One of my talents, as Karen has told me, is thinking and responding on the fly. Thus, when I made a status update on myface today it unfurled a nice conversation between friends. Not unlike yesterday's posting, here's what I've written (so far) under my status update:
Paul Boshears status:
It seems ruthless, yes, that American society has no problem imagining giant robots destroying the world (we'd even entertain a sequel - why hello Transformers 2), but it's inconceivable to us that we'd make access to health care universal. (2 hours ago)
Q: Who's going to pay for it?
Paul:
Let's be adults here: the only people that are going to benefit from this talk of "who's going to pay?" aren't going to be us (those that would benefit the most) - as usual - it will be those with the most money (those that see no immediate gain). The problem is that those in a position to stall this development (of common decency), once again, cannot see beyond immediate benefits. Look at the rhetoric: it's clear single payer will happen, but those in power want to steer the conversation such that it makes sense to postpone another 60 years. That's immoral and it's a shame. Meanwhile, those vehemently opposed to providing universal health care because of "financial" principles are up in arms about not being able to spend more than this amount on things that simply explode and create a less-stable world. Literally would rather burn the money than invest it in us.
Q: But I already pay about 30% of my income in taxes, why should I have to pay for the nation's sick?
Paul:
Why don't people see that this attitude of "why should I pay taxes?" is precisely what leads to corruption? The end result is that those that can afford to pay taxes the least don't have access to the resources (accountants, lobbying firms, etc.) that would reduce their tax expenditures; while those that can afford to pay the most, perversely, also can afford to pay the armies of accountants, lobbyists, lawyers, etc. to ensure that they actually pay less in taxes than the rest of us. That's immoral and it's shameful.
Q: I'm not saying I'm against health care reform, I just think the hold up is around who will pay for it [I'm also going to expand this to suggest that what is implied here is that it's normal to have these kinds of stalls, although my commenter did not say this]
Paul:
That's what I'm saying, though: it's a shame that those that can hold this up will do so and present the hold up as though the matter were mind-bendingly difficult; meanwhile, it's no leap of the imagination that Bruce Willis could save us from a meteor impact. Or that we could spend trillions of dollars on destroying other people's countries.
Q: But if giant robots can run off imaginary resources, why can't our government?
Paul:
since we are that imaginary resource, why shouldn't we be well-maintained? What's the point of supporting a government (that taxes us anyways) if our government won't support us? Isn't that the essence of commonwealth?
Q: I am not convinced that our government will do even a reasonably okay job at health care should this succeed. They can barely manage to get my driver's license correct; why would I trust them with my life?
Paul:
You already do trust them with your life: look at the roads you drive on; the food you eat, the materials in your home.
What is it about universal health care that is going to turn all our doctors into medicine men from the neolithic age? Will their thermometers stop working and the antibiotics rise against us?
Q: The point of supporting the government is that you don't get thrown in prison. Our economy is being devoured at both ends, and making healthcare "free" instead of fixing it.... well if the system crashes badly enough they might rebuild it right, so there is hope. I don't know exactly who you mean by "we", but I'm not so sure the american people as a whole count as energon, at least not as a matter of right.
Paul:
all we mean by rights these days, it seems, is the ability to own something. the first thing we should be able to then own is our bodies, how else will we perform in an economy without this?
Q: What I mean is that I think the government is already far too large and I don't think they need to get bigger. I do not want or need them to invade every single aspect of life.
The house is burning, what do you do; try to put it out and salvage the rubble or pour gasoline on the flames and hope something rises from the ashes?
Paul:
The house isn't on fire and why would anyone think to put gas on it? This is precisely the "Bruce Willis and Will Smith can save us if only we had the right nuke" kind of thinking that I'm trying to illuminate here.
Q: I'm just saying, people will never realise what they should do until they see the consequences of what they shouldn't.
Paul:
well, I think that there have been numerous examples of people in all areas and all times that have had foresight; in fact, the lack of foresight is the implicit argument in this whole conversation.
the trouble with foresight is that it requires courage on the part of those that have it. The irony of hindsight is that it seems so clear to all the cowards why they shouldn't have spoken-up.
Q: Unfortunately no one's agreeing and really, we're all one big pile of tiny factions, instead of a large group of people thinking together for the common good. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of universal healthcare, I hope we get it; but it's going to take something big to shake the American people and say, "Hey! Think about it!"
Paul:
Something big or just conversations like these?
And I'm really resistant to the idea that we are a collection of factions. We have a long tradition in the English-speaking world of talking about being of a group. Like John Donne in the 17th century wrote: No man is an island... every man's death lesson's me for I am a part of humanity... ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Talkin' 'bout health care
What follows is a discussion on a friend's facebook page about universal health care. It's just what I wrote so it may seem a little disjointed:
As one of those that had no health care (going to school full time, paying for it outta pocket, and working full-time waiting tables, which of course doesn't offer health insurance) and then broke his elbow (meaning he couldn't work any more); I can assure you, those millions of us CANNOT afford the $30,000+ to pay for healthcare. I owe more in ... Read Moremedical bills than I've made in the last two years. Thankfully I went to Japan, where they do have universal healthcare, and I received great treatment at a fraction of the cost in the States (wisdom teeth pulled out and weekly treatments for a month all for less than $800). Now I'm back in the U.S. and I am shocked at the rhetoric against universal healthcare. How can we not afford to invest in those that make this country great, the people of this country?
Just saying: the #1 reason people over 40 years of age file bankruptcy is medical bills. A quick google search of bankruptcy and medical debt gets these:
1) American Journal of Medicine:
"Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these
medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income."
2)Medical Debt Huge Bankruptcy Culprit:
3) Medical Bills Leading Cause of Bankruptcy, Harvard Study Finds
The U.S. spends more money on its military than EVERY OTHER COUNTRY COMBINED. Why can we afford to spend money blowing stuff up but can't spend money helping our own citizens live?
The real quality of health, ask any doctor, is measured in prevention. The most common thing doctors recommend for maintaining health is exercise and regular check-ups. On this account the U.S. health care system is hopelessly flawed.
What we have instead is a heroic model where we have the most expensive people and equipment to intervene when the... Read More intervention itself optimizes health the least.
Universal health care isn't about making sure everyone gets their own kidney dialysis machine, it's about making sure people don't need dialysis machines by encouraging people to do simple, cheap things, like visit a doctor one a year.
Going for regular check-ups isn't going to happen if parents have to choose between feeding their children for the next two months or sending themselves for an annual screening. In Okinawa we were required by law and by our employers to get an annual check-up. Karen was required to go more frequently because she has female parts. Had I been older I too would have had to go more frequently. Lesson: to change health culture you have to make access universal and create incentives for compliance.
As to eating bad foods:
You're going to think I've gone off the map but this is directly related to changing cultures.
Did you know that the Federal poverty rate is determined by a family's ability to ingest calories? It's true. What do you do, then? You get the most calorie-rich food you can find. What would that be? Yup, high fructrose corn syrup... Read More. It's ubiquitous, and thanks to three decades of gov't corn subsidies (by politicians touting the families first motto) it's not likely to go anywhere.
What's the result of 30 years of corn subsidies? A significant increase in "food" (if the development of Cheetos counts) production, yes, but a reduction in the nutrient distribution in the caloric intake of American families.
It's the most efficient thing in the world to feed families with bad-for-you food, and since we're defining poor as being able to get access to this food, no surprise that we have a positive feedback loop, like a snake eating its tail.
As one of those that had no health care (going to school full time, paying for it outta pocket, and working full-time waiting tables, which of course doesn't offer health insurance) and then broke his elbow (meaning he couldn't work any more); I can assure you, those millions of us CANNOT afford the $30,000+ to pay for healthcare. I owe more in ... Read Moremedical bills than I've made in the last two years. Thankfully I went to Japan, where they do have universal healthcare, and I received great treatment at a fraction of the cost in the States (wisdom teeth pulled out and weekly treatments for a month all for less than $800). Now I'm back in the U.S. and I am shocked at the rhetoric against universal healthcare. How can we not afford to invest in those that make this country great, the people of this country?
Just saying: the #1 reason people over 40 years of age file bankruptcy is medical bills. A quick google search of bankruptcy and medical debt gets these:
1) American Journal of Medicine:
"Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these
medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income."
2)Medical Debt Huge Bankruptcy Culprit:
3) Medical Bills Leading Cause of Bankruptcy, Harvard Study Finds
The U.S. spends more money on its military than EVERY OTHER COUNTRY COMBINED. Why can we afford to spend money blowing stuff up but can't spend money helping our own citizens live?
The real quality of health, ask any doctor, is measured in prevention. The most common thing doctors recommend for maintaining health is exercise and regular check-ups. On this account the U.S. health care system is hopelessly flawed.
What we have instead is a heroic model where we have the most expensive people and equipment to intervene when the... Read More intervention itself optimizes health the least.
Universal health care isn't about making sure everyone gets their own kidney dialysis machine, it's about making sure people don't need dialysis machines by encouraging people to do simple, cheap things, like visit a doctor one a year.
Going for regular check-ups isn't going to happen if parents have to choose between feeding their children for the next two months or sending themselves for an annual screening. In Okinawa we were required by law and by our employers to get an annual check-up. Karen was required to go more frequently because she has female parts. Had I been older I too would have had to go more frequently. Lesson: to change health culture you have to make access universal and create incentives for compliance.
As to eating bad foods:
You're going to think I've gone off the map but this is directly related to changing cultures.
Did you know that the Federal poverty rate is determined by a family's ability to ingest calories? It's true. What do you do, then? You get the most calorie-rich food you can find. What would that be? Yup, high fructrose corn syrup... Read More. It's ubiquitous, and thanks to three decades of gov't corn subsidies (by politicians touting the families first motto) it's not likely to go anywhere.
What's the result of 30 years of corn subsidies? A significant increase in "food" (if the development of Cheetos counts) production, yes, but a reduction in the nutrient distribution in the caloric intake of American families.
It's the most efficient thing in the world to feed families with bad-for-you food, and since we're defining poor as being able to get access to this food, no surprise that we have a positive feedback loop, like a snake eating its tail.
Monday, July 27, 2009
UPDATE: Replying to Reader Responses (Pt. 2)
UPDATED 28 July, 2009
As I mentioned in the last two posts, I had to write a book review for my coursework at the European Graduate School. I am very grateful to Vincent van Gerven Oei who also read my review and joined in the discussion. Below I present my response to him:
ヴィンセント先輩
You very much flatter me in reading these words, thank you. And thank you also for encouraging further discussion, I will do my best.
Yes, translation presents a host of concerns; but I suspect that translation is fundamentally the task that is at-hand if we are to discuss community, politics, or selfhood. There is a wonderful poem by Wendell Berry that nicely emphasizes why I think that translation is the fundamental task at work in ethical engagement. The poem, "The Country of Marriage," has this singularly wonder-full line: "you are the path that leads always into the dark." I can think of no better way to discuss a loving, long-term, committed relationship. There is this myth (or perhaps fervent/fever dream) that what works in one language will work in any language. This is the lesson of that Bill Murray movie, Lost in Translation, isn't it? That, no matter how long we live or share our love with someone, what isn't irrecoverably lost in translation between us all? Surely, love is the path that leads always into the dark.
When I introduce the Chinese and Japanese examples what I am introducing (and thank you for pointing out where this isn't clear) a case where it is not only possible to discuss the world in a non-metaphysically-dependent manner, but there are many successful examples of how this is possible. I certainly don't want the reader to surrender to a "call to the exotic;" and, of course, Heidegger warns against this in his discussion of "Ister."
You are right and do my argument a great service by pointing out that it is possible to ask a direct question in Japanese. But we cannot understate how irregular it would be to announce 何だ! (nanda!) Of course, nanda is not Subject-Object-Verb (UPDATE: Japanese is, as Vincent points-out perhaps THE S-O-V language) because always already present in the utterance is an assumption of both a subject and an object. "Nanda!" is a performative utterance, not an ontological position to start from. Not only are the subject and object assumed but the expression is of disbelief at what is assumed to be an implicit moral order. One cannot say "Nanda!" and not simultaneously be reacting in a moral manner. The same is true in Chinese wherein one asks, "how do you cook it?" when referring to something that is unfamiliar. What we see in both languages is the residue of an a-metaphysical worldview: to be a person is to fundamentally be a moral entity. And we see this expressed in all host of manners, whether it's pedagogy, the arrangement of rocks in a garden, one's penmanship, or Shinto practice. We are accustomed to clearly partitioning grammatical rules from moral rules, but these two are not capable of being conceptualized as separate in the Classical views of East Asia. Simply stated: "to be" is "to be a moral entity." Without this assumed interrelatedness, "Nanda!" is only as intelligible as discussing an American football bat.
I think that I may have not expressed clearly what I said in my discussion about the development of "thing" and "happy." If you review my statement the operative phrase is that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview until after the Medieval and Modern eras. I should have better articulated that although we may foreground a particular worldview or orientation this does not by any means negate the fact that there is another orientation in the background.
In the Western world(s), while we see implicit calls for interrelatedness in words like "thing" and "happy" prior to the medieval and modern eras, what we know to be true in living in these languages today is that "thing" refers to a particular object and happiness is no longer a process of manifesting a project but is the result of drinking Coca-Cola (just kidding). This shift to objectifying, and here I think I understand Heidegger's overall trajectory, was within a shifting conceptualization of man's place in the world. We may privilege a worldview where all relationships are externalized (symbolized best by the love contract - also called marriage), but we all are familiar with the pain of dissolving a relationship such as a marriage.
The contract is a technology that was developed in response to the social order of the medieval period. The contract was supposed to state a priori what the nature of our relationship would be and thus secure the integrity of the two parties. The thinking has been that if we are both able to enter into this relationship as separate individuals, when we dissolve the contract we can both walk away as the individuals we were before the contract was enacted. But, as we can probably all attest to, to dissolve a marriage is not to simply sever something "out there" but to lose a part of myself. We are both lessened by the experience.
Again, this is not an unfamiliar experience and is not an insight from our contemporary moment because this is precisely what John Donne referred to in his Meditation XVII (1623):
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
But today, at least in the U.S., we don't hear too many calls for this sort of interrelatedness and it is certainly not what is present when the U.S. (and probably the rest of the European Community) talk to East Asian nations about human rights. Human rights, as developed in the Western traditions are primarily ways of delimiting space and establishing property rights over these spaces. For these rights to even exist there must be something upon which these rights could hang, an identity. For these rights to exist for eternity the identity must be fixed as well. Of course here we begin to see that fixed identity is not only problematic, but would irrecoverably reduce any notion of interbeing as described in the Donne poem.
As I mentioned in the last two posts, I had to write a book review for my coursework at the European Graduate School. I am very grateful to Vincent van Gerven Oei who also read my review and joined in the discussion. Below I present my response to him:
ヴィンセント先輩
You very much flatter me in reading these words, thank you. And thank you also for encouraging further discussion, I will do my best.
Yes, translation presents a host of concerns; but I suspect that translation is fundamentally the task that is at-hand if we are to discuss community, politics, or selfhood. There is a wonderful poem by Wendell Berry that nicely emphasizes why I think that translation is the fundamental task at work in ethical engagement. The poem, "The Country of Marriage," has this singularly wonder-full line: "you are the path that leads always into the dark." I can think of no better way to discuss a loving, long-term, committed relationship. There is this myth (or perhaps fervent/fever dream) that what works in one language will work in any language. This is the lesson of that Bill Murray movie, Lost in Translation, isn't it? That, no matter how long we live or share our love with someone, what isn't irrecoverably lost in translation between us all? Surely, love is the path that leads always into the dark.
When I introduce the Chinese and Japanese examples what I am introducing (and thank you for pointing out where this isn't clear) a case where it is not only possible to discuss the world in a non-metaphysically-dependent manner, but there are many successful examples of how this is possible. I certainly don't want the reader to surrender to a "call to the exotic;" and, of course, Heidegger warns against this in his discussion of "Ister."
You are right and do my argument a great service by pointing out that it is possible to ask a direct question in Japanese. But we cannot understate how irregular it would be to announce 何だ! (nanda!) Of course, nanda is not Subject-Object-Verb (UPDATE: Japanese is, as Vincent points-out perhaps THE S-O-V language) because always already present in the utterance is an assumption of both a subject and an object. "Nanda!" is a performative utterance, not an ontological position to start from. Not only are the subject and object assumed but the expression is of disbelief at what is assumed to be an implicit moral order. One cannot say "Nanda!" and not simultaneously be reacting in a moral manner. The same is true in Chinese wherein one asks, "how do you cook it?" when referring to something that is unfamiliar. What we see in both languages is the residue of an a-metaphysical worldview: to be a person is to fundamentally be a moral entity. And we see this expressed in all host of manners, whether it's pedagogy, the arrangement of rocks in a garden, one's penmanship, or Shinto practice. We are accustomed to clearly partitioning grammatical rules from moral rules, but these two are not capable of being conceptualized as separate in the Classical views of East Asia. Simply stated: "to be" is "to be a moral entity." Without this assumed interrelatedness, "Nanda!" is only as intelligible as discussing an American football bat.
I think that I may have not expressed clearly what I said in my discussion about the development of "thing" and "happy." If you review my statement the operative phrase is that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview until after the Medieval and Modern eras. I should have better articulated that although we may foreground a particular worldview or orientation this does not by any means negate the fact that there is another orientation in the background.
In the Western world(s), while we see implicit calls for interrelatedness in words like "thing" and "happy" prior to the medieval and modern eras, what we know to be true in living in these languages today is that "thing" refers to a particular object and happiness is no longer a process of manifesting a project but is the result of drinking Coca-Cola (just kidding). This shift to objectifying, and here I think I understand Heidegger's overall trajectory, was within a shifting conceptualization of man's place in the world. We may privilege a worldview where all relationships are externalized (symbolized best by the love contract - also called marriage), but we all are familiar with the pain of dissolving a relationship such as a marriage.
The contract is a technology that was developed in response to the social order of the medieval period. The contract was supposed to state a priori what the nature of our relationship would be and thus secure the integrity of the two parties. The thinking has been that if we are both able to enter into this relationship as separate individuals, when we dissolve the contract we can both walk away as the individuals we were before the contract was enacted. But, as we can probably all attest to, to dissolve a marriage is not to simply sever something "out there" but to lose a part of myself. We are both lessened by the experience.
Again, this is not an unfamiliar experience and is not an insight from our contemporary moment because this is precisely what John Donne referred to in his Meditation XVII (1623):
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
But today, at least in the U.S., we don't hear too many calls for this sort of interrelatedness and it is certainly not what is present when the U.S. (and probably the rest of the European Community) talk to East Asian nations about human rights. Human rights, as developed in the Western traditions are primarily ways of delimiting space and establishing property rights over these spaces. For these rights to even exist there must be something upon which these rights could hang, an identity. For these rights to exist for eternity the identity must be fixed as well. Of course here we begin to see that fixed identity is not only problematic, but would irrecoverably reduce any notion of interbeing as described in the Donne poem.
Replying to Reader Responses (Pt. 1)
So as I mentioned in the last post, I had to submit a book review for my classwork at the European Graduate School. I am very grateful to Mikael Liss, who was kind enough to not only read my review but also initiate a discussion. Below is my response to him.
Hi Mikael,
Thanks for reading my review, that's very kind of you, especially to then also say nice things about the review. I was reading something the other day by David Wood where he pointed out a funny similarity: according to some anthropologist, there is/was a tribe where young men weren't given a name until they had killed an enemy and then they took that person's name. Wood felt that this practice is not too unfamiliar at times when reading reviews of others' books. Ha!
I've not seen this movie, but the idea of a spirit of machines is compelling.
I should really hasten to stress that I think See's book provides a very useful Heidegger. I think that he wrote about Heidegger in a fairly accessible manner (which we both concede is no small feat), and I think he did a fine job also of maintaining his line of thought throughout the middle sections. When I reread his book I suspected that he had developed some of these ideas earlier, walked away to get more familiar with Deleuze, Derrida, etc. and then came back to Heidegger armed with their insights. I like See's treatment of Heidegger and I will be referencing him in an upcoming talk in October and so I very much need to thank him for his hard work.
I feel bad for having pointed-out the number of typoes, 'cause I know I'm not free of these either. I agree with you, someone should be reviewing these things (and so are we now both going to have our names in the hat for editors at Atropos Press, I'd like that gig).
Y'know, I will level with you: my purchase of Heidegger comes almost entirely from a comparative philosophy perspective. That means I am primarily (and I assume many would say, to a fault) influenced in my reading of Heidegger by what those who came after him had to say. I would defend this, however, by pointing out that the most interesting philosophical movement of the 20th century was the Kyoto School in Japan. I think Heidegger is a wonderful thinker to discuss in a comparative manner because he was so profoundly concerned with getting at the arche of the Western metaphysical tradition. (I recognize that, perhaps, Derrida would pop-in here and say, "ah, but there is no such 'Western' world." To him I would humbly submit that there is most certainly a different worldview between what has come to be known as East and West.) But I have also been very fortunate to share multiple, lengthy conversations with excellent Nietzsche and Heidegger scholars such as Graham Parkes and David Krell.
I 110% agree with you (and I suspect that Heidegger does as well) that the grammar of Indoeuropean languages already have within them the problem of objectifying the world. I got a crash course in this last year when I was working in Japan - where it is grammatically impossible to ask a direct question. I think that it would be putting the cart before the horse, however, to say that people already have the view that the world is a standing reserve and so developed a language that describes it as such. The languages that have developed in the Western world already assume that there are divisions between things; and a handy way to imagine another orientation would be Chinese where perception of the world can be understood as a focusing of attention to a field of events. But I think that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview (at least in Europe and slowly dissipating to its colonies) until the Medieval to Modern eras and I would use two very common words to illustrate this shift: thing, and happy.
"Thing" is a judicial institution in North-Germanic societies and it's rooted in English as meaning "an assembly." Very briefly: it's compelling to think that matters of justice could not be decided unless the community was present to judge, this seems to suggest a privileging of interrelatedness (or as Kasulis might say, intimacy). Later on this idea would become developed into a question of whether what is Just cannot be performed at all times by individuals and this could in turn be a guiding principle. Happy, happiness, happenstance - all share the root hap which means luck or chance occurrence. I am not really sure, though, that hap is unpredictable. There definitely seems to be a strong indication of mutual causality between the individual and the environment in which she finds herself. In other words, we don't simply stumble into this fortune, not only.
I defend this reading by looking for guidance from the word "happen." What does it mean for us to make something happen? It means to align our environs with fortune (perhaps understood as natural tendencies allowed to authoritatively manifest) and delight in this alignment. It is only in creating (worlding as Heidegger might say) in a manner that maximizes the flourishing of our coming together (our happenings) with those we encounter that our sense of fate (understood here as purpose or raison d'etre) will be sated.
So to your question, is it possible to choose an ethical comportment first, I feel emphatically yes. This is how I prejudice my reading of Ranciere as well. To foreground interrelatedness is an aesthetic act, and it is a political act in so far as it seeks to reinvigorate the community dynamic (were we to foreground this it would then become a policing action as we establish that it is the way things should be).
Hi Mikael,
Thanks for reading my review, that's very kind of you, especially to then also say nice things about the review. I was reading something the other day by David Wood where he pointed out a funny similarity: according to some anthropologist, there is/was a tribe where young men weren't given a name until they had killed an enemy and then they took that person's name. Wood felt that this practice is not too unfamiliar at times when reading reviews of others' books. Ha!
I've not seen this movie, but the idea of a spirit of machines is compelling.
I should really hasten to stress that I think See's book provides a very useful Heidegger. I think that he wrote about Heidegger in a fairly accessible manner (which we both concede is no small feat), and I think he did a fine job also of maintaining his line of thought throughout the middle sections. When I reread his book I suspected that he had developed some of these ideas earlier, walked away to get more familiar with Deleuze, Derrida, etc. and then came back to Heidegger armed with their insights. I like See's treatment of Heidegger and I will be referencing him in an upcoming talk in October and so I very much need to thank him for his hard work.
I feel bad for having pointed-out the number of typoes, 'cause I know I'm not free of these either. I agree with you, someone should be reviewing these things (and so are we now both going to have our names in the hat for editors at Atropos Press, I'd like that gig).
Y'know, I will level with you: my purchase of Heidegger comes almost entirely from a comparative philosophy perspective. That means I am primarily (and I assume many would say, to a fault) influenced in my reading of Heidegger by what those who came after him had to say. I would defend this, however, by pointing out that the most interesting philosophical movement of the 20th century was the Kyoto School in Japan. I think Heidegger is a wonderful thinker to discuss in a comparative manner because he was so profoundly concerned with getting at the arche of the Western metaphysical tradition. (I recognize that, perhaps, Derrida would pop-in here and say, "ah, but there is no such 'Western' world." To him I would humbly submit that there is most certainly a different worldview between what has come to be known as East and West.) But I have also been very fortunate to share multiple, lengthy conversations with excellent Nietzsche and Heidegger scholars such as Graham Parkes and David Krell.
I 110% agree with you (and I suspect that Heidegger does as well) that the grammar of Indoeuropean languages already have within them the problem of objectifying the world. I got a crash course in this last year when I was working in Japan - where it is grammatically impossible to ask a direct question. I think that it would be putting the cart before the horse, however, to say that people already have the view that the world is a standing reserve and so developed a language that describes it as such. The languages that have developed in the Western world already assume that there are divisions between things; and a handy way to imagine another orientation would be Chinese where perception of the world can be understood as a focusing of attention to a field of events. But I think that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview (at least in Europe and slowly dissipating to its colonies) until the Medieval to Modern eras and I would use two very common words to illustrate this shift: thing, and happy.
"Thing" is a judicial institution in North-Germanic societies and it's rooted in English as meaning "an assembly." Very briefly: it's compelling to think that matters of justice could not be decided unless the community was present to judge, this seems to suggest a privileging of interrelatedness (or as Kasulis might say, intimacy). Later on this idea would become developed into a question of whether what is Just cannot be performed at all times by individuals and this could in turn be a guiding principle. Happy, happiness, happenstance - all share the root hap which means luck or chance occurrence. I am not really sure, though, that hap is unpredictable. There definitely seems to be a strong indication of mutual causality between the individual and the environment in which she finds herself. In other words, we don't simply stumble into this fortune, not only.
I defend this reading by looking for guidance from the word "happen." What does it mean for us to make something happen? It means to align our environs with fortune (perhaps understood as natural tendencies allowed to authoritatively manifest) and delight in this alignment. It is only in creating (worlding as Heidegger might say) in a manner that maximizes the flourishing of our coming together (our happenings) with those we encounter that our sense of fate (understood here as purpose or raison d'etre) will be sated.
So to your question, is it possible to choose an ethical comportment first, I feel emphatically yes. This is how I prejudice my reading of Ranciere as well. To foreground interrelatedness is an aesthetic act, and it is a political act in so far as it seeks to reinvigorate the community dynamic (were we to foreground this it would then become a policing action as we establish that it is the way things should be).
Community without Integrity: A Review
(***NOTE: this is the first paper I had to write for classes at the European Graduate School; so for those of you that are already reading these papers on the bulletin board, sorry, this is a repeat***)
A Community without Integrity: Reviewing Tony See's Community without Identity.
Paul Boshears
Tony See is to be commended for his accomplishment in publishing his dissertation that boldly suggests “none other than a rethinking of the political itself.” See sets about demonstrating that community is the common thread linking Heidegger's multiphasic body of work. This dissertation contains a useful summary of Heidegger's works arranged around discussions of politics, technology, and metaphysics. This is a useful organizing of Heidegger's work because this helps us to understand a lineage of thought transmitted through Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy. That said, one wonders at the author's suggestion that those, “well acquainted with Heidegger's thinking in general,” should feel free to skip the vast majority of his dissertation and judge only his final chapter where he presents the form of Heidegger's political theory. According to See, Heidegger rejected American capitalism and Russian communism because both were technologies which reduced the individual to resources for the State. This dehumanization is possible because of the Modern presupposition (and logically imposing as a result) of a metaphysical order that views the immanent reality before us as a standing reserve to be managed rather than encountered. Thus Heidegger's deep engagement with metaphysics is always toward demonstrating that this metaphysical project has succeeded in delimiting the world in which we live and has hamstrung our ability to authentically experience the world.
See states that the central problem of the book is alleviating the violence that is inherent in visions of community based upon identity. How will we avoid this violence? By the, “erasure of identity from the very heart of community itself, so that the unique singularity of the members of the community are not subject to violence;”[1] and in so doing we will be freed from the violence of homogeneity. The violence of homogeneity is based upon a willing suspension of disbelief: while building a representation of the world (in this moment a picture), we become fascinated (whose relationship to fascism would be welcome in this discussion) by the created image and, “mistake the menu for the meal.” That this process is in place is all that necessarily needs to exist for the violence of the modern era to begin, “The reduction of the world into a picture, thus, provides the necessary precondition of our being violent to the world.”[2] While sympathetic to the project of this book, the strengths of the presentation of Heidegger's philosophy are lost in an ineffective manner of expression vis-a-vis See's inconsistent thinking on how one might form a sense of identity that is not dependent upon transcendental claims in the first place.
See uses, correctly, Heidegger's interpretation of Holderlin's Ister in order to demonstrate the heart of Heidegger's political philosophy. From this discussion we learn that Heidegger sees the human condition as fundamentally one of being homeless. In this pursuit of finding one's place in the world clearly we can see Heidegger as a political thinker. But the argument loses its intelligibility when See seems to suggest that once we set out to find our home we will encounter something foreign (a concept that is metaphysically backed-up by being not-me), “that is [sic](3) what is proper or natural for a people can only be appropriated when it is founded on an encounter with what is foreign and other to that people”[4] and then states, “it becomes clear that what is called for is none other than an encounter with the Greeks here....[t]his suggests that what is proper to a people can be appropriated only by way of a journey outward to encounter the foreign.”[5] Again, being sympathetic to See's project, I believe that he has made an appropriate gesture: Heidegger reconfigures Holderlin's notion of homecoming as a “nearness to Being” and so Germans must eschew familiar patterns of reducing the world to classifications and objects to be understood within frameworks. See does say this; but it does not follow from this statement that Heidegger's was a politics that, “does not reduce the difference of the other into an identity, but which suggests of an ethical recognition of the difference and singularity of the other.”[6] Thus we understand the importance of Levinas in the 20th century (as Derrida points out at his eulogy for Levinas[7]) as not only the man that brought Heidegger to France[8] but also the man that first suggested, after the tour de force of Enlightenment reasoning that was the first two world wars: these wars are inevitable and unavoidable if the first question we ask upon meeting something with which we are unfamiliar is an ontological question, “what is it?” rather than first asking an ethical question, “how will I promote harmonious relations with what I encounter?”
This book would benefit tremendously by taking Heidegger to the next logical step and suggesting that it is possible to arrange a worldview that is not dependent upon transcendental claims, that an immanent worldview is possible. Although listed in the secondary literature of the bibliography there seems to be no encounter in See's book with Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought, wherein one might be introduced to the very rich Japanese reception of Heidegger (the Japanese having made no less than five translations of Sein und Zeit before there was an English translation of his magnum opus). If, as See suggests, we can only begin to form community by understanding the limits of our cultural inheritance, then this East Asian encounter must surely be a richly rewarding endeavor. Again, sympathetic to See's project, I believe I get a sense of what he refers to at the conclusion of the book: that a community without identity might be palpated by considering the singularity of children. But children are marked by, fundamentally, an inability to understand themselves over time. Perhaps theirs is a world not of immanence but of immaturity. Identity (which is of course a problematic word and See does well to not limit what is meant by the term), if it does anything, must provide a sense of meaning over a duration of time. As Nietzsche put it (and we can suspect Heidegger took this to heart), man would rather will nothing than not will at all. Those that employ suicide bombers know this to be true as well: a person can readily affirm death and act upon that affirmation, but that same person cannot tolerate a life where their suffering is for nothing[9]. I suspect that Deleuze and Guattari also recognize this when they state that what the dispossessed desire are not hand-me-downs but the ability to produce in the real[10]. The lesson of the suicide bomber is that identity production is the sine qua non of humanity.
Rather than a community without identity, the argument here presented would be strengthened by sustaining an argument for community without integrity. Integrity understood as the quality of being solid and stolid; one that has integrity cannot be compromised by outside influence. If we think through the logic of this statement, integrity means to be wholly insulated and impermeable, precisely the opposite of what Heidegger throughout his ontic explorations demonstrated: that the worlding of the world is a process of attunement, of becoming more and more authentic in our living by becoming more and more enveloped in this time and this place in which we find ourselves thrown[11]. Allowing-Being-to-be as a safeguard against totalitarianism is possible if we redefine the relationship between the knower and reality, using what Kasulis calls, the assimilation theory of truth[12]. While we foreground a correspondence model of truth, where language reflects a structure of truth (but is not necessarily truth itself) such that I propose something in language that correlates to what is true; in the assimilation theory of truth reality and the knower are not discrete but are interrelated and so knowledge is the overlap between the two. The depth of my knowledge and truth is only limited by my allowing access between myself and that which I seek to understand. While this talk about knowledge and the knower interrelating seems foreign, we do have an everyday expression that intimates this way of accessing truth: something that we find difficult to comprehend we say is hard to digest. As See points out in his presentation of Heidegger's works, theory cannot be separated from practice and this also suggests that a call for an assimilative theory of truth.
In this reconfiguration of knowledge production there is the understanding that the knower is fundamentally implicated in the object of knowledge because the base understanding of the world is one of interdependence rather than independence. That is, all relationships are foundationally intimate relationships (and expressions of degrees of internalization), rather than the what has been the push in Western philosophy over the past 600 years to establish the hegemony of externalized relationships whose best symbol is the technology of the contract. The result has been communities by lashing together (and this becomes more interesting if we include that the term fascism comes from the Latin symbol of many rods lashed to the axe) ontology and theology through the primacy of metaphysical questioning.
See should be commended for his courage in pursuing this particular dissertation topic, not the politics of Heidegger (a question twenty years too late), but to discuss Heidegger at all at this point in the development of the Heideggerian literature exposes one to many critics as there have been so many dissertations on Heidegger in so many languages. See has produced a very helpful book that quickly provides the reader with a very French orientation of Heidegger's philosophy – to play with Kojeve's comments on Hegel, here we have Heidegger-as-anthropologist, whether he wishes to be one or not. I thank See for presenting Heidegger as such. Almost as though an afterthought, See tacks-on a Conclusion giving an all-too-brief presentation of how community has come to be discussed by Derrida, Nancy, and Deleuze. Because See's book has such a strong French reading (in many ways a discussion of why Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Deleuze have formulated their political philosophies) to include something about Heidegger's friendships to Jaspers and Arendt could only benefit his interpretation of Heidegger as a philosopher who prefers engagement instead of evasion. See is correct to demonstrate why Heidegger's involvement with the National Socialist movement must be read in the context of his insights into metaphysics and technology; but, surely there is much that can be learned from the Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt triad as it was performed. Would this not be an excellent moment of theoria in praxis?
[1] page 16.
[2] page 42.
[3] This typo is one of many glaring errors in word choice, subject-verb agreement, missing citations, and failures to correctly spell names. The effect of encountering so many errors (more than one would anticipate in a first edition) is a significant feeling of disappointment as it suggests no consideration for the reader's experience. Of course, there is a very real concern that the author, in presenting himself in this manner, has said much more than was intended.
[4] page 163.
[5] page 164-5.
[6] page 167.
[7] Derrida, Jacques. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, trans. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.10.
[8] Tom Rockmore's “Aspects of Heidegger in France.” also discusses the lineage of Heidegger-Kojeve/Levinas-Derrida and points-out that the French philosophical tradition has long been concerned with understanding the human being. Available at: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf
[9] Wood, David. (2005). The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press. 16.
[10] Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 27.
[11] I would suggest that as one becomes more authentically oneself in worlding one's world one is becoming more authoritative in one's practice of being in the world.
[12] Kasulis, Thomas P. (2002). Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press.
Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger
Tony See
2009 Atropos Press, New York & Dresden.
$21.95
A Community without Integrity: Reviewing Tony See's Community without Identity.
Paul Boshears
Tony See is to be commended for his accomplishment in publishing his dissertation that boldly suggests “none other than a rethinking of the political itself.” See sets about demonstrating that community is the common thread linking Heidegger's multiphasic body of work. This dissertation contains a useful summary of Heidegger's works arranged around discussions of politics, technology, and metaphysics. This is a useful organizing of Heidegger's work because this helps us to understand a lineage of thought transmitted through Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy. That said, one wonders at the author's suggestion that those, “well acquainted with Heidegger's thinking in general,” should feel free to skip the vast majority of his dissertation and judge only his final chapter where he presents the form of Heidegger's political theory. According to See, Heidegger rejected American capitalism and Russian communism because both were technologies which reduced the individual to resources for the State. This dehumanization is possible because of the Modern presupposition (and logically imposing as a result) of a metaphysical order that views the immanent reality before us as a standing reserve to be managed rather than encountered. Thus Heidegger's deep engagement with metaphysics is always toward demonstrating that this metaphysical project has succeeded in delimiting the world in which we live and has hamstrung our ability to authentically experience the world.
See states that the central problem of the book is alleviating the violence that is inherent in visions of community based upon identity. How will we avoid this violence? By the, “erasure of identity from the very heart of community itself, so that the unique singularity of the members of the community are not subject to violence;”[1] and in so doing we will be freed from the violence of homogeneity. The violence of homogeneity is based upon a willing suspension of disbelief: while building a representation of the world (in this moment a picture), we become fascinated (whose relationship to fascism would be welcome in this discussion) by the created image and, “mistake the menu for the meal.” That this process is in place is all that necessarily needs to exist for the violence of the modern era to begin, “The reduction of the world into a picture, thus, provides the necessary precondition of our being violent to the world.”[2] While sympathetic to the project of this book, the strengths of the presentation of Heidegger's philosophy are lost in an ineffective manner of expression vis-a-vis See's inconsistent thinking on how one might form a sense of identity that is not dependent upon transcendental claims in the first place.
See uses, correctly, Heidegger's interpretation of Holderlin's Ister in order to demonstrate the heart of Heidegger's political philosophy. From this discussion we learn that Heidegger sees the human condition as fundamentally one of being homeless. In this pursuit of finding one's place in the world clearly we can see Heidegger as a political thinker. But the argument loses its intelligibility when See seems to suggest that once we set out to find our home we will encounter something foreign (a concept that is metaphysically backed-up by being not-me), “that is [sic](3) what is proper or natural for a people can only be appropriated when it is founded on an encounter with what is foreign and other to that people”[4] and then states, “it becomes clear that what is called for is none other than an encounter with the Greeks here....[t]his suggests that what is proper to a people can be appropriated only by way of a journey outward to encounter the foreign.”[5] Again, being sympathetic to See's project, I believe that he has made an appropriate gesture: Heidegger reconfigures Holderlin's notion of homecoming as a “nearness to Being” and so Germans must eschew familiar patterns of reducing the world to classifications and objects to be understood within frameworks. See does say this; but it does not follow from this statement that Heidegger's was a politics that, “does not reduce the difference of the other into an identity, but which suggests of an ethical recognition of the difference and singularity of the other.”[6] Thus we understand the importance of Levinas in the 20th century (as Derrida points out at his eulogy for Levinas[7]) as not only the man that brought Heidegger to France[8] but also the man that first suggested, after the tour de force of Enlightenment reasoning that was the first two world wars: these wars are inevitable and unavoidable if the first question we ask upon meeting something with which we are unfamiliar is an ontological question, “what is it?” rather than first asking an ethical question, “how will I promote harmonious relations with what I encounter?”
This book would benefit tremendously by taking Heidegger to the next logical step and suggesting that it is possible to arrange a worldview that is not dependent upon transcendental claims, that an immanent worldview is possible. Although listed in the secondary literature of the bibliography there seems to be no encounter in See's book with Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought, wherein one might be introduced to the very rich Japanese reception of Heidegger (the Japanese having made no less than five translations of Sein und Zeit before there was an English translation of his magnum opus). If, as See suggests, we can only begin to form community by understanding the limits of our cultural inheritance, then this East Asian encounter must surely be a richly rewarding endeavor. Again, sympathetic to See's project, I believe I get a sense of what he refers to at the conclusion of the book: that a community without identity might be palpated by considering the singularity of children. But children are marked by, fundamentally, an inability to understand themselves over time. Perhaps theirs is a world not of immanence but of immaturity. Identity (which is of course a problematic word and See does well to not limit what is meant by the term), if it does anything, must provide a sense of meaning over a duration of time. As Nietzsche put it (and we can suspect Heidegger took this to heart), man would rather will nothing than not will at all. Those that employ suicide bombers know this to be true as well: a person can readily affirm death and act upon that affirmation, but that same person cannot tolerate a life where their suffering is for nothing[9]. I suspect that Deleuze and Guattari also recognize this when they state that what the dispossessed desire are not hand-me-downs but the ability to produce in the real[10]. The lesson of the suicide bomber is that identity production is the sine qua non of humanity.
Rather than a community without identity, the argument here presented would be strengthened by sustaining an argument for community without integrity. Integrity understood as the quality of being solid and stolid; one that has integrity cannot be compromised by outside influence. If we think through the logic of this statement, integrity means to be wholly insulated and impermeable, precisely the opposite of what Heidegger throughout his ontic explorations demonstrated: that the worlding of the world is a process of attunement, of becoming more and more authentic in our living by becoming more and more enveloped in this time and this place in which we find ourselves thrown[11]. Allowing-Being-to-be as a safeguard against totalitarianism is possible if we redefine the relationship between the knower and reality, using what Kasulis calls, the assimilation theory of truth[12]. While we foreground a correspondence model of truth, where language reflects a structure of truth (but is not necessarily truth itself) such that I propose something in language that correlates to what is true; in the assimilation theory of truth reality and the knower are not discrete but are interrelated and so knowledge is the overlap between the two. The depth of my knowledge and truth is only limited by my allowing access between myself and that which I seek to understand. While this talk about knowledge and the knower interrelating seems foreign, we do have an everyday expression that intimates this way of accessing truth: something that we find difficult to comprehend we say is hard to digest. As See points out in his presentation of Heidegger's works, theory cannot be separated from practice and this also suggests that a call for an assimilative theory of truth.
In this reconfiguration of knowledge production there is the understanding that the knower is fundamentally implicated in the object of knowledge because the base understanding of the world is one of interdependence rather than independence. That is, all relationships are foundationally intimate relationships (and expressions of degrees of internalization), rather than the what has been the push in Western philosophy over the past 600 years to establish the hegemony of externalized relationships whose best symbol is the technology of the contract. The result has been communities by lashing together (and this becomes more interesting if we include that the term fascism comes from the Latin symbol of many rods lashed to the axe) ontology and theology through the primacy of metaphysical questioning.
See should be commended for his courage in pursuing this particular dissertation topic, not the politics of Heidegger (a question twenty years too late), but to discuss Heidegger at all at this point in the development of the Heideggerian literature exposes one to many critics as there have been so many dissertations on Heidegger in so many languages. See has produced a very helpful book that quickly provides the reader with a very French orientation of Heidegger's philosophy – to play with Kojeve's comments on Hegel, here we have Heidegger-as-anthropologist, whether he wishes to be one or not. I thank See for presenting Heidegger as such. Almost as though an afterthought, See tacks-on a Conclusion giving an all-too-brief presentation of how community has come to be discussed by Derrida, Nancy, and Deleuze. Because See's book has such a strong French reading (in many ways a discussion of why Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Deleuze have formulated their political philosophies) to include something about Heidegger's friendships to Jaspers and Arendt could only benefit his interpretation of Heidegger as a philosopher who prefers engagement instead of evasion. See is correct to demonstrate why Heidegger's involvement with the National Socialist movement must be read in the context of his insights into metaphysics and technology; but, surely there is much that can be learned from the Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt triad as it was performed. Would this not be an excellent moment of theoria in praxis?
[1] page 16.
[2] page 42.
[3] This typo is one of many glaring errors in word choice, subject-verb agreement, missing citations, and failures to correctly spell names. The effect of encountering so many errors (more than one would anticipate in a first edition) is a significant feeling of disappointment as it suggests no consideration for the reader's experience. Of course, there is a very real concern that the author, in presenting himself in this manner, has said much more than was intended.
[4] page 163.
[5] page 164-5.
[6] page 167.
[7] Derrida, Jacques. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, trans. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.10.
[8] Tom Rockmore's “Aspects of Heidegger in France.” also discusses the lineage of Heidegger-Kojeve/Levinas-Derrida and points-out that the French philosophical tradition has long been concerned with understanding the human being. Available at: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf
[9] Wood, David. (2005). The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press. 16.
[10] Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 27.
[11] I would suggest that as one becomes more authentically oneself in worlding one's world one is becoming more authoritative in one's practice of being in the world.
[12] Kasulis, Thomas P. (2002). Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press.
Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger
Tony See
2009 Atropos Press, New York & Dresden.
$21.95
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