Carlin Romano was persuasive, charming, and gracious, even after an appalling bike-rack incident. My contrarian colleague's predictably-ornery ideological dissent notwithstanding, MTSU's inaugural Fall Lyceum was a great success.
He reconfirmed my frequent observation that there's way more interesting philosophy abroad in the land than you'd ever guess, if your only acquaintance was with philosophy-in-academia. America is philosophical even amongst her bellmen and taxi drivers.
And journalists. He also reassured me as to Older Daughter's career aspirations. (So, by the way, does the new Dean of our College of Mass Communications. "The Dean Speaks Freely" on WMOT...)
But it's back to the academy for us, today. This afternoon's local forecast is clear and sunny, ahead of tomorrow's cold front, so in CoPhi it may finally be time to try that peripatetic experiment I've been intending to run, as a foretaste of the Study Abroad in Britain course another colleague and I have up on the drawing board. Bring good (comfortable and functional, not stylish and heel-mounted) shoes, kids. A pocket notebook would be good, too.
We'll perambulate and ponder Marx, Kierkegaard (and Clare Carlisle on Abraham & Isaac in Fear and Trembling), and some more of Carlin's featured lit critics: Irving Howe, Harold Bloom, and Edward Said.
Kierkegaard (whose name means "graveyard") said something similar to what Hegel more cryptically assigned to the owl of Minerva, when he said “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” He also said
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Once you label me you negate me.
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
But what about the possibility of overriding the ethical, humane, and parental demands and privileges of fatherhood in the name of a sacrificial faith? The Abraham and Isaac story still chills, especially in an age when young women around the world continue to be sacrificed by their pious fathers, brothers, and other young men.
"What if Abraham was wrong?" Or delusional, or sick? His actions "can't be understood, and can't be admired, on the basis of any socially acceptable notion of morality."
And what if some modern Abraham thinks God has commanded him to (say) shoot an 11-year old schoolgirl for being “anti-Taliban and secular," i.e., for advocating girls' right to education? [Malala's story... Daily Show]
“Honor killings,” such atrocities are sometimes euphemistically camouflaged. There’s nothing honorable about them, and nothing a respectable philosopher can say in their defense.
It’s not just Islamist fundamentalists, btw, who support the abuse and murder of children in God’s name. Ophelia Benson cites an Arkansas congressional candidate who says “God’s law” decrees death for “rebellious children.”
But Clare Carlisle reads Kierkegaard's pseudonymously-delivered message as less commital, and more philosophically inquisitory: "What is faith?" Is it immoral ("morally abhorrent" in Abraham's case), irrational, and yet somehow elective and excusable? Whatever it is, she says he's saying, it's not anything to be complacent about. And it's not something you have just because you go through the motions (i.e., attend church services and criticize atheists).
Fair enough. But if "the truth of human existence can't be adequately grasped or expressed in terms of rational thought," we may be in big trouble.
Marx said some things too.
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
Whether Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s words have ultimately been a force for emancipation and the change we need is a question for historians, and philosophers, and historians of philosophy, and philosophers of history. It’s probably best to leave the politicians out of it. [Kierkegaard and Marx @dawn]
But I'd like to hear from a good and thoughtful critic or two. Carlin Romano knows a few more.
Irving Howe was never cowed by academic "pedants and dullards," in his years of Dissent. (I can never hear that journal's name without recalling Woody Allen's line about the rumored merger of Dissent with Commentary...) "This Age of Conformity" was on the money in 1954, and it still is. And the Ph.D. "octopus" is still strangling the life out of too many scholars. We need more "charged autodidacts, bounding out of the library to change the world." But we and they need to keep our library cards. The world seems to be forgetting how to "long-read."
Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" may have been overstated, and many of his judgments may have been off-base. But at least he's been trying to keep the spirit of Emerson alive in our conformist times. The world may still come round to him.
Edward Said is an intriguing figure, one of those whose personal filigrees make them bridges between worlds whether the worlds like it or not. We need more bridges and more "contrapuntal" thinking. "No one today is purely one thing."
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