There are nice-looking donkeys …

… and then there are the beautiful ones:

Nature’s reclamation

The canal running behind my home is now closed forever, due to the tragic collapse this summer. But nature is finding new uses for it.

Oxford philosophical report, part 2

Graham Parkes, author of Composing the Soul (perhaps my favorite book on Nz), presented what was to me easily the best address of the conference. The first half of his presentation was a discussion of the links between Nz and meditative practices in eastern philosophy. Nz hiked and walked extensively, claiming that he didn’t trust any philosophy that was conceived while sitting down. Getting to know nature as it is in itself means quieting the clutter of consciousness, which consists in tangled relations to other people and what they say and think. One way to quiet consciousness is through walking meditation. By silencing consciousness we allow the drives of life to surge forward, unrestrained by all the filters and “thou shalts” of consciousness. The second half of the presentation was a video Parkes made of the Alpine region where Nz summered and hiked — a very beautiful video, effectively showing that when you stop thinking and simply try to experience, the quality of one’s state of mind does change in some substantial way. I’m probably not putting everything quite right, and there were many more fascinating details I won’t try to relate here, but it was a marvelous presentation.

Another presentation I enjoyed very much was Galen Strawson’s. Strawson is a very smart, very well-read metaphysician, and he’s not afraid of making bold, sweeping pronouncements (along the lines of “There really isn’t any intelligible alternative to Spinoza’s metaphysics; when you think about it, it’s perfectly obvious”). I’m very skeptical of metaphysics, so I really was incapable of seriously considering most of the claims he made, but it was a delight to watch a master metaphysician going at it, carving and distinguishing and deducing and proclaiming.

Finally, among the talks I enjoyed most, I will mention Günther Abel, whose topic was “Consciousness, Language, and Nature,” and who did indeed attempt to cover it all. Abel has read and understood very broadly, and has an enviable synoptic vision bringing everything into focus. One of the interesting claims he made in his far-ranging talk was that freedom of the will is essential to personhood — not because of some metaphysical fact about the human mind, but because of the multiple roles the concept of “person” plays in the community of language users. We need to understand the person as free, simply because our usage of the term implies that freedom.

Oxford conference: philosophical report, part 1

I thought I’d share some of my impressions of some of the papers I attended.

The conference featured seven plenary addresses, which everyone attended, and three groups of concurrent session. I’ve recounted now, and I guess I only heard 16 papers in all (counting my own), not 19 as I had thought. I don’t have comments on all of them, as sometimes one cannot help but daydream from time to time.

Two of the plenary addresses, Reginster’s and Poellner’s, did not have much impact on me. I’m sure it’s my fault: I was jet-lagged, and even if I hadn’t been, my mind tends toward broad and shallow, and their papers were focusing fairly narrowly and deeply on topics that don’t interest me much. Reginster was documenting Nz’s account in GM about how the Christian sense of guilt emerges from a more basic, everyday sense of guilt. One key point that I found interesting is that Reginster claimed Nz wasn’t really interested in providing a more general account of how guilt arises in the first place; rather, he was interested in a diagnosis of the Christian variety of guilt — that is, Nz was more interested in pathology than reduction. That seems right.

Poellner’s paper was concerned with understanding the precise sense in which the hatred giving rise to slave morality could be in any sense unconscious. Actually, Poellner was arguing that hatred simply can’t be unconscious; instead, it must be conscious, but the slaves are engaged in loads of self-deception about it. Okay.

I’ll mention two other concurrent session papers for now. Lawrence Hatab focused on the importance of language for self-consciousness, and a puzzling remark of Nz’s, that “man thinks without knowing it.” The upshot, I think, is that a lot of our thinking is done for us, by our language communities, and by the time our consciousness comes on the scene, a lot of presuppositions are already in place. This leads to interesting questions about the ontology of individuals in Nz: basically, there can’t be any, without a community providing a deep and significant backdrop.

In the same session, Jutta Georg-Lauer probed the embodiment of consciousness in Nz. So far, Nz claims, “we have embodied only our errors.” The task is to embody something other than errors. He thinks our embodied knowledge must be enhanced, and not further abstract/conceptual knowledge: we need a different way of being in the world, to speak Heideggerianingly. Doing this means reducing the opposition of body and reason, and recognizing thoughts as shadows of the senses and reflexes. We also must devalue the notion of truth, in the sense in which we have regarded truth since Plato. We should allow for the ecstasies of “body reason,” and let the natural affinities of the body replace our marshaling our forces under the will to truth. Very provocative, I thought, though I guess I’m too will-to-truth oriented to really climb aboard that wagon.

Oxford: the video

The soundtrack, by the way, is an old 78 of Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers, with the great, growling Bubber Miley on horn.

All OK in the UK

More than ok, in fact: simply freaking awesome is more like it. This was my first trip to the UK, and as I told several people there, my impression is that the sun always shines and people know a helluva lot about Nietzsche. I’ll give an overview of my time there.

Last Wednesday I was supposed to fly to Chicago and then to London. But the plane in Chicago had some broken part it couldn’t do without, and there weren’t any replacement parts anywhere, so I was bumped to a flight Thursday evening. That gave me a day to trot around Chicago, where I found a great coffeeshop on Michigan Avenue, of all places:

The flight Thurs eve was uneventful, though I only slept for maybe 20 minutes. I arrived in London Friday morning, grabbed the bus to Oxford, and arrived in time to stow my bags, eat some bangers-and-mash at a pub, and attend the first conference paper, followed by tea, followed by papers in concurrent sessions, followed by tea, followed by another main paper, followed by dinner, followed by a recital of Nietzsche’s piano music, followed by a drink at the college bar. By the end, I had been going for about 30 hours, and I was beginning to hallucinate. The chapel in which the main papers were read started to transform, in my experience, into the lobby of a bank, with a revolving door, and there were images of little pickles chasing after a sandwich.

I’ll give a more scholarly account of the papers and conversations over the next few days. Generally, Saturday was chock-full of papers and teas, with a fancy dinner at the end, and more drinking in the bar. And Sunday was a shorter day, again with papers and teas. The conference ended at about 4, and I was unprepared for what happens in England on Sundays at 5pm: absolutely nothing. Everything closes. So I bought a ticket to see Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. A masterpiece, with typically Tarantino grotesque hilarity and meaningless but fun blends of genres.

The next day, Monday, was mostly spent touring places (like Christ Church college and the Bodleian library), visiting as many pubs as possible, and walking along the Thames at dusk. Tuesday was a full travel day, and I made it home Tuesday evening at about 10, after only 20 or so hours of travel.

The numbers: 19 scholarly papers, 6 pubs, and maybe 5 new friends. I had an absolutely marvelous time, one I’ll remember the rest of my life, and my brain is jam packed with new ideas, insights, and knowledge. I’ll see what I can do to squander that capital over the next few months.

What’s been going on?

It appears I haven’t posted in about a month. What’s up?

Well, a cluster of little things. There’s been painting the house, the kids starting school, me starting teaching, etc. I have been rewriting a paper on Nietzsche for the upcoming “Nietzsche on Mind and Nature” conference at Oxford, and arranging travel, etc. That’s next week. And I am working on a book on Spinoza’s philosophy, tentatively entitled God or Nature: Spinoza’s Radical Theology. It is a shift for me, moving from Nietzsche’s thrilling prose to the ever-cautious geometer (who encased his philosophy in an invincible iron maiden, as ol’ Fritz once wrote). I’m not sure readers of this blog will be as interested in periodic updates about the Spinoza project, but that’s probably going to happen from here on out, at least for the next few months.

A more interesting question looming in the back of my mind is along the lines of “What next?” I’ll keep reading Nz, but I don’t have a great urge to write a whole lot more about him. Same even more so for Spinoza, once this project is complete. I think that, bound up with the question, is a bit of soul searching about where I am and who I am. The fact is that I am in a backwater, so far as philosophy is concerned: my colleagues are delightful, and I like where I live and so on, but there’s no way to deny that I am “more than somewhat” removed from the action of contemporary academic philosophy. (The web helps to make up for that, but only to a very limited extent. Hallway conversations are where it’s it. Or that’s what I remember, anyway.) And, since I’ve been in such a spot for 15 years, it has had some effect on who I am as a philosopher. In short, I am turning slowly into a backwater sort of person, the geezer who shows up at a conference in bib overalls and with bits of straw in his hair and strangely opines, “But you’re all forgetting the question of Change! How can you do any of this without settling that first?” Then he stomps off, back to wherever he came from. And everyone goes back to discussing Dretske and closure principles of knowledge, or whatever.

I could probably buck against fate, but I think I’ll just go with it. The virtue of being in an inconspicuous place is that you’re free to pursue your (possibly weird) views of things without feeling compelled to relate it to what more conspicuous people are saying and doing. There’s some pleasure in that, though you have to give up the pleasures of belonging to some wider, professional, academic community, and make do with the delightful people around you, who take an interest in what you write just because, well, you’re you.

Yes, sounds like a rationalization to me too. But the other option — trying to stay conspicuous in and engaged with an intellectual community that seems awfully far away — sounds a bit like trying to be someone I’m not. What I truly revere in Nz and Emerson is that they didn’t let their untimeliness or Americanness (respectively) stop them from trying to express frankly what was on their minds. I certainly am no FWN or RWE, but, hell, I don’t have to be Lance Armstrong in order to enjoy cycling, either. So I’ll just do things my way, and everyone is perfectly within their rights to take no notice whatsoever. Just keep your eyes open for me — I’ll be the guy in the bib overalls.