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Waking the dead

Terry Eagleton

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority – the story of human history to date, in fact – can never be recompensed for their wretched plight.

What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

More at:

New Statesman – Waking the dead.

His book is a good read – he takes issue with the liberal myths we’ve been stuck with for too long

Fast Tube by Casper">All the 12 episodes are on youtube

Break through in grey lair

Instead of tripping and beating a philosophy for its supposed faults only to end up with the same range of mediocre biases with which we began, we ought to find a more vigorous means of engagement with philosophers. The method I propose is to replace the piously overvalued ‘critical thinking’ with a seldom-used hyperbolic thinking. For me at least, it is only books of the most stunning weakness that draw attention to non sequiturs and other logical fallacies. The books that stir us most are not those containing the fewest errors, but those that throw most light on unknown portions of the map. In the case of any author who interests us, we should not ask ‘where are the mistakes here?’, as if we hoped for nothing more than to avoid being fooled. We should ask instead: ‘what if this book, this thinker, were the most important of the century? How would things need to change? And in what ways would we feel both liberated and imprisoned?’ Such questions restore the proper scale of evaluation for intellectual work: demoting the pushy careerist sandbagger who remains within the bounds of the currently plausible and prudent, and promoting the gambler who uncovers new worlds. Nietzsche makes far more ‘mistakes’ than an average peer-reviewed journal article, but this does not stop intelligent adults from reading him all night long, while tossing the article aside for a day that never comes. Graham, Prince Of Networks

This is one of the most stirring passages in Prince Of Networks, and it’s particularly worth citing just now, when the topic of grey vampires has come up again.

More here at: k-punk.

On Knowledge Without Wisdom

By Namit Arora

The Greeks understood ‘philosophy’ as the love of wisdom. They valued theoretical knowledge to the extent it contributed to practical wisdom. Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato’s Academy contained a grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. But philosophy today, at least as pursued by much of the Anglo-American academy, is markedly different. For the most part, its concerns have shrunk to sub-disciplines in epistemology, paving the way for the acquisition of theoretical knowledge as an end in itself. The pursuit of wisdom seems to have left the academy and alighted on the stormy shores of self-help aisles.

More at 3quarksdaily.

chaospet » Archive » #72 Relativism.

The End of Philosophy…?

In case you haven’t seen it, the target of today’s comic/rant is a ridiculous piece in the New York Times by David Brooks titled (no joke) “The End of Philosophy”. The title is especially absurd because he doesn’t target philosophy in the article at all – just ethics, which of course (but perhaps Mr. Brooks doesn’t understand this) is a sub-field of philosophy, not philosophy itself.

The worst part is the nature of the argument against doing normative ethics. As near as I can tell, the argument is that since the sciences (psychology, socio-biology, etc) are giving us evidence that moral judgments are something we make automatically, based on emotion and intuition rather than reason, we needn’t concern ourself with speculations about moral principles or justifications or the like. Morality is all built into us already, so there’s nothing to figure out! Right?

Wrong. This argument is, of course, completely idiotic. It commits the naturalistic fallacy in a manner that I might expect from one of my intro-philosophy students, not from an Op-Ed Columnist in a major publication like the New York Times. The very obvious fact is that no amount of description of how we actually tend to make moral judgments is going to resolve the question whether those moral judgments are right or not. To answer that question, we’re going to have to engage in good old fashioned philosophical reasoning and argumentation about moral principles. It should be no surprise if reflective moral evaluation yields the conclusion that at least some of our natural tendancies and biases produce faulty snap moral judgments and we decide that they need to be compensated for in various ways. But this is something that Mr. Brooks’ position rules out in principle.

Anyway, here is a nice blog on the article by one Sabrina Jamil (who first brought my attention the article), and another one here by PZ Myers. They’re both worth looking at. And those of you readers who are involved in philosophy, or who care about it at all – please spread the word. These sorts of ridiculous misconceptions of philosophy are damaging to our discipline and need to be answered.

Reblogged: via chaospet.

Pragmatism is an important contribution to philosophy, with its roots in the work of three American thinkers of the late 19th/early 20th century: C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Set against the long history of western philoso­phy, this makes it a relatively recent phenomenon, although like most things that seem new in philosophy, it has many continuities with what went before. Recent it may be, but it already constitutes a kind of tradition, with competing camps, radicals, apostates and reformers. Two leading contemporary figures in that tradition are Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, philosophers who, as we shall see, have major disagreements on many issues. Because pragmatists themselves disagree on all sorts of things, it is impossible to give a straight, neutral account of ‘what pragmatists all believe’. So in what follows I shall start with what I think would get a good deal of assent, and then move to consider some of the work of Rorty and Putnam.

What is the value of an idea, or a belief? More

Reblogged from Chaospet

Reblogged from Chaospet

Reblogged from Chaospet

Chris Horner

I wrote this when New Labour was promoting this concept. It’s still relevant.

‘The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun’ –Tony Blair

What would a fair society look like? ‘New Labour’ thought it had the answer: “meritocracy”. This is the vision of a society in which the highest rewards go to those who deserve them, unhindered by the barriers of inherited wealth, class and privilege. It will be achieved by ‘equality of opportunity’, an equal start for all, regardless of class, race or creed. In this way the energetic, ambitious and talented reach the top, whatever their origins. This view of a just society has a powerful appeal in an unequal society like that of the UK, where class, gender, and race still limit the life chances of many. Unfortunately, the goal of a meritocracy is in itself deeply problematic, and equality of opportunity, at least as understood by Blair and Co., is likely to make society even less fair than it is already. That’s why anyone who cares about genuine social justice should oppose both.

THE BIG RACE

Equality of opportunity is an attractive idea. Some inequalities between people are unrelated to anything they might have done: gender, race, being born to poor parents and so on. These kinds of differences ought to be compensated for, as people shouldn’t suffer because of brute bad luck, a roll of the genetic dice. But for New Labour it is as if people’s circumstances were like the opening of a race. Just as we would expect a race to be arranged so that each runner has an equal start, so the state ought to take steps to ensure that people are given equal opportunities to get on in life. Thus the state should intervene to ensure that accidents of birth (race, gender, poverty) do not act as obstacles to success in the race of life. But that’s just at the start: life, like a race, will still produce winners – and losers. The fastest win the prizes.

It’s here we hit our first problem. Equal opportunities alone cannot achieve the goal of a meritocratic society. Imagine two caterers, each earning £10,000, and two clever and industrious lawyers, earning £100,000 each. If both couples marry and have children the difference in their combined incomes will be huge. With their £200,000 the lawyers will be able to buy their child the best start in life, including expensive schooling. Their child, regardless of merit, has an enormous relative advantage, one that it will pass on to its children in turn. In a society dominated by market values ‘equal opportunities’ is doomed to reproduce inequality, irrespective of merit.

THE MIRAGE OF MERIT

‘Merit’ can be understood in different ways: as courage, self-sacrifice, industriousness and so on. But the market is not going to reward just any kind of merit: it selects only those with the ‘right’ kinds of abilities: ‘market merits’. Bus drivers, nurses and office cleaners aren’t necessarily less valuable to society than solicitors and advertisers, but they will be much less well rewarded. So will those, mainly women, who spend their time and energy bringing up children or supporting the elderly. “Market merit” turns out to comprise a narrow range of human characteristics, some of them, like ambitiousness, not always morally admirable. Ambitious people are often ego driven and self-centred. Contrast that type with the nurse or the unpaid carer.

Yet surely we can reward people for their ability? One is talented at playing the violin; another has financial acumen and entrepreneurial flair. We want to factor out the irrelevant things (heredity, upbringing) letting talent bloom and be rewarded. But how? People don’t choose their abilities. Take Nigel Kennedy’s talent with the violin. He didn’t choose to have that any more than he chose the colour of his eyes. Of course, we might want to distinguish between what he was born with and what he chose to do with it. We might say: Kennedy worked hard to develop his talent, and it’s his energy and determination that deserve praise and reward. But the difficulty here is how to know where one thing ends and another starts. Perhaps Kennedy’s determination to practice the violin was also a product of his upbringing or genes. If so then he was no more responsible for it than he was for his talent or the colour of his eyes. All this goes to show how difficult it is to pick out what, exactly, we mean by merit and desert. That takes us to the heart of the question: the nature of just rewards.

JUSTICE FOR ALL?

Justice is about the business of costs and benefits, rewards and burdens – what one ought to do, what it would be fair to expect. The following principle, which goes back to Aristotle, is a common starting point: individuals ought to be treated in the same way unless there is a relevant difference between them. So if two people are to be given a slice of cake, each of them ought to get a piece the same size. But suppose one of them is already well fed while the other is malnourished; then one of them needs it more, and so would benefit more from a larger helping. Justice sometimes involves treating people differently, on account of their different circumstances and needs. And this takes us back to merit. For the meritocrat is introducing another ‘relevant difference’ as justification for unequal shares: the principle of deservingness. But what we have also seen is that (1) New Labour’s preferred method for rewarding desert is likely to entrench undeserved privilege; (2) ‘merit’ in this context has a highly restricted meaning and (3) the concept of desert itself is a highly problematic one.

The defenders of the current system of reward seem to be on stronger ground when they cite efficiency rather than merit as their justification. They argue that the free market delivers greater overall prosperity through an unequal distribution of rewards. So perhaps this is the best of all possible systems. But even this can be questioned. First, it is not immediately obvious that if this were the most efficient system, it is the one we ought to have: ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘right’. Second, it may not be true that this is the most effective approach to harnessing talent in the pursuit of prosperity, as inequality tends to bury talent and human worth. Lastly, it’s clear that the often staggering rewards that some receive aren’t genuinely tied to performance. To take one example: in 2001 Britain’s top executives received an average 28% pay increase (six times the national average) although profits fell by 11.5 %. The link between even ‘market merit’ and reward is a shaky one. In practice, the best way to ensure a good income is still to get oneself born into the family of a high earner. If New Labour really wants a fairer Britain it must go beyond the rhetoric of ‘meritocracy’ and start tackling structural inequalities. Or ‘class’, as we used to call it.

Originally published in Think 2004

‘Well begun is half finished’ as Aristotle said, somewhat optimistically..