December's Blogpost_What can one learn about philosophy from a dog?

At first blush the question may seem idle; so perhaps we can just turn it around and stare at it from a different direction, by asking a second question, which is to say: what can a dog teach us about the philosophical life? This might seem a little better, and not at all idle.

So, what can a dog teach us about the philosophical life broadly conceived? Unless your experiences with dogs have pretty much been limited to the Cerberus three-headed hound of hell variety, on this question the world of dogs is “[th]ine oyster, Which I with sword will open,” to borrow liberally from the Bard.

            The Internet is chock-full of words of wisdom inspired by relationships some have had with those of the canine persuasion; moralizing memoires about how animals in general, including dogs, can teach us to be better humans; heart-warming photos & videos of adorable puppies doing this thing (or not, precisely, depending on whether one thinks napping is a “doing” rather than a “taking”), and very clever dogs doing that thing; and there is also all the scientific palaver about the “surprising” (really? I suppose there are a lot of people out there who just ought to wake up…) health benefits of canine this, and the therapeutic rewards associated with canine that.

            In the vast majority of these Internet attributions, the assumption is that by living in the moment-to-moment of this day we benefit psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, physically, socially, spiritually, and therefore, by associative fiat, philosophically, from an alliance with our furry four-footed friends. So, at the very least, what dogs can teach us about the philosophical life is how to live clearly – to rejoice simply in the time that is already slipping too quickly out of our grasp, even today, even now as we read these all-too-fleeting words on a page.

General Information.

            Now some things about dogs are just downright intuitive, even when it comes to thinking philosophically; and notwithstanding the question of the sometimes dubious tastefulness of our intuitions, these still may not be ignored in discursive reflections. Most of my own memories in this meditation will be colored by a long association with an Aussie Cattle Dog named Daisy and a start-up friendship with a (very) young Border Collie, a four-legged coiled spring, named Auggie—one a very fine and the other a very promising traveling companion through this “dark wood” we call Life.  The Reader may of course substitute other memories… and particular names may be changed to protect the innocent; the universal aspect of the meditation will not be affected.

There are many behavioral things dogs do as a part of their normal dog-nicity, which is to say that many of their actions simply arise out of the fact or nature of Dog as Canis lupus familiaris; and then there are “other” things that Clf does, which seem to flow more from the familiaris part of Dog, or from the dog as it has become intimate and familiar with the human owner. In our quest to discover what a dog can teach us about the philosophical life, it might be important to keep this distinction in mind.

            Some of our immediate and more pleasant associations when thinking about dogs, might be –should be—that, when they are focused on something, such as a ball or a Frisbee, then Life = only ball or only Frisbee; this ability to focus single-mindedly, which thankfully is not their full-time job, is enhanced by their quasi-philosophical commitment to living exclusively in the day-to-day. Our dogs do as a matter of course most of the things we humans consider to be among the joys of being alive, but then only seldom get around to. These include the more obvious joys of eating, of napping; of yawning; of digging in the sand at the beach; of stretching out and sleeping on their backs; and of scratching themselves with obvious great relish. These are simple joys in which human partners of canines may partake with no reservation, and with unmistakable philosophical benefit.

            Then there are those “other” canine joys and behaviors, which the fainter of heart may wish to ignore at this point, and which we humans may rightly have some reservations about participating in at any (and probably every) level. Likewise, it may also be rightly wondered whether or not there is any arguable philosophical benefit to be gained from human participation in these “other,” but also obviously joyful canine activities.

            Beyond the familiar de-crotching of owner underwear, leg-humping visitors, and trying to intimately groom owners at shower time, other canine joys include mutual butt sniffing by way of greeting; the joys of yarking (=a very wide open maw accompanied by a dramatically impressive ralphing noise + voluminous aftereffects); butt-scooting; rolling in deliciously smelly fecal stuff; and poop-snacking, or in the case of teething Border Collie puppies, lip-smacking and toothless poop-gumming (my DAW just prompted me over the shoulder that Auggie’s puppyish gumming put her in mind of an old ad jingle – ‘it melts in your mouth….’). Nota Bene: Scientists who study Canis lupus familiaris generally agree that the species suffers from terminal cacophagie, and seems even to relish in it. Nuff said.

            Then there are also the joys-to-come in store for new puppy parents, such as trying to help Puppy establish regular toilet habits. Those moments of complete delight for all concerned when, in a market square crammed with people, Puppy gets surprised by an intestinal explosion of unalloyed liquidity—follow the runny trail…; and other moments when, (owners of female dogs may skip this next part), Little Dog is pursuing self-discovery with a vengeance—licking himself with quasi robotic intensity.

           Which brings me, as the night follows the day, to the joys of male Puppy Pudenda. According to the Huff Post: “During the 2012 campaign, former President Bill Clinton was amazed that President Barack Obama seemed to be catching break after break, while GOP nominee Mitt Romney seemed to stumble constantly.” Our former President, prompted by Obama’s apparently unremitting streak of good fortune, and seemingly desirous of expressing himself in folksy colloquialism, is quoted in a new book as often telling his pals that Obama is, "luckier than a dog with two dicks."

            Now it seems that there are only two ways really to go with this metaphor at this point. One can go in the direction of the fabulist and express existential tragedy, as does the French cartoonist Marcel Gotlib, who graphically narrates for our moral edification The (Terribly) Triste Tale of the Gentleman who had Two Tallywackers (public library, p 22ff). Or one can take the metaphor literally and comedically… think about Mr. Clinton’s dog reference for a moment; form a mental picture; then imagine the possibilities. If the Puppy has no hidden Platonist (i.e., religious) tendencies, then he must be a very happy Dog indeed.

A Very Famous Dog in Literature.

            One of the most ancient and celebrated stories in Western literature, The Odyssey, is a Greek epic poem that was composed around the 7^th-8^th century BC; and in this lengthy poem (some 12,110 lines) Homer narrates for our listening (and reading) pleasure the story of a journey whose central motif, framed around the 10-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans, is Odysseus’ Nostos, his homecoming from war and hardship after 20 long and weary years absent from hearth and home.

            Now for those of you who did the math on this one, the war only lasted 10 years, and Odysseus was gone for 20 years, which means that for the other additional 10 years Odysseus was being besieged and beleaguered by the gods (Poseidon, to be exact). Given the Greek tragic worldview, this is the obvious conclusion for his epically extended absence; and Odysseus’ meandering and troubled passage, during the latter 10 years, through the divine obstacle course of his Return Home, is in fact the subject of the poem.

            Among the many fine moments that Homer sings about in this poem whose subject is long-sought-for but elusive Homecomings, our reflection will select out only two of what are perhaps its most delightful, memorable, and poignant moments. The first occurs in Book 19, but has already been set up in Book 13. Athena has succeeded in bringing Odysseus back through lo-so-many perils to his island, Ithaca, as a man with a plan:

"noble son of Laertes, think how you can lay hands on these disreputable people who have been lording it in your house these three years, courting your wife and making wedding presents to her, while she does nothing but lament your absence, giving hope and sending your encouraging messages to every one of them, but meaning the very opposite of all she says.
            […]I will begin by disguising you so that no human being shall know you; I will cover your body with wrinkles; you shall lose all your yellow hair; I will clothe you in a garment that shall fill all who see it with loathing; I will blear your fine eyes for you, and make you an unseemly object in the sight of the suitors, of your wife, and of the son whom you left behind you.”

So arrives, in Book 19, the long-anticipated moment of entry into his own once-familiar halls— although disguised and unrecognized by all, Odysseus has even gained admittance into the presence of Penelope, his wife. Penelope has bid Euryclea, O’s childhood nurse now grown old and feeble, to wash the feet of this “stranger”-guest to her home, and when Euryclea sees the scar on the stranger’s thigh, she recognizes her long-lost master. But he bids her to silence…

As soon as Euryclea had got the scarred limb in her hands and had well hold of it, she recognized it and dropped the foot at once. The leg fell into the bath, which rang out and was overturned, so that all the water was spilt on the ground; Euryclea's eyes between her joy and her grief filled with tears, and she could not speak, but she caught Ulysses by the beard and said, "My dear child, I am sure you must be Ulysses himself, only I did not know you till I had actually touched and handled you."

In his book Mimesis, Erich Auerbach famously celebrates in an interpretative symphony this touching episode of unrecognized Homecoming.

The perceptive Reader may have also noticed that this “fine moment” of recognition during an otherwise obscured reception among his own people, while touching and charged with the expectancy of the avenging Justice to come to the suitors, does not contain any Animal Anecdotery for which our appetites have been here wetted. Patience, oh Reader; for one moment of recognition sets the stage for the other, providing us with a paralleling transition to a second “fine moment” of recognition: the moment where Odysseus is recognized by Argos, his more than ancient dog.

            This moment comes for us in Book 17 when Argos recognizes his old master despite the disguising illusion put on him by Athena. Accompanied by the swine-heard, Eumaeus, Odysseus has entered into the grounds of his former palace; and “As they were thus talking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Ulysses had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any work out of him.” Homer describes this debilitated wreck of a dog, “lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas.” It would seem that pricking up his ears was about all that Argos could muster at this point, because even though he “saw Ulysses standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master.”

            Then, turning the “camera lens” back to Odysseus, Homer reminds the Reader of the days of Argos’ youth and strength: “When [he] saw the dog on the other side of the yard, [he] dashed a tear from his eyes,” and asked the swine-heard:"Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?" In response to Odysseus’ question, Eumaeus delineates Argos’ pedigree:

"This hound belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Ulysses left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Jove takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him."

Odysseus then entered the buildings that used to be his home, “but Argos died as soon as he had recognized his master.” At this point in the narrative, it is only Argos, an apt foil to a forgetful Ithaca in the absence of its king, who recognizes Odysseus; and the joy of Recognition comes at the expense of his Life.

A Very Famous Dog in Religion & Art.

            In one of his three master prints, the 1513 engraving of the Knight, Death, and the Devil (Ritter, Tod, und Teufel), Albrecht Dürer illustrates for us a significant and early Western vision of Dog as Fido—the faithful companion who dogs the feet of the Lord’s knight, thereby adding one final (four-legged) defense, Fido-fidelity, to the protection of the knight whom Paul describes for us in Ephesians 6:11-18:

“¹¹ Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. ¹² For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.¹³ Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. ¹⁴ Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, ¹⁵ and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. ¹⁶ In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. ¹⁷ Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

The engraving depicts an armored knight on horseback, and his faithful dog (fides), riding through a barren rocky place, flanked by the Devil near the horse’s far-side croup and, to his right side, Death, an hourglass in his hand, riding a pale horse.

            Fidos of a more secular variety were going to continue to enjoy popularity, especially in the United States, where the name Fido apparently came to prominence as a dog’s name after Abraham Lincoln named his dog, Fido; and the name entered into mutt moniker mythology, although hard evidence suggests that Fido is really quite an uncommon name for a dog. Fortunately, though, there are still some Dürer-esque “Fido” stories floating around and about, such as about the Italian mixed-breed Fido, whose master died in a WWII air raid near Florence in 1943. Another site says that “Fido waited in vain, for the following 14 years, for [his masters]'s return, going daily to the bus stop where the man used to get off after coming home from work.”

Dogs & Science

            I like the Dog Whisperer; largely because his ideas are realistic and, in my actual dog-related experience, effective and not mean-spirited when it comes (first) to decoding and (then) to responding to the dynamics surrounding domestic dogs and their human companions. However, there seems to be some resistance “out there” in the virtual universe to the DW’s theories and training strategies, especially among some canine scientists and dog training specialists—and far be it from me to impugn their motivations.

            One of the central assumptions behind the DW philosophy, concerns the social nature of the relationships, or hierarchies, if you will, that inherently exist among and between all organisms. Among domestic dogs the inherent social relationship is, by common scientific consensus, articulated through a “pack” dynamic, and in this pack hierarchy there is always an alpha dog or pack leader. More recent research, however, seems to indicate that the pack leadership position may be more fluid, i.e., more a shared task, than was earlier thought. This research changes nothing for the DW philosophy, however, which very reasonably argues that the leadership position in a blended human-canine pack needs to be the human, and not the dog. This means that pack leader leads (decides, dominates, controls, et al), and non-pack leaders follow (do not decide or control, but rather submit to the dominance hierarchy). This is not brain science; and yet…

            There is an Australian site called C.L.E.A.R Dog Training, where research from Dr. Ian Dunbar, and from Debra Millikan, Chief Trainer of Canine Behaviour School in Adelaide, is used to challenge the idea of the alpha dog and of the “dominance/submissive” paradigm in dog training.

“The Alpha “dominance” theories were based on short-term studies in 1947 by Rupert Shenkel of unrelated captive wolves in a Swiss zoo. Subsequent long-term research on wolves in the wild has proved the conclusions of the original studies to be incorrect. Sixty years later, however, these 'dominance/submissive' theories are still being used to justify and rationalize heavy-handed and even harsh dog training.”

For a variety of reasons grounded in the research and lecture posted on this site, C.L.E.A.R Dog Training makes the case that the research upon which the DW theory of pack dynamic is based, is “outdated,” and “seriously flawed.” Most of the argument, however, centers on the single idea that the dog and the wolf are not the same animal, so the assumed behavior of one group, the wolf, should not be used analogically to create behavior strategies for the other group, the dog.

“With regard to the concept of people acting like pack leaders, Coppinger and Coppinger (2001) say “Since dogs came from wolves, dogs should behave like wolves, think like wolves and respond to wolf like signals. But dogs can’t think like wolves because they do not have wolf brains. We descended from apes but we don’t behave like them and we don’t think like they do. We are a much different animal than the apes in spite of our common genetic ancestry. The same is true of the dog and its ancestor”.”

So far so good. I get the idea that Dog does not equal Wolf. Unfortunately, the clear distinction Dunbar and Millikan make in this article between the sub-species Canis lupus familiaris and its species Canis lupus, which is substantiated in other research as well, does not allow one to persuasively conclude, from the premise that Dog does not equal Wolf, that therefore there is not a dominance/submissive dynamic at work either or both in packs of wolves, as well as in packs of dogs. So while C.L.E.A.R Dog Training makes a plausible scientific case that dogs and wolves are different animals, which is actually rather clichéd given the plethora and availability of the research, their data and research does not contradict the idea that dogs are pack animals, or that there is a natural leadership hierarchy in canine packs, which humans need to recognize if they wish to participate well in the blending human-canine social relationship. So, the DW philosophy scores the point, and these particular “scientists” continue to pound upon a proverbial dead horse.

            Unfortunately, sites inspired by this type of Straw Man reasoning (i.e., because Dog does not equal Wolf, therefore canine society does not have a dominance/submissive hierarchy, nor should that social hierarchical model be used in behavior strategies involving dog-human societies), sites such as C.L.E.A.R Dog Training (or others: such as here and here and here) continue to have an audience. Fortunately, and in what many might perhaps see as an ironic reversal, Wikipedia got the pack idea right: “Domesticated dogs have had humans as part of dog social structure for at least 12,000 years, and human behavior is not the same as wolf behavior.”

            That said, there are any number of good recent articles dealing with the canine-human relationship, from generic articles exploring the many ways canine-human domestic exchange works and benefits both parties (here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here), to more scientific studies suggesting that it is humans [who] may in fact have been domesticated by dogs.

Another key assumption behind the DW philosophy concerns dog behavior: it is desirable in the human-canine domestic relationship for the dog to be calm and submissive to its human. Now once the hierarchical nature of the social relationship between dogs and their humans is admitted, which we have just argued, it would be a conversation non-starter to suggest that it is more desirable for humans to have a feral & half-crazed dog around, than that the canine companion should be calm and well-balanced in its blended social environment. So, the DW philosophy scores yet another (obvious) point, and naysayers can just go somewhere else to hang out with their frenzied and uptight pets.

Dogs & Philosophy

            If the Reader thinks back, the original question at the outset of this meditation was “What can you learn about philosophy from a dog?”; but to avoid being accused of frivolity and idle speculation, the question was changed slightly to, “What can a dog teach us about the philosophical life?” Now it seems, however, (as if I had not known all along!) that there may also be strong justification for considering the more formal, historical connections that create an association between the human-dog relationship and philosophy.

            We have already seen that there are really two primary categories of dog-ish philosophy, and that the human partners of canine colleagues need to carefully discern among the various types of canine joys on offer. In the first category are some of the broader and more intuitive philosophical lessons that humans might readily consider adopting from canine life-curricula, and these are associated with Joy. There are the joys of eating and napping, yawning, lounging, digging, and scratching oneself. In the second philosophical category we can group the “other,” more strictly body-oriented canine joys: the joys of mutual butt sniffing, of yarking, of butt-scooting, of poop-snacking, the joys of establishing toilet routines, and the joys surrounding the care and maintenance, by puppy, of puppy pudenda.

            The choice is entirely ours to determine to what degree we wish to participate in the full experience of canine joie de vivre, or whether we might not wish to be somewhat more discriminating in our selection from among so many joys.

Dogs have actually played quite a diverse role in the history of Western philosophy, occupying everything from metaphor to proverb, some flattering, and others less so.  One thinks almost automatically of Schopenhauer, of course, and wishes that his apparently extremely curmudgeonly character had benefited more from his long habit of associating with fluffy, four-footed philosophers. To cite another example: in Book II (376a-b) of Plato’s Republic Socrates imagines the somewhat ironic possibility that a dog can be a “true philosopher,” if in fact the dog-ish quality in question is nothing more than to have knowledge of known things and ignorance of things not known. However, more significant to our reflection than these cursory references and allusions, is that in ancient Greece there was even a school of philosophy whose adherents were known as the Cynics—the Dog-philosophers (Greek: Κυνικοί - Kynikoi).

            The origins of Cynicism as a school of philosophical thought are generally laid at the feet of Antisthenes (c. 445–365 BC) who, like Plato, was a student of Socrates. So what, then, might be the overlap between the ideas espoused by the Dog-philosophers of antiquity, the Kynikoi, and the more modern philosophical gleanings from our domesticated dog teachers, which have been thus far suggested?

            According to Donald Dudley, there are four reasons why the Cynics chose the moniker of Dog-philosophers for themselves.

1.     “First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads.

2.     The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it.

3.     The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy.

4.     The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them.”

For the Kynikoi of old, of whom Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 412-323 BC) was certainly the most famous, the purpose of life was to live virtuously, freely, and in simplicity, mentally and physically, which was to say, to live in agreement with nature and free from a life of possessions. Most of the anecdotes concerning this ascetic life of Diogenes the philosopher come from Diogenes Laertius (200-250 AD), the famous biographer to the Greek philosophers, who said, among other things, that the philosophical D. used to sleep in a tub, eat raw meat, and have a ready tongue for delivering acerbic and satiric commentary concerning people’s behavior.

            Diogenes seemed interested primarily in living a life marked by freedom from things and material austerity. He emphasized the public naturalness of the body-life, which included belching, evacuation, and “laying air biscuits” (per Epictetus, albeit rendered in modern vernacular) whenever and wherever; and assumed along with Aristotle after him, the virtue of correctly understanding a man’s life in this world. What this meant was that men should live the philosophical life, which is the good life, the well-reasoned life, the self-sufficient life – i.e., remembering that they are a unit composed of a reasoning element and a biological element, and neglecting neither; that men have only a short time to adventure through the play-ground of this world; and that men should reason well about this world, and not get all caught up and twisted in the ways of pleasure, or of fame and good reputation, or of wealth and possessions.

            As an aside: some have argued that many of the more austere characteristics of Kynikoi philosophy would also become relevant to the life and in the teachings of Jesus from Nazareth, which in his day was situated in a Hellenistic region known for its Cynic philosophers.

From the panoply of the almost infinitely wide variety of puppy pleasures, we have seen that some of a dog’s joyful activity lends itself well to philosophical interpolation into the realm of human occupation, while we moderns may wish to approach other types of joyful canine behavior with a little more reserve, especially those that seem to be more strictly concerned with the hilarities of personal puppy hygiene, snacking habits, nasal-rectal introductions, etc. From our all-too brief consideration of the Kynikoi of old, however, it would seem that many of them might have been more interested in the shock value associated with the bodily hilarities of our canine friends, rather than with the other, “higher” joys of pooch philosophy.

            Go now, and live joyfully. Or, translated into Border collie-ese: Enjoy. Live long! Stay focused!

For further reading: The philosopher’s dog: friendships with animals; Do Dogs Have Morality?; Schopenhauer: Dogs Are Preferable To Humans; on Schopenhauer and his dogs; My Dog: The Paradox Book at The Oatmeal Shop.

Ad Hoc re media coverage & the Law: Equality and Justice are not equivalences—sometimes with tragic consequences.

AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, FILE

Well, that is certainly some elephant that will be standing right smack in the middle of a Michigan courtroom if the lawyers have their way! Many of us have recently become aware of the tragic shooting, by a white homeowner in a very white suburb of Detroit, of a black intoxicated woman who was standing on his front porch in the middle of the night (between 4-5 a.m.) and pounding on his door. This is a tragedy of truly American proportions… and no one with an inkling of sanity or humanity should wish to take sides in this story, because every side has already lost in the human tragedy. Yet to hear the media tell the tale, the lawyers and legal analysts in the case all seem to be gearing up to heap a layer of legal tragedy upon an already unfortunate core of American historical and sociological tragedy.

            This new American tragedy, which begins to rival Greek tragedy in the convolution of its storyline, could be called: The Black Girl is Dead; So Now Let’s Kill the White Guy too Just to Make Sure That Equality Happens for Everyone! It is telling that there would be no interesting media story had the shooter and the victim both been either white (an unfortunate incident in suburban America?) or black (same old, same old). What this means, however, is that the mechanism that seems to be framing this tragic story so far is the material substitution of Equality, for Justice—more plainly stated: the substitution of racial equality (or, both black and white must suffer) for the more Just consideration concerning what, precisely, the crime is in this story.

My reflection is not about the hard facts of the events of November 2^nd: 19 year-old woman bangs on a stranger’s house door in early morning hours, and ends up shot by the male homeowner. These are the facts that tell of tragedy at a very human level—they are the simple, neutral plot lines of a failure to communicate, and subsequent misfortune and loss. They do not, however, tell us what this particular story is about; and what it is about, it seems to me, is clearly about home-bound notions of race and fear enabled by a promiscuous environment of weapons ownership. After all, it was not this man, the Shooter, who was out prowling around trying to criminally impose his rather broken worldview on some unsuspecting victim; rather, all the complexities of the real world came pounding on his door in the middle of the night, and shaking him out of sleep in his own home, discovered that he was not up to the task of acting like an adult in-the-world. But, then, there are a great many people in the world who already suspect that this might generally be the case with a great many, too many, Americans.

            This story’s “aboutness” may still yet be lost to us, the audience, because it seems that the attorneys in the case and legal minds in the know are trying to stick just to the Plot, and do not wish to explore the Intrigue—they do not wish to re-create the whole tragic Story in all its layered complexity and messiness, but they only wish to give us its “neutral” or “objective” bare bones. This is nothing more than a rather disingenuous attempt to use historical revisionism to hide the existence of the racial and fear-laden context surrounding this event.

            Now there are two ideas imbedded in this lawyerly desire to control the narrative. The first is that behind a thin veil of imagined neutrality is hidden the power of Politically Correct compulsion. In an archetypal Barabbas moment, the crowd is being stirred up and is beginning to clamor for blood; and the media play no small part in the stirring up of this hornet’s nest. The second is that, if this particular Huff-post avatar of the story (November 16^th) is to be believed, the lawyers for both sides in this case seem to be set on arguing for Equality – one dead girl = (the need for) one dead shooter (the Barabbas moment), instead of trying to establish whatever may begin to look like Justice in this event of human tragedy.

            The Cooley Law School professor who was interviewed as an expert analyst for the article, in fact, boldly says that, “both sides would be wise to stick to a "race-neutral" strategy. "Don't go there. Keep it on the facts." "Who wants to bring race into it? Everybody else. ... The defense doesn't want that. And the prosecution doesn't want to bring it in. I don't think they need to." There is clearly an overpopulation of bad lawyers in the world, if a professor of law can publicly make the case just for “facts,” as if facts have any existence apart from “spin” or narrative.

Now welcome to the Twilight Zone of “spin” and complexity. Nota Bene: This is the job the attorneys in this case should be doing, were they interested in the intricacies of Justice instead of some notion of populist Equality.

The Time: Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. on November 2, 2013; which means that it was either very late or very early, depending on your point of view, and that it was very dark outside.

The Shooter Setting: Dearborn Heights, MI.

·      Place (part 1): Detroit, MI, which is the 12^th most populous urban area in the United States. According to Wikipedia, at the time of the 2010 census Detroit reported 70.1% White, and 22.8% African American, which accounts for 92.9% of its population, the rest being composed of Hispanic/Latinos, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islanders, and other races.

·      Place (part 2): As is true with all populous urban areas, Detroit is an agglomeration of numerous smaller communities. So, more specifically on the question of Shooter Setting, this tragedy occurred in Dearborn Heights, which is an even more racially unmixed enclave of metropolitan Detroit. For Dearborn Heights Wikipedia reports that in the 2010 census the racial makeup of the city was a whooping 86.1% White, and 7.9% African American.

All things being equal, then, the white Shooter was asleep in his bed, which was in his home, which is situated in an overwhelmingly white bedroom community of metropolitan Detroit.

The Victim setting: Southfield, MI.

·      Place (residence): The victim was from Southfield, MI, which is only 21.3 km from Dearborn Heights, or about 18 minutes by car. At the time of the 2010 census, the racial makeup of the city was 70.3% African American, and 24.9% White, which shows a marked shift in demographics from the 2000 census, when Southfield was only 54.22% African American, and 38.83% White.

All things considered, then, the Victim found herself in an accident, very late at night, in a Looking Glass world… because Southfield (70.3% African American) is as remote from Dearborn Heights (70.1% White) as Timbuktu from the Halls of Montezuma.

These simple-to-obtain demographics do not yet provide us with any insight into why a man in the safety of his own home and behind his locked front door, the Shooter, would shoot with a shotgun and kill a girl who was on his porch and banging on his door in the middle of the night. It seems, certainly, to be an act of absolute irrationality. And the expert legal analyst, the Cooley Law School professor, seems to think that this case will hinge on a single factor: ‘"It's got to be reasonable," he said. "The question is: What would a reasonable person do in these circumstances?"’ So, according to our legal Expert Opinion, the Shooter is clearly guilty… he has to be guilty, because his action is not that of a reasonable person.

            Or is it? How might we reconstruct the worldview of a reasonable person living in Detroit, MI?

Point 1. For anybody living in the United States, let alone a reasonable person, race is clearly an issue in almost any case involving crime or the penal system.  America may have a black president, and the Supreme Court may have overturned the National Voter Registration Act in a moment of euphoria and blind ivory tour optimism, but race is still very much a live-wire issue for citizens not-living in the La-La Land of the U.S. Supreme Court justices. For Bill Maher’s take on the U.S. Supreme Court, questions of race, etc., follow the link.

Point 2. For a reasonable person living in Detroit, Detroit itself is clearly an issue in this case.

·      Case in point: On the official website for the French government, the French State urges their citizens to avoid traveling in certain areas of the United States, including the city of Detroit: “The center is not recommended after the close of business.”

·      Case in point: Just for kicks and giggles let us consider a Contest for Crime among various cities in the United States. We can limit ourselves to the following seven categories of criminal activity: crimes of Murder, Forcible Rape, Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Burglary, Larceny Theft, and Vehicle Theft.

o   Between Detroit and Chicago, where both cities roundly trounce the national average in most categories (there is a discrepancy in Larceny Theft), Detroit whoops Chicago resoundingly in the number of crimes per 100,000 People (data from 2006).

o   Between Detroit and Miami, where both cities again beat the national average in most categories (except, again, in Larceny Theft), Detroit stomps all over Miami (except, yet again, in Larceny Theft). What is there with Larceny Theft?

o   Between Detroit and New York City, (with several areas of discrepancy in terms of the national average), Detroit absolutely destroys New York City in every category.

In fact, according to Forbes, and despite a recent drop in its rate of violent crime, Detroit, MI is the single most dangerous city in America, coming in first for violent crime for a continuous 5 years. Their data was compiled from “the FBI’s Crime Statistics database, screening for cities with populations above 200,000,” which allowed Forbes to eliminate cities like Flint, Mich., with its record-busting murder rate of 63 per 100,000, but yet which still allows them “to focus on major American cities that presumably have full-fledged police departments.” In descending order of violence:

1.     Detroit, MI

2.     Oakland, CA

3.     St Louis, MO

4.     Memphis, TN

5.     Stockton, CA

6.     Birmingham, AL

7.     Baltimore, MD

8.     Cleveland, OH

9.     Atlanta, GA

10. Milwaukee, WI

So, what might we conclude about the worldview of an idealized Reasonable Person living in Detroit, MI? Well… WTF comes quickly to my mind, at the very least. Because suppose that I, Mr. Reasonable Philosopher, lived in or near Dearborn Heights, MI., and that, although I wanted to go to church on a Sunday morning, I dared not for fear that my home in this veil of tears would be robbed as I attended to my heavenly duties (Read the story here). Let us further suppose that I live in the most dangerous city in America, in a country whose record of gun ownership per 100 residents is # 1 in the entire world, at 89 guns per 100 residents. Mr. Reasonable Me in Detroit already begins to look markedly different from a Mr. Reasonable Me in the Netherlands, for example, which is # 112 on the list of gun ownership, at 3.9 guns per 100 residents. To the rest of the civilized world outside the United States, such an idealized Reasonable Person as these Detroit attorneys are seeking to reconstruct, would conceivably look very much like an insane savage.

            If, then, as the lawyers for both parties pretend, this trial should play itself out on a terrain of neutral and theoretical reason, was this man’s act reasonable in the most neutral sense of that term? Absolutely not. His action was completely unreasonable – irrational even. In much the same way, it would be irrational that I should shoot the Anonymous Someone [knowing, as I do, that 81% of the population of the Netherlands is Caucasian of Germanic or Gallo Celtic descent—that is to say, they look like me so there is no automatic sense of alienation between us] who rings our doorbell in Middelburg (Netherlands) in the middle of the night on a Friday or Saturday, which the kids around here seem to enjoy doing on a regular basis (which is why, I suppose, doorbells around here all have shutoff switches). Why would it be irrational for me to shoot them? Because I “know” them without knowing them. I know they are like me; that they do not wish me harm, either to my person, my family, or my property; I know that, for the most, they also do not ring my doorbell armed; nor do they have any particular malice in ringing my doorbell; they are just stupid. So were we to follow this lawyerly line of idealized reasoning, the Shooter in Detroit is not only unreasonable, he is a raving lunatic; and the conclusion of the trial at a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion.

            However, there is another type of possible irrationality in this situation, which is the irrationality of fear. How does one rationally explain fear, an emotion, an inherent irrationality that comes of living in a jungle, of being surrounded by danger and Hostile Otherness? It is not possible. So, in fact the race question and the climate of fear engendered by the dark Other who happens to find herself in a significantly white-bread milieu, as much as we may find it reprehensible on a variety of levels, does in fact give reasonable explanation for an irrational act. An act that is intellectually unreasonable because it is thoughtless, but which is not emotionally unreasonable; because like the stream to the ocean, this type of discriminatory act flows from the wellsprings of indiscriminate fear.

Follow-up:

• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-dearbornheights/tearful-judge-gives-man-17-years-for-michigan-porch-shooting-idUSKBN0GY14C20140903
• https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2015/06/12/renisha-mcbride-civil-settlement/71160078/ 
• http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2017/01/25/michigans-high-court-weigh-porch-shooting-case/97040888/

 

November's Blog_The Existentialist “Project” & the Ostensible “Problem” of Existence.

Douglas Adam’s computer, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, famously spits out the following answer –42, when asked the question, what is the meaning of life? So not daring to tread where even fictional computers only go sluggishly and with trepidation, let me distinguish between the hitchhiker’s question concerning the meaning of life, and a much more focused reflection on the so-called “problem” of existence.

… “to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe” (Salmon Rushdie, Joseph Anton). It is a rather wonderful irony that most of existentialist philosophy is actually existentialist and Nobel Prize winning literature. This makes reading transpositions of existentialist themes and perceptions, from authors such as Luigi Pirandello (1934), Hermann Hesse (1946), André Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), and Samuel Beckett (1969), much more interesting, aesthetically satisfying, and emotionally inspiring.

            This is a noteworthy advantage when reading existentialist fiction, because for a rather long time the only other alternative was the point of view represented by the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann edited the first, and for a long while only, existentialist primer intended for English-language students of philosophy, so for texts from philosophers of the existentialist persuasion he had the market cornered; and of course on that corner only Kaufmann’s dictum reigned supreme: that the criterion for belonging to the club of existentialists is to be depressed! This, notwithstanding that Kaufmann’s life work was the rehabilitation of the most joyful of all existentialists, Nietzsche, who, if we consider philosophy only historically, was really only a proto-existentialist.

            An exception that confirms our above-stated rule that existentialism is most cogently expressed in the language of prize-winning literati, is the Russian existentialist writer, Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who, although certainly worthy to be a NP recipient, had the misfortune to flourish well before the onset of Nobel Prizes in Literature, which did not begin until 1901. There is also the Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an exquisite and exquisitely existentialist writer if ever there was; and if in their infinite wisdom the Nobel Committee did not deem Borges fit to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which they did not, then it must be that the esteemed NP Committee Members had already begun to follow the type of selection peculiarities that would later characterize the train(-wreck) of thought that would lead them to award the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Barack Obama (ostensibly not for the following non-peaceful types of things: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting military intervention in Somalia, Libya, and Syria; escalating the drone war in Pakistan; Guantanamo; extending the Patriot Act; etc.).

            To put clearly the obvious point to the argument: the writing of existentialist littérateurs is significantly and just all-around better than the writing of existentialist philosophers. By way of demonstrating the unfortunate philosophical standard—if you are looking to pass a thoroughly soporific moment, crack one of the covers of existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers who, although obviously superbly educated, reads like a dehydrated mud puddle.

Common to all of these contributors to the existentialist project, of course, is that they follow their own inimitable visions and imaginary fancies concerning the World of Men; and each narrates into existence heuristic forays into that World outside of the normal high-ways and by-ways of the classical thought tradition, thus exposing to our view and for our consideration the almost infinite variety of themes associated with the existentialist realization of Man’s Coming-of-Age, of our radical solitude and vulnerability. In language borrowed from Rushdie (who has only won the Booker Prize for literature), story telling of this philosophical sort is in fact an invitation for us to enter into the existential frame of interiority, to recognize that the World within is without borders. Formulaically, the Open Self equals the Open Universe. So Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton:

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. […] There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back.

This is a literature that puts us in the awkward position of having to reflect on our lives from womb to tomb; and in that reflection we will be called upon to give an accounting for what we will Stand For in the space & time between the extremes. This is a literature that asks from us that we enter into the world of Symbol; that we allow our life to become transmogrified into a “Standing For”; and that the days of our lives should become representative or reflective of some notion of Otherness, some Idea(l)—that we should strive to embody the Symbolic Life.

Heads & Hands. A common device used by both littérateurs and philosophers, and which is certainly worth our meditating upon, is the rather typical existentialist opposition between Homo Faber, man as maker or doer, and Homo Sapiens, man as thinker or knower. A superb illustration of this device frames Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund, where Narcissus will represent the life of the mind and Goldmund the “handy” life of the creator or artist; and Hesse’s story-telling talent is such that all the peripeties of his two protagonists will carefully shadow the singular antagonism in our own Western lives between the life of the mind and the life of the body. When one takes this particular device, opposing the doer to the thinker, and applies it to the Western philosophical Life-world, which is becoming ever-more defined by all the various types of materialisms, then the existential dilemma achieves a certain philosophical poignancy and urgency, which is exactly what the NP Committee Members have not failed to recognize in the great existentialist literature of the last 100+ years.

            However, if we had only the philosophers and their generally impermeable writing styles to inform us on this, the very intimate confrontation between our bodies and our minds, then it would look something like the analysis composed by the Stanford professor of German and philosophy, Kurt Reinhardt, in his 1952 book, The Existentialist Revolt. Reinhardt introduces his topic by considering the merits of a diagnosis about Western culture, doomed to materialism and despair, which is advanced by a German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in his 1917 masterwork, The End of the West.

There is no doubt that if his premises of an all-inclusive materialism and naturalism were correct, the conclusions presented in The End of the West are logically conclusive and thus equally correct. If the distinguishing mark of man is indeed “his hand” rather than his head, then such a being might actually achieve its greatest triumphs in the creation of “millions and billions of horsepower. But if man’s distinguishing marks are his intellect and free will, then the entire picture changes, and the essentially different premises call for essentially different conclusions and solutions. If in fact the crisis of human existence issues from the confused mind, the sick heart, and the perverted will of modern Western man, then he and his civilization are not irretrievably doomed or lost, because then even at this critical juncture human nature will be able to rouse itself and to rise again, to challenge the “spirit of the age” and to recover the wholeness and balance of a truly human life and civilization.

Reinhardt’s book allows us to cherry-pick yet another splendid illustration of the device of opposing the doer to the thinker, and then applying that to the Western philosophical Life-world. According to Reinhardt, French personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) frames his thinking in a parallel between “creative nihilism” and “destructive nihilism.” Creative nihilism, which characterizes the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is of the head (Homo Sapiens). It is an intellectual nihilism that sees the death of philosophy and the life of the mind through valuation of faith and the anti-intellectual life. This nihilism is “creative” because it is “preliminary” in nature, which simply means that Reason precedes Action. Destructive nihilism (Homo Faber), on the other hand, is where the hand is occupied with actual physical nihilism, the destruction of man and his planet. This type of nihilism is, to state the obvious, rather definitive in nature.

            There is also Reinhardt on a Nietzschean oppositionalism, citing an 1873 reference concerning barbarism—that “Western hearts had been emptied of the strong and noble sentiments of a heroic past”: ‘…barbarism in human minds, which had lost their sense of direction and orientation, and of the barbarism in human works and deeds which had become the stillborn children of intellectual and moral chaos.’”

            Finally, Reinhardt reminds us, in the words of French Catholic and existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), that Man is Homo Viator (a “traveling man,” a voyager, or explorer), constantly unterwegs between the world-at-hand, as Heidegger might have said, the world he creates with his hands, and the world pulsating in his head, the world of meaning and purpose and intent, the philosophical world. The journey, when conceived of in this Heracleitan kind of way, is between the greater sophon, divine wisdom, which is immanent in the cosmic dialectic, and human phronesis, “introspective listening” to the way, or the being, of the world around us.

Now although the ideas with which Reinhardt is engaged are certainly and obviously interesting and important in and of themselves, and even engrossing, their stylized philosophical articulations have nothing of the littérateur’s je-ne-sais-quoi related to the turning of a phrase in the art of telling the Story. This is perhaps history of philosophy at its best; but it is just not the stuff of a Nobel in Literature.

The Horns of the Human Dilemma. Another component common to collaborators in the existentialist project, is that central to their narrative plots is the “problem” of existence.

                  I should perhaps concede at this point that, before reading existentialist literature, it had never occurred to me that “being here” in the world was especially problematic (beyond muddling through the usual predicaments of growing up, finding a job, thinking about relationships, and difficulties of that sort)… nonetheless, with respect to existence, the philosophical dilemma upon whose horns we are ostensibly poised, is that we are here instead of not here (to speak like Parmenides by way of Heidegger); and so also, by extension, being here, what should we do to pass the time? (When stated like this, though, the problem actually begins to sound a lot more like a religious rather than a philosophical inquiry – a sort of Pirandelloesque, six-characters-in-search-of-an-author (i.e., a god) problem of origins.)

            In another post that also deals with this “problem” of existence, I suggested that we humans, each and every one, are not any particular “thing,” but rather like so many layers of an onion without an actual being or core at the center. I have since come to realize, however, that while I really like my onion metaphor, as I really like being able to “blame” Heraclitus for the philosophical direction of that earlier reflection, I did not really like discovering, as well, that I was following a point of view also shared by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. So I have decided to give equal time for the question to another French existentialist intellectual, Albert Camus. Perhaps it is just that I find Camus more personally likeable than the rancunier Sartre. Color me vindictive.

            On this one question, though, inspired by an intuition from Heraclitus, which Sartre translated into philosophical constructs and I blogified into an onion-like metaphor, Sartre and I have both found it plausible that the human individual is not some essential “thing,” some substantive self, some type of noun-idea.  Rather, Man is a Verbal idea – a Deciding and an Acting. The existentialist conclusion from this premise is then rather straight-forward and unavoidable: that because our decisions and actions are 1) absolutely arbitrary—in the infinite diversity of decisions and actions the ones we choose are simply from among an infinite many, and 2) profoundly irrelevant to some bigger, and specifically pertinent picture—life has no obvious or intrinsic single goal, it would therefore seem that, along with our decisions and actions, which have no specifically ultimate arguable point, neither does Mankind as such have one precise and decisive point to it.

            On this particular question of being, however, unlike Heraclitus, Sartre, and this humble teacher of philosophy, Camus follows Friedrich Nietzsche, holding that the individual is in fact some essential “thing,” and that there is in fact a fundamental nature to the animal that is Man.

            Whatever we think Man is ultimately, though, He is still very much alone in an unanchored kosmos (read: surrounded entirely by immanence with no hope of transcendence); and cocooned by despair and absurdity, He is become defined by a condition of Worldlessness, which is the precondition for the existential possibility of self-creation. Camus will find this idea so persuasive, in fact, that in the 1938 autobiographical collection called Noces, he will even transform the existential life-journey, the adventure of coming-home-to-self, into a type of Odyssean journey Home, a Nostos : « ce n’est pas si facile de devenir ce qu’on est. »  It is on this point, precisely, that Camus, the intellectual and journalist, will oppose Sartre, famous philosopher and arrogant jerk.  

            Philosophical one-upmanship notwithstanding, it is an interesting irony of history that while Sartre may have possibly won the greater academic battle for existentialism on the question of being, it will still be Camus who will most influence general international readers of existential literature, with books such as L’Etranger. After all, who has ever read Sartre’s massive 1943 opus, Etre et le néant (which tips the scales at 722 pages in the French edition), and can still claim to have some kind of a life?

Zarathustra summons from outre-tombe. Another piece of the existentialist project, which goes well beyond how the various story-tellers, both littérateur and philosopher, frame their stories and which devices they use, is that each seeks deliberately to make of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, arguably the West’s first full-bodied albeit fictional existentialist, a paraphrase into real-world categories of human existence. These translations will be multifaceted, certainly, and not necessarily recognizable for any one quality that might bind them together as a particular type. Yet it may still be argued that each translation, each fictional incarnation, no matter how they differ from one another, is a plausible imagined-reflection of some aspect of the Zarathustrian type, as that type could appear in the World of Men. Ultimately, it will be up to the Reader to determine what the various characters in the various narratives symbolize, and whether the journey of those characters on their way to Übermensch-Symbol is actually successful, either as embodying a faithful son of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or simply as representing a credible Life of Man.

            Zarathustra can look out at us through the eyes of Camus’ Merseult (L’Etranger), for example, as he can be translated through the binary philoso-phrenia of Harry Haller (Steppenwolf). Normally in his writings, Hesse tended to split the mind/body problem classically, such as he does through the characters of Narcissus (mind-intellectual) and Goldmund (body-artist) in the eponymously titled work. His depiction of Haller, though, not unlike that of his Siddhartha, unifies the dichotomy in one person, one body.

            A quality that would seem to knit together many of Sartre’s existential protagonists, is an overwhelming feeling of nausea (Les mains sales; La nausée); but the sine que non characteristic of his Zarathustras, which Sartre makes unmistakably clear in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, is that in the person of the existentialist, Zarathustra is a man (or woman) of action.

            In a work such as Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, on the other hand, the Zarathustrian type might not necessarily be reflected through one of the characters, nor even be implicitly housed in the Omniscient Narrator. Rather, the Reader may be called upon to recognize that the situational outworking of the plot may itself be the subject of the piece, and that Beckett might perhaps be suggesting that the most relevant way to speak of a god who is expected to arrive, to be there (present), is to speak of the God(ot) who is not there (absent).

            Zarathustra is also present in other existentialist literature, but perhaps only as a fragmented composite, where no one character has all the traits that we might associate with an Über-Man, with one who has achieved the freedom of having divested himself, intellectually, of the emotional and irrational accouterments of Culture. Diverse Zarathustrian traits might be shared among various characters, thus giving the impression that each of the players in the novel’s cast of characters is wandering around somewhere on the road toward the liberation of his own Thought-Life. This seems to me to be true of André Gide’s 1902 L’immoraliste.

            There are many ways to become waylaid in our thinking about this novel—that it is about homosexuality, or pedophilia, or evil; but this is to wander along the Holzwege of Gide’s thought-world, instead of daring to tread the high road of his fictional vision. For it is indisputable that Gide is attempting to characterize Zarathustrian qualities in L’immoraliste, which have little to do with specific forms of sexuality or with evil; he is taking us along on the journey back to the natural world (Penguin: 2000, 120), away from the masks (cities, labor, morality) created by men in their histories…. (Ibid, 110). Indeed, it is perhaps only in this way that the principal protagonist, Michel, reflects any recognizable quality of the Zarathustrian hero.

            Gide’s Ménalque, on the other hand, although he plays only a small part in the overall narrative of L’immoraliste, is a Zarathustrian hero of Wildean proportions; and it is through this character that we come to see just how impoverished Michel is, how pathetically dim his illumination, and how very much bound he is to the chains of his shallow thought-life. Ménalque incarnates Man-as-Choosing-Agent who is very much at home in himself in his world. He offers drink to others for their pleasure, but does not himself drink, because, he says, “I find sobriety a more powerful form of intoxication, one where I retain my lucidity. […] I seek to heighten life, not diminish it through intoxication.” Continuing the conversation with Michel, Ménalque lays out the existential underpinnings that explain his life:

. . . I hate resting. Possessions encourage this; when one feels secure one falls asleep. I love life enough to prefer to live it awake. So within all this wealth I preserve a sense of precariousness with which I aggravate, or at least intensify, my life. I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky. I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment . . .

Against the life-affirming light of this Zarathustrian existentialism, Michel is able to measure his own intellectual puniness and pastiness: “But how pale are mere words compared to actions! Wasn’t Ménalque’s life, his smallest action, a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? Now I understood that the moral lessons of the great philosophers of Antiquity were given as much by example as by words, if not more so.”

It seems fitting to close our meandering reflections on the Existentialist “Project” with a sentiment from Gide’s Ménalque, which, because it is so obviously and so fully inspired by Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism, could be said to lie at the heart of the very best of existentialist thought:

The Greeks created their ideals directly from life. The life of the artist was itself an act of poetic creation, the life of the philosopher the enactment of his philosophy. Both are bound up with life: instead of ignoring each other, philosophy fed poetry, and poetry expressed philosophy, with admirably persuasive results. Nowadays beauty no longer appears in action, action no longer aspires to be beautiful, and wisdom exists in a separate sphere.

October's Blog_Life-long Learners: The Degree of our Disquiet is the Measure of our Merit.

So what is the role and purpose of education? Why are our universities so all-fired committed to the liberal arts, which would have us, already through the diversity of our course subjects and readings, at least encounter if not “experience” the almost infinite layers of existential possibility reflected in the World of Storybook?

            The question is of interest, because journalists who specialize in education, and many times even the teachers themselves, often seem to miss the point of education in the democratic process. I recently slammed [25.09.13] an article that was trying to make the case that there is in America a toxic culture of testing; my criticism was that the writer entirely misses the point of education when she writes that, [Our] "ultimate goal is to help children live up to their potential to become happy adults who make positive contributions to society." Her point is of course all claptrap and nonsense... because while the discovery of "happiness" may be in fact the goal of the study of philosophy or perhaps even of religion, it is absolutely not the goal of education per se.

            It has been well said of education, and particularly in our undergraduate universities, that it is “the job of teachers to create productive discomfort—and to help young adults gain comfort with ambiguity.” This, I would contend, is the truest goal of the university education, both in the smaller as in the larger picture. Our education should in fact serve to alienate us from our foundational myths in the greater Culture that surrounds us, instead of trying to affirm our place in those myths in that Culture. This is the nature of fundamental ambiguity, of the equivocality that reaches through all the strata of our onion-layered self-life.

            This was also the conclusion yielded by some of the more perceptive analyses of the Canon Wars. On the one hand, the National Association of Scholars has made the case that the Western Canon of books was created to preserve “the Western intellectual heritage”; more thoughtful minds, however, such as Mark Lilla, historian of ideas at Columbia University, have made the better case that “‘the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West […] Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is ‘the most alienating experience possible. When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.’”

            On this reading, what makes “greatness” in a book, and what makes that particular book worth studying, is not that it reaffirms us in our narrative “being” (e.g., being-American, being-African American, being-Woman, etc.), but rather that such a book challenges the very parameters of our cultural being, thereby serving to alienate us from our mytho-cultural foundations, from the narrative “being/s” with which we identify. By alienating us, by making us the Outsiders or Strangers in our own cultural narrative, studying and learning works of greatness drives us forward on the path away from the psychological and intellectual comfort of our informing narrative, and toward more universal possibilities for expressing ourselves in the existentiality of our here-and-now. Learning and education are two prongs of a Sartrean “situation”; and we can rethink and continually rework both in order to make them more nearly correspond to our idea(l)s and needs.

Miscellaneous models of malaise with respect to the life of the mind. Perhaps the most disturbing model for intellectual malaise is the breakdown of the I-You relationship typified by the Cassandra Complex, a syndrome described by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). If we recast the Cassandra story in terms of the classroom, the clear moral-of-the-story would be that Cassandra, the teacher, although speaking about things truthfully and relevantly, can no longer be “heard” by the audience (students). This model in education disturbs precisely because it describes the final worthlessness of speaking truthfully (about anything and everything) in our classrooms, thereby portending the death-through-irrelevance both of teaching, and of the greater life of the mind in general.

            Significant parts of Cassandra’s story are contained in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (circa lines 1140). A priestess who was enabled to foretell the future through the prophetic gift, Cassandra scorned the advances made to her by the god of that gift, Apollo. It could have been well said that “hell hath no ‘fury like a god scorned,’” but Congreve (1670-1729) was otherwise inspired at the moment. According to Aeschylus the Olympian Apollo did not take the scorning very well, but apparently nor do women if Congreve be believed, so Apollo placed a curse on her: she keeps the power of foresight afforded by the prophetic gift, but no one believes her predictions—her audience cannot hear her.

            Cassandra prophetically foresees the destruction of Troy, even announcing the equine gift of the Greeks (the famous Trojan Horse); she foresees the death of her brother, the Trojan Hector; and, taken captive at war’s end by Agamemnon, great king of the Greeks, and led back to his home, she informs Agamemnon –but to no avail, that his wife has been preparing a rather pointed welcome for his return (remember that Clytemnestra, together with her lover, Aegisthus, slays Agamemnon with a knife in his bath). Everyone eventually dies miserably. Ouf—and welcome to the world of Greek tragedy.

Other models for malaise in thinking and perceiving might be derived from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This lovely comedy is woven through and through with farcical threads, of course, but the framework for the comedic action is composed of the classic elements of mis-take, mis-information, and mis-identification. If we transfer the Titania (Queen of the Fairies) “situation” to the classroom, for example, we discover a situation in which the student, in this metaphor Titania, is deliberately tricked/deceived by Oberon (King of the Fairies), i.e., the teacher. Is it possible, following out the implications of this metaphor, that We the People, in the form of students in public education, are being deceived by our schools? To what end? And, what exactly would be the form of the deception being practiced, and what the content of the deceit?

            In the original Shakespeare telling there is Titania, Oberon’s queen, who is deliberately deceived by her Lord…  Oberon explains his purpose and plan in soliloquy:

OBERON

Having once this juice,
I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.
The next thing then she waking looks upon,
Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,
She shall pursue it with the soul of love:
And ere I take this charm from off her sight,
As I can take it with another herb,
I'll make her render up her page to me.

Another instance of con- & per-ceptual malaise in the play comes about when Puck, who understands Oberon’s purpose, actually mis-takes the players and thus anoints the wrong set of eyes.

OBERON

What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken quite
And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight:
Of thy misprision must perforce ensue
Some true love turn'd and not a false turn'd true.

PUCK

Then fate o'er-rules, that, one man holding troth,
A million fail, confounding oath on oath.

And this first mis-take yields a second mis-take and malaise… where Oberon, when he does not see the expected results of his planned trumpery, believes Puck has been negligent or deliberately wayward.

OBERON

This is thy negligence: still thou mistakest,
Or else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully.

PUCK

Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.
Did not you tell me I should know the man
By the Athenian garment be had on?
And so far blameless proves my enterprise,
That I have 'nointed an Athenian's eyes;

Yet another model for malaise associated with knowledge or understanding might be derived from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear’s malaise is that of a man, a king, who has had all the advantages of being a good king through long years; who has successfully raised up and married off two of his three daughters; but then, in the winter of his life, Lear does something irredeemably stupid—he asks a type of question that most children already know is laden with foolishness, which is to ask his daughters how much they love their father. The first two daughters answer with exaggeration because they stand to inherit great wealth and lands; the youngest, Cordelia, refuses hyperbole and answers the naked truth:

CORDELIA

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

It would seem, however, that this once worthy man and king is no longer in the way to understand correctly anything of his situation – either to appreciate that his question to his daughters is inappropriate, because it is not “meet” or fitting to ask such questions publically when there is the possibility of great advantage in the balance, or to recognize that the “bond” of the daughter to love her father is entirely “meet,” which a father must not then tempt into public transgression by invitation to hyperbole.

            In this metaphor of malaise, Lear represents the individual or citizen who has had all the benefits that accrue to one through life-long participation in one’s society, but who, moved by some fatal impulse of whimsicality and irrationality, decides to reject and then to act despite every bit of collective wisdom and interpersonal insight accumulated through a long experience of the world.

            Lear’s situation could also perhaps be considered a type of Ted Cruz moment, manifest in the spiteful hypocrisy so apparent in one who has had all the advantages a society can offer, has arrived at a certain level of affluence, but who then actively works to keep others from accessing similar advantages. Nevertheless, the model of malaise suggested by Shakespeare’s Lear is a little more challenging for me to understand and to accept than the straightforward hypocrisy of a Ted Cruz; for short of explaining the actions of this king through some type of mental illness, which makes it simpler to interpret the play in and to the modern reader, this interpretation clearly detracts from the tragic action of the drama, and renders the play entirely less dramatic in the sense of men acting in their world. Shakespeare’s Lear seems to represent the thoroughly Modern Everyman in the irrationality of his approach to his existential “situation.”

KING LEAR

Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied--Ha! waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

A final interpretative difficulty in this most modern of Shakespeare’s plays is that Lear seems to be less motivated by some comprehensible and realistic ideology or design, with which I may disagree although I can understand it, than simply by a meanness of spirit, which I neither understand nor sanction. It is in this respect that Lear most seems to be the precursor or archetype for our modern Ted Cruz (different article).

There are yet two nobler examples of intellectual malaise in King Lear, the first of which is represented by the Fool, and the second, by Edgar disguised as a mad man, Tom o’Bedlam, who will take on a second fool’s roll, the Cassandra roll, in an attempt to counter Lear’s folly, to reason the old king back onto more sensible thoroughfares.  This mad man plays the roll of a modern Socrates – the “noble philosopher” who continues to speak the truth to the foolhardy Lear who, although still careening along the byways of his folly, is yet beginning to slow down and to re(dis)cover his senses.

KING LEAR

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.

When we rub up against greatness in the course of our education, the friction from that encounter should make of us Outsiders to our thought-world, the Rejected, the Alienated, Strangers. As we have seen, such Strangers are known to us from our readings in literature and philosophy, and even the New Testament writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (Ch.13:2) encourages his readers not to neglect “to show hospitality to Strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” In our current lived-world, one variation of these Strangers would perhaps be translated by the modern Truth-tellers and Whistle-blowers, by those “Fools” who tell truths some do not wish to be trafficked in the public arena.

In his novel Creole Belle, James Lee Burke (pp. 524-525) was kind enough to provide the summary of our reflection:

Is there any worse curse than approval? Have you ever learned anything new from people who accept the world as it is? The bravest individuals I have ever known appear out of nowhere and perform heroic deeds we normally associate with paratroopers, but they’re so nondescript that we can’t remember what they look like after they have left the room. […] Regardless, it’s a fine thing to belong to a private club based on rejection and difference. I’ll go a step further. I believe excoriation is the true measure of our merit.

What if this is true, that excoriation is the real measure of merit for the thoughtful mind –the educated mind? It would sure explain why there are so many unworthy, “Cruz-ean”-type voices screeching against our tympana, while so many excellent voices, abraded and discarded, go unattended.