So Says Heidegger June 23, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care, Philosophy.Tags: dualism, Heidegger and western society, Simon Critchley
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I think Heidegger is the most important philosopher of the 20th Century, largely because of one simple insight that has much to say about the fate of humanity. Simon Critchley (in the Guardian UK) has a clear description of Heidegger’s basic thesis:
What Heidegger seeks to destroy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes (indeed Descartes is the philosopher who stands most accused in Being and Time). Roughly and readily, this is the idea that there are two sorts of substances in the world: thinking things like us and extended things, like tables, chairs and indeed the entire fabric of space and time.
The relation between thinking things and extended things is one of knowledge and the philosophical and indeed scientific task consists in ensuring that what a later tradition called “subject” might have access to a world of objects. This is what we might call the epistemological construal of the relation between human beings and the world, where epistemology means “theory of knowledge”. Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula “Dasein is being-in-the-world”. What might that mean?
If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part and parcel of my being, of the fabric of my existence. We might capture the sense of Heidegger’s thought here by thinking of Dasein not as a subject distinct from a world of objects, but as an experience of openedness where my being and that of the world are not distinguished for the most part. I am completely fascinated and absorbed by my world, not cut off from it in some sort of “mind” or what Heidegger calls “the cabinet of consciousness”.
It is a bit risky to draw ethical and political generalizations from metaphysical claims. But the excessive individualism of Western society does seem to have a conceptual affinity with the idea of subject inherently cut off from its world.
If the Cartesian picture is right then our connection to the world is contingent, optional, and always in question, and we can opt out of that connection if we wish. If the Heideggarian picture is right, then we cannot conceive of ourselves without a world, and to tarnish or destroy it is to tarnish or destroy ourselves.
Which picture lends itself more readily to caring for our world?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Terminating the Tax Phobia June 22, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger and taxes, California budget, Dean Calbreath
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I don’t often praise the San Diego Union-Tribune. Its radical, right-wing editorial stance is partly responsible for the disastrous political climate that has generated California’s budget deficit.
But on Sunday, Dean Calbreath’s column was a breath of fresh air:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal before the Legislature is to rely on cuts alone to fix the budget: $5.5 billion from health and human services, $5.1 billion from education and $1.3 billion from the court and prison systems. The rest of the money would come from one-time sales of state assets; borrowing from cities and counties (an idea that infuriates local officials); furloughs, pay cuts and layoffs of state employees; fee increases and cuts in other services.
Schwarzenegger pledged last week to veto any budget that includes new taxes beyond what he has already proposed, which largely consist of increases to the state sales and income taxes.
“To do another tax increase is irresponsible,” Schwarzenegger said.
But Calbreath describes the minor tax increases that Democrats in the legislature have put on the table that will help avoid approximately 5 billion dollars of those cuts.
Tax Oil Extraction
[…]California is the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the country behind Louisiana, Texas and Alaska. But despite our reputation as a high-tax area, California has never imposed severance taxes for pulling gas or oil out of the ground.
That’s a stark contrast to the other oil-and gas-producing states, most of which have double-digit severance taxes […]
Repeal Corporate Tax Breaks
[…] During the budget negotiations in February, the Legislature inserted three corporate tax breaks that resulted in a total gap of $2 billion to $2.5 billion.
Data from the state Franchise Tax Board show that one of the proposals – to allow companies to choose between two ways of being taxed in the state – would largely benefit the 0.1 percent of companies in California that make more than $1 billion per year. Much of the benefit would go to just nine companies, saving them an average of $33 million a year. […]
Another proposal, which would allow corporations to transfer taxes among related companies, would benefit just 0.03 percent of corporations, with the top six companies saving an average of $23.5 million a year.
Increase the auto license fee.
Schwarzenegger’s first action as governor was to roll back California’s fee on automobile licenses, which put a $4 billion hole in the budget. As the budget problems mounted last year, Schwarzenegger was forced to increase the license fee. And now the Legislature is proposing to raise it an additional $15. […]
Cigarette taxes.
The committee is proposing to increase excise taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products by $1.50 per pack, nearly tripling the tax on a pack of cigarettes from 87 cents to $2.37. This proposal would increase revenue by an estimated $1 billion next year.
Schwarzenegger claims it would be irresponsible to increase taxes, despite the fact that they will affect very few Californians. Somehow slashing public health and safety programs, plundering local government, gutting K-12 and higher education, and laying off thousands of state workers is responsible?
It is ironic that Schwarzenegger at the end of his political career is reprising the film role that launched his career as a celebrity—the predator in Terminator 1.
Iranian Showdown June 21, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts.Tags: Iranian revolt, Roger Cohen
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Columnist Roger Cohen, who is in Tehran and likely in some danger, had a penetrating article in the NY Times over the weekend
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.
He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.
The issues now go far beyond the vote count. The regime has turned on its own people.
As Juan Cole wrote in responding to Mir Hossein Mousavi’s speech denouncing the supreme leader Ali Khamenei:
Mousavi has thrown down a gauntlet before the Supreme Leader and a battle has been joined. By the rules of the Khomeinist regime, only one of them can now survive. And perhaps neither will.
I don’t see how this does not end in a bloody mess. The only hope is that a sufficiently large portion of the security force decides they don’t want to slaughter their friends and families.
And perhaps there is reason to be hopeful. Via Brian Leiter, an Iranian/American philosopher writes of the utter bankruptcy of the regimes ideology and its loss of legitimacy.
The corruption, the impoverishment, the decline of Iran under the clerics, especially Ahmadinejad is undeniable. With dwindling and poor management of resources, this regime is facing a very young, fairly educated population that wants more. Distractions – like picking fights with Israel and even the Iranian nuclear program in the name of pride and sovereignty – only go so far. At this point, Iran needs to develop its infrastructure; it must provide for its people, it must meet the demands of its young population, including its need for greater freedom. Regardless of its posturing, it has little credibility left. […]
Had this regime had any actual pull, it would have left Moussavi come to power and be an utter disappointment, while allowing some softening of the international discourse toward Iran. No longer believing in itself, it resorts to amateurish rigging and violence. Once a government starts shooting at its own people, it is signaling its own eventual end. The clerics should know that; that is how they came to power when the Shah brought his army to quash the protests in 79.
It is to be hoped that such disenchantment is shared by the people with the guns.
Friday Food Blogging June 19, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: cooking in the future
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I’m reasonably confident that food has a future. I am increasingly confident that the future of food will be interesting.
If this doesn’t remind you of your friendly, neighborhood sushi chef, check out this “guy” in the video clip.
The sushi-plating starts about 3′ 40’’ in.
cooking in the future
Ethicists Are Not Ethical June 18, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Philosophy Profession, Teaching.Tags: Eric Schwitzgebel, ethical conduct of professors, experimental philosophy
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According to a paper written by two philosophy professors, Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Joshua Rust of Stetson University, a college professorship in ethics does not necessary translate into moral behavior. At least, that’s what the people who work with ethicists say.
Their results:
Most of the 277 survey respondents reported no positive correlation between a professional focus on ethics and actual moral behavior. Respondents who were ethicists themselves shied away from saying that ethicists behave worse than those outside the discipline – generally reporting that ethicists behave either the same or better – but non-ethicists were mostly split between reporting that ethicists behave the same as or worse than others. Even those ethicists who did rank their peers’ behavior as better than average said their moral behavior is just barely better than average – hardly a ringing endorsement.
I don’t find this surprising. Why think that people who study ethics are morally superior to people who don’t. Are psychologists more mentally stable than non-psychologists? Are chemists better cooks?
One of the paper’s authors goes on to express some doubt about whether ethics courses improve student’s behavior:
“People do sometimes justify ethics courses on the assumption that taking ethics courses will improve students’ behavior down the road,” Schwitzgebel said, noting legal and business ethics as examples, although they are separate from ethics courses in the philosophy department. “I think there is a potential this line of research could undercut the justification for those classes.”
But, as Schwitzgebel was quick to point out, his study does not imply that. The jump from ethics professors’ immoral behavior to students’ benefiting (or not) from ethics courses is a long one to make, he said.
I think there is some confusion here. People who behave well tend to be well-motivated. But theorizing about ethics probably has little influence on motivational states. People who lack moral motives because they are narcissistic, excessively selfish, authoritarian, etc. will not acquire moral motives through theoretical reasoning. (My Kantian friends might disagree.)
However, if a person is well-motivated, studying ethical theory can give her the tools to think more clearly and consistently about ethical behavior. Studying ethics makes well-motivated people better; scoundrels will need more than a finely-honed argument to get well.
For an entertaining debate about this, head over to Crooked Timber.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
When Power Overplays Its Hand June 17, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts.Tags: Iran and authoritarianism, Iranian election, Jim Sleeper
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Jim Sleeper’s former student, reporting from Iran, suggests that the Iranian power structure may have gone too far:
From a temporarily secure and undisclosed location (when not in the streets), a former student of mine who’s freelancing in Tehran for a European newspaper and two online publications is telling the untold story behind the opposition demonstrations.
I won’t light up his name by linking him right now, but here’s his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don’t like. Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now?
The answer, almost literally, is blowin’ in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren’t all taking to the streets; they’re asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia,”Don’t the Basij have parents, don’t they have children?” Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, “revolutionary” Iran.
Yes, the opposition is more conservative and nationalist than it is revolutionary, let alone “progressive” as many Americans use that term. It says it wants to redeem the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah. The American Revolution was conservative that way, too: Even though it did oust a monarch, it wasn’t as radically democratic as the French Revolution (or as President Sarkozy’s rhetoric about Tehran). It sought to confirm as many things as it overthrew. […]
While before the election Iranians spent a lot of time and energy debating the country’s rate of inflation and alternative names for the Persian Gulf, my student notes, “That’s forgotten now. The fight for more elemental aspects of political life has superseded the issues of the election; in the streets there is a desire to name simple facts and to call them such and treat them such: facts like election ballots, facts like gun shots fired at innocent bystanders. The demonstrators are bound together by their desire for truth.”
Call it God’s truth, or natural law, or human rights: This movement of its ordinary bearers may be asphyxiated tonight or tomorrow by the crackdown that keeps me from mentioning my former student’s name. Or it could be perverted and derailed, as it was in Iraq, by its would-be neocon champions. But something irreversible and, I think, more constructive, has happened, and it will be vindicated, even if not tonight or tomorrow.
What is happening in Iran is uniquely Iranian and its people are responding to local issues and local conditions. What is not uniquely Iranian, but universal, is that authoritarians always overplay their hand. When power is deployed for its own sake, corruption is easily recognized.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
McCain Is Wrong on Iran June 16, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Iranian elections, John McCain and the Iranian election
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John McCain (remember him) has been all over the media in the past few days demanding that President Obama call for new elections in Iran. Obama, he said on NBC, “should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election and that the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”
In a Twitter interview with Jake Tapper, McCain said “… But If we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail. But this regime has tight control.”
This is one of the more annoying of conservative tics (I know, the competition is stiff), this notion that making self-righteous statements amounts to doing something.
As Matt Yglesias said today,
Whether or not the Iranian people prevail [according to McCain] depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services?
This situation in Iran is not about us. The people demanding reform in Iran are not waiting for us to do something; and anything Obama does will be looked upon as meddling in Iran’s affairs and will undermine the credibility of the reform movement in Iran.
Remember, we are not real popular there, and they have not forgotten the last time we got involved in Iranian politics.
As I have said many times, I don’t understand why anyone still listens to people who have been so catastrophically wrong so often.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
What’s Going On In Iran? June 15, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts.Tags: Iranian election
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News reports from Iran depict a chaotic, violent scene in Tehran in the aftermath of Friday’s election. Reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters are claiming the election was stolen by the incumbent President Ahmadinejad. Others claim that Western media reports of a groundswell of support for Mousavi were misleadingly focused on only upper-middle class voters in Tehran and missed the solid support in the countryside and among the poor for Ahmadinejad.
I, of course, have no idea whether the election was stolen or not.
But here is some expert opinion from Juan Cole (here and here):
So observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi’s smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class. It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in 2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the growth of Iran’s urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi should have won in the ongoing culture war.
Most of the evidence of fraud involves vote totals that deviated sharply from current expectations as well as from historical patterns.
As for American policy toward these developments, Spencer Ackerman has a run down:
…the Obama administration insisted that it would not interfere with the struggle for power between regime-backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the thousands of demonstrators who contend the election was stolen. Administration officials, on and off the record, said that President Obama would offer support for human rights in Iran generally and would not back away from his diplomatic outreach to the longtime U.S. adversary, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the election.
Republicans of course want to stir up trouble:
That position began to come under criticism on Sunday. The post-election violence “certainly makes such a dialogue much more difficult,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on CNN, “but frankly I’ve always been skeptical of any kind of dialogue with the hardline leaders of Iran.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), issued a statement urging Obama and others to “speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support.
But hopefully cooler heads will prevail:
While the Obama administration ought to express support for the Iranian opposition’s safety and for human rights in Iran as the regime clamps down on dissent, any expression of political support for the protesters would only “instigate the cry that the reformers are somehow driven and directed by the United States, whether under [former President George W. Bush] or under Obama, and there’s no reason to give that unfounded allegation” any chance to spread.
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis June 11, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Art and Music, Culture, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: fertility figurine, Gerda Lerner, Hohle Fels, Marija Gimbutas, Mother Goddess religion, symbolic thinking
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Or: “Art is long, life is short.” In mid-May German archaeologists announced that they had found a piece of three-dimensional art, a little figurine carved out of mammoth ivory depicting a naked woman, in the Hohle Fels Cave, a region that has already yielded interesting human artifacts, including the oldest known musical instrument, a flute. The style resembles the famous Venus of Willendorf and other fertility figurines, but “Venus” is only ca. 24,000 years old, and the newfound little statuette is older than any other three-dimensional depiction of a human, going back ca. 40,000 years. Here are some dates to put this find into perspective: About 150,000-200,000 years ago Cro-Magnon humans traveled out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world. Cave art have been found dating back 75,000 years, and 40,000 years ago we humans were still sharing Europe and the Middle East with the last of the Neandertals.
Why is this so fascinating? Another headless, big-breasted figurine found in Europe—what is significant about that? Some commentators can’t get over those big breasts, and the exaggerated genitalia, and talk about “pornographic” images. Like many other conversations about art, those comment reveal more about the beholder than about the work of art. We have no idea what these little figurines were for. But we do have so many of them (albeit from a later time period) that we may be able to speculate: Certainly it might be that they were made by men, and for men, to add something tangible to their fantasies during lonely times—and what of it? I would assume that if there is anything that remains stable in the human condition, it is a natural preoccupation with sex. But in the archaeological community it hasn’t been the sexual aspect that has been accentuated, but the fertility symbolism: These figurines are not only “voluptuous,” they are apparently pregnant. For ancient cultures this may have been far more significant as a symbol of the fertility of the tribe, the herds, and nature itself, than being a sex-symbol (then again, one does not preclude the other. We’re just so used to the Victorian and post-Victorian mindset where sex is dirty…) .
Thanks to scholars such as Marija Gimbutas and Gerda Lerner who have studied ancient cultures centered around female fertility, we may see these little figurines as stylized images of creative power. According to Gimbutas and Lerner, the worship of female fertility is linked to what is probably the oldest religion in the world, the worship of the Mother Goddess. Archaeological evidence seem to indicate that there was indeed a time, dating back some 8,000 years and beyond, where the Goddess worship was widespread all over the ancient world, and (according to Lerner) this would imply that the Goddess’s human representatives, the priestesses, would have had a prominent presence in the social structure. Scholars don’t like to use the term matriarchy, because we have no evidence that women actually ruled in those ancient times, but there is enough evidence to suggest that women did play a more integrated role in society. So scholars prefer to talk about matrifocal or gynocentric values. Now, thanks to the new find of the little figurine, added to the other Venus figurines from a later date, we can perhaps move this tradition back an additional 30,000 years, and speculate that a matrifocal system may have been in effect among the Cro-Magnon humans, even as the hunters outwitted or outcompeted the Neandertals. As Lerner would say, patriarchy has only been around for some 3500 years—but for most of our time as humans, we have been matrifocal. (We will talk about all this in my Fall 2009 class, Phil 125, Philosophy of Women, by the way!) Just for the record, in my personal opinion patriarchy is not the source of all evil, as it has often been presented by radical feminism, but it is a thought-provoking idea that a tradition preceding patriarchy can perhaps be anchored that far back in time, thanks to this new piece of evidence.
But we need not take sides about patriarchy and Goddess worship to see an additional significance to the little figurine: As a work of art, which it indisputably is, it speaks to us from across 40,000 years about the human capacity for symbolic thinking: Our language, our gestures, our artifacts, and the very ways we think utilize images and expressions to signify other images and expressions. The little headless figurine is probably intended to symbolize something: maybe Woman as such, maybe Fertility, maybe Mom, or Sweetheart, maybe the Goddess who Gives and Takes Away—we don’t know. What we do know is that she has meant something—to he or she who carved her, and to the generations who kept her in their tribe. The little statuette has reached out, beyond the lifetime of the artist, to the future—which is what good art does. And that brings me back to the Latin proverb (translated from an even older Greek saying): Art is long, life is short. Life may be a lot longer for most of us than what the artist who carved the figurine could expect—some 30 years at the most. Still, each lifetime is not long enough to accomplish everything we’d like to accomplish, and experience and understand all there is to understand. But art ties generations together, and makes our short lives link up in a common experience transcending the individual lifespan. And thanks to the little figurine, Art just got a whole lot longer.
