My recent interest in liberation theology comes out of an attempt to think the radical social critique of Marcuse together with the neglected potential of Christian eschatology to holistically envision and humanely enact the kingdom of heaven. Like most Marxists, Marcuse accepts the commonplace Protestant binary between God’s activity and human activity, such that we either are politically complaisant as we await Godot, or we are crypto-humanists who think God takes no part in what goes in the world we and only we transform. The idea that God could be at work in the world alongside us—or a synergistic conception of grace—is totally absent in the dichotomy Marcuse presents:

The ideology of death is not yet an indispensible instrument of domination [at the time Plato wrote the Republic]. It came to assume this function when the Christian doctrine of the freedom and equality of man as man had merged with the continuing institutions of unfreedom and injustice. The contradiction between the humanistic gospel and the inhumane reality required an effective solution. The death and resurrection of the god-hero, once the symbol of periodic renewal and of a rational sacrifice, now directs all hope to the transnatural life hereafter. The supreme penalty must be suffered so that man may find supreme fulfillment after his natural life has ended. How can one protest against death, fight for its delay and conquest, when Christ died willingly on the cross so that mankind might be redeemed from sin? The death of the son of God bestows final sanction on the death of the son of man.[1]

I find this passage to be something of a head-scratcher, particularly in its penultimate sentence: the exultation at Christ’s victory over death in I Corinthians 15:55 (which echoes Hosea 13:14) does not imply or necessitate gleefulness about death as an escape hatch to eternal life, so much as it implies that death in both material and spiritual forms is to be overcome. Given that Christians are enjoined to imitate the behavior of Christ, they are encouraged to not let fear of death (in this historical context, death at the hands of those who perhaps not inaccurately brand Christians enemies of the Roman empire) get in the way of doing God’s work in the world. The awkwardness of Marcuse’s interpretation suggests he is trying to shoehorn his reading of Christ’s victory over death into a larger Marxist narrative about Christians as benighted sell-outs who buy heavenly bliss at the price of earthly suffering.

The hinge on which Marcuse’s reading turns is whether Christianity “directs all hope to the transnatural life herafter.” More precisely, much depends on whether it is all hope that is transferred, or just some hope or chief hope; likewise, much depends on whether “the transnatural life” is a discontinuous break with the natural world, or lies in continuity with the natural world as a glorification or radically transfigurative realization of its latent possibilities. Indeed, it may be the case that what Christianity represents is not so much a transfer of hope from this world to another one so much as an expansion of the horizon of hope to include the physical world while also seeing its situation within an inexhaustible (that is to say, transcendent) context of an endlessly dynamic and all-encompassing Spirit. In other words, within the panentheist framework, and within the version of the apokatastasis where all natural beings are restored to life in heaven, Christianity is playing at something different than Marcuse’s Nietzschean, zero-sum game where love for “the lily and the rose” is inversely proportional to love for the kingdom of God.

In the panentheist view God is both immanent and transcendent, nature itself is divine, and so life with God is not “transnatural” per se: the kingdom of God includes all since there is nothing the Absolute cannot contain while remaining absolute. Within this heterodox Christian understanding, hope for immortality is not a form of escapism but engagement, since the kingdom of heaven will be an evolution (glorification) of the world we were charged to steward. The modern worldview in particular, where the fallenness and despicability of nature is supposed to make people yearn for God’s grace in order to leave this godforsaken existence, has for many come to define not just mainline Christianity but all “real” Christianity, even all secular modernity (mutatis mutandis). Instead of this negative definition of the afterlife as escape into God’s arms from a godforsaken world, the sacramental view of panentheism—where God is not absent from the world—better fits with a positive definition of the afterlife as engagement with God’s creation, where nature is a sacred garden that God’s grace provides and will gradually perfect alongside our comparatively small yet ethically urgent care. The world is not disposable in the panentheist’s afterlife, hence we cannot dispose of it or dispose ourselves however we please, as though either is a separate sphere from spirituality. We are less liable to let the world go to hell if we see it as proto-heaven. If we can be motivated not by the threat of good things running out (mortality) but by the promise of good things lasting forever (immortality), then heaven is not a pretext for procrastination but an appeal for applying ourselves.

Here apokatastasis offers us a helpful reorientation from our usual mercenary attitude toward the project of ethical perfection. If we get it into our heads that our selves or our world are beyond saving—that there is a hell for which we are predestined—then we despair and give up doing what we ought to do because it strikes us as futile. When I presented an atheist friend with the idea of apokatastasis last week, his first reaction was to say: “What is the point of being a Christian if there is no hell?” A bit like asking a gay couple which one of them is the woman, this question is a category mistake that bespeaks an unchristian way of looking at Christianity, for hopefully any Christian who thinks about it would say that Christianity offers them more than fire insurance, and that there is something positive about life with God such that it is intrinsically good and not the anemic attraction of just being better than the alternatives (hellfire or nonexistence after death).[2] If death is not the end, and there is no hell, and heaven is a perpetual progress in godliness, then you are never “off the hook” for becoming a better person. More precisely, apokatastasis means we all have an eternity’s worth of enjoyable progress to make—so why not get started now? Within this kind of hope for eternal life one would not hesitate to engage the world as a better person.

A lot of Marcuse’s argument against Christianity rests on what he means by “hope”: hope can be a quietist affect where one looks forward to outside help when one’s own activity is futile, or hope can mean looking forward to outside assistance alongside one’s activity, as the thing that gets one’s activity past the otherwise insurmountable tipping point of some project. It is pretty clear which connotation of hope Marcuse has in mind here, and it goes hand in hand with a distinctly Lutheran doctrine that we are saved by grace alone (reflecting another false dichotomy, this time between faith and works). Thus Marcuse is singling out one (admittedly large) current of Christianity as though it reflected the entirety of the tradition has been and can ever be. Were Marcuse’s interpretation of Christian hope as escapism correct, we could make no sense out of how some Christian communities such as the Anabaptists, Diggers, or Quakers could use “the humanistic gospel” (as he calls it above) to challenge “the continuing institutions of unfreedom and injustice” (ibid.). To be sure, the vast majority of Christians have denigrated these groups and their experiments in replicating the communism of the early church described in Acts 4:32-34, as they lend hermeneutic priority to the submission to earthly rulers laid out in Romans 13.

Still, it is crucial to see how Marcuse is by and large adopting the terms of Martin Luther’s critique of radical Protestants such as Thomas Müntzer without pausing to consider the potential validity of alternate theological views.[3] (According to Luther, since your soul can be free by faith, it doesn’t matter how unfree your bodily existence is under a tyrant, hence to insist that society uphold or at least not trespass Christian principles of charity is a covert idolatrous insistence upon works as salvific—see James 2:14-25, a book Luther wanted to excise from the Bible as “an epistle of straw.”[4]) It is not for nothing that Nietzsche—the son of a Lutheran pastor—leveled his critique of Christianity as resentful hatred of the body and the physical world. My friend’s impression that Christianity is for fire insurance and political escapism did not come out of nowhere. Examples loom over us in voluminous heaps of Christians who indeed comply with institutions of injustice in the mendaciously mercenary or merely misguided hope that ordinary obedience to earthly rulers will mean eternal reward upon death or Christ’s return.

Yet what if this stalling is theologically in addition to ethically unsound? In my next posts, I will unpack Agamben’s retrieval of the messianic eschatology of the early Christian church, and its implications for Marcuse’s utopianism.

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] Herbert Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, Collected Papers Vol. 5 Ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce. London and New York: Routledge. 2011. P. 127

[2] There is a reason why Origen thinks the doctrine of hell is only spiritually useful for the most spiritually immature kind of person.

[3] Marcuse’s most extensive analysis of Christian texts is found in one chapter of his Study on Authority, where he devotes the majority of his time to the political theology of Luther and Calvin, and Müntzer is relegated to one brief footnote. Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority, trans. Joris De Bres. London/New York: Verso Press. 2008. P. 20.

[4] Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian, in On the Freedom a Christian with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Tryntje Helfferich. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2013. P. 19 and pp. 40-41. See also Martin Luther, Against the Robbing and Murderous Hordes of Peasants, op.cit., p. 120

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: apokatastasis, ecotheology, immanence, immortality, Marcuse, radical Protestantism, transcendence

Free Time for All Time

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 27, 2016

Nietzsche’s manner of justifying the ways of the cosmos to humanity—his cosmodicy, so to speak—is to put forth his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, in which we are challenged to live and think in such a way that we can desire that everything repeat over in identically the same sequence forever, as a sign of how deeply we affirm this world in all its hurly-burly recalcitrance to our comforting illusions. As his mouthpiece Zarathustra says: “But all joy wants eternity…wants deep, wants deep eternity.”[1]

Why does joy want eternity, and what does that mean? According to Nietzsche, no healthy person can want eternity to mean the mummified stasis he takes to define Platonism as well as “Platonism for the masses” (Christianity):

God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight, and makes turn whatever stands. How? Should time be gone, and all that is impermanent a mere lie? To think this is a dizzy whirl for human bones, and a vomit for the stomach; verily, I call it the turning sickness to conjecture thus. Evil I call it, and misanthropic—all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the permanent—that is only a parable. And the poets lie too much.

It is of time and becoming that the best parables should speak: let them be a praise and a justification of all impermanence.[2]

On this Nietzschean view, only the circular conception of time—thinking of time as a ring in which the same events will repeat—can avoid embittered resent toward the only real existence there is: embodied, impermanent, imperfect—but ours.

Marcuse endorses eternal recurrence in the “Philosophical Interlude” that stands as the ontological watermark of his magnum opus, Eros and Civilization:

Eternity, long since the ultimate consolation of an alienated existence, had been made into an instrument of repression by its relegation to a transcendental world—unreal reward for real suffering. Here, eternity is reclaimed for the fair earth—as the eternal return of its children, of the lily and the rose, of the sun on the mountains and lakes, of the lover and the beloved, of the fear for their life, of pain and happiness. Death is; it is conquered only if it is followed by the real rebirth of everything that was before death here on earth—not as a mere repetition but as willed and wanted re-creation. The eternal return thus includes the return of suffering, but suffering as a means for more gratification, for the aggrandizement of joy.[3]

Notice how Marcuse, following Nietzsche, presents us with a dichotomy: either you love this world or you love another world, either you expect joy in this world or you expect joy in a future world, either you love mountains and lakes or you spurn them for spiritual terrain. Apparently the message of Jesus is to not consider “the lily and the rose,” so that one may more complacently toil and spin in a life of worry for the finery of kings. I find this Feuerbachian trope that we cannot walk and chew gum at the same time a tiresome and destructive form of uncritical common sense, one that unwittingly hinders Marcuse’s critical social thought. After all, Marcuse is constantly wary of confining our view simply to the existing world, and he writes an entire book (One-Dimensional Man) about the need to go beyond the prevailing order and imagine something on the other side of it, something transcending it, since the deflationary impetus of positivism flattens social and individual possibilities into the shallowest platitudes.

Marcuse’s endorsement of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is odd in this respect, especially when he valorizes suffering as adding zest to life—for the animating thought in Marcuse’s work is a critique of the equation of suffering with inner worth, and that stands diametrically at odds with the titanic monument to Struggle that Nietzsche wants to build.[4] Indeed, in a lesser-known essay titled “The Ideology of Death,” Marcuse rakes Heidegger over the coals for trying to justify the longstanding idea that death is what gives life meaning, as this functions to placate the oppressed into thinking that the threat of death is ontologically and therefore socially necessary.[5] Instead of accepting death as absolute, we should hope for and demand life that brooks no arbitrary or exploitative constraints, and organize society to work for overcoming death through humane research:

Moreover, the fight for the prolongation of life depends for its effectiveness on the response in the mind and in the instinctual structure of individuals. A positive response presupposes that their life is really ‘the good life’—that they have the possibility to develop and satisfy humane needs and faculties, that their life is an end-in-itself rather than a means for sustaining themselves. Should conditions obtain under which this possibility may become reality, quantity may turn into quality: the gradually increasing duration of life may change the substance and character not only of life but also of death. The latter would lose its ontological and moral sanctions; men would experience death primarily as a technical limit of human freedom whose surpassing would become the recognized goal of the individual and social endeavor.[6]

Contra Heidegger, we do not need death in order to appreciate life, we do not need to suffer in order to cherish the beauty and flourishing of the social and natural world—because life is inherently good and an end in-itself, and not merely a means to something else (on a par with how freedom has no price but dignity in the Kantian system). We do not need the threat of time running out in order to take time seriously, no more than an artist needs to suffer to create art. The demand for a life of free time is inextricable from the demand that life be freed for all time. The hope for immortality means: free time for all time! It therefore also means: a better world is possible. The hope for a life without death is the hope for a life without dead time.[7]

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. 1977. Pp. 339-340

[2] Nietzsche, ibid., pp. 198-199

[3] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 123

[4] See, for example, §225 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

[5] Herbert Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, Collected Papers Vol. 5 Ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce. London and New York: Routledge. 2011.

[6] Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” p. 126. Marcuse also touches on this briefly in the closing pages of Eros and Civilization, as the full-fledged meaning of his project of valorizing Eros over against Thanatos (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 234-237).

[7] Members of the Situationist International, On the Poverty of Student Life. Detroit: Black & Red. 2000. P. 29: “Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or they will be nothing, for celebration is the keynote of the life they herald. Play is the fundamental principle of this festival, and the only rules it recognizes are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints.”

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: eternal recurrence, free time, immanence, immortality, Marcuse, Nietzsche, transcendence

What Does It Mean to Be Made in the Image of God?

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 17, 2016

One thought that has been occupying my mind recently is something I came across while glancing through J. Richard Middleton’s The Liberating Image, an analysis of the theological doctrine that humans were made in the image of God. Middleton uses a rigorous blend of archaeology, linguistics, and historical analysis to make a potent theological case that this doctrine—one properly seen in its historical context as an inversion of other ancient Mesopotamian religions, which hold that the image of God is a cultic statue in a specific temple, over which only an elite has access and control—implies that we have a robust ecological responsibility that is of a piece with an egalitarian political vision in which no king is necessary but God.

I have only skimmed through this book, but even the little bits I alight upon are promising for seeing how ethicotheology can and must also be ecotheology (that is, theology that proceeds from a healthy ecological sensibility). By showing how the initial chapters of Genesis draw upon an unstated matrix of cultural associations we no longer know, and which we are bound to miss if we look at that chapters alone instead of in connection with other parts of the Hebrew Bible as well as other Mesopotamian cultures, Middleton shows how the ruah elohim (spirit of God) mentioned at Genesis 1:2 is implied to suffuse all of nature such that God is immanent within the world (see, for instance, Jeremiah 23:24).[1] This in turn entails that God is both immanent (there is no part of the world bereft of him) and transcendent (the world does not exhaust his nature, as the aniconic commands clearly imply)—a position known as panentheism (not to be confused with pantheism, my dear Jacobi). Panentheism is a whole world unto itself (and more), so I cannot go into it, but for now I wish to focus on its implication that God is intimately involved in the created world, while at the same time allowing his creatures the space for their own agency. Middleton elaborates that the first chapter of Genesis implies that God needs no temple made of precious stone in some particular land, because the entire world is his temple and all creatures worship there:

If the cosmos can be understood as indwelt by the creator, then the language of Psalm 119:91 (“all things are your servants”; NRSV) might well refer not only to the obedience of creatures to their cosmic ruler, but also to liturgical service in the cosmic sanctuary. This is consistent with Psalm 148, which exhorts all creatures—humans, angels, animals, even the sun, moon, mountains, and trees—to praise the creator, as if all creatures constituted a host of worshippers in the cosmic temple, over which God is exalted as king. This picture of creation as a cosmic temple also suggest the appropriateness of humanity as God’s image in the symbolic world of Genesis 1. For just as no pagan temple in the ancient Near East could be complete without the installation of the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, so creation in Genesis 1 is not complete (or “very good”) until God creates humanity on the sixth day as the imago Dei, in order to represent and mediate the divine presence on earth.[2]

In the ancient Near East, “the king is the image of the god,” and thereby entitled to rule, both representing the god and acting like him, such that royal decrees are extensions of the divine power and authority.[3] By being a good ruler and properly performing certain rituals of the cult—centered around the statue of the god in the temple—the king ensures that the rain will fall, and the land will flourish.[4] Within this wider context, God’s injunction to the first humans to be fruitful and multiply, and to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28), should be understood as the relaying of divine rule to not just one but multiple humans as each equally imago Dei.[5] We are to cooperate with God by carrying on his work in the world: “God has…started the process of forming and filling, which humans, as God’s earthly delegates, are to continue.”[6] This openness to creaturely agency and creativity betokens a trust on the Creator’s part that the gods in preexisting religions do not display. Nature operates without a caste of elites who require sacrifice and obedience (like the needy gods they represent) to make the rains fall:

Contrary to the Atrahasis Epic 3.7, for example, where the gods are threatened by human overpopulation and thus devise various means of thinning out the human race (including infertility, stillbirth, and spontaneous abortion), the creator in Genesis 1 freely grants fertility to both human and nonhuman as a permanent gift or blessing. That both vegetation and animals are able to reproduce themselves “after their kind” (Genesis 1:11-12, 21-22, 24-25) and that humans are blessed and gifted with fertility and commissioned to multiply and fill the earth (1:28) suggests that God is not threatened by the self-perpetuating nature of creatures. On the contrary, Genesis 1 understands fertility as an intrinsic part of organic creaturely life that does not need to be achieved or guaranteed by cultic means. Since the primary cultic means of securing divine blessing and fertility in ancient Mesopotamia would have been the sacrificial system—the provision of food and drink for the gods, as part of the imposed servitude of humanity—it is significant that in Genesis 1 it is God who graciously provides food for both humans and animals (1:29-30). …Thus every element of the account of human creation on the sixth day (image and rule, fertility and food) articulates a vision of the human role in the cosmos that is diametrically opposed to that of ancient Mesopotamia. In contrast to an ideology that claims that humans are created for a relationship of dependency, to meet divine need, God in Genesis 1 creates for the benefit of the creature, without explicitly asking for a direct return of any kind. And humans, in God’s image, I suggest, are expected to imitate this primal generosity in their own shared rule of the earth.[7]

While many people have taken a heteronormative interpretation of these passages, such that sexuality is strictly for the purpose of procreation, Middleton’s analysis suggests that the real significance here is not procreation simpliciter but creativity as a cooperative endeavor between creature and Creator. God is the King whose generosity is disinterested and whose creativity makes room for the creativity of others, who he in turn sets free to be free among one another in a life lived for the sake of liveliness (the play in the garden of Eden), in contrast to all the pretenders who call themselves kings and take kingship to be an institution started (and therefore legitimated) by gods, who want their subjects to be unlike them and powerless.[8] The God of Genesis is deliberately characterized as the anti-tyrant par excellence. The imago Dei is not exclusively possessed by some humans and not others, and thus the power we have been given is not for making anybody a slave.

While non-humans do not have the imago Dei, they have their own agency and worship their Creator in their own way, so they are not vacuous and empty objects with which human beings can do anything they please. In fact, one could easily argue for a consonance here with Hans Jonas’ own elaboration of the imago Dei in his attempt to ground an ethics of ecological responsibility. Jonas argues that humans occupy the unique position of being vastly more powerful than any other species, and are therefore the ones most responsible for them; just by being able to affect something, I ipso facto become responsible for how I affect it. “In its full dimensions, however—in all it applies to—responsibility is a function of our power and proportional to it. For the magnitude of our power determines the extent to which we can affect reality and in fact do so in our actions. Thus, as power increases so does responsibility.”[9] If this still sounds speciesist, we might see its force by asking which species is to blame for the escalating ecological devastation we witness. After all, we don’t blame giraffes for climate change, and we could stand to hold ourselves more responsible for what we’re doing.

Using Jonas’ framework, we can return to Middleton’s reading of Genesis and find within it the rudiments of an ecotheology that fits with the egalitarian ethicotheology his hermeneutic crystallizes. Middleton never elaborates how to be a good “steward” of creation, but the fundamental precondition would have to be an understanding of power as something to be shared rather than hoarded, just as the Creator of Genesis sees creativity as cooperative. Here it feels best to close with words from the last page of Middleton’s book: “…it is time to begin a pattern of reading differently, respecting the alterity of the text, listening to its word to us, attending to its disclosure of God and the human calling. Perhaps, then, our practice of reading (which we might call a hermeneutic of love) would be in harmony with the new ethic of interhuman relationships and ecological practice that we are aiming for and that is rooted in the imago Dei, an ethic characterized fundamentally by power with rather than power over.”[10]

[1] J. Richard Middleton. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. 2005. Pages 86-87.

[2] Middleton 87

[3] Middleton 121

[4] Middleton 120

[5] Many people take a lot to rest on how one translates the Hebrew verb kabas, rendered here as “subdue.” The hope is that if there is a less domineering way of reading the original Hebrew text, then the tradition of indifference or hostility toward nature will have no genuine theological basis. Middleton makes an argument on pages 50-55 that the verb should not be read as necessarily entailing a violent subduing, but something more along the lines of domestication or gardening—or “stewardship,” as is commonly preferred nowadays.

[6] Middleton 89

[7] Middleton 210-211

[8] Middleton 217: “According to the worldview of the Sumero-Akkadian myths, the gods act in history and change the course of human affairs. So do kings, as representatives of the gods on earth. However, the vast majority of the human race was understood to live relatively predetermined lives of mimetic repetition, beholden to their divine and human overlords, reduced to puppets in a social order in which they had no significant agency or freedom. It is thus of immense significance that the primeval history recounts the founding of the first city not by God but by a human being (Genesis 4:17) and lists three brothers (Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-Cain) as the inventors of metallurgy, music, and nomadic livestock herding (4:20-22).”

[9] Hans Jonas. “Toward an Ontological Grounding of an Ethics for the Future,” in Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1996. Pages 102-103.

[10] Middleton 297

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Tagged: ecotheology, empire, Hans Jonas, imago dei, Jacobi, panentheism, pantheism

“My Mind is Forever Opened to Itself”: Kyle Williams Reflects on Time from Prison

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 15, 2016

[Today I finished teaching a summer course on the philosophy of time for JCI Scholars, and I asked the students to come to the final class with one page about how this class has changed what they think about time. Kyle Williams, a student I mentioned in an earlier post, decided to read his reflection aloud in the last few minutes of class. The other students insisted that it be published, and he gave me permission to publish it and to use his name. Except for tweaking some punctuation and spelling, and adding two words in brackets to make it match the way he read it aloud, the following constitutes his reflection, exactly as he wrote it. –Joseph Trullinger]

7-12-16

Dr. Trullinger,

Time to me is an oppressive reality that we as humans can’t control yet are dictated by. While we can’t dictate time, we can dictate how people use their time in order to control them.

I never thought about time, so this class has not changed my thoughts, this class has given me a ground to think on. Honestly, this class was depressing to me because it made me realize how much of my time has been wasted, stolen, and mismanaged by an unseen hand. Even more, this class showed me that since birth I’ve been suppressed and molded into a structure that only has the bottom line as it pertains to monetary domination as a priority, along with the maintenance of the status quo. My very existence has been pre-ordered, and I am only and will only ever be a worker bee living on borrowed time, unless I revolutionize our people by first revolutionizing my own mind in order to break the chains of psychological slavery from clock time.

This class has made me want to enjoy a quality [life] instead of a long life and I believe that that is the true purpose of life: to live life to its fullest and enjoy every minute of it harmoniously with everyone else. But Western civilization has a way of life so imbedded with greed and power that I will most likely run out of time and die unhappy because I spent my life chasing a clock and not enjoying every day, only expecting peace and a quality of life once I’m dead. I’m upset because this class has ended too soon and I feel like there are so many questions that I need to ask but I don’t even know [how] to ask them yet. My mind is forever opened to itself, also I see that my youthful imagination needs to kick in and validate me as an adult and a truly free man.

Kyle Williams

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: empire, free time, freedom, JCI Scholars, Kyle Williams

Fiery Friendship

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 14, 2016

Leigh Johnson’s piece on friendly fire makes the case that we need friends who are willing to levy thoroughgoing attacks on our cherished philosophical convictions, and that this “friendly fire” is a sign of a solid friendship. Using Aristotle’s trichotomy of friendships of use, pleasure, and virtue, Johnson argues just as the truest form of friendship is one of two souls united in the project of virtue, the highest form of friendship is one that admits of vigorous debate:

I was having a conversation with one of my oldest and closest friends (Dr. Trott) a few weeks ago, and we were both genuinely perplexed by people who take disagreement to indicate some fundamental devaluation of the other person or, alternatively, people who take disagreement to be the expression of a fundamentally un-friendly disposition toward the other. Dr. Trott and I disagree about a lot of things, some of them quite important to one of us, but for as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve taken the fact that we can have it out about things that matter to us to be a sign of the health and strength of our friendship. In fact, I tend to be more unsure of friendships in which those kinds of arguments present “threats” to the relationship.

As I see it, Johnson reveals two main truths: 1) some attacks from friends challenge us to refine our arguments, and 2) strong friendships can withstand some attacks. Demonstrable as these truths are, I think these observations need to be supplemented. Otherwise, we can come away thinking that all refinement of philosophical ideas requires attacks, and likewise that attacking our friend’s views makes our friendships stronger. In other words, there is an illicit inference from a statement about particulars to a statement about universals.

I don’t think this is what Johnson means to say, nonetheless I don’t think it’s controversial to say that many use the phenomena she notices to make this kind of fallacious inference. There is a long and storied history, in fact, of prominent philosophers saying that we will stagnate without antagonism: Nietzsche and Hegel are just two examples of what William Blake was pointing to when he said, “Without contraries is no progression.” On the whole, we tend to think that it is when we are leveling hard critique that we are doing serious philosophy, and after giving a visiting speaker a sound thrashing we might go up to them and tell them something to that effect. No hard feelings, just hard thinking. The second point seems to follow upon the first: through adversariality, we take on a worthy adversary, and thereby gauge and reaffirm our friend’s worth as a philosopher, for to philosophize is to be adverse.

Joshua Miller extends Johnson’s view in an Arendtian fashion: in order to be doing good philosophy, a difference of opinions is not just salubrious but necessary, to the extent that if one lacks friends who disagree one must become the devil’s advocate and take up an opposing view one does not actually think true, in the name of truth-seeking.[1] According to Miller, what matters more than certainty (especially in metaphysical matters) is the political space of free inquiry and honesty created and maintained by “friendly fire,” but the volley of debates back and forth, in which a ceasefire would mean the end of friendship.

[Arendt] suggests that Lessing would always trade certainty for friendship and debate. The plurality of religious dogmas provides an opportunity to encounter others, rather than a set of differences which must be managed or equalized. If Arendt is right, then Scruton’s liberal tolerance is worthless, a mere modus vivendi for putting up with each other. The measure of tolerance is the friendships that are possible despite disagreements or rivalries.

Like Johnson, Miller sees something noble in the ability of people with different convictions to hash it out among themselves, and like Johnson, Miller is picking up on phenomena that are demonstrably true: people who can withstand a philosophical attack on their worldview appear to exemplify the tolerance necessary for a pluralistic democracy. Yet here too, I fear that this could be taken up by some contrarian to mean that the more we pounce upon someone’s poorly articulated or ill-formed views, the more tolerant we are ourselves are being.

Earlier I proposed the cultivation of a certain kind of philosophical hospitality to overcome the implicit dangers of what Maria Lugones calls “arrogant perception.” Both Johnson and Miller strike me as people who want to avoid arrogant perception, and think the way to do that is through a virtuous adversariality. In contrast, I suggest that adversariality itself—especially when understood through the language of war and contestation—can often erode friendliness to wisdom precisely because adversariality suggests a zero-sum game only one can win. If it were truly the case that antagonism were the best way to avoid self-deception and self-flattery in philosophy, we would see more people willing to concede that they have lost the debate.[2] “Let the best man win”—and if I’m not winning, that is only because this isn’t over yet. From this it should be no surprise how rare it is for a person to gladly (without internal grumbling) allow his opponent the last word, and how common it is for a person to giddily cut his opponent off in the middle of speaking.

Even in “sportsmanship” that adheres to prearranged rules, there is some degree of indulgence in our drive for aggression alongside the restraint of aggression. There is supposedly joy in controlling one’s temper, in seeing how much irritation and vexation and insult one can withstand without losing one’s cool, as signs of the degree to which you are self-possessed. “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” as some say.

To my mind, coming from Marcuse’s critique of how aggressiveness is normalized and internalized, this idea that friendly fire is needed for philosophical growth smacks too much of the idea that (to use the title of Chris Hedges’ book) war is a force that gives us meaning. This vision of reality—that it is only during crisis, during war, that we take things seriously and pay proper care and attention—is one that comes easily to me, as I suspect it comes easily to most Americans. In this way of looking at ourselves and the world, whenever it is unclear whether an oncoming person is friend or foe, it seems wise to regard them as a threat until proven otherwise; hypervigilance is our default mode of being in the world, and sometimes if there is no object to fear the mind will supply one. After all, what use is a warrior if there is no enemy? When another’s point is not clear, or one does not see another’s point clearly, one fires away some truth bombs. Sometimes it turns out one fired on one’s friend: friendly fire.^{^[3]}

Much of my critique of friendly fire, appropriately enough, springs out of a back-and-forth I have been having with Miller, as we are good friends. In contrast to this disciplinary rudeness Arpaly describes, and what I call philoniky, Miller proposes that we might conceive of a receptivity toward other people’s arguments—which is the subject of a short essay by Kathryn Norlock, “Receptivity as a Virtue of (Practitioners of) Argumentation”—that dovetails with the hospitality I described in my last post. Norlock uses Noddings’ ethics of care to argue that philosophical debates should be a form of caring for the interlocutor, and therefore one must be receptive to the reasons given by others. Naturally, receptivity speaks to a characteristic that may be in deficiency (as in pugilism) or in excess (as in uncritical acceptance). Thus Norlock wishes to retain the vigor and rigor of philosophical debate, but see it as operating within the context of a very specific communal norm, the community of academics:

…I hold that our relations in interpersonal argumentation are not limited to the dyadic one of author and an individual audience member; I include the relationships of both to the wider philosophical community that provides the opportunities for argumentation. One could argue that even in the dyadic relationship, it is not really caring to refrain from robust criticism, but this is a hard sell depending on the context; if my friend and colleague mentions during a long car ride that she is absolutely devastated by writer’s block, then I will probably not take this opportunity to point our every weakness in her current project. However, if I am writing a book review for publication, or engaging in a question and answer period during a conference session, I must consider the philosophical aims of my hosts and fellow guests. Generally, philosophers provide engaged in a community whose members hold that truth is best tested by some rigorous argumentation designed to experiment with whether a counterargument succeeds or fails, then adversariality of a sort is a receptive practice.^{^[4]}

Although there is some similarity here to Arpaly’s use of just war theory (i.e., an otherwise illegitimate practice is justified within certain circumscriptions), what Norlock brings to bear is the important fact that debates happen between persons with whom we are in a relationship of one sort or another: “…precisely because the other is an individual subject and not a mere means, one ought to refrain from using their identity as a vehicle for disagreement, or reducing their personhood to that of an opponent.”[5] Even if I see flaws within the argument of my friend who has crippling writer’s block, now would not be the time to mention them, and when that time comes, instead of seeking to lay waste to her argument, I could be honest about the flaws but also recommend alternative paths for her project. In the process, I might surprise myself by realizing new things about my own project, which I could not have come to had I not tried to be hospitable to her view. In so doing I would avoid an excess of receptivity, but I would also provide much-needed support that acknowledges who she uniquely is. In paying attention and paying heed (Achtung) to who she is, I give her respect (Achtung)—and in so doing I treat her as an end in itself in that wonderful, old, evergreen, flexible, polyvalent Kantian sense. The true respect of a real philosophical friendship is one that does not see the other as an occasion for victory (philoniky). Miller highlights Norlock’s communal norms as the grounding context for what constitutes virtuous receptivity, but does not discuss Norlock’s parallel analysis of individual, one-on-one relationships that involve unique, irreplaceable persons. I am for Miller’s proposal that we have “infinite conversation,” although I take it that for this conversation to be infinite it cannot just be communal but must also (perhaps primarily) be personal. With some attention to the one-on-one nature of hospitable philosophizing, we see why friendly fire is an inadequate framework.

I see hospitality to be superior to adversariality because I find that hearing good ideas from someone else is oftentimes more philosophically productive than the collapse of my bad ideas. In those hospitable sorts of discussions I become less defensive, less fixated on trying to hold on to a bad point, and more willing to imagine with how else I might think about the world and who I might be in what the world looks like from that vantage point. It’s then that I really philosophize, and come up with my own adaptations or elaborations on the other person’s original point, and because what I say proceeds from how I’ve deeply listened to them, they are more willing to return a comment that speaks to mine, and we go back and forth like that and it feels like we could do that forever—genuine dialectic, what Gadamer calls the “inner infinity” of dialogue.[6] As he quotes Rilke:

Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is

mere skill and little gain;

but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball

thrown by an eternal partner

with accurate and measured swing

towards you, to your center, in an arch

from the great bridgebuilding of God;

why catching then becomes a power–

not yours, a world’s.[7]

Not yours—and thank God it is not!—for this is the liberating dimension of reverence, in this case reverence of wisdom: when we cease to see wisdom as something someone can take credit for, we cease to stay alone. By opening ourselves up, we open up to the world as a more expansive, more playful, more personal place. We engage in world-travelling, as Lugones puts it. The more lovingly we perceive our dialogue partner, the more we see that we will never exhaust their world, and their complexity is such that we do not have to have new human beings trucked in periodically to keep us philosophical, provided that we are faithful to the immensity of what we have before us in each other. We are still underway, and we are works in progress. Whereas the person who feels herself near victory sees her opponent as “finished,” the philosophical friendship consists in a mutual sense of our unfinishedness, as Paulo Freire so beautifully puts it.[8]

In contrast to friendly fire, I wish now to put forth “fiery friendship,” which captures a good deal of what Johnson and Miller have been driving at, but were barred from by the antagonistic framework of friendly fire. Fiery friendship is a friendship that crackles with the energy of different minds who humbly accept one another’s help with their unfinishedness. The fire of fiery friendship is an internal fire of transformation, while the fire of friendly fire is an external fire of attrition. Fiery friendship sees the value of being in the hot seat, but without turning discussion into an inquisition in which the other is the heretic who must be burned at the stake. Just as one fire may be in danger of going out and need the fire of another to rekindle itself, while remaining separate fires, a fiery friend shares the ideas they are burning with without seeking to extinguish yours.

One example of a fiery friendship would be the one I have with my friend Chris Ellzey, an atheist, who last year listened carefully to my excited jabbering about Philo’s account of prophecy as God speaking within the prophet and not to the prophet.[9] With great hospitality for the concept, he helped me consider how Philo’s view might be correct, and he concluded: “God cannot be heard, only listened to.”

Chris continues to be an atheist, and I continue to reflect on the implications of this reverberating statement. He raises strong objections to the view that he suspects others will have, and together we consider the merits and flaws of each. He does not believe in God, nor does he need to for me to have felt truly heard, truly recognized as an end in itself. At other times I will hear him out, for instance, about frustrations he may have with religious fundamentalists, and I try to receive this message personally by trying to be more conscious about ways I may cause frustrations for others.

We are working on different things, yet we can work together on one person’s project for a while without forsaking entirely who we are. We have to overcome our fear that if we listen we will forget what it is we want to say. We must behave as if the dialogue will last forever, and therefore we will get back around to it.

As anybody who cooks knows, fire cannot be applied too quickly, or else it consumes what you were seeking to transform. Likewise, a fiery friend applies the fire of their supportive critique slowly, with great patience and humble attention to the state of the other person, in order to refine away the dross we all have—all the while being open to revising their idea of what the other person should think, or more properly, who they should become. Instead of being a volcanic eruption of genius that devastates everything in its path, a truly philosophical discussion with a friend would take the form of a slow burn, lasting years or centuries or eternity.

You must read, read, reread, work, and maintain reverence for wisdom as transcending you both, and then you will discover together. You will have to—get to—visit one another’s worlds again and again, and in the process make a transition yourself from something base into something noble. Alchemical drawings often show a magus collaborating with an assistant in the laboratory—the space of labor, the space of experiments for the great work of finding the philosopher’s stone, whose final form nobody can know ahead of time. One stage in the process involves a special kind of crucible known as an athanor, where materials slowly transmute under a constant heat. It looks something like a house, where transformation is welcome. A fiery friend is an athanor for your soul.

Part 1: Philonikers and Philosophers

Part 2: Guest-Friendship and Friends of Wisdom: Dialoguing with Arpaly and Lugones

Part 3: Fiery Friendship

[1] I have problems with Arendt’s reading of Lessing on this—I think she de-metaphysicizes him, when in actual fact he was acutely involved in Leibnizian metaphysical and theological disputes with what appear to be ardent hopes for a certain result, alongside his Socratic playfulness and humility. I’ll leave this for a future post.

[2] The parameters for winning and losing are relatively clear in most sports—and far less so in war, where even those who win lose—and do not exist with remotely such clarity in philosophy, however invigorating it is to think that philosophy admits of the jocular respect that a bloodied boxer can have for the champion who bested him. The comparison of philosophy to a blood sport is therefore aspirational, at best. I would speculate that this comparison only appeals when one imagines oneself to be the person in possession of the better argument, having just delivered the coup de grace—yet as experience shows, the ones you defeat in an argument (if that is what you have done) keep piping back up.

[3] It is true enough that, within a relationship that is already well-developed and amicable, small acts of mockery or teasing constitute signs of warm fellow feeling. A world where no friends would ever engage in things like trash-talk or zingers seems like a less vibrant world. But in any moment where teasing is actually friendly it is always already the case that constructive habits of hospitality are in place, which guarantee that the “attacks” stand as exceptions to an otherwise persistent sense of solidarity and support. Another salient feature is that the teasing not be mean-spirited, that the butt of the joke be laughing with the jokester, that the jokester’s amusement should never be too much greater than the recipient’s, and especially once things go too far the jokester leaves off immediately. The problem comes in with who gets to decide what counts as going too far. Sometimes the “friendly” punch on the shoulder is uninvited or hard enough that you can’t use your arm for a while. Other times you really do not need to hear someone address you by the derogatory term that has become their nickname for you. And sometimes unremitting teasing goes too far for too long, or intentionally touches a sore spot. There is an amorphous but noticeable sense that you are somehow your friend’s enemy, even as they swear you are still friends. It is not for nothing that modern English has the word “frenemy.” It is telling that the first defense of the bully is that they were “only joking”: perhaps much of what we call friendship is predicated upon the ability to disavow the harm we do as unintentional. Friendly fire legitimizes this ambiguity.

[4] Kathryn J. Norlock, “Receptivity as a Virtue of (Practitioners of ) Argumentation,” in Mohammed, D., & Lewiński, M. (Eds.) Virtues of Argumentation. Proceedings of the 10^th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 22-26 May 2013. Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1-7. Page 6.

[5] Norlock, p. 7

[6] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. D. Linge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1977. p. 67: “…every dialogue has an inner infinity and no end.”

[7] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. 1989. Vi.

[8] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, trans. Patrick Clarke. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1998. P. 51

[9] For more on this, see p. 164 of Adam Kamesar’s “The Logos Endiathetos and the Logos Prophorikos in Allegorical Interpretation: Philo and the D-Scholia to the Iliad,” in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 44 (2004): 163-181.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: fiery friendship, friendly fire, Gadamer, hospitality, Joshua Miller, Leigh Johnson, philoniky

Guest-Friendship and Friends of Wisdom

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 12, 2016

This discussion begins in medias res. I apologize in advance for its many twists and turns. Years ago, Leigh Johnson wrote a piece laying out an idea of philosophical debate as “friendly fire,” using an Aristotelian conception of friendship. My friend and former colleague Joshua Miller responded to that idea with his own elaboration of “friendly fire,” using an Arendtian notion of dialogue across difference. Having read Miller’s blogpost (but not Johnson’s), I came across Nomy Arpaly’s “Is Polite Philosophical Discussion Possible?” in the Daily Nous, and thought I saw a connection between the two. Arpaly makes a compelling case that to equate rudeness with philosophical rigor is a hazardous conflation, and that bareknuckle pugilism hinders the philosophical process and discourages many (especially women) from participating in that process. Arpaly draws an analogy between philosophy and warfare: in both cases, a person is required to suspend our ordinary inhibition to attack other people, but there must still be inviolable rules of engagement for the fighting to be just. She writes:

I do not wish to be a philosophical pacifist. I think arguing—including, naturally, correcting and being corrected—is something for which there is no substitute in philosophy. I remember it whenever a beginner graduate student asks me how to anticipate objections or simply how to “see” the arguments for the other side of one’s view, which, as per Mill, is important if we want to understand our own view at all. I tell her that we humans are pretty bad at imagining what having the opposite view would be like (more on the badness of our imagination some other time), and thus there is no substitute for talking to someone who disagrees with you and who can “pressure” you hard to come up with answers to her arguments. Someone who pretends to disagree is not enough, as the same lack of imagination makes us bad at the pretending. You need the real thing.

Idly musing on Facebook about this, I took issue not with Arpaly’s recommendation that we avoid rudeness, but with characterizing philosophy through martial virtue. Miller then responded to this in his blog, which then got taken up recently by the Daily Nous. I will be responding to both Johnson’s original “friendly fire” and Miller’s elaboration of it in my next post. For now, however, I wish to engage with Arpaly’s martial framework and show why it is still wrong to identify hardness and toughness as “the real thing” in philosophy, and why it would be better to cultivate something like hospitality to avoid philoniky. We all know a philoniker or two; like the character of Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, they’re not necessarily wrong about the point they militate for, they’re just jerks who brandish their justifications in needlessly aggressive ways. Arpaly retains the adversarial debate norm while critiquing its excesses, but I wonder whether this very way of conceiving of debate inherently leads us toward those pitfalls she wishes to avoid. As I put it earlier,

Philosophy has for too long patterned itself after polemos, war, and been polemics; I think there’s a reason Nietzsche’s depiction of the philosopher as warrior of ideas appealed to me more when I was a reedy hormonal teenager, as these sorts of self-descriptions appeal to men undergoing a crisis of masculinity. The issue is not that we have been “too soft” with ourselves and need someone from the outside to be “hard” on us. The issue is that we worship hardness itself at the expense of what we tell ourselves we’re defending with it. Here I draw a lot of insight from Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” (h/t Joan Braune). Yeah, Achilles looks cool, and he takes offense over something trivial, but don’t get carried away with that pretext for allowing or gloating over more violence. Briseis is not the issue here, dude. Nor is it actually Achilles’ honor, or Agamemnon’s honor. It’s the idea that life is all about enforcing one’s life in the push and pull of force and counterforce. The intellectual “battlefield” is not the Iliad, nor should it be. Instead, we should foster the hospitality we see so many good examples of in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: less andreia, more xenia.

When we start being philosophical with someone, we take in a new guest-friend, or become one. They may come from a very different place than the ones we’re used to, and their way of speaking may be very different from ours. The different way they think is not an emergency that requires defensiveness, but a delight that is a gift, even when they are in fact wrong. Menelaus invites Telemachus in, bathes him, clothes him, and throws a feast in his honor before asking his identity or purpose for visiting; we can learn from this extraordinary case that there is virtue in making the strange welcome, making ourselves vulnerable to it, and not making what we have to give conditional upon getting answers we like. “To have friends arrive from afar—is this not a joy? To be patient even when others do not understand—is this not the mark of the gentleman?”[1]

For dialectic to refrain from being eristic, we must momentarily try to see from the other’s perspective, and I contend that this does not mean that you lob all your heaviest artillery against it—at least not at first, and perhaps not for a very long while. You see very little through your spyglass when you’re bombarding someone, and conceding that their building is still standing after your raid—and furthermore, that there are no hard feelings because you only assailed them to test the strength of their position—hardly constitutes real respect outside of fantasies of machismo.

Likewise, when we are under attack we are unlikely to do our best philosophizing. We are liable to get defensive, to fall back upon petty tricks and fallacies, or simply to become tongue-tied, especially if—for reasons of individual temperament or socialization—we already doubt ourselves to an unhealthy extreme. Either way, both sides get entrenched, and the back-and-forth of dialectic ceases. While Arpaly is right to mention the obvious fact that we tend to be overfond of our own perspective, the fog of war may do just as much to obscure what we can otherwise see with others. After all, you can only philosophize with someone, and you cannot philosophize at someone, even if both parties are philosophizing at each other—once that happens, you’ve both ceased to philosophize, and you are engaged in polemic (which may be necessary in situations of injustice [2]) or philoniky (which is never necessary). The playfulness goes out of the discussion, and one is no longer hospitable to the xenos, the stranger. In philoniky one wallows in what Maria Lugones calls “arrogant perception,”[3] which prevents you from travelling to another person’s world:

An agonistic sense of playfulness is one in which competence is supreme. You better know the rules of the game. In agonistic play there is risk, there is uncertainty, but the uncertainty is about who is going to win and who is going to lose. There are rules that inspire hostility. The attitude of playfulness is conceived as secondary to or derivate from play. Since play is agon, then the only conceivable playful attitude is an agonistic one (the attitude does not turn an activity into play, but rather presupposes an activity that is play). One of the paradigmatic ways of playing for both Gadamer and Huizinga is role-playing. In role-playing, the person who is a participant in the game has a fixed conception of him or herself. I also think that the players are imbued with self-importance in agonistic play since they are so keen on winning given their own merits, their very own competence.

When considering the value of “world”-travelling and whether playfulness is the loving attitude to have while travelling, I recognized the agonistic attitude as inimical to travelling across “worlds.” The agonistic traveller is a conqueror…. Agonistic travellers fail consistently in their attempt to travel because what they do is try to conquer the other “world.”[4]

From Lugones it’s clear that we should think of hospitality in a dual sense both as host and as guest. When we put forth an idea to someone as a sort of guest and hope the other person will entertain the thought, we have to be courteous guests in their conceptual space and kindly try out the food for thought they give us, even if it’s not like what nourishes us at home. (Especially then! Why not stay at home if you insist on getting things exactly the way you like them?) But the lion’s share of the work of hospitality falls on the host: to have patience for their stories, to give healthy feedback, to be game for what the guest offers and how they say it. The back-and-forth of host and guest has its rituals—you try to help out in the kitchen, they insist you relax, if they’re really struggling you help out anyway—and its interplay has to be respected. Part of this respect is to enjoy each other’s company, to take delight in the visit—not as a dour command of punctiliousness, but as a freeing command to give each other’s customs and habits a little leeway. Take yourself out of yourself for a little while—leave behind ossified ideas of yourself and try a different version of yourself, with this other person. It is absurd to think of a host or a guest winning at the game of hospitality—we all know how it kills the mood when people try to outdo each other in politeness—and thus it is far more amenable a metaphor than war to the mutuality Arpaly and Lugones seek in philosophizing. The “give and take” we lionize in philosophical discussions must become a give and take in the truest sense.

Part 1: Philonikers and Philosophers

Part 2: Guest-Friendship and Friends of Wisdom: Dialoguing with Arpaly and Lugones

Part 3: Fiery Friendship

[1] Confucius, Analects 1.1. Analects: with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2003. Page 1.

[2] Leigh Johnson and Edward Kazarian have written a thought-provoking piece on the dangers of tone-policing in philosophy, especially given that we live in asymmetrical power relations. I cannot begin to address this complex issue here, but I acknowledge its importance and hope in a future post to talk about how hospitality could avoid the dangers of tone-policing they note.

[3] Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2:2 (Summer 1987): 3-19. Page 4.

[4] Lugones, pp. 15-16

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: friendly fire, hospitality, Joshua Miller, Leigh Johnson, Maria Lugones, Nomy Arpaly, philoniky

Wabi-Sabi

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 3, 2016

I teach a class on the philosophy of time twice a week at a maximum security prison in Jessup, Maryland, for the JCI Scholars Program (which you can find out more about here—as well as the wonderful recent news about Pell Grants here!) When I told some of the students last summer that I was thinking of teaching a class on time, one approvingly responded, “If there’s anybody who knows about time, it’s us.” And so far that is indeed my experience: the students come to each class with an eagerness to relate the course material to their long and intensely reflective experience. Some of them appear to be in their sixties, but most are in their late twenties or thirties. They’ve been in prison a long time and speak about their lives beforehand with something more than the informed wistfulness most of us have in retrospection about our youth: it’s a tone of forward-looking determination and hard-won calm about who they’ve become and will continue to be. Nietzsche’s dictum to “become who you are”[1] is no dilettantish pastime for them, but a matter of keeping alive their sense of what they live for. In that regard, their decision to come to class and tackle the stuff I throw at them (light bedtime reading such as Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Parmenides and Aristotle’s refutation of Zeno’s paradox, etc.)—all for their own edification, since up to this point, they could not earn any college credit for taking these courses—all of this speaks to the nobility of their desire to learn more about the world and themselves.

In keeping with their particular mixture of perpetual acumen and poignant experience, they rapidly probe into the problems and possibilities of each text. One particularly stylish student, his white trucker hat tilted at a carefully calculated angle and with a twinkle you swear you can see behind his sunglasses that he always wears indoors, interjects during my explanation of God as actus purus: “The way I look at it, God cannot be said self-actualize, really, ‘cause that would mean he would have to become more powerful over time, like he isn’t already perfect. That would be that sempiternity and not that eternity.” He grins like the cat who got the last of the milk. For privacy reasons I can’t tell you his moniker, but I’ll call him “Cheshire” and it will be equally as artificial as the name he goes by. Cheshire’s persona in class is a total construction of self, and as a big time David Bowie fan, I am all for it.

This past Friday’s discussion centered on excerpts from Leonard Koren’s book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Briefly put, wabi-sabi is the traditional Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in decaying and imperfect things. It therefore functions as a nice counterpoint to last week’s discussion of eternity as the completeness of divine life in Boethius. Whereas a modernist aesthetic strives to make things with completely smooth surfaces and sharp right angles (“clean lines”), the wabi-sabi aesthetic values the rough and irregular: a bowl with a chip in it, a clay cup a little wobbly at the top, a fountain with dark green streaks.[2] Whereas our society strives to fight the effects of time on objects—we wipe down shelves when dust accumulates, we repair scratches in cars once we find them, we buy all manner of “anti-aging” cosmetics—the wabi-sabi aesthetic embraces how time changes things. There is a beauty in how the nails in a fence leave streaks of soft red rust. Time seasons things with experiences that are irreplaceable, and can’t be replicated through mass production. As we talk about wabi-sabi in class, we arrive at the consensus that wabi-sabi appreciates how things are unique and how those imperfections and irregularities give them character.

From that we have a conversation about beauty standards for women in our society, and how the push to strive for perfection leads to ugliness. One student—who earlier had a bone to pick with Aristotle and the idea that you could identify discrete entities, apart from the constant temporal process of one thing changing into another—likes the wabi-sabi idea a lot, and shares how he knew a woman who was astonishingly beautiful in every way, but she could not get past the fact that she had a small white birthmark on her cheek, which she constantly covered up with make-up. He uses this to illustrate how if we could embrace wabi-sabi, maybe we wouldn’t have so many insecurities, and we could be at peace with ourselves instead of trying to conform to a stereotype imposed on us by culture. It’s a beautiful thought I want to connect to my passion for Marcuse’s critique of the performance principle, but I decide to sit on that and see what they have to say—and they don’t disappoint.

Another student, Kyle Williams, is soft-spoken but has a completely attentive gaze. Kyle says how he was looking outside at the uncut grass just outside the prison, and how he saw a goose laying down in it while the heat was shimmering, “and to me it was beautiful. And if somebody had cut that grass to make it beautiful, or what they think is beautiful, the goose would’ve had no place to lay down. It was just nature. That’s what I like about this wabi-sabi. People try to get rid of weeds and put flowers there in order to make it more beautiful, but weeds are really flowers when you think about it. And looking at those weeds, coming up through everything, even when things are in their way, those weeds are like me going through everything I go through.” The lyrical quality of what Kyle shares makes time stand still for a moment in the room. He goes on to read from a passage he liked: “Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness. While the universe destructs it also constructs. New things emerge out of nothingness.”[3] Cheshire agrees that, “We are trying to make everything in nature unnatural, but the universe as a whole can’t be unnatural. If we go with wasabi, we would be a part of that whole instead of fighting time itself.” Gently, because this is the fourth time he’s done it, I point out that the term is wabi-sabi and not wasabi. He instantly cracks up at his mistake and we all have a good, friendly laugh. The room’s dynamic is lightened up and Kyle feels free to remark on how with wabi-sabi the scuffs on this wall in this classroom in the prison can be beautiful.

Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.[4]

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §270

[2] Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Point Reyes, California: Imperfect Publishing. See pages 26-29 for helpful juxtapositions between modernism and wabi-sabi.

[3] Koren, p. 42

[4] Koren p. 51

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: beauty, Boethius, eternity, JCI Scholars, Kyle Williams, Nietzsche, wabi-sabi

Free Time is Holy

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on June 30, 2016

The ancient Greek word schole is usually translated as “leisure,” and it is from this word that we get a number of English words. A school is a place where one can spend hours away from work, devoting that time to a study and unhurried reflection that would be impossible when toiling to meet expectations of productivity in the field or the factory. (Or so goes the idea.) A scholar is a person similarly free from productivity quotas, able to devote the majority of their time to thinking and discussing ideas.

Classically, school and scholarship have been the prerogative of a small demographic of wealthy or otherwise socially privileged persons, and this classist history has been well-documented and appropriately critiqued. After all, the liberal arts or artes liberales literally means “arts of free men” (arts that they did not need to be profitable, arts concerned with what is fine and beautiful, such as logic, geometry, astronomy, music, philosophy, etc.) as opposed to artes serviles, “arts of servants” (arts aimed at providing necessities, the mechanical arts such as cooking, farming, carpentry, masonry, tailoring, etc.). The sharp separation of these kinds of work—one taken to be “too low” for the nobility to busy themselves with, the other taken to be “too lofty” for the rabble to appreciate—has carried over into our current age in many ways that other people track better than I could. My main aim here is to point to a social possibility hinted at but unclaimed by this history: provided that our needs could be met in a fair and sufficient way through wise and responsible organization of automation technology, the leisure important for useless but beautiful activity could be the lifestyle of all and not just the luxury of a few. The mechanical arts heretofore denigrated as “necessary evils” could have their artistic potential opened up. When you don’t have to rush to throw something together for dinner after a long day on the job, cooking can be an opportunity for self-expression and fellow feeling, as it should be. Our workaday lives could have the same aura of self-exploration a few of us currently get to feel in the heady days of college. All arts could be fine arts, all arts could be liberal arts—not merely in the negative sense that you are free because others slave away for you, but in the positive sense that these arts set you free and allow you to be free alongside others. It’s for this reason that I prefer to translate schole as “free time,” because this underscores the extent to which a free society cannot exist without a great deal of free time.

What stands in the way of a time of free time? Why do we feel as though we have no time? According to Herbert Marcuse, we feel hurried because we feel harried, beset on all sides by pressure to live up to expectations of productivity, expectations to perform that are so deeply ingrained that we place this pressure on ourselves “to do something useful” even when off the job. (He calls this internalized pressure “the performance principle.”) Despite indisputable advances in time-saving technologies, we work more hours than ever before—or else—and are expected to project a mask of phony cheerfulness about doing so, even when we lack freedom to decide what sort of work we do, how it can be done, how long we do it for, who we do it with, and who we do it for.[1] The language and values of the marketplace are increasingly internalized to the exclusion of alternative ways of thinking: consumer preferences become paradigmatic for self-determination, privatization presents itself as the solution to political problems, professional philosophers debate whether they should “buy” the premises of arguments.

Liberal arts colleges wither under the pressure for the mechanical arts, which are in turn not allowed to blossom into autonomous artistry but become instead arts for maximizing efficiency toward mechanically pre-given ends. Aristotle sounds not only classist but quaint when he says of education that “To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.”[2] Aristotle meant only a small subset of people when he talked about “free souls,” but he was more right than he knew: people of all sexes, races, and backgrounds cannot be free unless they gain free time, in which they do not need to “get something out of” the activities in which they delight. It is this double moment of elitist obfuscation and egalitarian potential that Marcuse finds within “high culture.” In describing the wonders of a transcendent world where soul and Spirit soar free, it justifies the delay of justice in this world, even as this description of the higher world inspires us to imagine and then demand that a better world is possible:

The freedom of the soul was used to excuse the poverty, martyrdom, and bondage of the body. It served the ideological surrender of existence to the economy of capitalism. Correctly understood, however, spiritual freedom does not mean the participation of man in an eternal beyond where everything is righted when the individual can no longer benefit from it. Rather, it anticipates the higher truth that in this world a form of social existence is possible in which the economy does not preempt the entire life of individuals. Man does not live by bread alone; this truth is thoroughly falsified by the interpretation that spiritual nourishment is an adequate substitute for too little bread.[3]

Does the hope for an afterlife negate the pursuit of free time in this life? In the passage above Marcuse tells us the dangers of a false interpretation of Jesus’ reply to Satan’s temptation to transhumanist self-assertion in Luke 4:4 (and by extension, Deuteronomy 8:3), but Marcuse does not clarify what a true interpretation of this passage would be. I wish to pick up on the neglected possibility of liberation latent within the search for what is eternal, such that reverence for the potentially holy character of time is the completion of the attitude that respects the unconditional worth of free time. My hypothesis is this: if there is a connection between liveliness and eternity[4], between being spirited and being spiritual, then there is something holy about free time. I want to make Marcuse consistent with himself when he says: “Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure.”

I find inspiration for this project in a little book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, which argues that anyone who takes seriously the commandment to keep the day of rest holy must, by that very attitude, also be someone who holds free time to be unconditionally and uncompromisingly valuable—so much so, in fact, that they hope free time continues on after death.[5] The Sabbath is not merely useful for getting back to work refreshed, not merely important for community morale, not merely enjoyable for one’s sense of being self-actualized, but in addition to and including all these things, the Sabbath is holy unto God, sacred. Heschel is at pains to show that, caricatures of abstemious dourness notwithstanding, piety is indivisible from pleasure and joy:

Call the Sabbath a delight: a delight to the soul and a delight to the body. Since there are so many acts which one must abstain from doing on the seventh day, ‘you might think I have given you the Sabbath for your displeasure; I have surely given you the Sabbath for your pleasure.’ To sanctify the seventh day does not mean: Thou shalt mortify thyself, but, on the contrary: Thou shalt sanctify it with all thy heart, with all thy soul and all thy senses. ‘Sanctify the Sabbath by choice meals, by beautiful garments; delight your soul with pleasure and I will reward you for this pleasure.’[6]

Here I find an astonishing convergence of Heschel’s call for spirituality with Marcuse’s call for sensuality. The Ancient of Days Heschel knows through his study of sacred scripture, through careful discussion and prayer and searching, is not a god who wants him to be miserable and gloomy, but hale and hearty, sanctifying creation and Creator through the heartfelt act of joy, and becoming blessed for this attentive wholeness (wherein he is seven sevenths of what God has made him to be) by the One Who Makes Whole, the Holy One, the Hale One. This day of rest does not designate lack of activity simpliciter, but the lack of work that is toilsome or degrading, and the presence of a kind of work so different that “work” as we so often mean it is an inappropriate word—liberating art, you might say instead.[7] It is instructive that part of observing the Sabbath is to engage in study of the Torah and to make love. (Read in between the lines about “marital duty” at Exodus 21:10, for example.)

Marcuse likewise considers the power of Eros—the Freudian psychological principle of pleasure-seeking in general, not limited to coitus—not simply as a selfish force of chaos that must be harshly repressed to make “law and order,” but as a source for order of a peaceful and ever more beautiful, more inclusive kind.[8] Instead of Eros meaning rushing headlong into self-destructive dissipation, Eros can “self-sublimate” by delaying gratification so as to yield a future of higher pleasure. It is more pleasurable to slowly mix flour and knead dough, and smell the bread baking over relaxed conversation, than to feel compelled to wolf down something pre-packaged by the constraints of schedules and budgets. The post-scarcity society made possible by modern technology could be devoted to continual refinement and beautification of our social and environmental relationships, allowing us to see life’s chief attribute not as a struggle but as play: “Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means.”[9]

When we see living for joy as legitimate—separating it carefully from the selfish and possessive half-pleasure we might call “hedonism,” which delights in minds and bodies only when it fits the performance principle—then we see that all time should be playtime, free time. Marcuse says, “A new basic experience of being would change human existence in its entirety.”[10] Even just existing would be physically and mentally heightened for us, elevated—and we might add along with Heschel, sanctified. Carpe diem—except that our lives should have this fullness all of the time, for all time, not just for one day; our lives should celebrate the Sabbath not just one seventh of the week, but seven sevenths.

[1] Marcuse, “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” Five Lectures, pp. 29-30. For more empirical data confirming Marcuse’s thesis, see Kathi Weeks’ recent book, The Problem with Work.

[2] Aristotle, Politics VIII.3

[3] Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” The Essential Marcuse, p. 218

[4] Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy V.vi

[5] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, p. 19

[6] Heschel, pp. 18-19. Heschel’s footnote to this passage reads: “Deuteronomy rabba 3,1; see Midrash Tehillim, chap. 90.”

[7] Heschel, p. 22. Cp. Giorgio Agamben, postface to The Coming Community: “It is well known that during the Jewish Shabbat one has to abstain from every melakha, from any productive work. This idleness, this primal inoperativity, is for man a sort of another soul, or, if you like, his true soul. An act of pure destruction, however, an activity that has a perfectly destructive or de-creative character, is closer to menucha, the idleness prescribed for Shabbat and, as such, it is not prohibited.”

[8] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 201-202

[9] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 17

[10] Eros and Civilization, p. 158

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: free time, Heschel, Marcuse, performance principle, sabbath

experiments in ethicotheology

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Guest-Friendship and Friends of Wisdom

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Wabi-Sabi

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Free Time is Holy

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on June 30, 2016