Philosophical Diversity

Philosophy, like national parks, has a diversity problem, or so it is said. What this actually means is that academic philosophy has a diversity problem, that it is mostly white and mostly male, and that it is generally dismissive toward non-Western contributions. 

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric is given to collecting numbers regarding the citation frequencies of non-Western, female, and ethnic minority thinkers. As expected, those numbers are all very small, prompting him to ask, "Why don't we [U.S.-based philosophy professors] know our Chinese philosophers?"

I keep thinking of the videotape format war of the 1970s and 80s. Why did VHS win out over Betamax? There are many reasons, but they all seem to boil down to the vagaries of consumer choice. Likewise for the ascendancy of Anglo-American over Chinese philosophers. Any attempt to extrapolate the "determining factors" can only result in generalizations of consumer needs and demands of varying practical significance.

But unlike the market dominance of VHS, the homogeneity of academic philosophy reputedly derives from internal prejudice, a presumed distortion of how differences would actually be accommodated if faculty appointments were subject to external criteria.

And yet the distinction between internal and external is hard to maintain. External criteria, being diverse, can only be applied on the basis of internal prejudice. But where does the formation of such prejudice take place? When Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "unhired" Professor Steven Salaita for incendiary discourse, is she looking out for the public good or for the good of the university?

Dialectical What?

More like Dialectical Standstill.

I am an incorrigible critic - a troll. This would explain to some extent the irregularity of these outtakes. With a few exceptions my friends also write irregularly, presumably out of fear, conscious or unconscious, of critics like me who would assault their work. And I share that fear, reflect it right back at them. Thus we find ourselves in this irresolvable deadlock of mutually assured humiliation, projecting our own dispositions onto each other in a dialectical cold war where ideas pile up on either side, always on the verge of deployment but never taking off.

And then we have Socrates, who wrote nothing. And what was he if not a first-rate critic?

Every apt pupil of Socrates is wrought with vacillation. Plato's genius lay in the way he offset the burden of his thought onto the shoulders of his predecessor. And he was fortunate to have had such a predecessor as Socrates: without him he would have left a barren legacy, fearful of critics laying waste to what would otherwise have been construed as philosophical misappropriations. Employing Socrates as a mouthpiece is above all not a way of honoring him, but a way for Plato to inhabit a zone of indistinction between reader and writer, and thereby elude any assault whatsoever.

Ranking Lives

After a slow start, I am now moving swiftly through R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy, or as swiftly as can be expected given life's obstacles - that is to say, its means. Sometimes I find a passage I want to underline but a pencil is nowhere within reach, so I sail right ahead to the next one that gives me pause. Here is one such passage only a few pages back from where I just left off in the second book (so I can still find it) in which some characters debate the meaning of a parable:

"It means that these things - courage, honor, even love - are problems, not absolutes. Questions."

Iryssas shook his head vigorously. "Courage, honor, love - these are problems? Then what are the solutions? Cowardice and depravity?"

"No," Kellhus replied. "Cowardice and depravity are problems as well. As for the solutions? You, Iryssas - you're a solution. In fact, we're all solutions. Every life lived sketches a different answer, a different way...." 

"So are all solutions equal?" Achamian blurted. The bitterness of his tone startled him. 

"No. Of course not. Some lives are better lived than others - there can be no doubt. Why do you think we sing the lays we do? Why do you think we revere our scriptures? Or ponder the life of the Latter Prophet?"

Examples, Achamian realized. Examples of lives that enlightened, that solved...." 

Now we can debate the meaning of this passage. But clearly it means that lives are ranked according to their powers of resolution to problems common to all. The size of a problem is measured by the number of solutions competing under a single name - 'courage', 'honor', 'love', whatever - while the leading solution is decided by the totality.

But what is decided by the totality is determinative upon each life: however a life ranks as a solution, it follows inferentially from the nature of the problem. But different problems yield different ranking orders. Therefore, to raise the exemplary status of a life, one need only decide on a new problem for which that life is now the leading solution, and by which a new totality is born.

Indiscernible Philosophy

Can one be a philosopher without "doing philosophy," without producing anything "philosophical" in writing or in speech - in a word, indiscernibly?

From Here

Like Bataille, I have been forced to become a librarian. Less than that, even: a library technician. In this way I am deprived of the option of finding satisfaction as a teacher of philosophy. From here I can only become...a philosopher.