerance and decency as their guideposts, while at the same time recognizing you may share nothing else in common. And of course, in looking, you will find people who are struggling as you once were to share with you their own idiosyncratic loves that they feel are somehow objectively superior exemplars. Which, if they’re not something that stokes your own interest, the best thing you can do is to tolerate and smile at the enthusiastic love of a fellow human for something they found in the path of their existence.

I feel I should add, as I continue reading Rorty, as much as he appeals to me I feel like he is somewhat naive in one important area. I feel as he does about the “existing approximations” to fully democratic societies. Except, I also think there’s something to the leftist critique of imperialism that consists of very powerful people who are somewhat above the rules and boundaries of those societies. And I’m not sure what to do about that. Perhaps the wave of global progress which they heretofore seem to have ridden will someday simply overcome and drown them in a crash of post-imperial societies of human decency. Much as the aristocracy once appeared to have crashed.