A word about theory: Republic 327A

“κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ μετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρίστωνος προσευξόμενός τε τῇ θεῷ καὶ ἅμα τὴν ἑορτὴν βουλόμενος θεάσασθαι τίνα τρόπον ποιήσουσιν ἅτε νῦν πρῶτον ἄγοντες.”

“I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and at the same time, I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since they were now holding it for the first time.”

(Plato, Republic 1 327a; Bloom, trans.)

It’s hard to know, really, where to start with this sentence. It is, of course, one of the most famous in all of philosophy, a fact made all the more odd by its apparent inconsequence, its effortlessness. And yet, first year philosophy seminars regularly devote their first class period to discussing this particular piece of ink (in translation, none the less!); yet, in antiquity, it was rumored that Plato kept ten different versions under his pillow. Of course, this story is about as credible as the one which claims Plato invented peanut butter, but hey, this is the internet–all bets are off. The point is, with a little patience for the mundane you can find some quiet miracles here. And the point is, with enough stomach to strip the bark from the sapling, well, you can see all the silvery wood underneath, which is almost worth the pain you cause the tree. Today, in this post, I want to examine just one of those moments.

In much the same way that there’s a difference between a name and the thing named, serious study, theory, philosophy is marked by a constant, necessary, and perhaps pernicious distinction between the act of study and the thing studied. I say ‘necessary’ because there seems to be something about the scientific subjectivity which demands distance to perform its work. (I am using science here not in its limited twentieth century sense of ‘experimental laboratory science’ but rather in its primordial, seventeenth century sense of ’serious systematic inquiry into man and nature.’) In other words, as any child knows, we cannot look ourselves in the face; the rigor, the exactness of inquiry cannot be performed in the rush and confusion of life. Scholarship is born in a kind of elementary stepping back from the everyday. (Indeed the root of ’scholar’ and ’scholarship’ reveals this, albeit in somewhat of an unflattering manner–’skole’ means ‘leisure.’) Hence the colloquial distinction between theory and practice–a point on which theory is indicted at every turn. (This, it seems to me, is a bit like indicting a dog for sitting, after asking it to sit, but whatever.)

 

On the death of Michael Jackson

1.

I’m writing this now–admittedly, somewhat after the fact–because of a dream I had. I have these kinds of dreams a lot, dreams where old friends have suffered serious injuries, and survived–leaving us, in the moments after, to learn how to live with the difference. I realize this sounds kind of awful (and I haven’t even told you the dream yet)–but, let me assure you, I harbor no homicidal rage against my friends. Quite to the contrary–what these dreams make present, in a typically hyperbolic, surreal fashion, is a natural consequence of growing-up: friends of mine, we are a diaspora, pin-heads scattered across the time zones; when we gather, as gather we must, for rushed reunions and awkward coffees what is most marked–even, and indeed, especially, because we cannot name it–is the fact of our change, the fact that we are not who we once were. And, since you can’t stop the water (no, really, you can’t), we have little recourse left but to live with these changes we do not understand. And, we have no recourse but to add them, as best we can, to the pictures we have of the people we love; no choice but to mar those pictures with awkward bits of glue and masking tape. Injury is just a palpable, physical sign of this kind of thing, this kind of drifting apart.

As for the dream, well, I’d gone to visit my friend Eli Schmitt. It was winter, gray mostly, and cold. He was living in a little apartment somewhere in New York, I think, with a sort of bohemian, amateur gymnastic troop. Whatever–it was a dream. Anyway, they convinced him to perform a particulariy risky stunt, the centerpiece of their winter pageant, and it hadn’t gone well. Indeed, it had gone quite badly: at the critical moment, a hand had slipped, too sweaty, too little chalk, and Eli had fallen, fracturing his neck. The doctors saved him in one of those moments best described as a “miracle of modern medicine,” though we can quibble about just what constitutes a miracle. The point is: in rebuilding in his neck, they had been forced to use beeswax, so that the whole of his neck was beeswax, yellow, a bit soft and hard to bend. We sat and talked a while, drank a few beers, and mostly tried not to say anything about honey, or honeycomb or honeybees–which, like  most things, are easy subjects to avoid until you try to avoid them. And that was it. I woke up. It was winter, I was still at Swarthmore. I had a lot of months to wait before I could go home.

 

Petite Notations, Vol. 2: What is Autonomy?

As I develop some thoughts on this question, I think it will become clear that I, the single thing that stands behind a (neuter) first person pronoun, have neither right nor capacity to answer; that this inquiry, by virtue of the thing it stands to investigate, which is nothing if not a form of government, must be a co-inquiry, a working-with. So, having begun with a hedge, I’d like to place the words of others at the center of my field. What is autonomy? The OED says,

1. Of a state, institution, etc.: The right of self-government, of making its own laws and administering its own affairs.     b. Liberty to follow one’s will, personal freedom.   c. Metaph. Freedom (of the will); the Kantian doctrine of the Will giving itself its own law, apart from any object willed; opposed to heteronomy. 2. Biol. Autonomous condition: a. The condition of being controlled only by its own laws, and not subject to any higher one. b. Organic independence.     3. A self-governing community (cf. a monarchy).

Not without a glimmer of laughter, that old OED — of course metaphysics comes third, following both the state and the individual: the biggest names in metaphysics (i.e. metaphysics itself), as Nietzsche suggests, are precisely those watched over and working within the state. This is no minor holiday, I think. If the definitions above suggest anything about the thing we hold in our mouths when we say ‘autonomy,’ they suggest that we conceive of personal freedom on analogy to the freedom of states. Personal freedom is self-determination — determination in the sense of laws, laws that frame and fix, laws that tell us what is fair and safe.

 

More notes: What is differance?

We may immediately throw out the question: differance is not anything, insofar, at least, as we are steeped in a metaphysical tradition which equates being (the participle of is) with presence. Derrida makes this clear time and time again, in calling differance neither a word nor a concept, and by bracketing the word is, calling attention to (and hopefully) neutralizing its over determined sense in the tradition. We can look to an example, though, the example which Derrida starts with: the word differance itself. The difference between ‘differance’ and ‘difference’ is unpronouncable in French, and hard to follow on the written page. Reading Derrida’s text, it takes a very close eye to keep difference and differance seperate; it is not long before, inadvertently we read all differences as differances and all differances as differences (that particular bit of visual tongue-twister bears witness to this effect). This is not something to be decried, to be fought against; to understand differance, we need not seperate it from difference. For Derrida, the confusion between the two is natural, necessary and constitutive of the way we experience words. As presences, as referents, as meanings, they are structured and shaped from without by things that may or may not by present in the meaning at all, by words that look similar, that sound similar, that are accidentally associated with them by virtue of chance. (For example, I was just looking at the Idaho state quarter, which features a rather prominent picture of a falcon; I can now no longer seperate the notion falcon from the notion Idaho, even though, speaking in terms of a metaphysics of presence, they have nothing to do with one another). Presence is thus shot through with non-presence. Try as we might to find a pure presence, we cannot — after all, even our notion of presence and purity has been shot through with non-presence and non-purity. One more important point to draw out: differance does not draw on some secret stash of non-present things that are exclusively non-present (this would lead us to posit a realm of absolutely present things which are corrupted by non-presence and which are, conceptually anyway, capable of being seperated from non-presence). The present thing, the falcon, is equally capable of being non-present, when we shift our focus to Idaho; things are both present and non-present simultaneously. The contexts in which are words are encounterable are not to be seperated from the words themselves; each use of the word is weighed down and shaped by the other contexts it’s used in. Sentances are nests upon nests of contexts, each original, necessary, ineluctable to the way we understand the words in the sentence.

 

Notes: Derrida on Husserl

(1) “That metaphysical thought–and consequently phenomenology–is the thought of being as form, that in it thought is conceived as the thought of form and the formality of form is nothing less than necessary; the fact that Husserl determines the living present as the ultimate, universal, and absolute “form” of transcendental experience in general is a final indication of this” (SP, 108).

I think of Kant in reference to this passage–specifically his insistence that we cannot experience anything unless it affects us, unless it is such a thing as to appear to us, to touch us, to hurt us, to smell bad to us, etc. This idea proves central to Kant’s epistemology; he uses it to derive transcendental idealism, the separation between things-in-themselves and things as they appear, and the distinction between sensible and intellectual faculties. Those of us steeped in Simone Weil, or even negative theology, are, I think, somewhat congenitally disposed to find this kind of epistemology suspicious: Kant seems to argue that we cannot be affected by nothing, that we can only be affected by things that are, things that presence themselves for our sensible faculties. And yet, we are consistently effected by absence, by things that we do not see or touch or taste, by things that we could not see, touch, or taste–for Weil, this is precisely what our experience of God is, an experience of something which is entirely beyond our capacity to experience, that is, an experience of a profound lack. We cannot, as Hume (and Kant too) suggest, come to experience or understand this absence by combining the superlative forms of things we already know; we cannot form an accurate image of God by stretching our notions of ’sovereignty’ or ‘wisdom’ or ‘beardness’ to their extereme forms. For Weil, God is the superlative form of the void, into which we can project nothing but unintelligibility, unexperience, unaffect.

 

Petite Notations, Vol. 1

“In the case of sequences of expressions, such as “The poet is a penguin” (e.e. cummings) or “All the boys went on a hike, but two of them stayed in their rooms,” where we have a predicative sentence or a conjunction of two sentences, it is obvious that more than one expression is involved. [The expressions which are recognized as absurd or contradictory will always be somehow complex rather than simple, and it is in the combination of more simple expressions that this absurdity or contradiction lies.] In a broad sense logic studies…these sorts of absurdity and proceeds formally, presenting its rules in terms of the expression themselves without reference to the time or place or circumstances of their use” (from Newton Garver’s preface to Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena).

A few things: (1) Absurdity is only possibile on the basis of sensibility — absurdity is formed when we combine two acceptable moments of thought, and judge the resulting combination logically inadequate in a certain way. This certain way, to draw on Heidegger, is both something that we construct, and something we have foisted upon ourselves: as much as our particular, dualistic (i.e. Western) way of thinking is implicated in logical commonplaces like “all unmarried men are bachelors,” it’s also true that it’s impossible (sort of) to be a married bachelor, it’s true that being itself, the world itself, by resisting, by limiting our thoughts, gives us much of the matter we think about. Absurdity, then, is not non-sense — it stands, albeit, confusedly, on the shoulders of sense, and in a world which determines that sense. Rather, absurdity is over-sense; the absurd has too much (or too many) sense(s) for us to process, or to understand (easily).

 

That Brutal Science: Notes on Outcrossing and Inbreeding, from My Intro Bio Lab

Toby Altman, Thursday PM
Bio 2 Lab Report # 2

That Brutal Science: Notes on Inbreeding and Outcrossing

Abstract

Like many species—including humans—rapid cycling Brassica (Brassica Oleracea) has evolved physical restraints against inbreeding. Despite being hermaphroditic, they have developed “sporophytic self-incompatibility”: when their own pollen accidentally falls on their stigmas the offending grains are killed. To try to understand why selection would favor such a rigorous (and brutal) suppression of ‘selfing’—and thus to help explain why inbreeding in general is so disadvantageous—we tricked rapid cycling Brassica into self-pollinating, and measured the silique (seed pod) length and the number of seeds within the siliques in the resulting inbred individuals against a control population. We found that control populations were, in fact, significantly different; inbred Brassicas produce fewer seeds and shorter siliques. These findings gesture toward substantially lower reproductive fitness in inbred individuals—though they only gesture, not prove. As we will argue, silique length and number of seeds are not the most reliable indicators of fitness in inbred individuals. A more complete study would examine fitness more holistically.

Introduction

Sophocles’ Oedpius Rex opens in a city blighted by plague—as though nature itself has risen up in revulsion against the crimes being committed within the city’s walls, that is, against patricide and, more importantly, against incest (Sophocles, 2005). Heidegger suggests that the Greeks knew a great deal more about being, about the things that are, than we, by virtue of their freedom from two thousand years of pedantic, confusing philosophical and scientific traditions (Heidegger, 1962). It should come as no surprise, then, that Sophocles so accurately notes nature’s response against incest. For, indeed, nature has risen in revulsion against incest—which rising our own bodies testify to, moored as they are to a single gender.
Now nature, though senseless, does not move at random; we presume that nature’s rising is grounded deeply in its fundamental mechanism—that is, in the evolution of species through natural selection. What, then, are the selective disadvantages of inbreeding? What force is there, so striking and so stirring, that drives us all in fear from the flesh of our own?  Russell Lande and Douglas W. Schmeske, in an oft-cited paper, suggest that inbreeding increases the chance that deleterious mutations are expressed in children (Lande and Schmeske, 1985)—so it was that the Hapsburgs, ever disdainful of the common man, lost their best seed to hemophilia. Of all the inbreeders to study, Brasscica, our plant of choise is a particularly interesting subject because it’s not only capable of inbreeding, but also hermaphroditic, capable of breeding with itself—a capacity which, on the surface, seems highly adaptive, reducing as it does the considerable energy expenditures necessary for sexual reproduction between individuals (Lande and Schmeske, 1985). To determine whether inbreeding really does lead to decreased fitness, whether the fitness benefits of hermaphroditic reproduction are really outweighed by the damages of incest, we tricked a number of rapid cycling Brassica into breeding with themselves, and compared the length of the resulting siliques and number of seeds within each silique against an outcrossed, control population. In accordance with the revulsion of nature and the wisdom of Lande and Schmeske (both of them, primal forces), we hypothesized that inbred individuals would produce shorter siliques and fewer seeds, decreasing their reproductive fitness, so pitiful and paltry their young.