PHILOSOPHY AND tHE - Purlieu
PHILOSOPHY AND tHE - Purlieu
PHILOSOPHY AND tHE - Purlieu
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
A Philosophical Journal<br />
Special Edition<br />
<strong>PHILOSOPHY</strong> <strong>AND</strong><br />
<strong>tHE</strong> UNIVERSITY<br />
Zabala<br />
Babich<br />
Vattimo<br />
Martinengo<br />
Crowell<br />
thomson
<strong>Purlieu</strong>: /‘perl-‘yu/<br />
1. Outlying place or district; environ<br />
2. Margin of a kingdom‘s forest, thick enough as to risk<br />
severance from authority.<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong> is an international publication committed to showcasing<br />
exceptional student works hand-in-hand with relevant and distinct<br />
perspectives of contemporary academic and cultural figures.<br />
Consider this a modest attempt to create something which is about<br />
the world, our disciplines, our universities, and—with any luck—<br />
about you, our readers and participants. <strong>Purlieu</strong> is free online at<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>Journal.com<br />
Subscriptions to <strong>Purlieu</strong>:<br />
Individual subscriptions are $10.00 and include print copies of the Fall and Spring<br />
issues for one year. Subscriptions, as well as institutional support and donation<br />
opportunities are made available through our website:<br />
www.purlieujournal.com/subscribe<br />
ISSN 2159-2101 (print)<br />
ISSN 2159-211X (online)<br />
Volume One, Issue Three<br />
Copyright © 2010-11 <strong>Purlieu</strong> Ltd.<br />
All Rights Reserved<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>: A Philosophical Journal<br />
P.O. Box 2924<br />
Denton, Texas 76202<br />
Printed in the United States of America.<br />
Fonts: Bookman Old Style [ 7.5 / 9 ] / Alte Haas Grotesk [ 9 / 10.5 / 12 ]<br />
Printed on responsibly<br />
harvested Hammermill Paper.<br />
Certified sustainable by the<br />
Sustainable Forest Initiative.
Founding Managing Editors:<br />
Dennis Erwin<br />
Matt Story<br />
Editorial Board:<br />
( Chair ) Dale Wilkerson<br />
University of North Texas<br />
Charles Bambach<br />
University of Texas, Dallas<br />
Matthew Calarco<br />
California State Fullerton<br />
Manuel Cruz<br />
University of Barcelona<br />
Carmelo Dotolo<br />
Urbanian Pontifical University, Rome<br />
William Egginton<br />
Johns Hopkins University<br />
Sharin Elkholy<br />
University of Houston-Downtown<br />
Jamey Findling<br />
Newman University<br />
Luanne Frank<br />
University of Texas, Arlington<br />
Patricia Glazebrook<br />
University of North Texas<br />
Josh Michael Hayes<br />
Santa Clara University<br />
Christoph Jamme<br />
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg<br />
Jiang Yi<br />
Beijing Normal University<br />
Irene Klaver<br />
University of North Texas<br />
Bruce Krajewski<br />
Texas Woman‘s University<br />
Liangjian Liu<br />
East China Normal University, Shanghai<br />
Jeff Malpas<br />
University of Tasmania<br />
Michael Marder<br />
Duquesne University<br />
Robert Piercey<br />
Campion College at Regina<br />
Francois Raffoul<br />
Louisiana State University<br />
Lucio Saviani<br />
University of Rome<br />
F. Scott Scribner<br />
University of Hartford<br />
Gianni Vattimo<br />
University of Turin<br />
Robert Wood<br />
University of Dallas<br />
Santiago Zabala<br />
ICREA / University of Barcelona<br />
Holger Zaborowski<br />
Catholic University of America<br />
1
CONTENTS<br />
4 � Editors‘ Letter Dennis Erwin & Matt Story<br />
6 � Being in the University:<br />
The Legitimations of<br />
Analytic Philosophy or a<br />
Philosophical Education?<br />
20 � Interview: Philosophical<br />
Antagonism and the<br />
Effects of Intellectual<br />
Fashion<br />
30 � The University and<br />
Research in Italy<br />
37 � Interview: An<br />
Impoverishment of<br />
Philosophy<br />
73 � Thinking the Pedagogical<br />
Truth Event After<br />
Heidegger<br />
Santiago Zabala<br />
ICREA / University of<br />
Barcelona<br />
Steven Crowell<br />
Rice University<br />
Gianni Vattimo<br />
University of Turin /<br />
European Parliament<br />
Alberto Martinengo<br />
University of Turin<br />
Babette Babich<br />
Fordham University<br />
Iain Thomson<br />
University of New Mexico
www.purlieujournal.com
From The Editors<br />
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong> was founded, one year ago, with the hope of introducing a new<br />
community of scholars and philosophers who are beginning their careers in<br />
the midst of an apparent re-valuation of the relationship between philosophy<br />
and the university. This re-valuation is fueled by current global economic<br />
changes influencing universities and departments.<br />
Philosophy students of this generation find themselves engaged in<br />
on-going discussions about the strength of the discipline, its role in the<br />
university, the future of academia, and their own futures within the field.<br />
Within the latter issue lies the tension between the necessity of making a<br />
living and pursuing the life of the mind. This is a major concern of today‘s<br />
students, and one hopes—we hope— that there is still a means by which<br />
many of today‘s brightest thinkers can reconcile the two. With each issue of<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong> we have tried to address this concern by interviewing contemporary<br />
thinkers who might provide insight into the direction of academia and public<br />
thought.<br />
Out of this shared desire, <strong>Purlieu</strong> and Santiago Zabala arranged to<br />
publish his essay ―Being in the University.‖ Excited by the piece, we invited<br />
other professional academic philosophers we knew and respected for their<br />
unique perspectives on similar issues regarding ‗Philosophy and the<br />
University‘. The result is this volume, <strong>Purlieu</strong>‟s first Special Edition,<br />
featuring essay contributions from Gianni Vattimo with Alberto Martinengo<br />
(translated for <strong>Purlieu</strong> by Robert Valgenti), Iain Thomson, and Santiago<br />
Zabala, as well as interviews with Babette Babich and Steven Crowell.<br />
It has been tremendous honor and a remarkable privilege working<br />
with these contributors. Thank you, all of you, for working with us.<br />
We‘d also like to thank Dale Wilkerson, whose work and guidance<br />
have been invaluable, and without whom this issue never would have<br />
happened. And we would like to thank our close friends and family,<br />
particularly Stephanie Erwin and Victoria Baria, for their continuous<br />
support.<br />
4<br />
// DE & MS
Call For Papers<br />
Articles are welcome in any area of philosophy or<br />
philosophical perspectives, including but not<br />
limited to: Gender and Race Studies, Literature,<br />
Political Science, Ecology, Education,<br />
Communication Studies, Linguistics, Sociology,<br />
Anthropology, Poetry, Urban Studies, and<br />
Psychology.<br />
Articles are blind-reviewed and judged on their<br />
philosophical merit and relevance. Articles should<br />
be double-spaced Word documents, with a cover<br />
page (including institutional affiliation) and<br />
300-500 word abstract. For stylistic concerns,<br />
consult the University of Chicago Press Manual of<br />
Style.<br />
Imagery is encouraged; however it is the obligation<br />
of the author to obtain permission for any imagery<br />
within the article if it is not within public domain.<br />
Authors will not be charged extra for images.<br />
www.purlieujournal.com<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
Dr. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. He is the<br />
author of The Remains of Being (2009), The Hermeneutical Nature of Analytic Philosophy<br />
(2008), co-author, with Gianni Vattimo, of Hermeneutic Communism (2011), editor of<br />
Weakening Philosophy (2007), The Future of Religion (2005), Nihilism and Emancipation<br />
(2004), Art‘s Claim to Truth (2009), and co-editor with Jeff Malpas of Consequences of<br />
Hermeneutics (2010). His forthcoming book is Being Shaken co-edited with Michael Marder<br />
(2012).<br />
A very healthy thing for philosophy would be to rethink its<br />
own historical origins. I think it has been much too<br />
unhistorical and has lost a lot of the insights of the past.<br />
Fruitful lines of thinking and development have been<br />
abandoned partly because of fashion and partly because of…<br />
the availability of certain simple, reasonably well-understood<br />
problems where you can do technical work that will succeed<br />
and will even be rather classy in a way, and elegant. In a<br />
way I think philosophy always has to keep going back to its<br />
own sources and try to return to the central problems that<br />
every generation somehow rethought and reformulated.<br />
~ Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics (2004)<br />
Being is challenged in the university today by the hegemony of analytic<br />
philosophy. The teaching of how to measure the quality of philosophical<br />
argumentation through formal logic is squeezing out ontological accounts of<br />
existential problems from the history of philosophy. An increasing number<br />
6
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
of departments all over the world are funded and rewarded only as long as<br />
they follow the secure path of modern science; in other words, if they adopt<br />
a problem-solving approach that assures objective results. In classrooms,<br />
the transmission of logical notions prevails over fruitful dialogues with the<br />
aim of educating students according to certain metaphysical assertions.<br />
While this transmission might be useful for being at the university, it<br />
definitely is not useful for Being in the university—an institution where it is<br />
possible to question the fundamental concepts of philosophy and also of<br />
oneself. If, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explained, ―we understand only when<br />
we understand differently,‖ then much more than the transmission of<br />
information happens during a lecture; there is also the possibility to disclose<br />
to students (and professors) their interpretations, differences, or even<br />
existence. Philosophy does not stand together with other disciplines, such as<br />
medicine or architecture, in legitimizing practices; rather, its practice is<br />
questions whose answers have never been legitimized or settled. Answers to<br />
the question of Being can only come from devotion to thought. Unlike<br />
economics or chemistry students, who are often motivated by the jobs their<br />
discipline guarantees, philosophy students are primarily motivated by the<br />
questions the discipline of philosophy will invite them to confront. 1 Noam<br />
Chomsky‘s critique in this paper‘s epigraph is clearly directed against<br />
analytic philosophy‘s ahistorical and technical method; that is, its<br />
subordination to science when philosophy is a theoretically self-sufficient<br />
discipline. Philosophy is not wisdom but rather ―love of wisdom,‖ where<br />
truth is sought and questioned instead of analyzed and applied.<br />
Using the ontological difference to individuate the relationship<br />
between philosophy and the university might seem misleading at first,<br />
considering ontology is itself a branch of philosophy, but it is the necessary<br />
point of departure for those who consider philosophy‘s ongoing<br />
subordination to science a misfortune. Such subordination is particularly<br />
evident in the prevailing role that analytic philosophers have in most U.S.<br />
departments and some European universities. Their alliance with the<br />
methods of science has compromised philosophy‘s ontological nature, which<br />
distinguished it from all the other disciplines throughout history.<br />
The goal of this brief essay is to point out why Being in the<br />
university ought to be the main concern of a philosophical education now<br />
that analytic philosophy has subordinated philosophy to scientific, corporate<br />
methods of legitimation. This subordination has reduced students to simple<br />
consumers of the information transmitted by the professor, has confined the<br />
role of professors to demonstrating the legitimacy of their competence<br />
through articles published in ranked journals, and has allowed new<br />
disciplines such as Business Ethics and Biomedical Ontology to become<br />
part of the mandatory academic program. While these features vary across<br />
7
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
departments and nations, as a rule they have ontologically changed the<br />
relations between the professor and student, the professor and his research,<br />
and philosophy and other disciplines. But where do the origins of<br />
philosophy‘s subordination to science lie, and why has analytic philosophy<br />
managed to prevail in departments and academic programs across the<br />
globe?<br />
For most analytic philosophers, exploring the origin of their position<br />
is useless because, as a historical enterprise, it would not benefit their<br />
professional development, which requires results, solutions, and verifiable<br />
applications. This explains why the few responsible analytic philosophers<br />
who ventured into the history of their position have not achieved much<br />
recognition among their colleagues. Paradigmatic examples include Ernst<br />
Tugendhat, who in 1976 published Traditional and Analytical Philosophy<br />
(which reconstructed the history of proposing semantic solutions to the<br />
ontological question of Being), 2 and Richard Rorty, who three years later<br />
released Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (in order to indicate the<br />
limitations of the semantic solutions his colleagues followed so consistently).<br />
While Rorty admired Tugendhat‘s theoretical operation, particularly his use<br />
of Martin Heidegger‘s philosophy, he went further than his German<br />
colleague and explained how the subordination of philosophy to science that<br />
I mention above is rooted is the essence of metaphysics, that is, in the<br />
obsession with revealing the truthful context of the subject matter.<br />
Following the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, and<br />
Heidegger, Rorty suggested that this truthful context is simply the<br />
determination of Being as presence, that is, descriptions of the present state<br />
of affairs that automatically privilege temporal, spatial, and unified<br />
presentness over their opposites: ―insofar as the pure relationship of the Ithink-unity<br />
(basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship,<br />
the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.‖ 3<br />
Although these descriptions vary among the different branches of<br />
philosophy (aesthetics, ethics, and logic) most philosophers (at least until<br />
Friedrich Nietzsche‘s, Heidegger‘s, and Jacques Derrida‘s deconstructions of<br />
metaphysics) considered Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and<br />
arithmetic object that operated just like the European sciences, which<br />
Edmund Husserl declared in crisis in 1936. 4 In sum, philosophy—especially<br />
since the Enlightenment, when the empirical sciences were given priority<br />
because of their total organization of all beings within a predictable<br />
structure of causes and effects—became a scientific enterprise and left aside<br />
the wider realms from which philosophic problems arise.<br />
During the past century, prominent analytic philosophers such as<br />
Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, George E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, and Wilfred V.<br />
8
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
O. Quine not only found that ―philosophy of science is philosophy enough‖ 5<br />
and that it should be submitted to ―the secure path of science‖ 6 but also<br />
described how it could better serve by becoming a set of ―regional<br />
ontologies.‖ These ontologies hold that the relation between subjects and<br />
beings is the only relation worthy of philosophical insight and leave aside<br />
the meaning of Being, that is, the ontological priority of understanding<br />
Being. This is why today there is a parallel between these regional ontologies<br />
and the sciences in their ongoing compartmentalization or specialization. 7<br />
Analytic philosophy has pursued these regional ontologies to extreme<br />
conclusions: first through Husserl‘s early phenomenological project 8 and<br />
most recently through the work of John Searle, for whom the conservation<br />
of the ―Western Rationalistic Tradition‖ (limited to the standards of<br />
objectivity, truth, and rationality) constitutes the ―essential presuppositions<br />
of any sane philosophy.‖ 9 But what does such ―sanity‖ refer to? Again, to the<br />
Western rationalistic tradition, which he circumscribes to the followers of<br />
―Russell, Wittgenstein and Frege.‖ 10 Searle, against Tugendhat or Rorty, has<br />
not bothered to venture into the metaphysical origins of his own position<br />
because the ―task of the philosopher is to get the problem into a precise<br />
enough form, to state the problem carefully enough, so that it admits of a<br />
scientific resolution.‖ 11<br />
As the completion of realism, analytic philosophy not only<br />
legitimizes scientific enterprises but also delegitimizes any different<br />
philosophical positions that do not submit to science. This is evident in<br />
Searle‘s debate with the (continental) 12 philosopher Derrida. 13 In this debate,<br />
the American philosopher and his analytic followers acted as scientists<br />
instead of philosophers by considering the French master‘s assertions<br />
―either false or trivial‖ without engaging in a dialogic exchange. 14 Against<br />
Derrida‘s iterability argument, 15 Searle saw not only an incomprehension of<br />
John Austin‘s type/token distinction, but most of all a loss of control<br />
implied by the French philosopher‘s arguments. The possibility that we<br />
could lose ―control of the meaning of the utterance‖ implies for Searle that<br />
―the whole system of distinctions, between sentence meaning and speaker<br />
meaning for example, is undermined or overthrown.‖ 16 But Derrida, as a<br />
other philosopher open to questioning the ontological foundation of his own<br />
arguments, pointed out that reality does not take place simply ―between<br />
sentence meaning and speaker meaning‖ because ―iterability alters‖; 17 that<br />
is, when texts are inserted into different contexts they will produce new<br />
meanings that are different from the ones we were accustomed to. This<br />
implies that every text, sign, or word is not possible without what makes its<br />
repetitions possible; its constituents are never ―simply‖ or ―really‖ fully<br />
present to themselves; they are often missing. Derrida named this infinite<br />
loss of constituents ―dissemination‖ in order to indicate how<br />
communication, contrary to analytic philosophy, is never a unified realm<br />
9
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
because its horizons constantly flee the non-wholly-present elements of its<br />
constituents. Such questions or suggestions are unacceptable to analytic<br />
philosophers who have become ―self-declared advocates of communication‖<br />
against the ―slightest difficulty, the slightest complication, the slightest<br />
transformation of the rules.‖ 18<br />
Analytic philosophers have used the objections of Derrida (and other<br />
continental philosophers, as the Sokal affair demonstrated) 19 to take over<br />
philosophy departments in the name of truth, clarity, and objectivity. In this<br />
way they are not only serving science but also legitimating it in the name of<br />
philosophy. If prominent philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni<br />
Vattimo, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek are not welcome in<br />
analytic departments, it isn‘t because they are less ―professional‖ than<br />
Pascal Engel, Donald Davidson, Peter Strawson, Michael Dummett, or<br />
Daniel Dennett, but rather because they are less inclined to circumscribe<br />
philosophy to science. In sum, the reason for analytic philosophers‘ success<br />
in dominating departments must be sought it their legitimation of scientific<br />
enterprises that are bound to governments, which in part also depend on<br />
such enterprises. 20 After all, government funding agencies prefer objective<br />
results that can impose political systems and control alterations rather than<br />
possibilities for theoretical, ethical, or linguistic emancipations. As we can<br />
see, analytic philosophy‘s ―imperialistic approach‖ shows an interest in<br />
establishing a descriptive, obedient, and universal civilization where ―no<br />
theoretical work, no literary work, no philosophical work, can receive<br />
worldwide legitimation without crossing the [United] States, without being<br />
first legitimized in the States.‖ 21 If we agree, as Derrida pointed out, that<br />
―linguistic hegemony cannot be dissociated from the hegemony of a type of<br />
philosophy,‖ 22 it shouldn‘t be a surprise that analytic philosophy has<br />
predominantly developed in the United States, where science‘s latest<br />
developments occur and where philosophy has almost disappeared from the<br />
public debates.<br />
As Michael Marder recently pointed out in Telos, philosophy has<br />
become ―a discipline in crisis, a discipline literally split, in an exceptionally<br />
asymmetrical fashion, between two competing strands that go under the<br />
names ‗analytic‘ and ‗Continental.‘‖ 23 This split has been particularly useful<br />
for analytic philosophers to unify their goals and dismiss as<br />
nonphilosophical all those working on the fundamental questions that have<br />
troubled philosophers for millennia: the meaning of life after death, the<br />
value of democracy, or the ethical consequence of science, all of which<br />
request deep historical research and ontological perspectives. Although<br />
Rorty proposed other terms to individuate the distinction (such as ―analytic<br />
philosophy and conversational philosophy,‖ ―systematic philosophy and<br />
edifying discourse,‖ ―ahistoricist and historicist philosophers‖), I believe we<br />
10
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
should start simply distinguishing between ―analytic philosophy and<br />
philosophy.‖ The main difference of philosophy (that is, ―continental‖<br />
philosophy) from analytic philosophy is not its emphasis on the history of<br />
the discipline and the classical ontological questions that tormented Plato,<br />
Descartes, and other classic thinkers, but its reluctance to submit to<br />
science. I‘m not suggesting that those concerned with formal logics should<br />
be fired from philosophy departments, or that no one should study<br />
philosophical problems raised by science, but rather that the discipline‘s<br />
ontological status, which is what distinguishes it from all the other<br />
disciplines, remains its fundamental approach.<br />
There is nothing more disturbing for a genuine philosophical<br />
education than that ―undergraduate students are trained in problem-solving<br />
approaches, drilled in formal and symbolic logic, and, frequently, not given a<br />
chance to explore the history of philosophy in depth.‖ 24 All supporters of<br />
continental philosophy, Marder continues, are being relegated ―to the<br />
margins of the profession, whose unofficial rankings of programs in<br />
philosophy deliberately leave out those departments that boast particular<br />
strengths in the already marginalized fields of study.‖ 25 Marginalizing these<br />
classical questions in favor of a scientific training in problem-solving<br />
approaches in formal and symbolic logic not only reduces students‘ interest<br />
in philosophy but also allows the value of the discipline to be determined by<br />
universities instead of by the philosophers who teach in them. Strong<br />
promoters of analytic philosophy, such as Brian Leiter, confirm how ―in the<br />
U.S., all the Ivy League universities [Harvard, Yale, Princeton], all the<br />
leading state research universities, all the University of California campuses,<br />
most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the<br />
second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that<br />
overwhelmingly self-identify as ‗analytic.‘‖ 26 Following this corporate ranking<br />
approach, students interested in German idealism, Donald Davidson, or<br />
pragmatism should not study with a specialist like Terry Pinkard, Jeff<br />
Malpas, or Richard Bernstein because they don‘t teach in these top-ranked<br />
universities. 27 How can students become disciples of philosophers (as<br />
Aristotle was of Plato, Thomas Aquinas of Albertus Magnus, Kant of Martin<br />
Knutzen, Hannah Arendt of Heidegger, or Robert Brandom of Richard Rorty)<br />
if the relation is limited by university ranking?<br />
In sum, among the most alarming consequences of analytic<br />
philosophy‘s instructive method is the transformation of the student into a<br />
simple consumer of information transmitted by a ranked university. If<br />
philosophy is submitted to science‘s established methods, where traditional<br />
questions and authors are dismissed, students have to learn to simply<br />
accept and apply these same paradigms. Instead of becoming autonomous<br />
disciples (Beings) who confront fundamental problems from the history of<br />
11
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
philosophy, they turn into controllable students (beings) who follow the<br />
indications dictated by legitimized academics. The same problem affects the<br />
professors, who, instead of being asked to engage in research to publish<br />
books (as most philosophers have done throughout the history of<br />
philosophy), are now requested to expose their results in articles (similar to<br />
scientists). 28 While it makes sense for scientists to publish their research in<br />
journals given the space required to expose the results, philosophers‘<br />
research constitutes their only ―result‖; much more space than allowed to an<br />
article is needed to elucidate, for example, the Hegelian origins of Stanley<br />
Cavell‘s aesthetic investigations. As far as new disciplines as biomedical<br />
ontology or business ethics are concerned, the problem is not whether they<br />
are added to the philosophy program but whether they are given the same<br />
priority as ―History of Greek Philosophy‖ or ―Introduction to Sartre.‖ The<br />
relation that is established between the student and teacher, the academic<br />
research obligations, and the disciplines are disenchanting philosophy‘s<br />
genuine concern for wisdom into an imposition of intelligence. But what are<br />
the hopes for redirecting academic programs into philosophy‘s historical<br />
origins in order to propose new and fruitful lines of thinking?<br />
While it is obvious there should not be a philosophy department<br />
that does not systematically teach every epoch of the history of philosophy<br />
so that students can choose to specialize in a particular theme, classic, or<br />
issue that she finds interesting, it is less clear what the purpose of such<br />
program should be. Whom can a philosophy department train—students,<br />
disciples, or geniuses? The answer to this question again depends on<br />
whether we decide beforehand to submit philosophy to science.<br />
According to Leiter, ―geniuses‖ such as Nietzsche, ―one may hope,<br />
will find its way in the world without the benefit of rankings. But for those<br />
who want to pursue a scholarly career in philosophy, one cannot do better<br />
than to pursue training in analytic philosophy—even if one plans to work, in<br />
the end, on Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche.‖ 29 As we can see, Leiter, like an<br />
ecclesiastical fundamentalist who submits to a cleric‘s interpretation of<br />
sacred texts, is convinced that only analytic philosophy can correctly read<br />
these classics. It is probably this legitimized culture that led a student to tell<br />
Gadamer, when he was teaching at Boston College, ―Oh, Professor Gadamer,<br />
I see that you are teaching Plato this semester! What a pity, because I have<br />
already done Plato!‖ 30<br />
Against these legitimations that impede students‘ pursuit of<br />
questions previously studied, philosophy must educate them to ―become<br />
who they‖ are because<br />
of the kind of Being which is constituted by the existentiale of<br />
projection, Dasein is constantly “more” than it factually is,<br />
12
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
supposing that one might want to make an inventory of it as<br />
something objectively present and list the contents of its<br />
Being, and supposing that one were able to do so. But Dasein<br />
is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity its<br />
potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially. Yet as Beingpossible,<br />
moreover, Dasein is never anything less; that is to<br />
say, it is existentially that which, in its potentiality-for-Being,<br />
it is not yet. Only because the Being of the “there” receives its<br />
Constitution through understanding and through the<br />
character of understanding as projection, only because it is<br />
what it becomes (or alternatively, does not become), can it<br />
say to itself “Become what you are,” and say this with<br />
understanding. 31<br />
Being in the university today must educate students ―to become<br />
who they are,‖ that is, to fulfill as much as possible the projections that<br />
constitute their own Being. This is probably why Heidegger, in the<br />
introduction to his lecture course of 1928, The Metaphysical Foundations of<br />
Logic, points out to the students that ―having devoted your current Dasein<br />
to academic studies is a form of existence in the university.‖ 32 But if<br />
students, through the fundamental questions that constitute the history of<br />
philosophy, must be educated to develop their initial devotion to thought, it<br />
is not simply to keep the discipline alive but because it is a living discipline.<br />
This is why dialogue is so important in a lecture. 33 For the relation between<br />
the teacher and student to be genuine there should never be a ―place in it<br />
for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.‖ 34<br />
Being in the university ―is only living, in the moment of self-understanding,<br />
and that means in one‘s own free, productive grasp of the task harbored in<br />
philosophy.‖ 35 After all, Kant himself believed a student would not ―learn<br />
philosophy [in the university, but] learn to philosophize.‖ 36<br />
As Iain Thomson suggested, we should focus on an ―ontological<br />
education‖ not simply for the sake of ―understanding what is, but of<br />
investigating the ontological presuppositions implicitly guiding all the<br />
various fields of knowledge.‖ 37 Thus, if philosophical disciplines such as<br />
ethics, aesthetics, or politics disclose the essence of morality, beauty, or<br />
democracy it is not because they are more scientific or objective or in<br />
possession of better ―analytic,‖ ―logical,‖ or ―linguistic‖ tools, but rather<br />
because their questions are posed from the essential position of the<br />
existence (Dasein) that questions them. While for analytic philosophy‘s<br />
legitimations, this ―position‖ (Dasein) is simply something that must be<br />
fulfilled with correct information; for philosophical education it must be<br />
encouraged to disclose itself. If teaching becomes more difficult than<br />
learning it is not ―because the teacher must have a larger store of<br />
information, and have it always ready,‖ but rather because the<br />
13
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than—<br />
learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the<br />
impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by<br />
“learning” we now suddenly understand merely the<br />
procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of<br />
his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to<br />
learn than they—he has to learn to let them learn. The<br />
teacher must be capable of being more teachable than his<br />
apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground<br />
than those who learn are of theirs. 38<br />
Philosophical education does not take place as the problem of Being<br />
but rather through the problem of Being; it is through this fundamental<br />
problem that students will be demanded to ―learn‖ or ―become what they<br />
are‖ ethically, aesthetically, or democratically. This is also the meaning of<br />
Derrida‘s ―dissemination‖ argument against Searle: texts inserted in<br />
different contexts will produce new meanings that are different from the<br />
ones we were accustomed to: ―different,‖ not ―truer,‖ in other words,<br />
disclosing new horizons for productive dialogues between students and<br />
professors. It is through these dialogues that academic programs may focus<br />
on ―Being in the university,‖ that is, on educating students to become ―what<br />
they are‖ instead of ―what they are supposed to be.‖ But since this process<br />
also involves the professor, whose main obligation is to let students learn<br />
and who therefore ―has still far more to learn than they,‖ teaching and<br />
research must be harmoniously integrated. A university that does not<br />
support philosophical research that leads specifically to the publication of<br />
productive books is similar to a philosophy department uninterested in<br />
student participation and contribution to its courses. We can overcome the<br />
analytic philosophy culture of legitimation as long as we allow both students<br />
and professors ―become who they are‖ in lectures and through their<br />
publications.<br />
Perhaps the efforts of (continental) philosophy against the culture of<br />
legitimation might also help other disciplines dissatisfied with the recent<br />
Bologna Process (for the unification of European higher education, which<br />
basically follows the U.S. educational system), which evaluates students on<br />
the basis of credits that measures hours studied. The subordination of<br />
higher education to social control and regulation is a clear example, as<br />
Miquel Caminal said, of ―directing teaching at whatever is more profitable in<br />
market terms, more attractive to business, both for the person buying the<br />
knowledge and for the person selling. In universities in the liberal<br />
democracies, knowledge is imposed through the capacity to purchase it.‖ 39<br />
In this context, such analytic disciplines as biomedical ontology or business<br />
ethics will not only become profitable in market terms but also measure the<br />
amount of hours a student studied. Philosophy students and professors<br />
14
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
must unite in the ontological education this discipline provides through the<br />
direct reading of classic texts in order to overcome any analytic, scientific, or<br />
political subordination.<br />
To comment or respond to Santiago Zabala‘s essay, please<br />
send an email to: editors@purlieujournal.com<br />
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published<br />
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of <strong>Purlieu</strong>.<br />
Notes<br />
1. As Heidegger explained in his course of 1928 (now available as The Metaphysical<br />
Foundations of Logic): ―You do not get to philosophy by reading many and<br />
multifarious philosophical books, nor by torturing yourself with solving the<br />
riddles of the universe, but solely and surely by not evading what is essential in<br />
what you encounter in your current Dasein devoted to academic studies.<br />
Nonevasion is crucial, since philosophy remains latent in every human existence<br />
and need not be first added to it from somewhere else‖ (M. Heidegger, The<br />
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim [Bloomington and Indianapolis:<br />
Indiana University Press, 1984], 18.<br />
2. Most of the favorable reviews of Tugendhat‘s books have been written by ―continental‖<br />
philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Robert Pippin, and Manfred Frank while the<br />
few hostile ones came from Barry Smith, Kevin Mulligan, and other defenders of<br />
logical analysis. For a reconstruction of Tugendhat‘s philosophy and its reception,<br />
see S. Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst<br />
Tugendhat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).<br />
3. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1989), trans. P. Emad and K.<br />
Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 140.<br />
4. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, (1936/1954),<br />
trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).<br />
5. W. V. O. Quine, ―Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory‖ (1953), in The Ways of Paradox and<br />
Other Essays (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 151.<br />
6. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University<br />
Press, 2008), 384.<br />
7. A confirmation of this compartmentalization can be found in S. Psillos and M. Curd, eds.,<br />
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science (London: Routledge, 2008),<br />
where the editors state in the introduction how the ―philosophies of the individual<br />
sciences have acquired an unprecedented maturity and independence over the<br />
past few decades‖ (ix).<br />
8. We are here referring to the ―Munich phenomenology‖ group, that is, A. Reinach, J.<br />
Daubert, A. Pfänder, and M. Geiger. For a complete account of all the<br />
phenomenological movements, see E. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological<br />
Movement: A Historical Introduction (Berlin: Springer, 2007).<br />
9. J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), iii.<br />
10. Searle, Conversations with John Searle, ed. G. Faigenbaum (Montevideo: Libros En Red,<br />
2001), 169.<br />
11. J. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 32.<br />
12. While the difference between analytic and continental philosophers is evident, I will<br />
explain later why I‘m reluctant to use the term ―continental‖ and prefer simply<br />
―philosophy.‖<br />
13. The debate comprises these texts: J. Derrida, ―Signature, Event, Context‖ (1971), in<br />
Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press:<br />
1982), 320; J. Searle, ―Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,‖ Glyph 1<br />
15
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
(1977): 198-208; J. Derrida, ―Limited Inc.,‖ supplement to Glyph 2 (1977): 162-<br />
254, reprint, in J. Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. G. Graff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern<br />
University Press, 1988), 29-110. For a complete history of the development and<br />
essence of the debate, see Raoul Moati, Derrida/Searle: Déconstruction et langage<br />
ordinaire (Paris: PUF, 2009); J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism<br />
After Structuralism (1982; Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 110-34; and Ian Maclean,<br />
―Un dialogue de sourds? Some Implications of the Austin-Searle-Derrida Debate‖<br />
(1985), in Jacques Derrida: Critical Thought, ed. I. Maclachlan (London: Ashgate,<br />
2004), 49-66.<br />
14. In 1992, a group of analytic philosophers lead by a known supporter of Searle, Barry<br />
Smith, attempted (without success) to convince Cambridge University to avoid<br />
honoring Derrida. In their letter, published by the Times, Smith and the others<br />
declared that the French master‘s assertions are ―either false or trivial‖ and that<br />
his ―originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate<br />
for an honorary degree‖ (B. Smith et al., ―Derrida Degree: A Question of Honour,‖<br />
Times [London], May 9, 1992).<br />
15. Iterability is the capacity of signs, texts, or words to be repeated in new situations,<br />
hence, grafted onto new contexts. A ―context is never saturated‖ because, as<br />
Derrida argued, every ―sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the<br />
usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put<br />
between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and<br />
engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does<br />
not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that<br />
there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring‖ (Derrida,<br />
―Signature, Event, Context,‖ 320). As we can see, ―iterability alters‖; that is, when<br />
texts are inserted into new contexts they continually produce new meanings that<br />
are both different from and similar to previous understandings.<br />
16. Searle, Conversations with John Searle, 166.<br />
17. Derrida, Limited Inc., 62.<br />
18. Derrida, Limited Inc., 158.<br />
19. The Sokal affair (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern<br />
Intellectuals‟ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador, 1999) is probably a better<br />
example than the Searle/Derrida debate because it highlighted the deep<br />
separation between philosophy and science, which, for the benefit of both, should<br />
be kept separated.<br />
20. For a development of this point see the first chapter of G. Vattimo and S. Zabala,<br />
Hermeneutic Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, in press).<br />
21. J. Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, ed. P. Pericles Trifonas<br />
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 29. This imperialistic nature of analytic<br />
philosophy was also stated by Searle in an interview with the Harvard Journal of<br />
Philosophy, where he expressed his desire to write a book on the ―ontology of<br />
civilization‖ (Z. Sachs-Arellano, ―Interview with Searle,‖ Harvard Review of<br />
Philosophy 12 [2004]: 132-33).<br />
22. Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, 29.<br />
23. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within,‖ available in<br />
http://www.telospress.com/main/<br />
index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=407. It must be mentioned that these<br />
philosophical divisions interact with cultural and political disputes especially in<br />
relation to the major continental philosopher: Heidegger. Many analytic<br />
philosophers still dismiss continental philosophers simply because of the<br />
collaboration of the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century with National<br />
Socialism (for eleven months as the president of the University of Freiburg before<br />
quitting because the Nazis would not allow books by Jews in the library). Analytic<br />
philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and others who left Germany<br />
after the rise of Hitler superimposed democratic disputes on philosophical<br />
debates, discrediting all of Heidegger works. While Heidegger made a mistake for<br />
eleven months of his life, his work (and that of all his disciples) should still be<br />
studied as carefully as that of David Hume, who considered negroes naturally<br />
inferior to whites, or Frege, who openly declared his anti-Semitism, something<br />
Heidegger never did.<br />
16
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
24. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within.‖<br />
25. M. Marder, ―A Discipline in Crisis: The View from Within.‖<br />
26. B. Leiter, ―‗Analytic‘ and ‗Continental‘ Philosophy,‖ available in<br />
http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp.<br />
27. Professor Pinkard teaches at Georgetown University (which although is ranked in Leiter<br />
list, it‘s not in the top 30 University according to his measures); professor Malpas<br />
teaches at Tasmania University; and Professor Bernstein teaches at the New<br />
School University in New York.<br />
28. It should be pointed out how T. Adorno, who was very critical of the scientific<br />
consequences of the enlightenment, after the second world war become very<br />
alarmed that music had to be cut in order to fit the temporal limits of industrial<br />
LP. See T. Adorno, Essays on Music, edited by R. Leppert (Berkeley and Los<br />
Angeles: California University of California Press, 2002). It seems today we are<br />
also force to cut books into articles to fit the requirements of the ranked journal<br />
industry.<br />
29. B. Leiter, ―‗Analytic‘ and ‗Continental‘ Philosophy.‖<br />
30. D. Misgeld and G. Nicholson, eds., H-G. Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History:<br />
Applied Hermeneutics, trans. L. Schmidt and M. Reuss (Albany: State University<br />
of New York Press, 1992), 5.<br />
31. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York:<br />
Harper and Collins Publishers, 1962, 2008): 185-186 [146]. I have modified the<br />
translation.<br />
32. M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 7-8. I have modified the<br />
translation.<br />
33. I have specified the meaning of dialogue in ―Being Is Conversation,‖ in Consequences of<br />
Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern<br />
University Press, 2010), 161-176.<br />
34. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (1954), trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harpers &<br />
Row, 1968), 15-16.<br />
35. M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 8.<br />
36. I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge<br />
University Press, 2003), 292.<br />
37. I. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education<br />
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101. Dermot Moran also makes<br />
interesting points on philosophical education today: ―The Analytic and<br />
Continental Divide: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism,‖ in Teaching<br />
Philosophy on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, ed. D. Evans and I. Kuçuradi<br />
(Ankara: International Federation of Philosophical Societies, 1998), 119-154.<br />
38. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 15.<br />
39. Miquel Caminal, ―The University Under Debate,‖ Metropolis (Autumn–Winter 2008–<br />
2009). Also available on<br />
http://www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en/page.asp?id=23&ui=138&prevNode=33&<br />
tagId=101. As I. Thompson points out, the tasks of philosophy and the university<br />
in general have not always been the same:<br />
Recall that on the medieval model of the university, the task of higher<br />
education was to transmit a relatively fixed body of knowledge. The<br />
French preserved something of this view; universities taught the<br />
supposedly established doctrines, while research took place outside the<br />
university in non-teaching academies. The French model was<br />
appropriated by the German universities which preceded Kant, in which<br />
the state-sponsored ‗higher faculties‘ of law, medicine, and theology<br />
were separated from the more independent ‗lower‘ faculty of philosophy.<br />
Kant personally experienced The Conflict of the Faculties of philosophy<br />
and theology (after publishing Religion within the Limits of Reason<br />
Alone), and his subsequent argument that it is in the best long-term<br />
interests of the state for the ‗philosophy faculty‘ to be ‗conceived as free<br />
and subject only to laws given by reason‘ helped inspire Fichte‘s<br />
philosophical elaboration of a German alternative to the French model.<br />
At the heart of Fichte‘s idea for the new University of Berlin, which<br />
Humboldt institutionalized in 1809, was the ‗scientific‘ view of research<br />
17
Zabala | Being in the University<br />
as a dynamic, open-ended endeavour, research and teaching would now<br />
be combined into a single institution of higher learning, with philosophy<br />
at the centre of a new proliferation of academic pursuits (I. Thomson,<br />
Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education,<br />
100).<br />
As this passage demonstrates, it is important to allow philosophers to<br />
become involved in the political decisions that will determine the<br />
discipline‘s role and place within the university because of the different<br />
philosophical cultures that constitute each epoch.<br />
18
submit<br />
online<br />
purlieujournal.com
INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell<br />
Dr. Steven Crowell is the Philosophy department Chair, as well as the Joseph and Joanna<br />
Nazro Mullen Professor in Humanities, at Rice University, where he has taught since 1983. He<br />
served as an Executive Director for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy<br />
(2001- 2004), and also served on the Executive Committee (1998 – 2004). His book, Husserl,<br />
Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology, won<br />
the 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize for the best book in phenomenology, and he is a<br />
co-editor for the journal Husserl Studies.<br />
PURLIEU: As the Chair of Philosophy at Rice, do you see your<br />
department and philosophy departments in general, having<br />
responsibilities not shared by others in the academy? If so, what are<br />
they? And, what obligations or duties are involved in maintaining those<br />
responsibilities?<br />
CROWELL: At Rice University, currently, the department structure is still<br />
pretty traditional, and it is a relatively small school that does not have the<br />
kind of departments that one might find at a much larger public institution<br />
– the Department of Broadcasting, or Hotel Management, and so on. At an<br />
institution where such departments exist, I would certainly say that the<br />
philosophy department has certain special responsibilities not shared by<br />
these more ―vocational‖ entities. But I‘m not sure that it has special<br />
responsibilities beyond those that would be found in the basic fields of a<br />
liberal arts education. On the other hand, I personally still subscribe to<br />
some (probably very attenuated) version of the idea that philosophy is a kind<br />
of ―meta-― discipline which draws from other fields but also has a unique<br />
intellectual profile that combines features of both the arts and sciences. I<br />
think it can be hard for students to think with ―both sides of their brains‖ –<br />
20
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
despite their rhetoric, universities tend to encourage students to divide up<br />
into ―art‖ types and ―science‖ types – and perhaps the philosophy<br />
department has a special obligation to be a place where the virtues of both<br />
aspects of the intellect can and must work together.<br />
But this is probably honored more in the breach than in the<br />
observance. I think that the key to maintaining those responsibilities is,<br />
quite simply, to stand up against any proposal for ―reform‖ (of the<br />
curriculum, of departmental structure, of university mission, etc.), from<br />
whatever quarter (administration, students, faculty pundits, etc.) that overemphasizes<br />
the sciences over the arts, and vice versa, and to refuse all<br />
faddishness.<br />
How have relationships between the private sector (professional<br />
organizations, endowments, etc.) and institutions of higher education<br />
changed in the last three decades?<br />
You know, I haven‘t really focused on this issue in a serious way, so I‘m not<br />
sure I have much to say about it. Obviously, universities (even public ones)<br />
are more beholden than ever to external funding, and this can bring with it<br />
both opportunities and challenges. It is often hard for university<br />
administrations to resist establishing a program or center for which a donor<br />
is available, even if no curricular or other need for such a program exists.<br />
And untrendy ―basic research‖ in various fields – especially in the<br />
Humanities – can go begging, since it can be hard to make those outside the<br />
academy (or even in it!) see its importance. I suppose that one of the things<br />
that can help to even out the imbalances here is a strong faculty hand on<br />
the university‘s academic offerings. But faculties are almost never of one<br />
mind on such issues.<br />
As former Executive Director of the Society for Phenomenology and<br />
Existential Philosophy (SPEP), you have a unique perspective on the<br />
organization‟s history and outlook. How has SPEP changed since the<br />
time you took over as Director, and how do you see the organization<br />
evolving in the future?<br />
SPEP began quite small, in the 1960s. It had little or no administrative<br />
structure beyond organizing an annual meeting of philosophers who were<br />
interested in phenomenology and its offshoot, existentialism. These<br />
movements were not well represented in American philosophy departments,<br />
and in a certain sense SPEP can be seen as one of the first examples of a<br />
21
INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell<br />
trend: philosophers getting together to form societies (i.e., outlets for sharing<br />
work and eventually publication) devoted to specific aspects of the<br />
philosophical landscape that were not well represented at the annual<br />
meetings of the American Philosophical Association, which was dominated<br />
by certain versions of what came to be called ―analytic‖ philosophy. I can‘t<br />
go into the subsequent history here in detail, but it is important to note that<br />
even when SPEP was founded, phenomenology and existentialism were by<br />
no means the only important non-analytical philosophical approaches in<br />
continental Europe – there was the Frankfurt School critical theory, the<br />
beginnings of Gadamerian hermeneutics, and various versions of<br />
structuralist-inspired thought, to name just a few – and very soon SPEP<br />
grew to include those interested in these movements as well.<br />
By the time I served on the SPEP Executive Committee (starting in<br />
1998) this pluralist character was what defined SPEP, and there was much<br />
discussion of whether the name should be changed to something like<br />
―Society for Continental Philosophy.‖ By then, the term ―continental<br />
philosophy‖ had come into general circulation as a rubric in Jobs for<br />
Philosophers, but there was no agreement on what it meant. Nor is there<br />
such agreement today. But in the previous decades certain philosophy<br />
departments had developed as centers for ―continental‖ philosophy, and this<br />
interjected a heavy dose of politics into SPEP itself: from being an<br />
organization whose sole purpose was to hold an annual meeting, it (perhaps<br />
inevitably) began to see itself as an ―advocate‖ for continental philosophy as<br />
such, against a mainstream philosophical culture that was perceived (often<br />
rightly) as hostile to what was going on in the continentally oriented<br />
departments. Indeed, in 1999 SPEP formed an ―Advocacy Committee‖ and<br />
began to urge its members to support SPEP candidates in APA elections, a<br />
tactic that has been quite successful. I am certain that at the first SPEP<br />
meeting some of those who attended had an ―adversarial‖ relation to analytic<br />
philosophy, but by now that relation has become strongly institutionalized<br />
in the SPEP self-definition, and an enormous committee structure has<br />
grown up to handle the internal divisions that would naturally arise in such<br />
a large and diverse organization.<br />
When I was on the Executive Committee I felt that adopting this<br />
adversarial and overtly political stance toward analytic philosophy was<br />
counter-productive, but I can certainly understand those who hold a<br />
different view. And in my own work – which is firmly centered in the<br />
phenomenological tradition – I find that less and less of what flies under the<br />
banner of continental philosophy has relevance to what I think is important,<br />
so SPEP meetings hold less interest for me these days. But at the individual<br />
level that sort of thing happens all the time.<br />
22
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
More distressing, I find, is this: as it becomes clearer that<br />
―continental‖ philosophy means ―whatever is being done in certain SPEPsupporting<br />
graduate programs‖ the tendency to emphasize SPEP‘s<br />
adversarial status and purely political goals can only take on increasing<br />
importance, providing criteria for decision-making in the organization. From<br />
my point of view this will render SPEP less, not more, relevant in the<br />
broader space of philosophical education in America.<br />
For some, the aims and influence of SPEP are still matters of<br />
controversy, which seems to us related to broader discussions<br />
concerning the „analytic/continental divide‟ in philosophy. Are they<br />
related in your view? What do you think of the usefulness of this<br />
distinction and its possible future?<br />
If you read the SPEP mission statement it becomes apparent pretty quickly<br />
that there is ―no there there.‖ From the website:<br />
SPEP is the Society for Phenomenology and<br />
Existential Philosophy, a professional organization devoted to<br />
supporting philosophy inspired by continental European<br />
traditions. With a membership of over 2500 people, it is one<br />
of the largest American philosophical societies, and strives to<br />
encourage work not only in the philosophical traditions of<br />
phenomenology and existentialism, but also in all those areas<br />
commonly associated with „continental philosophy,‟ such as<br />
animal studies, critical theory, cultural studies,<br />
deconstruction, environmental philosophy, feminism, German<br />
idealism, hermeneutics, philosophy of the Americas, postcolonialism,<br />
post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory<br />
and race theory.<br />
We foster discussion on all philosophical topics, from<br />
art and nature to politics and science, and in the classic<br />
philosophical disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology,<br />
ethics, and aesthetics. SPEP is actively committed to<br />
philosophical pluralism and to the support of historically<br />
under-represented groups in the philosophical profession.<br />
A statement such as this must change every time intellectual<br />
fashion changes – which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has nothing to<br />
do with any split between continental and analytic philosophy, since it has<br />
nothing to do with philosophy, period. As I mentioned above, SPEP has<br />
(almost) always seen itself as a pluralist institution – where ―pluralist‖<br />
means both ―welcoming of many different approaches to philosophy‖ and<br />
―critical of the analytic mainstream‖ – and there is nothing inherently wrong<br />
with this. If like-minded people want to get together and share their work,<br />
23
INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell<br />
what‘s the problem in that? And if that work is not thought of very highly by<br />
philosophers who belong to a different tradition, that‘s a fact of life that<br />
those like-minded people will have to deal with in one way or another.<br />
Defining something called ―continental‖ philosophy as the ―other‖ to the<br />
analytic mainstream is one way of doing that. But as you can see from the<br />
proliferation of ―theories‖ and ―studies‖ in the SPEP mission statement, one<br />
of the broad tendencies in SPEP is to include under its mantle many things<br />
that mainstream philosophy departments would not consider to be<br />
philosophy at all, and this points toward larger problems from the point of<br />
view of what SPEP hopes to achieve in the context of graduate education in<br />
philosophy in the United States.<br />
Of course, it can always be argued<br />
that who defines ―philosophy‖ is a matter of<br />
who is in power, or whatever, but I don‘t<br />
intend to engage these arguments here. And<br />
among SPEP members you would no doubt<br />
find a good number who feel that<br />
―philosophy‖ is dead anyway. But if SPEP‘s<br />
aim is to encourage pluralism in philosophy<br />
departments – that is, not merely to get a new<br />
faculty line here or there, but to show that<br />
what SPEP members are doing is important to<br />
the field of philosophy – then it must engage<br />
with the mainstream and cannot merely<br />
insist that mainstream departments simply<br />
accept whatever goes on in SPEP as<br />
something that must be ―represented‖ in the<br />
curriculum. There may, in other words, be<br />
good reasons for excluding it, or leaving it to<br />
If SPEP‘s aim is to<br />
encourage pluralism in<br />
philosophy<br />
departments, then it<br />
must engage with the<br />
mainstream and<br />
cannot merely insist<br />
departments simply<br />
accept whatever goes<br />
on in SPEP as<br />
something that must<br />
be ‗represented in the<br />
curriculum.‘<br />
other departments. Here one would have to get into a deep discussion of<br />
what sort of standards govern philosophical discussions generally: no one<br />
thinks that all work done in analytic philosophy is good philosophy, and no<br />
one thinks that all the papers on a SPEP program are good papers. But in<br />
any adversarial position it is almost inevitable that each side will consider<br />
its stuff as ―on the whole‖ (in contrast to the other side) good philosophy,<br />
while holding the other side‘s output to be ―on the whole‖ weak or otherwise<br />
deficient. That‘s the problem with the adversarial approach and the problem<br />
with maintaining the analytic/continental divide.<br />
I am by no means pessimistic about the possibility of carrying out<br />
constructive dialogues between those who, say, do ethics or philosophy of<br />
mind from a (broadly construed) analytic perspective and those who<br />
approach them from critical theory, phenomenology, deconstruction, and so<br />
on. But this is already to reject the adversarial position that (some feel) is<br />
24
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
needed to protect the very existence of non-mainstream thinking in the<br />
academy, and it demands that the partners in dialogue entertain the<br />
possibility of having to put their own entrenched standards at stake in the<br />
dialogue itself. Both of these facts make it difficult, within SPEP, to find a<br />
direction. And I think the organization is quite directionless at the moment.<br />
On the other hand, taken simply as an organization responsible for staging<br />
a large annual meeting, SPEP does not need a ―direction,‖ and it is quite<br />
healthy.<br />
Earlier in this issue, Santiago Zabala writes:<br />
―[A]mong the most alarming consequences of analytic<br />
philosophy‘s instructive method is the transformation of the<br />
student into a simple consumer of information transmitted<br />
by a ranked university. If philosophy is submitted to<br />
science‘s established methods, where traditional questions<br />
and authors are dismissed, students have to learn to simply<br />
accept and apply these same paradigms… The relation<br />
that is established between the student and teacher, the<br />
academic research obligations, and the disciplines are<br />
disenchanting philosophy‘s genuine concern for wisdom<br />
into an imposition of intelligence.‖<br />
Do you agree with Zabala‟s claims? Has the philosophical<br />
„divide‟ adjusted or altered the overall structure of university<br />
education?<br />
I guess the operative distinction in the quote is between ―wisdom‖ and<br />
―intelligence.‖ The quote does not define the former, but seems to link the<br />
latter to ―science.‖ At the same time, ―science‖ is linked with the dismissal of<br />
―traditional questions and authors‖ and this with ―analytic philosophy.‖<br />
While I do think that there is a difference between wisdom and science, I<br />
would not like to separate ―intelligence‖ from either of them. And while I do<br />
agree that housing philosophy in the research university has the effect of deemphasizing<br />
the development of ―wisdom‖ (whatever that might be), I‘m not<br />
sure that, to the extent that philosophy is a search for wisdom, it really<br />
belongs in the research university. Or at any rate, the standard format of<br />
career advancement in such universities – publication and conference<br />
participation on the tenure track – is hardly a map for either the pursuit or<br />
the attainment of wisdom.<br />
25
INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell<br />
Instead, a lot of what gets produced in the name of ―wisdom‖ is – to<br />
be frank – drearily self-important puffery and appallingly fuzzy thinking.<br />
After all, one presumably cannot churn out wisdom on command, yet that is<br />
exactly what is required in the context of a research university. Whether one<br />
is in an analytic or a continental department, one must publish early and<br />
often, and most of what gets published is not all that good. I do think that<br />
A lot of what gets produced<br />
[in the university] in the name<br />
of ‗wisdom‘ is – to be frank –<br />
drearily self-important puffery<br />
and appallingly fuzzy<br />
thinking. But who says that<br />
the university is the best<br />
place for philosophy to<br />
thrive?<br />
wisdom may get transmitted in the<br />
teaching process somehow, sometimes,<br />
but it is not exclusively the province of<br />
analytic or continental styles of<br />
teaching. Certainly, being concerned<br />
with ―traditional questions and<br />
authors‖ hardly guarantees a nose for<br />
wisdom; nor is it at all the case that<br />
good work in the history of philosophy<br />
is not being done by analytic<br />
philosophers. And I would strongly<br />
disagree with the characterization of<br />
the teaching methods of analytic philosophy as transforming ―the student<br />
into a simple consumer of information‖ or as submitting philosophy to<br />
―science‘s established methods.‖ That‘s just too reductive. Shall we say, in<br />
turn, that continental philosophy transforms the student into a ―disciple at<br />
the feet of the sage‖ and submits her to ―wisdom‘s esoteric authority‖?<br />
Philosophy is an interesting enterprise that straddles the ―divide‖ between<br />
art and science, and it is easy to caricature practitioners who lean too far to<br />
one side or the other. Certainly, in today‘s university that aspect of<br />
philosophy that can most readily be measured by publications and<br />
―problems‖ is dominant. But who says that the university is the best place<br />
for philosophy to thrive?<br />
At any rate, if one looked at the history of the university, beginning<br />
in the Medieval period, with an eye toward the wisdom/science divide, I<br />
expect that one would discover the same tensions that we feel today. Those<br />
members of the Philosophy Faculty who expounded Aristotle in the<br />
thirteenth century often did so in the name of a ―science‖ that was in<br />
tension, to say the least, with the dominant ―wisdom‖ – which was taught in<br />
the Theology Faculty. And the question of whether ―logic,‖ unadorned with<br />
revelation, can stand alone was certainly not unknown. Having said all that,<br />
the issue adumbrated in the quote – how can we communicate to students<br />
what it means to be liberally educated, and what structures should the<br />
university develop in order to facilitate this goal? – is a deep and important<br />
one.<br />
26
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Students frequently wonder about the practical implications of training<br />
received at the university. This is no less the case for those of us<br />
studying philosophy. What can you tell us about your graduate study in<br />
philosophy at Yale three decades ago and its relationship to your<br />
everyday professional concerns as Chair at Rice? How did the formal<br />
study of philosophy prepare you to meet your professional<br />
obligations?<br />
There is something paradoxical about one‘s graduate training. On the one<br />
hand, one works very hard to identify an area of specialization, to master it,<br />
and to craft an identity – mainly for the job market, but also, of course, to<br />
set out on a path that will be personally productive and rewarding<br />
intellectually. On the other hand, much of what one learns and does will be<br />
irrelevant in ten years or less. One‘s intellectual focus (and maturity,<br />
knowledge, etc.) will change – perhaps for the worse, if one is in a<br />
particularly grueling job situation – and one‘s responsibilities (departmental<br />
and university committees, national organizations, teaching) will be vastly<br />
different than what one experiences in graduate school. Of course, this is no<br />
different than with any other academic training: a lot of it is just<br />
credentialing and gate-keeping.<br />
To put it another way: one learns what one needs to learn ―on the<br />
job.‖ But to get that job one needs to demonstrate certain abilities, and<br />
these (presumably) are what graduate programs try to inculcate in their<br />
students.<br />
From that point of view,<br />
nothing essentially has changed since<br />
my days at Yale: the idea was to<br />
provide a context in which students<br />
could apprentice in the profession –<br />
learn to read and think in such a way<br />
that publishable work can come out<br />
of it; get familiar with classroom giveand-take<br />
as a teaching assistant so<br />
that one day you can lead your own<br />
class, etc. The difference now is this:<br />
because most universities are under<br />
severe economic pressure, there is<br />
great emphasis on getting grad<br />
students into their own classes earlier<br />
and earlier; and because of the unrelenting insistence on university and<br />
departmental rankings, there is a great push to get students to publish<br />
earlier and earlier. Both of these trends (which are of course reflected in the<br />
27<br />
As most universities are<br />
under severe economic<br />
pressure, there is great<br />
emphasis on getting grad<br />
students into their own<br />
classes earlier and earlier;<br />
and there is a great push to<br />
get students to publish earlier<br />
and earlier. Both of these<br />
trends are, in my opinion,<br />
very regrettable.
INTERVIEW: Steven Crowell<br />
ramped-up expectations about teaching and publishing in the highly<br />
competitive entry-level job market) are, in my opinion, very regrettable, since<br />
they work against the main intellectual point of it all: to give the student<br />
time to learn how to think independently and critically. The present<br />
situation tends, in contrast, to produce slaves to intellectual fashion.<br />
Recently, the Chair of a philosophy department in the U.S contacted<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>, asking “is it simply that the academic world has adopted an<br />
economic paradigm, namely, that we need to increase production every<br />
year? Well, just as economic growth is clearly unsustainable, so is this<br />
inflation of scholarly publications.” We ask ourselves often, what is the<br />
value or harm of a periodical such as this one—which aims to connect<br />
and amplify discourses found within the profession—given the rapid<br />
proliferation of independent and corporate publication opportunities?<br />
What is your response to this Chair‟s comments, and what do you see<br />
as the future for academic publishing?<br />
Good question. It seems to me that if a publication such as <strong>Purlieu</strong> develops<br />
an audience, then it has a reason for being. The problem comes when people<br />
who write in it want others to recognize that effort as ―counting‖ toward<br />
something else: fame, fortune, or (as the case may be) tenure. That raises<br />
the whole question of what should count toward tenure, and I‘m not going to<br />
address that here.<br />
Suffice to say that ―academic publishing‖ used to mean that some<br />
sort of gate-keeping function was being served by editorial boards,<br />
refereeing, and so on. This has been eroding for years. University faculties<br />
expanded greatly in the 1960s, and with that came the demand for<br />
publication. It is very hard to find any university these days that is content<br />
to tenure a professor on the basis of teaching. In general, the proliferation of<br />
outlets that arose in response to this demand did two things: it allowed a lot<br />
more mediocre work to get published, but it allowed a lot more good work to<br />
get published too. It‘s just damned hard these days to find a way to get to<br />
the good stuff without having to go through the mountains of bad.<br />
To comment or respond to Steven Crowell‘s interview, please<br />
send an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com<br />
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published<br />
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of <strong>Purlieu</strong>.<br />
28
tortuga o liebre<br />
purlieu 2012<br />
Yevgeny Khaldei / Shellshocked Reindeer, Murmansk
Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy<br />
Dr. Gianni Vattimo is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Turin and a<br />
member of the European Parliament. He is the author of A Farewell to Truth; The<br />
Responsibility of the Philosopher; Art‘s Claim to Truth; After the Death of God (with John D.<br />
Caputo); Dialogue with Nietzsche; The Future of Religion (with Richard Rorty); Nihilism and<br />
Emancipation; After Christianity; and (with Santiago Zabala) Hermeneutic Communism.<br />
Dr. Alberto Martinengo is Research Fellow at the University of Turin. He works on the<br />
heritage of the hermeneutical tradition, particularly from an aesthetical point of view. His<br />
research deals with the notion of reconstruction as keyword of the debate on the limits of<br />
hermeneutics. He has published a book on Reiner Schürmann (Introduzione a Reiner<br />
Schürmann, 2008) and a volume on Paul Ricoeur (Il pensiero incompiuto, 2008).<br />
Dr. Robert T. Valgenti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. His<br />
research interests include 19th and 20th Century Continental philosophy, hermeneutics,<br />
contemporary Italian philosophy, and the philosophy of food. He is the translator of several<br />
essays by Italian philosophers into English and is currently completing his translation and<br />
critical introduction to Luigi Pareyson‘s Truth and Interpretation.<br />
Among the many protest movements that have spread across Italy in the<br />
past few years, one of the liveliest and loudest at getting their point across<br />
was the ―Wave‖ [Onda]. Gathered under this name since 2008 are important<br />
elements from the world of the university: primarily, politically left-leaning<br />
students; however, it is also common to find significant elements from<br />
among the various contingent laborers 1 employed by the Italian university in<br />
remarkable and at times—as we will see—disturbing numbers.<br />
The ―Wave‖ movement is a response to the first projects of legal<br />
reform put forward by the government of Silvio Berlusconi: the so-called<br />
30
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
―Tremonti-Gelmini‖ reforms, named for the Minister of the Economy, Giulio<br />
Tremonti, and the Minister of Universities, Mariastella Gelmini. On the one<br />
hand, much is known about the ills of the Italian university, even abroad<br />
(from the system of competition for professorial posts, to the age-old<br />
problem of the fixed number of students). But it is said, very correctly, that<br />
all of that aside, our universities are still able to prepare professionals and<br />
scholars who are competitive on the global stage. The same can be said of<br />
the capacity of our system to guarantee access for diverse sectors of the<br />
population, thanks to the public trust in the university, which remains an<br />
important engine of development and social mobility. Nevertheless, in these<br />
years the merits of the Italian system appear to be in grave danger, and our<br />
governments have not demonstrated even the slightest ability to confront the<br />
ills of our universities.<br />
In short, it is a fact that if Italy suffers from ―brain drain,‖ it must<br />
also mean that our institutions are producing graduates and researchers<br />
who can demonstrate their own abilities and the high level of their<br />
education. And it is equally clear that today our faculties accommodate<br />
students who come from families who occupy extraordinarily different social<br />
strata: students who thus have the chance to be educated at a level that<br />
would have been unthinkable merely one or two generations ago.<br />
Nevertheless, the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms (the reason why the students of<br />
the Wave have rightly called them this will be clear in a moment), not only<br />
ignore the ills mentioned above, but in fact place in grave danger the public,<br />
social and cultural values that until recently the Italian university had<br />
maintained, in spite of everything.<br />
To speak of the ―Tremonti-Gelmini‖ reforms, as many have rightly<br />
done and still do, is to underline the actions of the Berlusconi government,<br />
which in substance are essentially budgetary reforms that behind the shield<br />
of cutting waste have in reality struck at the heart of the control of our<br />
universities. This government was born in 2008 under the slogan of the war<br />
against loafers and identified in public workers their proper, nearly singular,<br />
objective. Now, it is right to say that something has happened when such a<br />
slogan, with the help of the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms, has also been<br />
directed at the university. The cuts at the base of ordinary funding (the<br />
amount of the budget that the minister apportions to the life of the public<br />
universities) have in reality a dramatic effect on the life of some<br />
departments—all departments, including the best ones (and there are many<br />
of them), to which mechanisms of reward have not yet been granted.<br />
In short, the Italian university is suffering—this is clear. And it<br />
suffers more than other European universities on account of a government<br />
that is not able to recognize that knowledge and research are fundamental<br />
31
Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy<br />
factors of economic development. But the paradox is that this suffering<br />
regards precisely the weakest zones of the university: the students and the<br />
plethora of contingent workers who today make our universities move<br />
forward. To speak of the ―suffering of the university‖ does not signify the use<br />
of a purely rhetorical expression, one perhaps dictated solely by ideology.<br />
The suffering of the university is something extremely concrete. The Italian<br />
university suffers from the cuts of the Tremonti-Gelmini reforms because it<br />
no longer has the money to pay for telephone bills, printer paper, the<br />
maintenance and repair of machines that would be considered essential in<br />
any office around our country (from photocopiers to sophisticated laboratory<br />
equipment), the travel expenses for work and research conducted by<br />
employees and collaborators, the daily maintenance of the buildings<br />
themselves (from cleaning to the painting of offices), along with basic and<br />
essential services (keeping libraries open, replacing obsolete computers,<br />
etc.). Now, if this is the waste that needs to be cut, the government is<br />
unable to explain which corporate and capitalistic mindset could ever accept<br />
that its own employees should pay out of pocket for the proper maintenance<br />
of their most essential equipment. This is the suffering into which the<br />
Tremonti-Gelmini reforms have thrown the university.<br />
But the greatest paradox—as I anticipated—is that teachers are not<br />
the only ones who have to pay for those cuts. To the generalized reduction of<br />
economic resources for the university there corresponds in reality a marked<br />
increase in difficulties for those who take advantage of the ―service‖ of<br />
teaching (namely, the students) and for those to whom such a ―service‖<br />
brings new blood in terms of research and development (namely, young<br />
contingent researchers). To a university that does not have the money to<br />
maintain libraries (hours of operation, the acquisition of new books,<br />
interlibrary loan) or to welcome students in buildings that meet the<br />
minimum standards of decency (classrooms of sufficient size, computers<br />
and other services for students), there corresponds in reality an increased<br />
difficulty, on the part of less affluent families, to continue the education of<br />
their own children.<br />
Fewer libraries, fewer computers, dilapidated classrooms and<br />
uncomfortable seats signify an ever-greater burden placed upon families<br />
who try to respond as best they can to the deficiencies of the institution. The<br />
cost of allowing one‘s children to study is always increasing: and this<br />
happens not only because of the more general economic crisis, but also (and<br />
primarily) because the services that universities are able to provide for those<br />
who enroll are always diminishing.<br />
Given all of that, some in [Italy] claim that it is a luxury to conduct<br />
research, or in other terms, it is a luxury to reward the legitimate<br />
32
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
aspirations of the young who have demonstrated their brilliance in an<br />
academic course of study and who yearn to do research, not as a hobby that<br />
is cultivated on weekends, but as their reason and source of sustenance.<br />
The reforms of welfare and of contractual models (which even some centerleft<br />
governments have been willing to support) have made it so that in the<br />
university, forms of ―non-structured‖ or contingent work have grown<br />
exponentially, to the point of reaching disturbing levels. In many cases, the<br />
official count that universities produce on the number and types of workers<br />
in their institution demonstrate that in some departments nearly half of the<br />
people who work there do so on contingent contracts (contracts by the<br />
project, temporary collaborations, training, scholarships): that amounts to<br />
saying that for every ten ―full-time‖ workers, there are often just as many<br />
who work with them on a contingent and thus precarious contract.<br />
However—one might ask us—isn‘t this the model closest to that of<br />
other Western countries? Why is this such a scandal in Italy? Here is the<br />
real problem: if, in fact, in the United States and in many other countries<br />
research is often associated with the status of fixed-term work, it happens<br />
that this occurs through contracts that in general are much more lucrative<br />
and that balance their precariousness with much more significant financial<br />
compensation. Now, over the course of years, it is increasingly clear that our<br />
country has adopted this model, but has added to it a level of pay that is not<br />
even minimally close to that found in other countries. In concrete terms, in<br />
our departments we have spent 50% of the budget on contingent workers;<br />
and these 50% work with contracts that in many cases don‘t even earn them<br />
1,500 euro. To be clear: this is 1,500 euro per year, not per month. It should<br />
also not be forgotten that, above all, in the Humanities departments, the<br />
precarious nature of these positions is a given fact that accompanies<br />
academics from graduation to their retirement forty years later.<br />
But how have the Tremonti-Gelmini cuts taken part in this<br />
situation? First of all, it is clear that in the approved measures and in the<br />
applicable decrees in phases of elaboration one sees only a general<br />
reshuffling of the cards (according to the principle ―change everything,<br />
because nothing really changes‖), but no concrete effect on the real defects<br />
of our universities that I mentioned earlier: programs and career<br />
advancement, among others. And, in the second place, in matters of<br />
contingent labor it happens in very many cases that contracts have<br />
worsened beyond the imaginable. We speak of the reduction (and, in many<br />
cases, of the suspension) of research fellows, which are the highest<br />
academic posts for our most talented students. And we speak of the<br />
transformation of contingent contracts into ―zero compensation‖ contracts,<br />
that is, ones that use manpower hired explicitly on a voluntary basis: with<br />
33
Vattimo / Martinengo | University and Research in Italy<br />
teaching or research activities now conducted in a manner completely<br />
without compensation.<br />
In recent years, the Italian public university has become this:<br />
universities that live on little; students who work in dilapidated and<br />
crumbling structures, with services whose usefulness diminish day by day;<br />
teachers who find themselves in workplaces where pay is guaranteed, but<br />
often without the support one normally finds in any business, no matter<br />
how big or small it is (despite the slogan ―university business,‖ which<br />
politicians would pretend to follow); young contingent researchers who are<br />
forced to work for free or are underpaid, publishing research recognized in<br />
the entire world but without even the smallest chance for a future in our<br />
own country.<br />
Europe, as a society of knowledge, can and must also save Italy in<br />
this. And it ought to do it with some very concrete initiatives:<br />
1. The imposition in member states of recognized and recognizable<br />
criteria for the judgment of merit and productivity, in order to reward true<br />
merit;<br />
2. The increase in available sources of funding for research in all<br />
disciplines (including the humanities), in order to improve the working<br />
conditions for contingent researchers;<br />
3. The increase of international exchanges, through large economic<br />
concessions to Erasmus students and to young researchers;<br />
4. Aid to publishers for the translation and diffusion of the most<br />
important scientific publications in the member states of the Union.<br />
To comment or respond to Gianni Vattimo and Alberto<br />
Martinengo‘s essay, please send an email to :<br />
editors@purlieujournal.com<br />
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published<br />
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of <strong>Purlieu</strong>.<br />
Notes<br />
1. Translator‘s Note: The Italian noun ―precariato‖ denotes temporary employment, but the<br />
root of the word ―precario‖ connotes the precariousness of these positions. I have opted for<br />
the word ―contingent laborer‖ as its translation, as this is the term used currently to<br />
indicate faculty and researchers who work without jobs.<br />
34
Call For Papers<br />
Articles are welcome in any area of philosophy or<br />
philosophical perspectives, including but not<br />
limited to: Gender and Race Studies, Literature,<br />
Political Science, Ecology, Education,<br />
Communication Studies, Linguistics, Sociology,<br />
Anthropology, Poetry, Urban Studies, and<br />
Psychology.<br />
Articles are blind-reviewed and judged on their<br />
philosophical merit and relevance. Articles should<br />
be double-spaced Word documents, with a cover<br />
page (including institutional affiliation) and<br />
300-500 word abstract. For stylistic concerns,<br />
consult the University of Chicago Press Manual of<br />
Style.<br />
Imagery is encouraged; however it is the obligation<br />
of the author to obtain permission for any imagery<br />
within the article if it is not within public domain.<br />
Authors will not be charged extra for images.<br />
www.purlieujournal.com<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>
www.purlieujournal.com
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Dr. Babette Babich is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University where<br />
she has taught since 1989. Her work focuses on Continental philosophy, especially Nietzsche<br />
and Heidegger, philosophy of science, as well as politics and aesthetics. Her books include<br />
Nietzsche‘s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life; Words in<br />
Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and<br />
Heidegger, and her most recent, Nietzsches Wissenshaftsphilosophie. She is the Executive<br />
Editor of New Nietzsche Studies, a journal she founded in 1994.<br />
PURLIEU: As the editors of <strong>Purlieu</strong> we have been accused of<br />
attempting something superfluous — or even detrimental — to the<br />
field of philosophy. Among the charges leveled against us, some<br />
critics have claimed that we risk diluting the rigor demanded of our<br />
discipline and that we thus compromise its integrity. As the editor of<br />
seven books and the founding and Executive Editor of New Nietzsche<br />
Studies, what can you tell us about our duties as editors? More<br />
generally, what is the value and the future of academic publishing,<br />
both with periodicals as well as books?<br />
BABICH: These are excellent questions, and as is often the case with<br />
excellent questions, I find more than just a few queries packed into what<br />
you say. And it is because you have just started a journal (and because I<br />
have founded not just one but two journals, one founded as an<br />
undergraduate, which continued after I graduated for several years before it<br />
vanished, as well as New Nietzsche Studies, which you mention above and<br />
37
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
which of course continues), I take your first set of questions as very<br />
important indeed. Because such issues are rarely addressed in the<br />
profession and because the new technologies of publication and<br />
communication have changed much of the playing field, I feel compelled to<br />
reply to your question at some length. Later, I‘ll abbreviate my replies to<br />
your following questions for the sake of balance.<br />
To begin with your initial remark regarding ―the charges leveled<br />
against‖ your editorial project, such charges seem to reflect what we may,<br />
for convenience, call the ―gate-keepers‖ worry. 1 I recall a conversation with<br />
Larry Hatab in which he denounced the many publishing opportunities, as<br />
he perceived them, that seemed to be springing up everywhere. At the time<br />
(and now), I didn‘t see the explosion as being either all that explosive or<br />
indeed as undesirable — so obviously we were on different sides on the<br />
matter.<br />
I held that we needed even more journals than we have. And in my<br />
view, current journals, even new ones, tend to reproduce very standard<br />
points of view, just with different names. I believe that one should have, just<br />
as Nietzsche argues, as many viewpoints as possible. And yet I should<br />
underline, and this is a more elusive point, I do not believe that we should<br />
have only or just those viewpoints we regard as ―good.‖ I say this because<br />
what we call ―good‖ is itself a judgment established on the basis of the<br />
things we take ourselves to know. Another word for such judgments, as we<br />
learn from hermeneutics, is prejudice.<br />
Nietzsche had his own way of putting this as he foregrounds it at<br />
the start of his The Gay Science, after his musical jokes (and here it matters<br />
very much that we keep in mind, from a publishing perspective, which was<br />
always of crucial interest to Nietzsche, that The Gay Science was a prelude<br />
to his Zarathustra, itself a parodic or, again, playful prelude to his very<br />
important and to date ill-understood, Beyond Good and Evil):<br />
it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an<br />
intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely<br />
populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everyone looks at<br />
you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales,<br />
calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when<br />
you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do<br />
people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. (GS<br />
§2)<br />
Larry, who is of course an excellent Nietzschean in every other<br />
sense, had his own good reasons for his concern. The gate-keeper‘s worry<br />
reflects the confidence we have, and we academics do count on this<br />
conviction for hiring and tenuring and so on, that so-called better or ―top<br />
tier‖ journals — and we may extend this to our views of publishing houses<br />
38
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
or even of universities and so on — are indeed better than other journals<br />
and publishing houses. And we hold that they are better (this is the point<br />
David Hume tries to make in his On the Standard of Taste) in some sort of<br />
objectively sanctioned fashion. It is essential to a conviction, in order for it<br />
to be a conviction, that it remains unquestioned.<br />
The notion of ―top-tier‖ corresponds to what the sociologist Pierre<br />
Bourdieu called ―distinction‖ and such things are the most solid things we<br />
have in our capitalist world: silk and cashmere are in truth more valuable<br />
(more goes into their production) than, say, acrylic or polyester. Beyond the<br />
stuff of stuff, beyond fabrics, a Rolls Royce, like a Bentley, is an excellent<br />
car, but how much better than a Jaguar? Or to make it a harder question,<br />
how much better than a Ferrari?—a Porsche? —a Mercedes Benz? —and so<br />
on. The car industry happily provides exemplars to answer such questions<br />
and much of what counts as excellence is perceived excellence. In addition,<br />
when it comes to truly high-end automobiles, it is a buyer‟s market only,<br />
and that means that most such questions hardly concern us as consumers,<br />
as users, and to that extent our own experience of high-end ―excellence‖ in<br />
the real world is a spectator‘s, an observer‘s, rather than a user‘s<br />
experience. The ―goodness‖ of the Rolls Royce, for most of us, is to see it<br />
driving past us if we are in downtown Beverly Hills or out in the Hamptons.<br />
So too, and this is the value point of the cost issue, an Ivy League education<br />
is similarly exclusive (ergo rarified) and excluding (and this is, the<br />
economists tell us, how scarcity is manufactured).<br />
Publications are different by nature. And desktop and online<br />
publishing only make the issue more complex. Thus the anxiety about new<br />
publications is related to anxiety about whether or not they have been<br />
properly ‗vetted‘ and this in turn is really about another question: will these<br />
new publications upset established apple carts? And so on. Nevertheless,<br />
founding journals is something you have in common with a number of<br />
illustrious forbears such as Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hölderlin.<br />
At the start, one journal is no better and no worse than any other.<br />
In fact, your greatest challenge is not so much the project you are beginning<br />
but whether it can be kept: there are many journals that have appeared,<br />
with ‗good‘ editors, and ‗good‘ contributors, only to vanish after a single<br />
issue. Thus what makes a journal, beyond reader judgment (and on an<br />
individual level that is always a matter of taste: what issue do you pick up?<br />
which do you continue to read?), is the editors‘ vision. At the same time, it<br />
depends even more on the authors who contribute, and yet more important<br />
(and I would actually add layout to the mix) is the question of dissemination.<br />
Dissemination is related to distribution, but in addition, and this is still<br />
more elusive, there is the challenge of acquiring readers even given<br />
distribution. Thus what makes a journal (or a press) top quality has to do<br />
39
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
with ―reception‖ and reception is tied to academic capital, again, in<br />
Bourdieu‘s sense of the term. Publishers such as Harvard University Press,<br />
Oxford University Press, Gallimard, Walter de Grutyer, have such capital.<br />
At the same time, the paradox of academic capital is its utter<br />
dreariness: the material such well-respected publishers publish is so very<br />
standardized (as a matter of sheer conventionality) that one very soon<br />
discovers that one is only reading the same old (or same young) folk talking<br />
to (and about) the same old (or young) folk. This is, for example, a complaint<br />
commonly uttered against the New York Review of Books just because the<br />
New York Review of Books, like most review publications, does not exist in<br />
order to, say, as one might innocently suppose, review books as such as<br />
much as it exists to review just and only the kind of books its<br />
editors/reviewers like — which almost always means only the kind of books<br />
its editors/reviewers write. This is well before Eli Pariser and others wrote<br />
about the Internet bubble, the academic bubble that used once to be called,<br />
shades of Simeon Stylites, the ivory tower.<br />
However, even as the inherent circularity, insularity, nepotism of<br />
academic publishing can be deadly, at the same time (and this is also the<br />
stuff of media studies, propaganda research, and the sociology of<br />
advertising, this is the McLuhan effect), it‘s also the case that as a species<br />
we crave repetition: repetition reinforces our beliefs and all of us are happy<br />
to confirm our prejudices. This is how<br />
the ‗bubble‘ (Google is calling this<br />
your ‗circles,‘ Facebook just filters<br />
your buddies for you without giving<br />
the filter a name) works as a bubble.<br />
Leibniz liked the word monad, in this<br />
case, to push the metaphor,<br />
windowless even with, just because<br />
of, windows and internet access.<br />
As I see it, the charges leveled against you derive from this broader<br />
circumstance. In general, what we don‘t like is for people who rock the boat.<br />
And when one starts a journal, I would say, especially as an undergraduate,<br />
one is inevitably rocking the boat, whether or not one means to be.<br />
To turn to your question about the ―duty‖ of an editor, I should<br />
qualify my views by emphasizing that I always also edit with the perspective<br />
of an author in mind. For my own part, and I am also thinking historically<br />
about what has been the case with regard to journals founded in the past<br />
(here we are back to Schiller and Hölderlin, et al.), the role of an editor is<br />
ultimately, and inevitably, to produce a whole. The editor qua editor edits a<br />
journal or (a book collection), that is then published as an entirety: the<br />
40<br />
What we don‘t like is for<br />
people who rock the boat.<br />
And when one starts a journal<br />
one is inevitably rocking the<br />
boat, whether or not one<br />
means to be.
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
journal is not this or that article, the book is not this or that chapter, it is<br />
the book as a whole. It is this entirety that conveys the spirit of its editors,<br />
its editorial board, and (this works backwards because this is also what<br />
draws future contributions) its authors as well.<br />
In this sense, the role of the editor is like a musical conductor‘s role,<br />
whereby the role of the editor is to permit or allow a certain overarching,<br />
unified voice or spirit to emerge. This spirit is already in evidence in what<br />
makes a given issue of a journal to be a particular issue (sometimes this is<br />
effected by nothing more than an ingenious title, sometimes it is evident in<br />
reading a table of contents), and it is what makes a book collection to be a<br />
book rather than a collocation of unrelated essays (this last question, when<br />
it comes to collections, is something book publishers worry a good deal<br />
about, although and in fact publishers tend to publish collections that are<br />
timely even when they do not cohere).<br />
At the same time, and I always find this surprising, not only do<br />
authors rarely appreciate an editor‘s efforts, authors brought together in a<br />
journal (or a book collection) tend not to read one another. This is relevant<br />
because when one speaks of readers one automatically discounts the<br />
authors themselves just as one discounts the editors and the reviewers and<br />
conjures up, in the general fantasy that is publishing, a great mass of<br />
readers: which mass is then reified as the ideal reader. But the one thing<br />
that emerges from web 2.0 hype is that for the most part all of us exemplify<br />
in the best and worst, i.e., most literal, way what Mark Twain once said (I<br />
owe the reference to Tracy B. Strong): all of us have music and poetry inside<br />
of us, but most have a hard time getting it out.<br />
Well, Mark Twain, i.e, twice and again: it‘s not hard anymore. Thus<br />
there‘s YouTube, there‘s Facebook, the rightly-named Twitter (proving, as if<br />
it had needed to be shown, that deep or complex thoughts cannot be<br />
expressed with brevity), and any number of other outlets. All ways, as I<br />
argue elsewhere with respect to today‘s internet, that are surprisingly<br />
similar to the activity of writing on a public bathroom wall, metaphorically<br />
speaking . . . 2<br />
Graffiti, Kilroy was here, or better words to that effect, is of course a<br />
kind of publishing and in many ways it trumps Twitter and proves that, in<br />
context and in the real world, far more can be done with far less.<br />
Hence, when the Barnes and Noble store closed at the Lincoln<br />
Center triangle of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, for a brief moment,<br />
passersby would be able to see what had been written on the wall in the<br />
universal idiom of spray paint, the medium and font of choice for urban<br />
commentary: ―UNION JOB NOT‖ and all the despair of the current<br />
41
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
downsizing that is shattering the American nation and its dream is written<br />
there.<br />
The real world point here has to do with the writing one can read on<br />
such a wall. In the case of a closing store, that inscription is soon painted<br />
over or boarded up, but with a journal that can last in the case of a print<br />
issue as long as the issue itself lasts, in libraries, stores (of course there are<br />
fewer and fewer of these and that trend will only continue), personal<br />
collections, and so on. What one encounters with a real print issue of a<br />
journal is the whole journal; printed and bound, for any given issue of a<br />
journal is effectively a book, and like a book collection, it is the editor, from<br />
the point of view of the Library of Congress, who counts as the author. 3<br />
By the same token, this experience of an encounter with a journal<br />
(or a magazine) is changing with the atomizing effects of on-line publishing,<br />
an atomization which extends the original insularity of the authors of the<br />
articles themselves, as the authors of those articles (never mind the<br />
intentions of the editor, and this is even the case with a commissioned book,<br />
that is to say: even when an editor conceives the theme and invites<br />
contributors to contribute) remain intrinsically isolated one from another.<br />
Readers too relate to the text as such in an increasingly atomistic<br />
fashion, and as Nietzsche once observed fairly disparagingly, one often reads<br />
(just as one often stops reading altogether) only for the sake of a book of<br />
one‘s own. But as I noted above, and as many commentators on the internet<br />
or web have also noted, especially Jaron Lanier but also media theorists at<br />
every level, there is a massive ―conversion‖ of consumers aka ―content users‖<br />
who are now, willy-nilly, and merely by posting, merely by ‗sharing,‘ also<br />
―publishing.‖ The point is an instructive one, and it would be great if<br />
economists could learn a bit from it.<br />
Those who produce are also those who consume. Note that this is<br />
not new: it was always so. What is new is that it is now true for more and<br />
more people. The writers in other words are the readers. This is literally so<br />
in the case of a Twitter ‗retweet‘ which is simply a more redundant version of<br />
a Facebook ‗like‘ — all of which are so many ways to advertise.<br />
By contrast, of course, the old model of publishing assumes a set of<br />
dynamics that have not changed since the means of the propagation of texts<br />
in antiquity: there we are back to writing on the wall, with parallels to and<br />
with proportionality that were themselves much older, drawn from public<br />
spaces to the theater in the open air and from the specific acoustics of a<br />
closed space, a cave, a tholos tomb (and we still see this in the lecture hall)<br />
or, expanding the theater (and therewith the lecture hall), to a public rally in<br />
the open air, where with the last we now assume loud speakers, as we must<br />
do ever since Hitler made this problematic. As Rudolf Arnheim noted, among<br />
42
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
many others who have explored this, an understanding of this phenomena<br />
must be extended ‗over the air‘ itself, across borders, with a study of radio<br />
broadcast. 4 Thus we cross the world, and today, given a network link,<br />
wireless or not, publishing is broadcast on the internet, visually in every<br />
graphic sense and acoustically. As the model goes: there is productive<br />
content (whether online, on the radio, at the podium, on stage) and there is<br />
a listening, receptive audience: ‗Hello world,‘ says the first time blogger.<br />
The ideal is the theatre, which is very interesting as that goes back<br />
to the dawn of democracy in antiquity, or the musical concert (which was in<br />
antiquity the same as Nietzsche sought to remind us, not that those who<br />
study him have managed to notice), and it continues to this day in a market<br />
economy, which engenders the kind of entertainment that made the world ―a<br />
stage‖ in the middle ages, because what one wants, after all, are paying<br />
customers. It is the spectacle that sells, or better said, as Nietzsche also<br />
shows to the frustration of his Zarathustra: it is a particular kind of<br />
spectacle, in this case that would be the cruel prospect of the undoing of the<br />
―overman‖ (the fall of the tightrope walker) that attracts people to the market<br />
place to begin with.<br />
This works with a medieval masque or fair, as this also works with a<br />
travelling show, with today‘s music concerts, be they classical or not, or<br />
when the circus comes to town (provided one does not think, as one ought<br />
to think, about the cruelty to animals). For the terms of publishing today,<br />
the trouble begins when it comes to understanding the new media.<br />
And today, in point of fact, everyone pays. You get your internet<br />
from somewhere; even if you don‘t personally pay AOL or Compuserve, you<br />
do pay the phone company for DSL or you pay for cable or what have you.<br />
Or if you use your university connection, you pay for that pretty directly<br />
(even if the university, to confuse matters, sometimes calls these ‗indirect<br />
costs‘). The problem when it comes to publishing, and it is this that gets<br />
Lanier‘s goat, is that the same everyman (to use that metaphor as we may,<br />
having introduced the medieval masque above) also produces or generates<br />
their own experience.<br />
Again: everyone pays but not everyone gets paid. And that last bit<br />
continues to resist comprehension although it is the most obvious of all,<br />
which was the point of Shakespeare‘s all the world‟s a stage, as I already<br />
alluded to it, and the point your composition or journalism teacher tried to<br />
drive home to you by suggesting you write, à la Kerouac, from ‗life.‘ If you<br />
want to sing Karaoke fine, if you don‘t want to sing fine, you are still part of<br />
the spectacle if you turn up for Karaoke Night at your local bar. And as<br />
Lanier and others are at pains to explain, you are still part of the spectacle if<br />
you skip the local bar and simply tune in to American Idol.<br />
43
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
Likewise, and because of its ubiquity, you are involved with<br />
YouTube whatever you do. YouTube is a giant machine for ―free‖ content<br />
supplied by both individuals and professional content makers. Content<br />
drives a system that goes beyond content itself. Indeed, the content is<br />
ultimately utterly irrelevant. It is there to occupy your mind, catch your<br />
critical attention while the real work is worked upon you, that is to say, the<br />
more interesting you, from the point of marketers, that is the uncritical and<br />
more receptive you. This is true of the poem, as T. S. Eliot tells us, and it is<br />
true of music and it is true of Google and Facebook ads, which is also how<br />
and why Google and Facebook make the money they do make. You don‘t<br />
think you pay attention to these ads but you do, and ten out of ten people<br />
(ok: nine because I would certainly say Yes! let them be gone forever, if<br />
anyone ever asked) say in fact, No: they would not want advertising banned<br />
from television: they want ads on tv, on the radio, on the internet. Even<br />
those who oppose ads, as in the case of the activist journal Adbusters, 5<br />
produce a product that is indistinguishable, and that is of course the<br />
editor‘s point, from a journal full of ads.<br />
Everyone pays but not<br />
everyone gets paid…<br />
And that last bit<br />
continues to resist<br />
comprehension although<br />
it is the most obvious of<br />
all. The problem for the<br />
producers/consumers is<br />
that content production<br />
happens to be a one-<br />
way street.<br />
The problem for the<br />
producers/consumers is that this content<br />
production happens to be a one-way street,<br />
as Lanier and others have observed. In<br />
general, it does not lead to a book contract,<br />
or a record contract, or a movie contract.<br />
Most of my colleagues, especially those with<br />
an interest in political philosophy, who<br />
would like to have CNN, say, call them in as<br />
―experts,‖ do not in fact get called. Most<br />
bloggers will not be able to turn their blogs<br />
into a book. (Sorry.) If you write a book<br />
about your senior year and turn it into an<br />
ebook, it may not get buyers; but then again<br />
it might. Lanier worries that is an inevitably<br />
one-off phenomenon, affected all the way down by a certain interplay (and<br />
many of his critics fail to note this and simply counter that, after all, it<br />
might happen again, not note that this is not how Lanier puts it, between<br />
mimesis and projection/conjecture). The point is the old science fiction<br />
paradox, which academics, from Žižek to me and many others, love to write<br />
about by abbreviating the reference to the SF paradox to a mere mention of<br />
the movie, Minority Report (though Twelve Monkeys is probably more to the<br />
gut existential point), and Minority Report is in fact, and as Avatar was, a<br />
kind of advance marketing for putatively future technologies (so far,<br />
however, 3-D screens, for example, are not selling as well as had been<br />
hoped).<br />
44
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Beyond the monotony that is the inevitable consequence of this<br />
phenomenon, the problem is the most pernicious for musicians. Indeed<br />
musicians tend to get the short of end of the stick in all times. They were not<br />
well served by the past system: the recording industry serves the recording<br />
industry not the musicians, and radio serves the recording industry not the<br />
musicians and not the listeners (what choice do you have, a question one<br />
always ponders when one‘s local public broadcasting station hits one up for<br />
bucks to support programming of a kind in which one as a member of the<br />
public has in fact no say whatever). Thus as Lanier observes in his book,<br />
you are not a gadget, the internet offers all kinds of possibilities, among<br />
them musical, but almost none of them serve the working musician. 6<br />
In other words, as the saying goes, ‗Don‘t quit your day job.‘ In his<br />
Against the Machine, Lee Siegel tries to track this from the start, going back,<br />
as Lanier also goes back, to the now nearly romantically iconic WELL (but<br />
this was also true of almost all of the old BBS and .alt communities, and<br />
indeed every chat room, a certain vestige of which survives, albeit, one-onone<br />
in Facebook messages). For Siegel‘s point, as I would gloss it, trades on<br />
the inherently economic equivocation built into the meaning of ‗exchange‘<br />
per se: ―behind every intimate expression lay a self-advertisement; hidden in<br />
the invitation to a relationship was the bid for a profitable connection.‖ 7<br />
It‘s all about the sell, as Marschall McLuhan observed a long time<br />
ago — which is why, although people periodically ―rediscover‖ him inside<br />
and outside of the academy, McLuhan never left the advertising world. Not<br />
for a single moment. Elvis may have left the building: McLuhan is always<br />
with us.<br />
Siegel too refers to McLuhan: he even includes a citation. Lanier<br />
repeats the same point leaving out Siegel along with his references. This is<br />
not a comment against Lanier, Siegel himself published his book apparently<br />
after slashing his own references which live on as allusions, as echoes and<br />
mentions which the majority of the readers one worries about, the readers<br />
one supposes will be lost if one has too many (that would be any) footnotes,<br />
can blissfully ignore: what you don‘t see won‘t bother you.<br />
What concerns Siegel is the nature of the urge to turn one‘s private<br />
experience into a public commodity, and Siegel‘s book is about the<br />
eagerness of the public in general to do just that. To illustrate, consider New<br />
York on New Year‘s Eve. The crowds who show up in Times Square do not<br />
merely come to see the ball drop: they come decked out and fully hoping to<br />
be seen seeing the ball drop.<br />
This is not about expression: this about the media, i.e., this is a<br />
reflection on publishing.<br />
45
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
Thus Siegel titles his central chapter, every allusion to McLuhan as<br />
patent as you please, ―The Me is the Message.‖ 8 And the point is that exactly<br />
this message is Madison Avenue‘s message: like the shirt or tie you plan to<br />
buy: the savvy salesperson sidles up to you, murmuring, it‟s you, it‟s all you.<br />
And we identify with this, a mirror of selling and sold, sold and selling. Thus<br />
the other day at a camera store, a young man pointed to his glasses and<br />
explained that this identified him as a PC, ‗You know,‘ he said to me<br />
patiently, noticing my bewilderment: ‗like the commercial,‘ dutifully<br />
deconstructing the point for my benefit: ‗Macs don‘t wear glasses.‘ I did not<br />
buy the camera I came to buy.<br />
Here the point is to become, and we are indeed to become, like the<br />
tv–commercial-watching-young-salesman himself, the products we<br />
‗consume.‘<br />
For editors this is a conundrum, but it is also an opportunity and<br />
others can tell you the opportunity. The conundrum is what interests me as<br />
an editor and as a philosopher, for as an editor (and indeed, as an author)<br />
what follows from this is that it is hard to count on readers. Hence, as<br />
Derrida would say, ‗friends, there are no friends!,‘ here we may simply say:<br />
‗readers, there are no readers!‘<br />
To return to the heart of your question, when you ask about the<br />
duty of the editor, the question is inevitably an ethical one. For my own part,<br />
I follow what I take to be the editor‘s imperative. For me this is not about<br />
serving a public, more or less imaginary as that public happens to be<br />
imaginary in a Lacanian sense, 9 but I take the role of an academic editor —<br />
and I note of course that this will be different if one is editing items of public<br />
or general interest — to be always to allow the author to speak.<br />
From an editor‘s point of view, what this means in real effect is that<br />
in academia as elsewhere, the editors, like the sound engineers in a music<br />
concert or a music recording, are invisible. As a corollary, you should note<br />
that editing will never do anything for you, neither for your ego nor for your<br />
career. Editing will not get you into graduate studies; it will not get you a<br />
job. In part this is a structural matter: the role of the editor is all about<br />
bringing out, foregrounding, the work of others, sometimes this is by way of<br />
direct editing, including direct cuts and glossing (this is hard because you<br />
have to be able to judge what is meant and you have to be correct in that<br />
judgment and every author, not only Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, claims to<br />
mean what they do not in fact say, not because they are perverse but<br />
because of the way language and context work in a text). In most cases in<br />
the academic world, editing is simply a matter of recommending revision<br />
(this lets the author say what they mean). Or the ultimate edit, which is of<br />
course either publishing a text as is or refusing it.<br />
46
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
But at the end of the day, and this too is a corollary of editorial<br />
invisibility, it remains the author, not the editor, who is responsible for what<br />
is published under the author‘s name. When articles appear in print they do<br />
not carry a little asterisk saying, ‗changed here and there by editorial fiat‘<br />
although such changes can and do happen (my own titles have been<br />
changed by editors, my texts have suffered awfully idiotic rephrasings and,<br />
on the other side of the desk, for my own part and as an editor, to my pain,<br />
if mostly for space reasons but sometimes for reasons of precision, I have<br />
myself had to change the odd title or two).<br />
At the same time, to go back to the idea of the supposedly undiluted<br />
―rigor‖ of the profession, now to use the language of your critics, an editor‘s<br />
judgment nearly always reflects, like the New York Review of Books already<br />
mentioned, today‘s prevailing standards and these are not only all-toohuman<br />
but notoriously subject to change. And as standards they often fall<br />
short of precisely what they claim to ensure as mentioned above:<br />
distinguishing between good and bad work.<br />
Here I find it salutary to reflect on the fact that Nietzsche‘s own<br />
academic peers refused to recognize his work at all (never mind refusing to<br />
name him as ―best‖ in his era). Nor has that changed in his field of classical<br />
philology and that remains the case now after an interval of more than a<br />
century.<br />
Max Weber pointed to this as well – and although it always seemed<br />
to me that Weber could have had Nietzsche in mind I believe he was<br />
thinking (as authors often are) only about himself in fact. At the heart of<br />
Weber‘s recommendation to anyone considering an academic life as a<br />
vocation, be it as editor, or author, professor, researcher, no one ought to<br />
consider academics (which he also called ―science,‖ using good German 19 th<br />
century terminology as he happened to have done) if what one expects of it<br />
is to be recognized for one‘s work. The unfairness of this lack of recognition<br />
is the signal character of academia. It is also the prime reason for despair<br />
and burn out among academics.<br />
Weber‘s advice is empirically well-founded. Nor should one enter<br />
into the life of a scholar, as an academic or a scientist of any kind, if one has<br />
hope to be recognized thereby for talent, for achievement or for dedication.<br />
Nor should one enter the life of academia if one hopes to find colleagues in<br />
the true sense (ah, that would be others who share your interests). Weber‘s<br />
reasons for saying this were empirical hence his advice is practical: so many<br />
counsels of prudence, as Kant would say, and Thomas Kuhn would go on to<br />
repeat them, with a good deal less verve, a little later. For us what follows<br />
from this is that supposedly higher gatekeepers, the people one supposes to<br />
be in control, the academic departments who make various appointments,<br />
47
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
especially at the level of distinguished chairs, the editors and the peer<br />
reviewers who vet submitted essays, the publishers who publish, all do so<br />
always according to their own reasons and ―excellence‖ is inevitably the least<br />
of these.<br />
The current worry in the peer-review process used in the natural<br />
sciences in particular, and arguably this is most the important for a sciencefaithful<br />
public such as our own, concerns the nepotism or inherent<br />
circularity of peer review. In fact, that is to say: in end effect, peer review<br />
guarantees not objectivity but insularity. Like the New York Review of Each<br />
Others Books, as it is sometimes called, the problem with ―peer review‖ in<br />
the natural sciences is that it inevitably concentrates power (and grants) in<br />
smaller and smaller circles of mutually reinforcing self-promotion. 10 The<br />
problem of industry supported research, namely that sponsored by big<br />
tobacco and big pharma and so on, is only a more transparent and<br />
manifestly more egregious variation on this. Science in general, and this is<br />
the source of the influence of the sciences in the university, draws enormous<br />
revenue (only museums and archaeological sites compare) from all kinds of<br />
sponsors, the government included, and that sponsorship as Feyerabend<br />
the problem with ―peer<br />
review‖ in the natural<br />
sciences is that it<br />
inevitably concentrates<br />
power (and grants) in<br />
smaller and smaller<br />
circles of mutually<br />
reinforcing selfpromotion.<br />
Where power<br />
is conferred on a few<br />
hands, one hand<br />
inevitably washes the<br />
other.<br />
emphasized is by no means neutral. 11<br />
Where power is conferred on a few hands,<br />
one hand inevitably washes the other.<br />
For Weber, and speaking<br />
practically, what this means for the student<br />
is that if one wishes to choose the life of the<br />
mind or the life of public service, that is<br />
academia/science or politics as a vocation,<br />
one is choosing science or politics as a<br />
vocation, that is to say: as a way of life.<br />
These then are recommendations for action,<br />
so Weber counsels us. At the same time,<br />
what people do in practice is not ideal. And<br />
what one does in anything that one is called<br />
to do, one does because one feels, for<br />
whatever reason, and this will vary from<br />
person to person, that it is worthwhile to do<br />
(maybe it serves a personal ambition,<br />
maybe everyone in one‘s family is also an academic, maybe one has nothing<br />
better to do, etc.)<br />
Your last question in this first series of questions is also, because it<br />
is general, the most difficult. You ask: ―what is the value and the future of<br />
academic publishing, both with periodicals as well as books?‖<br />
48
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
I think the most immediate value of specifically academic publishing<br />
is that is about the ―life of the mind.‖ Publishing is its life‘s blood as it were,<br />
and only through publishing can the ―life‖ of the life of the mind be assured<br />
beyond individual scholarship itself (or Wissenschaft as both Goethe and<br />
Kant and Nietzsche and Husserl and Heidegger spoke of it). This life is the<br />
ultimate value of the real or actual production of books: by which I mean the<br />
generation of the books themselves, the journals themselves, and that for<br />
me is always all about ‗real‘ journals and ‗real‘ books — of the real-life kind,<br />
on real paper.<br />
Of course I realize I sound old-fashioned by talking about real books<br />
and real paper. At the same time, the point I am hoping to make is a<br />
physical, visceral, vital one. I would add along the way that the publication<br />
of real journals, real books, already presupposes, as higher things tend to<br />
do, the lesser coincident things as well, namely digital publication. Thus by<br />
saying that publishing ought to be ―real,‖ I am hardly choosing against<br />
virtual or online publication, PDFs or E-anything. Publishing a journal in<br />
print form automatically generates the digital form (for we are not talking<br />
about setting type as this Gutenberg-style legacy is a craft which is no<br />
longer practiced and has thus become an ―art,‖ occasionally resuscitated<br />
and meaning, to be sure, and I underline this: that much of what once<br />
belonged to it qua craft is lost, perhaps irretrievably so as the things that are<br />
the most crucial in any craft are always the things that go without saying<br />
and are hence unrecorded 12 — but what is certain, in any case, is that the<br />
printer‘s skill in setting type is not used in today‘s academic publishing). 13<br />
I have already expressed my preference for print journals, but note<br />
too, as far too few of us do — even on the level of theoretical reflection on<br />
digital publication — that digital publishing as such is one of the most<br />
evanescent, that also means the most fragile, invisibly so, of all publishing<br />
forms. For this reason, real, physical journals; real, physical books, are<br />
essential for enduring scholarship and preservation remains, given our<br />
mortality and given our forgetfulness, the reason for scholarship as such.<br />
At the same time as I would argue that there is no reason to choose<br />
between ―real‖ and virtual publication, just such a choice happens (by<br />
default) more and more. Excellent on this topic would be both the<br />
aforementioned books by Lanier and by Siegel but also Cliff Stoll‘s Silicon<br />
Snakeoil, which last includes an account of the mindless destruction of<br />
information that was resultant not simply by destroying books as Google<br />
has been and is doing (wholesale), but the things one never notices: the loss<br />
of the accoutrements of past information technology, that would be<br />
university library card catalogues, which contained, in their physicality,<br />
corresponding in each case to their uniqueness to each institution,<br />
inherently uncatalogued information added by the librarians (usually<br />
49
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
penciled in by hand, with soft, paper and revision friendly, lead), 14 both in<br />
user choices and through the unfortunate effects of decisions made by<br />
librarians, which again reflect issues more of ideology than budgets. In<br />
addition, and this matters in the context of periodical publication, when a<br />
library cuts, as many libraries have cut, periodical subscriptions or book<br />
orders, such cuts rarely translate to savings overall. Much rather, funds<br />
spared in that way are usually spent in another way (this is a consequence<br />
of working with ―budgets‖ of any kind but especially as institutionally<br />
administered and one has recently been able to observe the terrible cost of<br />
―budget thinking‖ during the debt ceiling debates which could only consider<br />
certain — and never other — cuts). 15<br />
This Heidegger emphasizes, if it is also true that my old teacher Don<br />
Ihde, despite his brilliance as an analyst of technology, manages because of<br />
his own later focus on his own work (here Ihde is exactly like Heidegger who<br />
was in turn exactly like Nietzsche) to miss the point of the point Heidegger<br />
had been making with regard to both the printing press and the typewriter.<br />
For his part, Ihde is only following Friedrich Kittler, but Kittler, who is<br />
himself otherwise quite ingeniously brilliant, nevertheless, and like many<br />
people in Germany (and elsewhere), seems apparently afflicted with the<br />
desire to eschew Heidegger on principle (Sloterdijk is only somewhat of an<br />
exception to this). Yet Heidegger, attuned as he was to the dynamic<br />
evolution of technological artifacts, reminded us that ―the invention of the<br />
printing press coincides with the inception of the modern period.‖ 16 To be<br />
sure, Heidegger observes, this is the ―triumph of the machine,‖ but his point<br />
is that it moves our relation to reading, to writing, away from a relation to<br />
the word, to another way of forming the word. We no longer ―form‖ words<br />
with a stylus in our hands, with a reed pen or an ink brush in this way.<br />
Following the imprint of the printing press as the printer composed it,<br />
thereby setting a page as a whole and at a blow, we are all become<br />
typesetters, printer‘s assistants, ourselves: turned via the touch typing of a<br />
Hemmingway towards the finger. Perhaps better said, we now key without<br />
impact, we text: we have a fingertip relationship and increasingly less and<br />
less of a haptic or tactile one to our keyboards, our blackberries, iPads:<br />
soon, this is the point, again, about the pre-marketing marketing function of<br />
Minority Report, we will soon write in the air (thus the future is a not a<br />
personal jetpack or little spaceship, à la the Jetsons, but simply a business<br />
woman, usually oriental, surrounded by technological displays and<br />
competently conjuring an invisibly curved column of still more transparent<br />
displays in the air around her, as seen in televison, internet, and magazine<br />
advertisements, as these always reinforce one another), but we will not be<br />
writing, and perhaps not even indicating, but something a bit closer to<br />
‗completing‘/‘completed by‘ via the services of what we fairly revealingly call<br />
a cloud which by then, of course, we will call something else.<br />
50
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Academic study allows us to pay attention to things such as the<br />
past relationship to the text as this informed what scholars of the past wrote<br />
about, in some cases and here Foucault but also Pierre Hadot, Ivan Illich, 17<br />
and a range of authors following the Homer question and the use of new<br />
technology (recording and computer analysis) have all of them helped us to<br />
frame the question once again. As Hadot has taught us, what we take to be<br />
straightforward theoretical texts were written therapeutically, that is to say<br />
very literally for the sake of life, as practical aids to changing one‘s way of<br />
living, rather than for the kind of speculative theoretical reflection that<br />
appeals to us as children of the text and less and less of the book.<br />
I hardly need to remind you that there are more publications now<br />
than ever before. What is worth remembering as a scholar and a thinker is<br />
that less is read than ever before. New authors should keep this in mind.<br />
The sheer fact that you publish something does not entail that it is read.<br />
Even if your blog has a respectable number of hits, it does not follow that<br />
your blog has been read, and there is a similar caveat concerning the email<br />
you may have received telling you that one of your articles has been<br />
‗downloaded‘ so and so many times. In fact, the more articles one<br />
downloads, the less, so I would hazard to say, one reads them.<br />
As an illustration, consider the stunt at MIT recently used to<br />
dramatize the inaccessibility of scientific articles to a reading public. 18 If we<br />
bracket for the sake of argument (this is not a court of law) the closet Aaron<br />
Swartz is said to have broken into, there are still a few hoops to jump<br />
through, yet a few ―gates‖ to pass through. Access to MIT‘s library (access to<br />
the ―Tool,‖ as MIT undergrads used to call their library when I was in<br />
Boston/Cambridge) does not rank right up there with general access for<br />
anyone. Just think how hard it is to get into your university library: what is<br />
a mere annoyance for you in possession of an ID card turns out to be an<br />
obstacle for anyone without one. My only point, the point worth thinking<br />
about here is that accessing, downloading the articles, does not correlate to<br />
articles actually read by the person who so assiduously downloaded them —<br />
and of course Swartz very geekily did this, i.e., automatically, but to do so<br />
requires a certain amount of gadgeteering which is why he needed to be in<br />
an inaccessible place to begin with and indeed why he needed to be in the<br />
particular place he was.<br />
Increasingly, we are all such geeks, minus the latest or best<br />
hardware and certainly minus the publicity plan. That is to say, to a greater<br />
and greater degree, we tend to download on automatic pilot. The<br />
determinism or autonomy of ―downloading‖ allows us to do this. I note as I<br />
have already cited Stoll‘s point to this effect, that periodical reading rooms<br />
are increasingly disappearing at university and college libraries across the<br />
country. At my university, the entire periodicals room which had been<br />
51
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
architecturally designed into a library recently built at Fordham‘s Rose Hill<br />
campus in the Bronx, featuring grand light for reading, was re-purposed<br />
into a museum (rather like Stoll‘s dream of housing socks in old card<br />
catalog drawers). Ironically and to be sure, the light, so excellent for reading,<br />
cannot but be a liability for the artifacts housed there (even in their light<br />
filtering display cases), and it is hoped that the curator eventually notices<br />
this.<br />
At the same time, and this attests to the continuity between<br />
technologies of one kind or another, one always ran out of time in old<br />
fashioned reading rooms which means that one always anticipated running<br />
out of time, in advance of time. Thus if one could not make copies<br />
automatically, one spent one‘s archival time, Nietzsche did this, I myself did<br />
this in reading rooms where photo-copying was prohibited, taking manual<br />
notes, with the mind to reconstruct later. The entire industry of ―Nietzsche<br />
philology,‖ i.e., source scholarship, is thus concerned not with the<br />
philological issues of interest to Nietzsche himself but and much rather with<br />
the inevitably positivist and inevitably limited minutiae of sifting out what<br />
Nietzsche thought all by himself, as it were, from what Nietzsche took or<br />
derived from others. The very obvious fact that the two bleed into one<br />
another in the life of the mind only compounds the philosophic limits of this<br />
kind of work. 19<br />
If the technology at one‘s disposal is a real-live reading room, with<br />
real-live limited hours but featuring copy machines, we anticipate the<br />
consequences of limited time and proceed to subvert the same. This kind of<br />
subversion however is conformity, determinism. We tailor our behaviour to<br />
the fact that there are, as the T shirt goes, so many books, so little time.<br />
Thus we spend our time copying the journal for an article to read ―later.‖ 20<br />
I have binder volumes of articles I copied years ago just for this<br />
purpose, and I have in fact read many of them (because I am keen on<br />
reading). But I would also argue that the reason I have read many of them is<br />
the fact that I happened to have a real photocopy that I could read later the<br />
same day or happen across so many years later, be it serendipitously or<br />
deliberately. Today, what makes the PDF phenomenon so intriguing for<br />
philosophical reflection is the fact that when one has a PDF one does not<br />
have a real ―copy.‖ One scans a text, even better one downloads it from<br />
JSTOR. With that virtual advance, there is no need to actually read the text<br />
or (recalling the digital activism of Swartz‘s automatic downloading stunt)<br />
have any contact whatever with the text at all. As an author, you may still<br />
get a note that your article has been downloaded so and so many times, but<br />
this does not mean that anyone has read it.<br />
52
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
In fact, most articles, most books, have very few readers and among<br />
those readers, so I would say (but this is the professor in me talking), very<br />
few can be said to have really read the text. I have a German friend, the best<br />
of my best friends, who vigorously denies having read books I know he has<br />
read because I have seen him reading them with my own eyes and because I<br />
know the marginal marks he makes (he has left many of these in my own<br />
books). Now he happens to be a Suabian, and Nietzsche says that Suabians<br />
simply like to lie, but in his defense, it matters that his father was a<br />
classical philologist and it matters that he himself was a student of modern<br />
philology, a rigorous training which meant, as it took me years to realize,<br />
that he would refuse to say that he had read something until he had really,<br />
really read it.<br />
Nor was he wrong in so stylizing what counts as reading for this is<br />
the very kind of reading an editor or an author hopes for.<br />
When it comes to PDF‘s, Jaron Lanier has pointed out that the hit<br />
phenomenon has the effect it has on us because we have adapted ourselves<br />
to the structural design he names the UNIX legacy. This is the effective<br />
absence of time as part of the command line interface. We count on this<br />
absence (this is how we adapt to it/subvert it to use the sociologist‘s<br />
language) when we text during down moments (as my students do this in<br />
elevators, they also do this in class). But when we send them we know that<br />
we are not dealing with the infinitely timeless patience of the machine<br />
command line: we are no longer out of time, as it were. Once sent, the<br />
message enters the real time that it takes for a text message to arrive at its<br />
destination, for with texting as with email or a Facebook or blog post or a<br />
tweet, we assume that arrival to be instantaneous. This we parse in human<br />
time and hence we expect an immediate response the minute we send it. In<br />
this way we negotiate the difference between lived or real or human time and<br />
the timeless time of the command line (that is, until we hit return or ―send‖<br />
which is another name for return and we should note that the metaphor in<br />
question has already lodged itself in our consciousness). The immediacy of<br />
email or texting, which is between writing for the long term, parallels,<br />
although it is to be sure not the same as, immediate, face-to-face<br />
communication as Ihde very insightfully analysed this last and newer<br />
scholars would do well to explore this. (Note for instance that Facetime or<br />
Skyping is inherently difference from meeting in person, however much the<br />
software purveyors and your own increasingly busy life work to persuade<br />
you to think otherwise).<br />
There are all kinds of problems here (of course, what is at stake is<br />
nothing but a version of the Turing test), but the only issue that is currently<br />
thought to matter in a cash culture such as ours is whether or not you<br />
53
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
yourself or a machine has submitted an order form for a purchase or for<br />
some other purpose, signed an online petition, and so on.<br />
The Turing dimensionality of the test in question moves beyond or<br />
outside of the command line interface because it cannot do otherwise if it<br />
wishes to function as a test. What is problematic is that, and because it has<br />
to produce feedback of a digital kind, it is a matter of translation.<br />
Google wants the data for scanning purposes and otherwise, this we<br />
know, or should if we were consciously noticing the ads (we do notice<br />
subliminally/peripherally). Thus to prove that we are the one placing an<br />
order or whatever, one is given a squiggled text or garbled text of the kind<br />
that can nevertheless be read (eventually, and this is the fatality of this<br />
process, because Google wants the data, in a fairly short term, this test will<br />
no longer be able to function as a test), but it functions for now and one<br />
types in the so-called ―captcha‖ and one is good to go. 21<br />
If our relation to the text has moved from the hand holding a stylus<br />
or a quill pen of the kind Nietzsche still used before his very temporary<br />
foray, encouraged by his illness and his myopia, to the use of typewriter, to<br />
the typewriter/keyboard/keypad, using the tips or pads of our fingers. As<br />
typewriters change (Nietzsche‘s typewriter was actually better than the<br />
typewriters we know from our parents, just in terms of precision/speed), so<br />
too texting, now ‗aided‘ with helpful machine completions (younger people<br />
learn to accommodate this telegraphy, and accommodate one must in order<br />
to use it), because as Heidegger also reminds us, the machine, be it old or<br />
new, the technology (or the technique as Ellul would say) ―imposes its<br />
use.‖ 22<br />
In A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy,<br />
you claimed that analytic philosophy<br />
―. . . stands to science as scholastic philosophy once did to<br />
theology. Continental philosophy differs from analytic<br />
philosophy in its openness to questioning which also<br />
means that it is less concerned with solutions than it is with<br />
critical questioning (including the question of its own<br />
presumptions or prejudices). But this focus on critical<br />
questioning also means, at least ideally, that continental<br />
philosophy does not aspire to take its rational warrant from<br />
science itself.‖<br />
54
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Nearly a decade on, there remains heated discussion about this<br />
„analytic/continental divide.‟ What is the usefulness of this term and its<br />
possible future?<br />
The ―heatedness‖ of the discussion in question is mostly, so far as I can tell,<br />
a matter of denouncing the ―significance‖ of the distinction altogether and<br />
thus ultimately tending to deny its very existence. Your question regarding<br />
the ―usefulness of this term‖ seems to point in this way for it seems to be<br />
most ―useful‖ in order to pretend (here the Brian Leiter-report and<br />
associated blogs are good instantiations of this particular ―use‖ or desire as<br />
nerdish wish fulfillment) that scholars such as those whose work one does<br />
not like can be not merely ignored, this is the ostrich effect, but and<br />
ultimately ―designated‖ out of existence. And this sort of thing is quite old<br />
hat in academia, which has always been a competitive arena (going as far<br />
back as Heraclitus who recommended junking everyone else but himself).<br />
It‘s also emblematic of the modern, thus we hear the trope at the<br />
penultimate level of Nietzsche‘s short ―History of an Error,‖ which is more<br />
about the natural history of errancy and illusion than an account of the<br />
difference between the ―real‖ world (which originally of course meant the<br />
ideal world) and the apparent or phenomenal world when he writes:<br />
—an idea no longer of any use . . . — an idea grown useless,<br />
superfluous, consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!<br />
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, How the Real World at Last<br />
Became a Myth)<br />
It goes without saying that abolishing ―an idea grown useless‖ is<br />
inherently risky not for reasons of, say, reverential regard but because the<br />
supererogatory is not therefore or thereby ―refuted.‖ Occam‘s razor is a<br />
principle of convenience, not demonstration, and it is not a matter of<br />
ontology. In the case of Nietzsche‘s particular example, if we proceed to<br />
abolish the so-called ―real world‖ we will find that ―we have also abolished<br />
the apparent world (Ibid.).‖ The case of the real/apparent world is a case of<br />
co-relevant concepts. Nietzsche‘s joke is in the rhetorical array: it‘s because<br />
the idea may be said to be ―useless,‖ one supposes one may do away with it:<br />
because it is ―superfluous,‖ one concludes that it has been, as a result,<br />
―refuted.‖<br />
Why not get rid of it?<br />
More than one person 23 has told me that that one of the more<br />
compelling points in my article, as you quote it, from Carlos Prado‘s book<br />
collection, A House Divided, 24 is that I highlight the closed-off character of<br />
analytic style philosophy. Thus contemporary analytic philosophy is not<br />
55
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
open to questioning, and it is not closed because I say so but on its own<br />
terms. Thus I describe traditional continental philosophy in its critically<br />
hermeneutic and reflectively phenomenological character as the practice of<br />
intensifying questions. I contrast this with analytic philosophy‘s ongoing<br />
passion for deflating, puncturing, or otherwise dissolving questions, here,<br />
again, just to use the rhetoric of the mainstream. It is a common place in<br />
analytic philosophy to dismiss questions as such, i.e., ―unmasking‖ them as<br />
not (really) ―real‖ questions, declaring them pseudo-questions. In this sense,<br />
analytic or mainstream philosophy regards its task as the solving of<br />
problems (to this extent, analytic philosophy follows Karl Popper), dissolving<br />
all other problems and issues as irrelevant or unreal, as pseudo-problems.<br />
I should say that in the same way that continental philosophy<br />
describes a philosophical style and is thus otherwise than a description of<br />
philosophy as currently practiced on the continent, 25 analytic philosophy<br />
which is otherwise called ―mainstream‖ or received philosophy, is itself and<br />
likewise a style, referring to more than one kind and is thus not only a<br />
single or specific method or locus.<br />
In the case of continental philosophy, we do not ask which of the<br />
world‘s continents counts as the locus of continental philosophy. The<br />
referent, as we know, betrays the Anglo-Saxon, British origins of the<br />
distinction as such. Hence talk of European philosophy hardly settles the<br />
question as some have sought to settle it, nor is the issue resolved by<br />
arguing that there is no difference to speak of because analytic philosophy is<br />
now dominant the world over.<br />
Again, and in place of analytic problem solving, I highlight<br />
traditional continental philosophy‘s willingness to pose questions and to<br />
hold with them as such, as I take Heidegger and Nietzsche as prime<br />
exemplifications of this willingness to question and even, and as I have<br />
sought to do in my own work, to render what is questionable or problematic<br />
even more problematic.<br />
Where one asks whether it is ‗useful‘ to distinguish between<br />
maintaining and dissolving problems, perhaps simply by stipulating them as<br />
solved or else by declaring them useless or meaningless, as so many<br />
distinctions to be ―abolished,‖ one still means thereby to eliminate what is<br />
problematic and as a consequence one gets to dismiss those who present or<br />
maintain such problems. This is what makes the focus on what may be<br />
designated as ‗useful‘ or ‗efficient,‘ an expeditious one. This is done by the<br />
difference quashing power of the first person plural. Hence, one says: ―we‖<br />
don‘t need to talk about continental and analytic philosophy any longer,<br />
―we‖ don‘t find the distinction ―useful.‖ But such a way of speaking has its<br />
56
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
own utility and the result of that is a patently monolithic conception of<br />
philosophy.<br />
My worry in response to this has always been, firstly, that<br />
philosophy is and has always been all about making distinctions. 26 ―I‘ll<br />
teach you differences,‖ says Wittgenstein, himself quoting Shakespeare in<br />
his turn. Secondly, as just noted, I am struck by how self-serving such<br />
claims have tended to be for certain elements of the academy. When I first<br />
wrote this essay in 1991, twenty years ago, I noticed that when authors<br />
claimed as they did in book after book on the post this or post that ―turn‖ in<br />
analytic philosophy, authors tended to declare how very advanced analytic<br />
philosophy was, how open-minded it was, and so on but all such books<br />
tended almost without exception to use such claims as the basis for<br />
excluding or limiting rather than encouraging dialogue, conversation,<br />
exchange.<br />
If one wanted to talk about Husserl and Heisenberg in the<br />
philosophy of science, as one of my teachers did, or about Nietzsche and<br />
about Heidegger as I did, one met closed doors, there was and is no<br />
dialogue, no conversation, certainly no exchange. And when it comes to the<br />
profession, simple non-mention, utter exclusion turns out to be far more<br />
efficient than refutation.<br />
It does not seem to me that claiming that the distinction isn‘t<br />
‗useful‘ or that it is ‗meaningless‘ is terrifically different.<br />
The purpose to be served is exclusion.<br />
We all already know all that, say the powers that be, but analytic<br />
philosophy isn‟t that way at all, it has changed, analytic philosophy is now so<br />
various and so new, hence it is, as my colleagues at Fordham will tell me,<br />
that there are so many different kinds of philosophy of mind and analytic<br />
metaphysics and so on, the logic of which adverting to such proliferation of<br />
kinds and kinds translates in effect to saying: don‟t talk to us about your<br />
concerns, about the kinds of things you do, we‟re not interested, we don‟t<br />
want to hear from you, we don‟t want to hear from those like you, we already<br />
know what you have to say. And besides: we don‟t „understand it.‟ Instead of<br />
engaging in dialogue, instead of talking about what has been done in your<br />
tradition and what your current concerns are, what you ought to do is listen to<br />
us. Rather than exchange and conversation: it is just and only analytic<br />
philosophy that should be read, you should hire scholars trained in analytic<br />
philosophy who do so-called „continental‟ work, you ought to dialogue with<br />
analytic philosophers only, converse solely on our topics, using only our<br />
terminology.<br />
57
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
It seemed to me then and it still seems to me that this only serves<br />
the purpose of enshrining one particular style of doing philosophy as the<br />
only style of philosophy. And this is the effect whenever one says, as many<br />
younger scholars who also and despite an analytic formation describe<br />
themselves as continental (in good analytic fashion, let it be noted), let‘s not<br />
perpetuate such distinctions, but let‘s talk instead of ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘<br />
philosophy. But what counts as good and what counts as bad always turn<br />
to be kinds of philosophy that exemplify that same analytic formation.<br />
I will hold off discussing the last issue you raise in your question for<br />
my reply to the following question as it bears on the issue of science (in<br />
place of theology).<br />
Much of your work has focused on Nietzsche‟s relationship to science.<br />
What is the significance of Nietzsche, a figure predominantly read in<br />
the humanities, to a philosophy of science and to practical scientific<br />
endeavors?<br />
I hold that Nietzsche matters for anyone who wants to think<br />
philosophically, i.e., critically about science. 27 I say this because Nietzsche<br />
undertakes to question science purely philosophically by raising the<br />
question of science as a question and as such. This is the question<br />
Nietzsche poses in a preface added to his first book in the wake of his<br />
experience of being misunderstood by his peers with respect to his project<br />
there (as scholars continue to fail to understand it). That book, The Birth of<br />
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, hardly seems, as you correctly point out,<br />
to be a book about science as such or at all and certainly it seems irrelevant<br />
to the so-called hard sciences.<br />
Nietzsche‘s first book, the book he says is all about this very<br />
question of science, thus seems to be very much concerned with what you<br />
call the humanities, that aesthetic philosophy, historical questions of poetry<br />
and theatre and literature and music as well as political culture. Yet it is<br />
exactly with reference to this book that Nietzsche claims that he is the first<br />
to raise the question of science as a question. Most scholars simply dismiss<br />
this claim. I take it seriously and when one does that and when does so in a<br />
sustained fashion, one sees that Nietzsche‘s book is a genuinely,<br />
methodologically scientific undertaking just where Nietzsche qua classical<br />
philologist seeks to understand the genesis of the tragic work of art as the<br />
title of the book tells us that he does, out of the sounding, i.e., out of the<br />
spirit of ancient Greek (as this was, so Nietzsche had discovered, an<br />
explicitly, literally musical voicing). 28 The ―science‖ in question, disciplinarily<br />
speaking, was Nietzsche‘s own discipline of classical philology,<br />
58
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
methodologically articulated in accordance with the procedure of ‗any<br />
science whatever‘ as this was supposed possible in the 19 th century and<br />
Nietzsche did suppose this, following Kant, and the very specific<br />
understanding of the nature of lyric poetry in the tragic, musical work of art,<br />
in terms of the function of the chorus, and the entirety of the tragic artwork<br />
in terms of the role of culture as a whole in the same tragic era of ancient<br />
Greece, just and precisely because that era comes to an end, as Nietzsche<br />
argues in his first book, with the tragedies of Euripides (and coincidentally<br />
with Plato/Socrates).<br />
Note that what we name tragedy today, what Shakespeare called<br />
tragedy, what Walter Benjamin called tragedy, has in consequence nothing<br />
to do with the historical focus of Nietzsche‘s book and only thus can one<br />
understand why he speaks of the possibility of a rebirth of tragic culture<br />
(and his appeal to Wagner and his followers to support his cause).<br />
With Nietzsche‘s claim that he is the first to raise the question of<br />
science as such, as we have already noted this above, he takes science<br />
methodologically and as I show elsewhere, citing Karl Jaspers, this<br />
emphasis on method was no kind of conceit: many scientists, including<br />
students of medicine and physiology, turned to philology just to learn the<br />
rigors of method. Nor was it an accident that Darwin himself turned to the<br />
linguistic schema that was the legacy of the very same Alexandrian<br />
grammarians that Nietzsche speaks of in order to borrow the differential<br />
relations between the evolutionary development of language to pattern his<br />
own theory of the origin of species. And what Nietzsche means (and we recall<br />
that he recommends that one question grammar itself) is thus that he is the<br />
first to put the presuppositions of science itself in question, as this of course<br />
corresponds to the very Kantian question of putting science itself on the<br />
path, as it were, of a science.<br />
Nietzsche also raises the related question of truth, he questions<br />
causality as well as our presuppositions about it, and he goes on to frame or<br />
raise the question of the origin of logic itself in very logical and historical<br />
terms, again and in every case logically or scientifically (and in the case of<br />
the last he reminds us of the oddity of our universal conviction that we can<br />
proceed from non-knowledge to knowledge, transition from error to truth,<br />
and in general and thereby manage to advance from mythic thought and<br />
convention to logical and rational thinking). How, Nietzsche asks, does that<br />
work? How is it possible to begin with error and proceed to truth? If we<br />
begin with superstition and ignorance, exactly how do we attain<br />
enlightenment and knowledge? Everything depends upon the question of<br />
foundation or ground and Nietzsche‘s question asks the ultimate question of<br />
ground.<br />
59
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
As I have pointed out throughout my career, these are logical<br />
questions. Logic conserves or preserves what truth one has to begin with.<br />
Reasoning logically, we do not deviate from correct insights, whereas illogical<br />
process leaves any and everywhere, even when our premises are true.<br />
The problem for Nietzsche (and Heidegger), as for Kant, Hume,<br />
Descartes, is to find a secure foundation.<br />
Today we no longer worry about such questions because we take<br />
science as our foundation, as our point of departure. Hence, we take ‗as<br />
true‘ what science says is true. And maybe it is, but philosophy does not<br />
raise critical questions.<br />
Here I return to the parallel you cited above in your previous<br />
question on the analytic/continental divide, where scholastic philosophy<br />
once served theology and where theology indeed and very conscientiously,<br />
even anxiously required its services (even if this anxiety tended to lead to an<br />
ultimate movement to ―deny reason‖ in order, as it were, to make room ―for<br />
faith‖), today‘s science is not in need of philosophy‘s contributions be they<br />
analytic or continental. Just this sovereignty on the part of modern science<br />
is problematic for the dominant mode of philosophizing, that is, analytic<br />
philosophy, to the extent that it embraces (as traditional philosophy never<br />
for its part ‗embraced‘ theology, per impossibile, in the case of Aristotle)<br />
science as its model, or ideal.<br />
In other words, analytic philosophy embraces an enterprise, the<br />
natural sciences, that has no need of its services.<br />
Such an embrace does not characterize the critical, continental kind<br />
of philosophy of science, like Nietzsche‘s, as I have argued, that does not<br />
model itself on science and does not aspire to be taken ―as‖ science<br />
whenever that might be possible but instead and much rather puts science<br />
itself in question. In this way, although analytic philosophy emphasizes<br />
what is called ‗critical thinking,‘ there is in fact a radical avoidance of<br />
critique especially where it concerns science, and I have always found this<br />
problematic for the philosophy of science. I have some small comfort, though<br />
it may not comfort him to have me cite him here, but the perfectly analytic<br />
P.M.S. Hacker makes a similar point. 29<br />
Now to say that analytic-style philosophy radically avoids critique<br />
when it comes to science is hardly to say that there is a lack of critical<br />
terminology in analytic philosophy, and it doesn‘t mean that analytic<br />
philosophers aren‘t nasty about this or that. Indeed, from the point of<br />
feminist and other perspectives in the academy, speaking more universally,<br />
one of the more problematic characteristics of mainstream philosophy is<br />
that analytic philosophy features a style and modality that is one of the<br />
60
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
nastier styles to be found in the academy as a whole, specifically when it<br />
comes to friendliness towards women in philosophy, 30 which thus extends,<br />
as I have argued in another context, toward other reflective styles or ways of<br />
doing philosophy such as the continental modalities we were discussing<br />
above.<br />
If analytic philosophy does not question science, science in turn, as<br />
I have noted, does not for its part regard philosophy, no matter whether<br />
analytic or continental, as theology once regarded philosophy. Thus it is not<br />
the case that science gives a hoot about the distinctions between<br />
philosophical kinds that I am making here. Hence I have always found it<br />
worth reflecting that when it comes to the relevance of the philosophy of<br />
science of any flavor (analytic or continental), for ―practical scientific<br />
endeavors,‖ to use your terminology to refer to the work of contemporary<br />
scientists, science itself happily proceeds without referring to philosophy at<br />
all. Thus although traditional philosophers of science may regard what they<br />
write upon as having more significance to practical scientific endeavors (as<br />
opposed, say, to Nietzsche‘s philosophy of science), the scientists themselves<br />
do not depend upon philosophy of any kind and are, it would appear,<br />
universally united in not taking it to be particularly significant for their own<br />
practice.<br />
And indeed that has always been true. If Quine could say that<br />
mathematics is philosophy enough, the physicists, and this is why Nietzsche<br />
addresses himself directly to the physicists (―my dear Messieurs Physicist,‖<br />
he writes), might counter that physics is philosophy enough. If yesterday‘s<br />
scientist, scientists like Heisenberg and Einstein and Schrödinger, enjoyed a<br />
background that included philosophy in addition to classical studies, that<br />
did not mean that they revered the philosophers of science of their day. They<br />
always held themselves perfectly capable of philosophizing all by themselves<br />
— and many did. They did not need to and they did not appeal to their<br />
colleagues in philosophy to help them out.<br />
Let me note further that analytic philosophy, especially analytic<br />
philosophy of science, especially the cognitive sciences, are not at all<br />
sanguine about this state of affairs and they often undertake to do whatever<br />
they can to get scientists to pay attention to them. Hence it is precisely<br />
analytic philosophy — and precisely to the extent that it very deliberately<br />
patterns itself on science — that is concerned to persuade science to take its<br />
efforts seriously, to find its efforts useful, and so on. This may well be<br />
behind the recent turn to empirical philosophy, which is philosophy by<br />
survey, an amusing ennobling of the appeal that is called the argumentum<br />
ad populum (and which used once upon a time to be regarded as a textbook<br />
fallacy). 31 I note in passing however that this changes little with regard to<br />
the point I am making here, inasmuch as this turn will at best make of<br />
61
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
philosophy a social science, which social sciences have their own anxieties<br />
about presenting themselves to the natural sciences as sciences. In place of<br />
19 th century method, we have 20 th (and so far or to date 21 st) century<br />
quantificational analysis.<br />
I don‘t think analytic philosophers have had much success<br />
persuading the scientists per se that they need analytic philosophy. Analytic<br />
philosophers, claiming to speak for the scientists, do however have success<br />
in persuading university deans that they in fact represent the sciences<br />
although I don‘t know how long this will last. I have often thought that if<br />
there are, as indeed there are, many universities that host Departments of<br />
Cognitive Science along with Departments of Linguistics and Departments of<br />
Neuroscience as well as Departments of Cognitive Pyschology, Information<br />
Science, Robotics, and so on, that a Department of Philosophy taken as<br />
Perhaps it might be<br />
useful to replace<br />
departments of analytic<br />
philosophy…with real<br />
science studies<br />
programs that would<br />
teach stock or standard<br />
accounts of the aims of<br />
science to the general<br />
public, i.e., science<br />
literacy.<br />
translator of the sciences to the sciences,<br />
might well seem to be redundant or<br />
unnecessary, assuming, as I assume, a<br />
competent faculty in the aforenamed<br />
disciplines, all of whom can teach what<br />
analytic philosophers regard as ‗critical<br />
thinking,‘ and all of whom know the<br />
sciences to which analytic philosophers<br />
appeal (say, regarding brain states) far<br />
better than the philosophers themselves.<br />
Unlike theology that conscientiously<br />
drew upon philosophy, science faculty are<br />
well able to explain their own ways to<br />
themselves and to students and others and<br />
do not need such handmaidens or (ancillae).<br />
Perhaps it might be useful be to replace departments of analytic<br />
philosophy, dedicated as many are today to a kind of simplified science<br />
literacy (and not the critical analysis of science, as that last has died the<br />
death of the so-called strong program of the sociology of science and the<br />
evaporation of the anthropology of science into actor network analysis), and<br />
to the celebration of what it takes to be the content of science, with real<br />
science studies programs that would teach stock or standard accounts of<br />
the aims of science to the general public, i.e., science literacy.<br />
This is not the same for continental philosophy which for the most<br />
part, and because it is less and less what it used to be and more and more<br />
what analytic philosophy has left over for it to be, dutifully avoids reflection<br />
on science like the plague. This is not the case for continental philosophy of<br />
62
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
science but, as if I needed to emphasize this once again, that is a very small<br />
subfield.<br />
As someone who has spent considerable time working abroad, what<br />
are the primary differences among university systems in the United<br />
States and in the countries of Europe, and how do those differences<br />
bear on the way philosophy is regarded in these places?<br />
European universities have the great luxury of drawing upon students who<br />
have been trained at the level attained by secondary education in Europe,<br />
which is actually, although Americans rightly hate it when I say this — I<br />
lament that I have to say this — breathtaking by comparison with an<br />
American high school education, even a private high school or prep school<br />
education.<br />
By the time European students get to university they know<br />
languages (and American students tend not to learn languages at all, not<br />
even when they are doctoral students), they‘ve read texts. Most importantly,<br />
perhaps, they have learned how to read those texts, which is something that<br />
American students do not do perhaps for the simple reason that like high<br />
school teachers, professors in the US teach out of fragments of texts or bits<br />
of books. In other words, most US philosophy professors use textbooks and<br />
self-made textbooks (those would be course packs) and draw on examples or<br />
case studies rather than reading what they call the ―history‖ of philosophy,<br />
and so on.<br />
In addition and related to this, European students have also grown<br />
up in a culture of the same bookish and musical sort. In other words, there<br />
is a general regard for knowledge and for training, and especially for<br />
philosophy (that does not mean analytic philosophy as it currently conceives<br />
itself but it does mean philosophy as it has been historically and<br />
traditionally conceived). In the US, many people have little understanding of<br />
the meaning of philosophy and this circumstance has worsened in my<br />
judgment as today even educated people in the US assume that ‗philosophy‘<br />
is exactly (and only) what the analysts say it is. 32<br />
I am reminded here of Theodor Adorno‘s wry reflection that one of<br />
the things that he learnt for the first time during his sojourn in America was<br />
just how unimportant, how non-influential the so-called ―life of the mind‖ or<br />
the intellect, could manage to be for a society as a whole. 33 What Adorno<br />
realized, this was the culture shock of the man who went on, on the basis of<br />
this shock to write about what he thus called the ―culture industry‖ for the<br />
rest of his life, was that what immediately enjoyed respect in Germany, what<br />
63
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
seemingly went without saying in Europe, counted for little or nothing in the<br />
United States. This is an acknowledgment, on the one hand, of the freedom<br />
of the American spirit, 34 but and because this is Adorno speaking (who<br />
immediately and rudely connects this with what he also calls the least<br />
common denominator of intellectual capacity), it is also and on the other<br />
hand, a sobering point, and rather than bristle at the very idea, we should<br />
feel chastened by it.<br />
As a corollary, and in fact, when we go abroad we are often delighted<br />
by the opposite circumstance as it holds in Europe, whereby, metaphorically<br />
speaking, we all become so many Neg-Adorno particles, (not that so very<br />
many of us can afford to travel in Europe any longer). What is telling here is<br />
that if you wander about the US and tell folks on your travels that you are<br />
studying philosophy you can expect to meet a certain amount of<br />
incomprehension and even more indifference. By contrast, your expressions<br />
of philosophical interests will likely meet comprehension and respect and<br />
may even lead to valuable discussions in Europe. Thus I routinely hear from<br />
students who study abroad both astonishment at just how much they find<br />
their foreign peers to ―know,‖ in the sense of sheer knowledge and depth of<br />
knowledge, and regarding how much these peers ‗value‘ and enjoy learning<br />
and knowing.<br />
The primary difference<br />
between studying philosophy<br />
in Europe and studying<br />
philosophy in the US is that in<br />
the US we have neither the<br />
luxury of the level of preuniversity<br />
preparation nor the<br />
overall breadth of European<br />
culture…<br />
In sum, the primary difference<br />
between studying philosophy in<br />
Europe and studying philosophy in the<br />
US is that in the US we have neither<br />
the luxury of the level of pre-university<br />
preparation nor the overall breadth of<br />
European culture in its both its<br />
sensibility and its diversity. For many<br />
(of course not all, but many) US college<br />
students the first time they begin to do<br />
serious academic work is when they<br />
first arrive at university. But I think<br />
the moral of the story here, is that one simply seek to find some time to<br />
study abroad. And youth is for such journeys of broadening discovery.<br />
Let me note, however, that the system there is changing and it does<br />
seem as if Europe is collectively attempting its mighty best to become as<br />
Americanized as possible (though one wonders whether the current<br />
economic disaster on both the American and the European side may change<br />
that trend), but there are still books to be read, journals to be read, the<br />
encounter with other academic institutions and the traditions of the same<br />
and despite recent changes, there remains (largely due to the secondary<br />
64
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
system, which if thinned or abbreviated is still impressive) a tradition or<br />
culture of learning that is still well worth learning.<br />
But if that is not enough for you, I have always maintained that the<br />
only reason one ever has or will need to travel to Paris, for example, is the<br />
simple promise of a cup of coffee. Just a cup of coffee: just sitting in a café<br />
or standing at the bar. But once you get there, you might as well take a walk<br />
along the Seine, and that means books and books and books again.<br />
Mario Bunge, one of the many authors thinking about the „crisis of<br />
philosophy,‟ wrote in Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for<br />
Reconstruction that “all the philosophical schools are in ruins.” What<br />
are your thoughts on Bunge‟s claim, and what are the political and<br />
philosophical ramifications of the dialog of „crisis‟?<br />
Here, I agree with Bunge, although and of course he is writing from the<br />
analytic side in the philosophy of science and I too believe that things are as<br />
bad from his point of view as they are from mine. On the other hand, we do<br />
not of course agree as Bunge is strongly anti-hermeneutic.<br />
For my own part, agreeing as I do agree that ―all‖ the schools of<br />
philosophy are in ―ruins,‖ I also hold little hope that it is possible to<br />
reconstruct or rebuild or start anew. Once one loses the teachers (and we<br />
have lost them, not all but most), it is not just hard, it is impossible to<br />
proceed with what deserves the name of philosophy. At the same time as I<br />
say this, even if I mean only to say that most of the great minds are lost and<br />
because those who take their place are not, just to say this politely, as great,<br />
it is of course true that we still have to proceed as best we can.<br />
The trouble as I see it is that those who now occupy positions of<br />
prestige (here we are back to our original reference to standards and the<br />
‗rigor‘ of the profession) are as newer scholars also are as mediocre as they<br />
tend to be. For me, that only means that they are poorly trained and ill read,<br />
and these, my younger colleagues, become angry examples of what<br />
Nietzsche called Ressentiment if this is suggested, and I do suggest it.<br />
If you want to know if this description of being poorly trained and ill<br />
read applies to your professors, look around their house: how many books<br />
do they have? I exclude the books in one‘s office as these, very physically,<br />
very literally, are not the books one lives with.<br />
Such bookish standards are all about what is meant when one talks<br />
about formation as the French speak of it and Bildung as the Germans<br />
speak of it. This is what Nietzsche meant when he talked about getting<br />
65
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
oneself an ―educator,‖ which is to say, doing what it takes (that means<br />
reading and more reading) to acquire an ―education‖ or a ―culture,‖ and it<br />
should go without saying that Nietzsche‘s standards were much higher than<br />
mine could possibly be, just given my own inevitable limitations. This is<br />
what Isaac Newton also meant when he talked about the giants of a past<br />
intellectual formation. 35 It is simply mind-blowing what people once knew.<br />
I would point out that, and I blame myself as well, although I did my<br />
damndest, albeit without success, that it is today‘s professors who have<br />
presided over the current state of the profession. Bunge himself is to blame;<br />
I am to blame. Of course Bunge has had vastly more power and influence<br />
than I have had (this is easy to claim because I have had almost no<br />
influence), and his failures are for those reasons far more significant than<br />
mine just because I am not as important as he is.<br />
Let me put this in another manner: there is no doubt in my mind<br />
that Bunge has read not a word written by continental philosophers of<br />
science and certainly not a word I have written. 36 By contrast I have, of<br />
course (of course I say: of course) read Bunge (and many, many others).<br />
Analytic philosophers of science take themselves to be reading continental<br />
philosophy of science if they read Foucault — just as analytic philosophers<br />
take themselves to be continental if they read, say Heidegger or Nietzsche.<br />
What they do not do is read those continental authors or even many analytic<br />
authors who write on Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche. And yet by<br />
discounting the broader array of philosophy and philosophical authors and<br />
commentators, analytic philosophy has painted itself into its own smaller<br />
and smaller corner.<br />
What is most regrettable perhaps is that at this point there seems to<br />
be no robust alternative. Thus it is that today in most departments of<br />
philosophy there is no other style of philosophy than the analytic kind.<br />
Analytic philosophy has had the power in the academy (and it takes the<br />
power because it is a tradition of entitlement and not mutuality) and the<br />
result of its dominion (and it has and still has dominion) has been an<br />
impoverishment of philosophy.<br />
I will say that had the only kind of philosophy being taught when I<br />
was a student been philosophy of what is today the analytic or mainstream<br />
variety, not only would I not have been able to become what I am but I<br />
would not have bothered in the first or last place. 37 Life, after all, is short.<br />
As a professor of philosophy in the academy, we presume your<br />
responsibilities include research and publication and the education<br />
66
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
and mentoring of students. How are these responsibilities related? Do<br />
students benefit from faculty research? How do these academic<br />
responsibilities relate to the work of the philosopher, per se? Does it<br />
make any sense today to speak of the non-academic philosopher?<br />
Let me answer this, your last question, by starting with the last part of your<br />
question. I don‘t believe there are really many non-academic philosophers,<br />
unless they are independently wealthy. The Spinozas and the<br />
Schopenhauers have always been in short supply.<br />
But that said, the comparison is misleading. The simple fact that<br />
one does not have an academic appointment is itself irrelevant to one‘s<br />
academic qualifications or what I was above calling a formation. Both<br />
Spinoza and Schopenhauer were academically extraordinarily well qualified.<br />
So I would need more clarification with regard to your last question to be<br />
able to speak of it. Do you mean, for example, is one able to be a<br />
philosopher with no academic background whatever? I am not sure. Can<br />
one think thoughts that might interest one and perhaps be of interest to<br />
others? Certainly. Would this count as philosophy? To pose the question is<br />
already to make it over on the terms of the academy. And to this entire<br />
question it would still remain to consider what is to be counted as<br />
philosophy as there is a certain amount as it is indeed contested. So my<br />
answer here is simply an institutional one. Intriguingly over the years, and<br />
this is one of the perks (or more accurately said one of the downsides) of<br />
being an editor, I have received a fair bit of mail from non-academics who<br />
feel that they should be regarded as philosophers. It goes without saying<br />
that they themselves were seeking approbation from an academic —<br />
otherwise they would not have been writing to me to begin with.<br />
The task of teaching, at least as I teach the traditional texts of<br />
philosophy, keeps one in tune with both the field and the questions that are<br />
called perennial because they are undying: they resist ultimate solution. I<br />
think students benefit from faculty research just to the extent that that<br />
research is in touch with the tradition: one studies not the current work of<br />
any given professor active in a given research field, although one may find<br />
this of use to form one‘s own work, but and much rather to learn from that<br />
scholar how to approach extant scholarship and above all how to read the<br />
texts of philosophy and to learn the problems of philosophy. For me, the two<br />
simply go together.<br />
To comment or respond to Babette Babich‘s interview, please<br />
send an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com<br />
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published<br />
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of <strong>Purlieu</strong>.<br />
67
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
Notes<br />
1. In fact, this worry is related to Plato‘s concern, ‗who will guard the guards?‘<br />
2. Babich, ―The Birth of kd lang‘s Hallelujah out of the ‗Spirit of Music‘: Performing Desire<br />
and ‗Recording Consciousness‘ on Facebook and YouTube,‖ Perfect Sound Forever,<br />
January 2012, forthcoming.<br />
3. Interestingly enough this is the reason it is Nietzsche‘s sister, along with her co-editors,<br />
and not Nietzsche who is the author of the infamous Will to Power published in<br />
his name but not therefore under his authorship. I discuss this with reference to<br />
Nietzsche and Heidegger in Babich, ―Le sort du Nachlass: le problème de l‘œuvre<br />
posthume‖ In: Pascale Hummel, ed., Mélivres / Misbooks. Études sur l‟envers et<br />
les travers du livre (Paris: Philogicum, 2009), pp. 123-140.<br />
4. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: The Art of Sound (New York: da capo, 1936) but see also Adorno,<br />
Currents of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory (Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp,<br />
2006).<br />
5. I thank my student, the musician Carrie Gillespie, for bringing the sheer existence of this<br />
journal to my attention in the context of a class I was teaching on Politics and<br />
Technology in the department of Political Science at UCSD.<br />
6. See Jaron Lanier ―The City is Built to Music,‖ chapter five in Lanier, you are not a gadget<br />
(New York: Vintage, 2010), pp. 87ff.<br />
7. Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (New York:<br />
Spiegel & Grau, 2008), p. 44.<br />
8. Chapter Three, Ibid., pp. 47ff.<br />
9. Here I note that contemporary digital media scholars should go and rediscover what<br />
Lacan says about television and not just by reading Žižek and then go back and<br />
read not just Postman but Jerry Mander to boot.<br />
10. There are several studies of this, of course. One useful and respectable because<br />
insider‘s account, is David B. Resnick, The Price of Truth: How Money Affects the<br />
Norms of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) another and more<br />
popular account, not because of its authorship, the authors are similarly<br />
academics like Resnik, as historians of science, Naoimi Oreskes and Erik M.<br />
Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), but because the<br />
target is not, say AIDS or cancer or physics research but (and only) big tobacco<br />
and global warming. For a discussion dedicated to the role of journals and editors<br />
whose ultimate editorial policy is to simply block publication, see Pilkey, Orrin H.,<br />
and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can‟t<br />
Predict the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 136 and<br />
passim. Neither scientists nor engineers, as it turns out, are willing to revise a<br />
good model once they have one, no matter whether it models reality or not, and<br />
this recalcitrance was the inspiration for the Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis. For a nicely<br />
theoretical discussion, see Philip Mirowski‘s The Effortless Economy of Science<br />
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) as well as his earlier co-edited<br />
collection with E.-M. Sent, Science Bought and Sold (Chicago: University of<br />
Chicago Press, 2002). For a more general account, see Martin Walker, Dirty<br />
Medicine (London: Slingshot Publications, 1993). And if one really doesn‘t mind<br />
rocking the boat, see the arguments of the important but obviously controversial<br />
molecular biologist, Peter Duesberg‘s popular or exoteric, Inventing the AIDS Virus<br />
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1995), and for a perfect scientist‘s account, see<br />
Duesberg, et al., ―The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics:<br />
Recreational Drugs, Anti-Viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition,‖ J. Biosci., 28/4<br />
(June, 2003): 383-412. See further Gordon Moran, Silencing Scientists and<br />
Scholars in Other Fields: Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly<br />
Communication (Greenwich: Ablex Publishing, 1998).<br />
68
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
11. For a rare account using the tools of journalistic science, a science that has itself<br />
recently been coopted by its sponsors, see David S. Bertolloti, Culture and<br />
Technology (Bowling Green: Ohio University Press, 1984).<br />
12. This is the still too-little adverted to point of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,<br />
Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). I<br />
say too little adverted to because this ―invisible‖ point has gone without remark<br />
while the modest one, has captivated our attention. We are all of us the modest<br />
witness in question, just as we are all cyborg. See too for a related discussion,<br />
similarly insufficiently noted or discussed, but it is a glorious book and<br />
recommend it to philosophers if only for the implications to be drawn by reading<br />
the very first page, Lawrence Principe‘s The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his<br />
Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).<br />
13. I should note the phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon, of publishing by printing press<br />
on occasion and stamped wood cuts that constituted by Earl Nitschke‘s<br />
extraordinary mailing of postcards and prints to a wide range of Nietzsche<br />
scholars. As editor, I have characterized this as I feature his work in recent issue<br />
of New Nietzsche Studies, as dynamic performance art, as an art event: corelevant<br />
here would be Nietzsche‘s own description of a letter as being akin to an<br />
unannounced visit, shaking one up, disturbing, affecting one. The internet wishes<br />
it could be so effective. And Earl Nitschke is particularly good at this as a<br />
professor of industrial art and design. Thus publishing as noted at the outset with<br />
reference to writing on the wall, has many means. Postcard art is one of them.<br />
14. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York:<br />
Anchor Books, 1996), pp. 199ff.<br />
15. Add to this the literality of the humanities faculty and one finds that humanities‘ faculty<br />
members tend go along with rather than protesting such cuts. By contrast,<br />
science faculty, less literate perhaps, certainly unused to taking orders from<br />
librarians, often protest to high heaven when anyone proposes to cut their<br />
subscriptions. It goes without saying that the difference in costs between<br />
humanities subscriptions and science subscriptions are mind boggling, which<br />
means that relatively little is gained from the complicity of the humanities<br />
professors.<br />
16. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1992), p. 85.<br />
17. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault<br />
(Cambridge: Wiley, 1995) and Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A<br />
Commentary to Hugh‟s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).<br />
18. Aaron Swartz apparently broke into a restricted area at MIT and downloaded millions of<br />
articles from JSTOR.<br />
19. This is an old habit, reducing Nietzsche to Emerson or Lange or Wagner as one‘s<br />
personal inclinations prefer. Nietzsche himself found it fairly useless<br />
philosophically speaking and spoke instead not of the originality of the Greek but<br />
their genial qualities as masters of what he called ―the art of fruitful learning.‖<br />
Anyone can pick up anything, the challenge is to make something of it, to ―take<br />
up the spear from where another has left it and‖ — and this is what is hard —<br />
―throw it further.‖ See his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.<br />
20. Marcus Aurelius chides himself on the bootlessness of this, the original bookish idée<br />
fixe in his Meditations.<br />
21. The technology in question depends upon keeping inherently bodily issues in mind,<br />
hence it would be profitably explored by means of phenomenology (and Ihde<br />
should be quick to notice this aspect). The captcha website defines a captcha ―as<br />
a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests<br />
that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.‖ See ―CAPTCHA:<br />
Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically,‖ http://www.captcha.net/.<br />
Accessed 8:56, Pacific time. Albeit from NYC, but my computer does not know<br />
this.<br />
22. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 86.<br />
23. Of the few people who ever read the essay, a subset that regrettably (in my view as I<br />
would have welcomed the resultant dialogue) includes no one who writes on the<br />
topic.<br />
69
INTERVIEW: Babette Babich<br />
24. My essay, ―On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche‘s Lying Truth,<br />
Heidegger‘s Speaking Language, and Philosophy‖ in Carlos G. Prado, ed., A House<br />
Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY:<br />
Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003), pp. 63-103 goes back quite a bit as an<br />
initial version of it was originally written for a conference I organized in Dubrovnik<br />
in 1991 just before the ―war(s)‖ that dismantled Yugoslavia and what had been<br />
other countries of the time (countries to be sure that were themselves drawn,<br />
borderwise, following the previous world war(s)). It was revised and published four<br />
years after that as ―Against Analysis, Beyond Postmodernism‖ in the collection I<br />
edited (together with Debra B. Bergoffen and Simon V. Glynn, eds.), Continental<br />
and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science (Avebury. Aldershot, UK/<br />
Brookfield, USA. 1995), pp. 31-54.<br />
25. I have a book on this topic, forthcoming in French, where the distinction and the divide<br />
is similarly problematic: Babich, La fin de la pensée. Sur la différence et la<br />
politique de la désunion entre philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale.<br />
26. Thus Aquinas cites Aristotle‘s de Anima on the matter of such distinctions:<br />
scientiae dividuntur quemadmodum et res, ut dicitur in III de anima. Sed philosophia est de<br />
ente; est enim cognitio entis, ut dicit Dionysius in epistula ad Polycarpum. Cum ergo<br />
ens primo dividatur per potentiam et actum, per unum et multa, per substantiam et<br />
accidens, videtur quod per huiusmodi deberent partes philosophiae distingui.‖<br />
Aquinas, Librum Boetii de Trinitate Expositio (Quest. 5. Art. 1.)<br />
In addition, we remember Descartes‘ identification of the ―clear and distinct‖ as the<br />
distinctive characteristic of what might (ultimately, promissorily) be known with<br />
certainty. In an article on this topic, Robert Sokolowski notes that the entire<br />
impetus of Aristotle‘s characterization of his predecessors depended upon<br />
distinguishing their lack of distinctive distinguishing. Sokolowski cites Aristotle‘s<br />
Metaphysics 1.7 988a180-b15, noting as he does that Aristotle‘s own method<br />
proceeds by ‗clarifying‘ what his predecessors confusedly knew. See Sokolowski,<br />
―The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions,‖ The Review of Metaphysics, Vol.<br />
51, No. 3 (Mar., 1998): 515-532. Prior to Sokowlowski, see too Hannah Arendt‘s<br />
letter entitled ―Distinctions‖ which she sent to New York Review of Books, Volume<br />
13, Number 12 (January 1, 1970) in reply to a review published on her book, Men<br />
in Dark Times. Although by her own self-assessment, a political theorist rather<br />
than a philosopher, Arendt draws upon her clearly philosophical background to<br />
argue against her reviewer that<br />
the point at issue is not the past but tradition, and the distinction between them: Tradition<br />
orders the past, hands it down (tradere), interprets it, omits, selects, and<br />
emphasizes according to a system of pre-established beliefs. Tradition is a mental<br />
construct and as such always subject to critical examination. If I say that no<br />
tradition can claim validity today, I do not say that the past is dead but that we<br />
have no reliable guide through it any more, from which it follows that tradition<br />
itself has become a part of the past.‖ Ibid.<br />
27. I have written of course a good deal about this and I am happy to note that there is an<br />
increasingly interest in the topic – indeed Günther Abel and Helmut Heit<br />
organized a conference during the summer of 2010 on the theme of ―Nietzsches<br />
Wissenschaftsphilosophie/Nietzsche‘s Philosophy of Science.‖ A full three day,<br />
international conference and that, intriguingly enough, would not be the only<br />
such conference recently organized on Nietzsche science. Quite independently of<br />
such conferences, I myself begin a recent overview essay on the philosophy of<br />
science as such with an extended reference to Nietzsche in Babich, ―Towards a<br />
Critical Philosophy of Science: Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and<br />
Waterbears,‖ International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4<br />
(December 2010): 343-391.<br />
28. See the first few sections of Babich, ―Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science.‖<br />
29. See ― ‗Hacker‘s Challenge‘ James Garvey interviews P.M. S. Hacker,‖ TPM, The<br />
Philosopher‟s Magazine, Issue 51 ( October 25, 2010).<br />
70
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
30. Sally Haslanger, a professor of philosophy at MIT foregrounds this theme in her<br />
―Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone),‖<br />
Hypatia, 23/ 2 (2008): 210-223. That this hostile (sometimes politely called<br />
‗chilly‘) ―culture‖ has an ideological, political, and economic basis is clear. See just<br />
for a start, though data is notoriously difficult to collect, Miriam Solomon and<br />
John Clarke ―The CSW Jobs for Philosophers Employment Study,‖ APA<br />
Newsletter: Feminism and Philosophy, 8/2 (Spring 2009): 3-6. The reach of these<br />
reflections can be fairly extensive: see Londa Schiebinger and Shannon K.<br />
Gilmartin, ―Housework is an Academic Issue,‖ Academe, Vol. 96, No. 1 January-<br />
February 2010 as well as in a European context, Louise Morley, Quality and<br />
Power in Higher Education (Society for Research into Higher Education: McGraw<br />
Hill, 2003). For those who think that political issues are foreign to questions of<br />
discourse analysis in the academy, see Troemel-Ploetz, ―Selling the Apolitical,‖<br />
Discourse Society, 2/4(1991): 489-502.<br />
31. I am sure that Michael Wreen, who argues nicely that fallacies typically regarded are<br />
only qualifiedly so, would be comparably enlightening on the matter of this<br />
traditional informal fallacy. I cite Wreen and others in Babich, ―Towards a Critical<br />
Philosophy of Science.‖<br />
32. I have elsewhere observed that some of the limitations of Peter Kingsley‘s recent work<br />
on the presocratic tradition corresponded to his apparent limited knowledge of<br />
Nietzsche, owing to the constraints inherent in classical studies, but not less to<br />
the limitations of the analytic tendencies that dominate departments of<br />
philosophy.<br />
33. See further David Jenneman, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota<br />
Press, 2007) or Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography trans. Stewart Spencer<br />
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).<br />
34. This is Jennerman‘s point which he takes up from Jäger and others as well. I discuss<br />
this in the initial sections of Babich, ―Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals,<br />
and Jews,‖ Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue<br />
canadienne de philosophie continentale, Vol. 14, No. 1, (2011): 110-145.<br />
35. Read Principe‘s book just for the philosophical frisson of the first few pages, and read<br />
the rest for its own sake (not to mention for useful bits on Newton).<br />
36. Being unread is, of course, what it means to be non-influential, that is why I discussed<br />
the elusive quality of the readerly public above.<br />
37. There is also what one may call a boredom quotient that matters (to me) in philosophy.<br />
Bunge has that in spades, Nietzsche rather less of it.<br />
71
Call For Papers<br />
Articles are welcome in any area of philosophy or<br />
philosophical perspectives, including but not<br />
limited to: Gender and Race Studies, Literature,<br />
Political Science, Ecology, Education,<br />
Communication Studies, Linguistics, Sociology,<br />
Anthropology, Poetry, Urban Studies, and<br />
Psychology.<br />
Articles are blind-reviewed and judged on their<br />
philosophical merit and relevance. Articles should<br />
be double-spaced Word documents, with a cover<br />
page (including institutional affiliation) and<br />
300-500 word abstract. For stylistic concerns,<br />
consult the University of Chicago Press Manual of<br />
Style.<br />
Imagery is encouraged; however it is the obligation<br />
of the author to obtain permission for any imagery<br />
within the article if it is not within public domain.<br />
Authors will not be charged extra for images.<br />
www.purlieujournal.com<br />
<strong>Purlieu</strong>
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
Dr. Iain Thomson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Director at the<br />
University of New Mexico and a leading expert on the thought of Martin Heidegger, education,<br />
and technology. His first book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of<br />
Education, has been described as “the deepest and the most illuminating account of the<br />
relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics yet offered” and his newest book,<br />
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later<br />
philosophy.<br />
Paideia does not consist in merely pouring knowledge into the<br />
unprepared soul as if it were some container held out empty<br />
and waiting. On the contrary, real education lays hold of the<br />
soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all<br />
leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming<br />
us to it.<br />
~ Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Teaching on Truth.” 1<br />
As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger’s philosophy of education is a<br />
philosophy of transformation, one profoundly concerned with both personal<br />
and historical transformation. 2 In this necessarily condensed presentation, I<br />
want to work up to the moment in which these two dimensions intersect,<br />
such that personal and historical transformation come together to<br />
illuminate, motivate, and facilitate one another. I call this doubly<br />
transformative moment the pedagogical truth event. In such events, we<br />
achieve a revolutionary return to the self that shows us how to step beyond<br />
our nihilistic late-modernity into a genuinely meaningful postmodern<br />
understanding of being. To begin to explain this doubly-transformative event<br />
(which is all I can hope to do here), I shall briefly sketch its personal and<br />
historical dimensions and their intersection.<br />
73
Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger<br />
On the level of personal transformation, Heidegger‘s ontological<br />
understanding of education is centrally concerned with that paradoxical<br />
question at the heart of the ―perfectionist‖ tradition: How do we become<br />
what we are? ―Becoming what we are‖ means discovering the ground of<br />
which we already stand, without having realized it. What we are,<br />
ontologically, is a world-disclosing being (a Dasein or ―being-here‖), that is, a<br />
being who implicitly participates in the making-intelligible of its world (by<br />
―unconcealing the concealed,‖ or ―worlding the earth,‖ in Heidegger‘s<br />
language). To realize such world-disclosure means both (1) to recognize the<br />
implicit role we always-already play in constituting our intelligible worlds<br />
and also (2) to cultivate and develop our implicit skills for ―poietic‖ worlddisclosure,<br />
that is, for discerning and creatively developing the possibilities<br />
that continually emerge at the dynamic intersection between self and world,<br />
human being and being itself. In Heidegger‘s early work, to realize what we<br />
already are is to be transformed by coming full-circle back to ourselves, an<br />
existential odyssey of departure and return I have called the revolutionary<br />
return to ourselves. In his later work the emphasis shifts, and Heidegger<br />
suggests a more complex account of how this transformative return to the<br />
self takes place. It is this later vision that I shall briefly reconstruct here,<br />
since it is more carefully attuned to the historical dimension of historical<br />
intelligibility. 3<br />
For Heidegger, that we each play a role in constituting our<br />
intelligible worlds never meant that we can freely determine how things<br />
show up for us, making cruelty look kind, ugliness beautiful, or frenzy<br />
relaxing by force of will or rational argument (pace widespread caricatures of<br />
―existential voluntarism‖). He begins by acknowledging discursivity, the fact<br />
that the subconscious processes through which we render reality intelligible<br />
to ourselves dictate that even our sensory uptake of that reality is selective<br />
(as we can see by comparing our sense of smell with a dog‘s, or our<br />
comparatively impoverished visual acuity with a hawk‘s), and that the<br />
subconscious processes of attention to and conceptualization of this<br />
selectively-gathered perceptual information work to filter and organize it yet<br />
further (as we can see by comparing our sensitivity to shades of color with<br />
those of a skilled artist, or our taste of wine with that of an expert oenophile,<br />
or even our experience of the same film while in drastically different moods).<br />
As this suggests, our intelligible world, even in its greatest richness, is a<br />
slice of a slice of a slice of reality at best. 4 Yes, this helps explain why the<br />
text does not mean the same thing for the expert teacher as it does for the<br />
novice student, but that is only an important instance of the more general<br />
truth that the way the world shows up for one expert teacher is not simply<br />
the way it shows up for another—let alone the way it has always shown up<br />
or will always show up for all human or other world-disclosing beings.<br />
74
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
When Heidegger contrasts the different historical worlds of the<br />
ancient Greeks, medieval Christians, and modern Westerners, his primary<br />
concern is not with gender, class, or cultural differences, but rather with a<br />
pervasive phenomenological difference in the way the world shows up that is<br />
still more fundamental. His focus is on the way Western humanity‘s<br />
understanding of being—our most basic sense of what it means to be—gets<br />
constituted, focused, transmitted, and transformed. In his view, this ―history<br />
of being‖ changes drastically over time and yet is neither a constantly<br />
shifting medium we can alter at will nor an unchanging monolith over which<br />
human beings have no influence. Heidegger‘s understanding of ontological<br />
historicity—of the way in which our basic sense of reality changes with<br />
time—occupies a middle ground between the poles of voluntaristic<br />
constructivism and quietistic fatalism, and for him historical intelligibility is<br />
neither a formless Heraclitean flux (pace Derrida) nor an unbroken<br />
Parmenidean unity (pace Rorty). Instead, according to Heidegger‘s<br />
punctuated equilibrium view of historicity (which I call ontological<br />
epochality), our changing understanding of being takes shape as a series of<br />
three drastically different but internally unified and relatively coherent<br />
historical ―epochs,‖ the ancient, medieval, and modern. (The ancient and<br />
modern epochs further divided into the Presocratic and the Platonic, as well<br />
as the modern and later modern ages, for a total of five ages in the Western<br />
―history of being,‖ five overlapping yet distinguishable historical<br />
constellations of intelligibility.) 5 In each of these ―epochs,‖ the overwhelming<br />
floodwaters of being are temporarily dammed so that an island of historical<br />
intelligibility can arise out of the river of time. Ontotheologies are what<br />
build, undermine, and rebuild these dams. But how?<br />
Ontotheologies focus and disseminate our basic sense of what it<br />
means to be. Our fundamental understanding of the being of entities—that<br />
is, of what and how all entities are—gets shaped historically by the<br />
ontotheological tradition running from Plato to Nietzsche. Grasping the<br />
entire intelligible order by uncovering both its innermost ―ontological‖ core<br />
and its outermost ―theological‖ expression, ontotheologies link these<br />
antipodal perspectives together so as to ground an historical age‘s sense of<br />
reality from the inside-out and the outside-in simultaneously.<br />
Ontotheologies doubly anchor an epoch‘s historical understanding of being<br />
when they succeed in grasping reality from both extremes at once,<br />
temporarily establishing both its microscopic depths and ultimate telescopic<br />
expression. Thus, to take the most important example, the sense of reality<br />
unifying our own late-modern age is rooted in the ontotheology first<br />
articulated by Nietzsche. Universalizing insights already discovered by Adam<br />
Smith and Charles Darwin in the domains of economics and biology,<br />
Nietzsche recognized that for us reality is ultimately nothing but competing<br />
forces coming-together and breaking-apart with no end beyond the maximal<br />
75
Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger<br />
growth that perpetuates these underlying forces themselves. This is<br />
precisely what Heidegger discerns as Nietzsche‘s ―unthought‖ ontotheology,<br />
his understanding of the being of entities as ―eternally recurring will-topower.‖<br />
As long as we cannot think beneath or beyond such ontotheologies,<br />
they come to function like self-fulfilling prophecies—owing to what I have<br />
called ontological holism. Everything intelligible is in some way, so when<br />
ontotheologies reshape our sense of ―Is-ness‖ itself, they thereby catalyze a<br />
transformation in our sense of what it means for anything to be, including<br />
ourselves. These ontotheologies implicitly reshape our sense of what and<br />
how all things are, like lenses we do not ordinarily see but, instead, see<br />
through. The problem is that Nietzsche‘s ontotheology of eternally recurring<br />
will-to-power inaugurates what Heidegger famously calls the ―technological‖<br />
understanding of being, or ―enframing‖ (Gestell). As we late-moderns come to<br />
understand the being of all entities as nothing but forces seeking their own<br />
self-perpetuating growth, we tend to treat all things—even ourselves and<br />
each other—as intrinsically-meaningless ―resources‖ (Bestand) standing by<br />
merely to be optimized, enhanced, and ordered for maximally flexible use.<br />
As I argued in my book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and<br />
the Politics of Education, the ongoing reduction of education to the empty<br />
optimization imperative—―Get the most for the least!‖—has to be understood<br />
not simply as a result of capitalist corporatization or bureaucratic<br />
routinization but much more deeply, in terms of the nihilistic technological<br />
ontotheology underlying all of these phenomena. When all entities are<br />
implicitly understood and so treated as nothing but intrinsicallymeaningless<br />
resources to be optimized, it is not surprising that education<br />
becomes increasingly corporatized, instrumentalized, and technologized; nor<br />
is it surprising that students come to see education merely as a way to ―Get<br />
the most out of their potentials‖ (where that typically means maximizing<br />
their financial prospects), or that indolence and dishonesty become rampant<br />
(since the optimization imperative makes cutting-corners and even cheating<br />
seem rational if students can get away with it; for, they mistakenly<br />
conclude, what better way to optimize—to get more for less—than to get a<br />
diploma while doing as little work as possible?). Seen in the light of our<br />
technological ontotheology, it is not surprising that plagiarism is becoming a<br />
growing problem (along with a whole burgeoning culture of theft), since the<br />
techno-utopian mantra, ―information wants to be free,‖ though literally false<br />
(since information does not have any desires) is not a bad diagnosis of the<br />
basic problem with our technological understanding of being, which<br />
increasingly reduces reality to nothing but ―information‖ (dichotomous<br />
binaries) seeking ever more efficient means of circulation (and so naturally<br />
shorn of such obsolete rituals as authorship). Nor is it surprising that the<br />
administrative bureaucracy becomes a self-regulating system pursuing its<br />
76
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
own self-optimizing growth in the name of increasing ―efficiency,‖ that is, of<br />
regulating and maximizing the input/output ratios of the university as a<br />
system (often under the alibi of the pursuit of an excoriated ―excellence‖).<br />
These serious problems afflicting education are deeply entrenched<br />
in the metaphysical substructure of our historical self-understanding, and<br />
so need to be diagnosed and treated at that level. This means we need to<br />
become aware of the subtle and often unnoticed impact of our late-modern,<br />
technological ontotheology so that we can learn to resist and transcend it.<br />
The larger question, then, is how we might transcend our late-modern,<br />
technological ontotheology and so inaugurate a postmodern understanding<br />
of being, and how education can help us make that historical transition. The<br />
educational key to making this transformative transition from our nihilistic<br />
modern understanding of being to a genuinely meaningful postmodernity,<br />
Heidegger suggests, is to learn to practice the phenomenological<br />
comportment he calls ―dwelling‖ (or ―releasement to things‖). To put it much<br />
too briefly, to learn to dwell is to become attuned to the phenomenological<br />
―presencing‖ (Anwesen) whereby ―being as such‖ manifests itself. ―Being as<br />
such‖ is one of the later Heidegger‘s names for that conceptuallyinexhaustible<br />
dimension of intelligibility which all metaphysics‘ different<br />
ontotheological ways of understanding the being of entities partly capture<br />
but never exhaust, the recognition of which can help lead us beyond our<br />
current ontotheology. For, if we can learn from the great poets and artists to<br />
become comportmentally attuned to the dynamic phenomenological<br />
presencing that both precedes and exceeds all conceptualization, then we<br />
too can come to understand and experience entities as being richer in<br />
meaning than we are capable of doing justice to conceptually, rather than<br />
taking them as intrinsically-meaningless resources awaiting optimization.<br />
Such experiences can become microcosms of, as well as inspiration for, the<br />
revolution beyond our underlying ontotheology that we need in order to<br />
transcend the nihilism of late-modern enframing and set our world on a<br />
different, more meaningful path.<br />
In order to understand the drastically different ways of comporting<br />
ourselves toward things that Heidegger contrasts—namely, the active<br />
receptivity of poetic dwelling, on the one hand, and the obtuse domination of<br />
technological enframing, on the other—it helps to think about the difference<br />
between these poetic and technological modes of revealing in terms of the<br />
ancient Greek distinction between poiesis and technê. Just think, on the one<br />
hand, of a poetic shepherding into being which respects the natural<br />
potentialities of the matters with which it works, just as Michelangelo (who,<br />
let us recall, worked in a marble quarry) legendarily claimed he simply set<br />
his ―David‖ free from a particularly rich piece of marble (after studying it<br />
carefully for a month); or, less hyperbolically, as a skillful woodworker<br />
77
Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger<br />
notices the inherent qualities of particular pieces of wood—attending to<br />
subtleties of shape and grain, different shades of color, weight, and<br />
hardness—while deciding what might be built from that wood (or whether to<br />
build from it at all). Then contrast, on the other hand, a technological<br />
making which imposes a predetermined form on matter without paying heed<br />
to any intrinsic potentialities, the way an industrial factory indiscriminately<br />
grinds wood into woodchips in order to paste them back together into<br />
straight particle board, which can then be used flexibly and efficiently to<br />
construct a maximal variety of useful objects. Now, in the same terms, think<br />
about the difference between an educational approach that helps students<br />
identify and cultivate their own unique talents and intrinsic skills and<br />
capacities in order to help them meet their generation‘s emerging needs (and<br />
thereby encourages teachers to come into their own as teachers), as opposed<br />
to an approach that treats students merely as raw materials, ―human<br />
resources,‖ and seeks to remake them so that they can pursue whatever<br />
society currently deems to be the most ―valuable‖ career path. 6<br />
In each case, it helps to think about how one responds to the<br />
resistances one encounters: Does one seek to flatten-out and overcome them<br />
or, instead, to cultivate that which resists one‘s will and so help bring it to<br />
its own fruition? While many late-moderns continue to believe (with<br />
Nietzsche) that all meaning comes from us (as the result of our various<br />
―value positings‖), Heidegger is committed to the more phenomenologically<br />
accurate view that, at least with respect to that which most matters to us—<br />
the paradigm case being love—what we most care about is in fact not<br />
entirely up to us, not simply within our power to control, and this is a<br />
crucial part of what makes it so important. Indeed, the primary<br />
phenomenological lesson Heidegger drew from art is that when things are<br />
approached with openness and respect, they push back against us, making<br />
subtle but undeniable claims on us, and we need to learn to acknowledge<br />
and respond creatively to these claims if we do not want to deny the source<br />
of genuine meaning in the world. For, only meanings which are at least<br />
partly independent of us and so not entirely within our control—not simply<br />
up to us to bestow and rescind at will—can provide us with the kind of<br />
touchstones around which we can build meaningful lives and loves.<br />
Heidegger drew this lesson from poetry, but it is profoundly applicable to<br />
education, where it helps us understand what I have called the pedagogical<br />
truth event.<br />
Heidegger calls such an enduringly meaningful encounter an ―event<br />
of enowning‖ (Ereignis). In such momentous events, we find ourselves<br />
coming into our own (as world-disclosers) precisely by creatively enabling<br />
things to come into their own, just as Michelangelo came into his own as a<br />
sculptor by creatively responding to the veins and fissures in that particular<br />
78
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
piece of marble so as to bring forth his ―David‖; or as a woodworker comes<br />
into her own as a woodworker by responding creatively to the subtle weight,<br />
color, and grain of an individual piece of wood in order to make something<br />
out of it (or to leave it be); or as, in the pedagogical truth event, a teacher<br />
comes into his or her own as a teacher by learning to recognize and cultivate<br />
the particular talents and capacities of each individual student, thereby<br />
enabling these students to come into their own. In all such cases, a poetic<br />
openness to what pushes back against our pre-existing plans and designs<br />
helps disclose a texture of inherent meanings, affordances, significations,<br />
and solicitations, a texture Heidegger teaches us to discover ―all around<br />
us‖—not only in nature, our workshops, and classrooms but even in our<br />
lives as a whole. 7 For, we truly learn to ―make something‖ out of our lives<br />
not when we try to impose an artificial shape on them but, rather, when we<br />
learn to discern and develop creatively that which ―pushes back‖ in all the<br />
ways mentioned here, and many more.<br />
Here we can glimpse the importance of ―the pedagogical truth event‖<br />
for understanding mentorship. We can use ―mentorship‖ to name a crucial<br />
aspect of ontological education, namely, the teacher‘s helping the student to<br />
identify and develop his or her distinctive talents and capacities, ideally so<br />
as to help students respond to their sense of the most pressing issues of<br />
their time and generation. To some that might sound like a task burdened<br />
with duties, but in fact it‘s amazing how little it can take. Just ―as an<br />
inconspicuous tap of the sculptor‘s chisel imparts a different form to the<br />
figure‖ (as Heidegger put it), so a few simple but true words that recognize<br />
and respond to something inchoate but meaningful in a student‘s work can<br />
have a profound impact, encouraging students to continue to develop the<br />
skills and abilities that make them distinctive, since it is such development<br />
that leads to a fulfilling life, as the perfectionist tradition teaches us. Nor is<br />
this some wholly altruistic or other-directed action; on the contrary,<br />
teachers come into their own as teachers by helping students recognize and<br />
cultivate their distinctive skills and abilities in a meaningful way. In so<br />
doing, teachers and students help being itself to come into its own as well,<br />
as always informing yet never being exhausted by our poietic discernment<br />
and creative development of its possibilities. 8 Here the teacher is only the<br />
foremost learner, dedicated to learning in public in order to show by<br />
example that learning means discerning and developing ontological<br />
possibilities, thereby helping students develop their own sensitivities to the<br />
texture of the texts in which they live as well as their abilities for creative<br />
world-disclosure. This means being ready to let go of one‘s lesson plan when<br />
the opportunity to nurture a potentially important discussions arises, and<br />
also that it is advantageous not just to teach new figures and emerging<br />
movements, but to do so while also teaching the same great texts repeatedly,<br />
since the dedicated re-reading of such texts allows one to discover<br />
79
Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger<br />
something new in them every time. That experience of learning to see<br />
something where previously one saw nothing is absolutely central to the<br />
education philosophy of the pedagogical truth event. For, all genuine<br />
meaning derives from and requires this skill of learning to discern and<br />
disclose the inchoate possibilities of things. 9<br />
If intelligibility can be thought of as composed of ―texts‖ that we<br />
continually read and interpret (as Derrida‘s famous aperçu, ―there is nothing<br />
outside the text,‖ suggests), then we can hear Heidegger as reminding us<br />
that we need to learn to recognize and respond to the texture of these<br />
ubiquitous texts. This texture of meanings independent of our wills can be<br />
more or less subtle, but by dissolving all being into becoming, the current of<br />
Nietzschean technologization tends to sweep right past it and can even<br />
threaten to wash it away, as in the case of particle board and, much more<br />
―dangerously,‖ Heidegger suggests, in the technological reengineering of<br />
human beings, even in its seemingly milder form of educational enframing,<br />
in which poetic discernment of genuine possibilities get eclipsed and<br />
overwritten by empty technological optimization. Nonetheless, Heidegger<br />
remains hopeful that once we learn to discern this technological current, we<br />
can also learn to cultivate a ―free relation to technology‖ in which it becomes<br />
possible to use even technological devices themselves to resist<br />
technologization, the nihilistic obviation of any meaning independent of the<br />
will. In fact, we are already doing this, for example, when we use a camera,<br />
microscope, telescope, or even glasses to help bring out something<br />
meaningful that we might not otherwise have seen, when we use a<br />
synthesizer or computer to compose a new kind of music that helps us<br />
develop and share our sense of what is most significant to us, when we use<br />
a word processor to help bring out what is really there in the texts that<br />
matter to us and the philosophical issues that most concern us, or even<br />
when we use a highly technologized university to teach the art of slow and<br />
careful reading that is dedicated to helping teacher and students learn to<br />
discern and develop such will-independent meanings together.<br />
To put the larger point that emerges here in philosophical terms,<br />
what the later Heidegger suggests is a fundamental ontological pluralism (or<br />
plural realism). We need to be sensitive enough to meanings independent of<br />
the will to be able to ―cut reality at the joints,‖ but because those joints<br />
provide us with more of a suggestive outline than a final design, there will in<br />
most cases be more than one way of disclosing the genuine hints we are<br />
offered. 10 This means, for example, that, just as a talented artisan can make<br />
more than one thing from a single piece of wood, so there was also more<br />
than one form slumbering in the veins of the marble from which<br />
Michelangelo ―released‖ his David. And, for the same reasons, there will<br />
usually be more than one right answer to the existential question of what we<br />
80
<strong>Purlieu</strong> | Special Edition | Fall 2011<br />
should each do with our lives. That helps explain the persistent recurrence<br />
of the question in education, since it can never be settled once and for all,<br />
and why those looking for the one right answer never seem finally to find<br />
it. 11 Like the neo-Aristotelian view of ―open resoluteness‖ (Ent-schlossenheit)<br />
that Heidegger developed in Being and Time, his later view of the active<br />
receptivity of ―releasement‖ (Gelassenheit) suggests a kind of ethical and<br />
aesthetic phronêsis or practical wisdom. The guiding idea here is that,<br />
rather than getting hung up looking for the one right answer—and, when we<br />
finally despair of finding it, rebounding back to the relativistic view that no<br />
answer is better than any other (or concluding nihilistically that intrinsic<br />
meanings are an obsolete myth, thereby ignoring the multiple suggestions<br />
nature offers us or overwriting these hints with our own preconceived ideas<br />
rather than seeking to develop them creatively)—educators should instead<br />
cultivate the recognition that in most situations there will be more than one<br />
right answer to questions of what to do or how best to go on.<br />
The leading hermeneutic principle to follow pedagogically is thus<br />
that there is more than one inherent meaning to be found in things. For, if<br />
being is conceptually inexhaustible, capable of yielding meaning again and<br />
again, then the intrinsic meanings of things must be plural (or essentially<br />
polysemic), however paradoxical such a doctrine of ontological pluralism<br />
might now seem, given our current obsession with formal systems capable<br />
of securing monosemic exactitude. Indeed, to understand the being of the<br />
entities we encounter in a postmodern way is to no longer preconceive<br />
everything we experience as modern objects to be controlled or as latemodern<br />
resources to be optimized, but instead to learn to discern and<br />
creatively develop the independent meanings, solicitations, and affordances<br />
of things, staying open to the multiple suggestions things offer us, to the<br />
point of dedicating ourselves—as teachers and as human beings—to<br />
bringing forth such hints creatively and responsibly into the world.<br />
To comment or respond to Iain Thomson‘s essay, please send<br />
an email to : editors@purlieujournal.com<br />
Responses will be sent to the author, with some published<br />
online and/or in the Spring 2012 issue of <strong>Purlieu</strong>.<br />
Notes<br />
1. See Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 167;<br />
Gesamtausgabe Vol. 9: Wegmarken, F.-W. von Herrmann, ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: V.<br />
Klostermann, 1976), p. 217. (Volumes of Heidegger‘s Gesamtausgabe referred to<br />
hereafter as ―GA‖ plus the volume number.) I explain and discuss this crucial<br />
81
Thomson | Pedagological Truth Event After Heidegger<br />
passage in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of<br />
Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ch. 4, esp. pp. 155-<br />
81.<br />
2. For some of the hermeneutical evidence and philosophical arguments establishing that<br />
Heidegger‘s ontological thinking about education forms one of the deepest<br />
undercurrents running through his philosophy, both early and late, see Thomson,<br />
―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in Being and Time,‖ Continental<br />
Philosophy Review 37:4 (2004), pp. 439-467; and Thomson, Heidegger on<br />
Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education.<br />
3. For a presentation of his earlier, Being and Time, view and its main differences from his<br />
later understanding, see ―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in<br />
Being and Time‖ and Heidegger on Ontotheology, Chs. 3-4.<br />
4. I discuss Heidegger‘s heroic embrace of the tragic truth that the known floats atop the<br />
unknown like the tip of an iceberg above a deep dark sea in Heidegger, Art, and<br />
Postmodernity, Ch. 3.<br />
5. I explain these views in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology, Ch. 1, and in Heidegger, Art,<br />
and Postmodernity, Ch. 1.<br />
6. I develop these suggestions in detail in Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the<br />
Politics of Education, esp. Chs. 2 and 4. As I suggest there, a genuinely vocational<br />
education would be perfectionist, cultivating and developing essential capacities,<br />
not empty and instrumentalizing.<br />
7. Heidegger seeks to teach us ―to listen out into the undetermined‖ for a ―coming [which]<br />
essentially occurs all around us and at all times‖ (Country Path Conversations, B.<br />
Davis, trans [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010], p. 147/GA77, pp.<br />
226-7). Kenneth Maly describes the tripartite ―enowning‖ at the heart of the<br />
phenomenon of Ereignis in terms that cleave closely to Heidegger‘s own: ―Things<br />
emerge into their own, into what is own to them; humans come into their own as<br />
they respond to the owning dynamic in being as emergence; being as emergence<br />
enowns Dasein—all these dynamics belong to the matter said in ‗enowning.‘‖<br />
(Heidegger‟s Possibility: Language, Emergence—Saying Be-ing [Toronto: University<br />
of Toronto Press, 2008], p. 174). As Maly suggests, there is a third dimension of<br />
enowning in which being too comes into its own; that happens, I show in<br />
Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, when Dasein and the being of entities come<br />
into their own together in such a way that being itself is disclosed in its essential<br />
plenitude or polysemy—and this is the crucial postmodern moment.<br />
8. That such crucial pedagogical ―events‖ are what most deeply matters educationally,<br />
rather than the mere transmission of information, helps explain why teachers are<br />
more important than topics. Different teachers have different styles and interests,<br />
and different styles and interests disclose some students‘ distinctive skills and<br />
capacities better than others, so students should be encouraged to find the<br />
teachers whose teaching styles and interests speak to them, calling them to put<br />
their most into a class rather than just trying to get a good grade.<br />
9. This is one of the central theses of Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.<br />
10. Heidegger‘s ―The Origin of the Work of Art‖ suggests that intelligibility contains a<br />
complex texture of edges, lines, and breaks, a ―rift-structure‖ that forms an openended<br />
―basic design‖ or ―outline sketch‖ to which we need to learn to be creatively<br />
receptive in order to bring at least one of the potentially inexhaustible forms<br />
slumbering in the earth into the light of the world.<br />
11. I develop this view in ―Heidegger‘s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education in Being and<br />
Time.‖<br />
82
tortuga o liebre<br />
purlieu 2012<br />
Yevgeny Khaldei / Shellshocked Reindeer, Murmansk
Copyright <strong>Purlieu</strong> Ltd. 2010-11<br />
All Rights Reserved<br />
www.purlieujournal.com<br />
Cover Design: Matt Story<br />
Image Courtesy: Attila Szucs [photo.medvekoma.net] of Budapest, Hungary<br />
ISSUE No. 3<br />
ISSN 2159-2101 (print)<br />
ISSN 2159-211X (online)