355-8: Status

355.365: What an / amazing year. / This exercise has / pulled around with / time and been / a steady fo- / -cussing, an / umbilical scar.



356.365: Philosophy is a lost art. Don't let the bookstores fool you -- popular philosophy only displays the crisis. Self-help still reigns, and academia's irrelevant. The market drives a sector of watered down works pitched at the general(ly bored) reader.

Not that things might not take a turn. But philosophy's still to be rediscovered. One key: the ascetic exercise -"askesis", Greek for exercise. Pierre Hadot discussed it thoroughly enough as a start, although a taxonomy has yet to be written. Foucault translated it to life as a work of art --call this the "philosophical avant garde"-- but then he died, a rockstar with all the vices attached to his perpetual adolescence. At the margins of "philosophy", other things have sprung up --such as philosophical counseling, which does appear to me to retrieve the art, since its primary work is wisdom rather than knowledge. And the Jesuits have kept spiritual exercise alive for near five hundred years. All these have a sense of how philosophy works in actuality --not in abstraction-- to turn lives through structured work toward wisdom and the self-knowledge belonging to it.

What's needed in addition is a maturing in the general(ly bored) public's taste so that self-help appears superficial as it is and more serious philosophy's demanded of the vicious industry known as academic Philosophy. ("Vicious" in that it does not begin and end by focusing on wisdom; a fatal vice.)

(You might object: but academic philosophy proceeds by working piece by piece on extremely difficult systematic philosophy. It produces hard to reach wisdom when its results are collected and synthesized. But it has few results --something academic "philosophers" repeatedly note -- and one look at, say, the Leiter Report should be enough to disabuse one of the pretense that academic Philosophy is wisdom-bent. It's just bent; status-bent to be exact --as shallow and reductive as a marketing device. A complete parody of wisdom-seeking, one of the places you'd avoid sending your child if she genuinely longed to mature. "Stay away from that, honey. It's a waste of time and will mess with your head." Academic philosophy --at the research level-- is mostly a block to philosophy. )

For the meantime, philosophy's a lost art, practiced at the margins of both the publishing industry and of academia, with only one exceptional current. (I think of Enlightenment work carrying on the general readership begun in the 18th century and allied with the gradual self-maturing of humankind; here, there is hope -- think of Susan Neiman's philosophy alive for demanding members of the general public who seek self-direction that is historically informed and conceptually astute. Or Martha Nussbaum's work. Avishai Margalit's. Jonathan Glover. There is a mainstream current here worth noting --it seeks wisdom-- but it is easily lost in the seas that are rows on rows of self-help or uninformed religious writing, the pretentious latest additions of French thought or of pop-culture "philosophy" or of trivia on trivia of journal article. )

I hope I've added my *weed*, my Earth thoughts exercise to these between-the-sidewalk-cracks. I hope my exercise -- this "askesis"-- this "discernment practice" (to echo Jesuits)-- is in the sidewalk, breaking apart some tiny part of the concrete slab the status quo calls "reality" and which is so only as a kind of unrecognized tragedy, akin to the hollow men T.S. Eliot evoked or which Nietzsche's Zarathustra lampooned as the pretentiously imbalanced world of "professors".

In my weed, my gnarly little weed -- freak that it is-- I've tried to do something with myself and my relationship to the Earth, and I've tried not to simplify things -- neither in form nor in content-- and I've tried not to lose the big picture, i.e., wisdom-seeking.

357.365: What I wrote yesterday was inaccurate. As I thought about the general reading public, many more examples of conscientious readers --and of different kinds-- came through. Without good social science on the matter, my sense can only be impressionistic. But what impressions I have are enough to shift the picture I had in my head.

And not that only -- I ought to have some faith in the reading public. I went to a public high school -- it was one of the best schools I went to in my life -- and I understand the way non-academics still roam and search -- often more authentically than academics -- for wisdom or self-knowledge in the midst of a busy life. Trust more in that, Jeremy. You've seen it in many countries, too.

The problem, really, is the castle called Philosophy -- and the research driven institution of which it is a part and within which it is often misconceived by we "philosophers" ourselves. Non-academics turn to "philosophers" seeking guidance -- expecting the traces of the Enlightenment, or of discernment, or of the ancient schools. And what we show is a discipline kept around an image of research science, still today after official Scientism -ideology of analytic philosophy- has waned. We see an institution pretending that it produces knowledge, and in a manner mimicking science, piece by piece, smaller and smaller bit by bit. And yet there are seldom hypotheses being tested, or experience being accounted for by powerful modeling.

Why? WHY? Since being an undergraduate at one of my nation's "finest" institutions, since going through grad school at one of the most erudite schools on the planet -- a place where Nobel Prizes hang like tinsel in some corridors -- I have wondered why academic Philosophy persists in its model of pursuing knowledge, rather than wisdom.

My hypothesis is that the dynamics of an institution --the research university-- and the way it justifies its status, funding, and function in society are at issue, and that Philosophy has been caught up in that history. But this guess is vague!

And then there is the idea that Philosophy used to be the Queen of the Sciences and no longer is, that it still needs to save face. But I don't buy such shame lasting for almost a hundred years. There must be material incentives perpetuating the myth and the mistake.

I can hear a knowledge-oriented colleague replying: but truth-seeking *is* about knowledge at some point. I don't disagree. My point, however, is that truth-seeking and knowledge-seeking are not sufficient for finding wisdom. And my question is why wisdom-seeking isn't kept in view for a discipline that's purportedly the love of wisdom.

One extra thing I do know. Contemporary U.S. Philosophy is not only knowledge-driven in its mainstream self-image, it is also viciously status-conscious. The very idea that seeking-wisdom admits of *rankings* is utterly confused. And yet this is how many of my colleagues talk, and talk as common sense in their minds. They speak of the "best" schools and the "best" journals, of being in "top 50" institutions and all sorts of utter non-sense that simply does not pattern onto the logical structure implicit in seeking wisdom.

(Logical structure: e.g., who is seeking, where s/he is, what she aims to do, how her time has been, etc., etc. The questions only multiply once one moves to communal wisdom-seeking within institutional, social, political and cultural history.)

I know. I have been to many conferences, read many reference letters for aspiring job candidates, and seen far too many conversations on blogs and Facebook among professional "philosophers" to not turn green with nausea at the utter absurdity of the situation. It is utterly astounding to see the smartest people pass off the dumbest things as common sense.

No, the problem I want to work on now is my own profession. Not that I believe I can change it. I can't. But in my own sense of what blocks wisdom-seeking, I am now turned to myself and my discipline, and I will work out the blocks to wisdom that arise in *me* and in what of my discipline I face as an organic part of doing my *job*. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised. I hope so. I won't blame everyday people --even if only in part-- for the lost art of philosophy, though. I will blame myself and my discipline such as I see it blocking out the art of living.

And just think: this same discipline does not think it crucial to teach environmental philosophy in its "top 50" programs, except on occasion. I am not surprised when wisdom is not the goal, but knowledge is --or the pretense of it, rather. We live on the Earth, and it's here that our good life will or will not be achieved. Wisdom-seekers face that fairly quickly -- as indeed the general public already has to a quite large extent. And knowledge-seekers do, too. The sciences -- real sciences-- have been leading the way in illuminating our ecological situation. But knowledge-pretenders, encrusted with status and the pretensions of the abstruse and ever more refined puzzle ... well, what planet are we on?

358.365: One more week to go. What I said yesterday was misleading -- as David Keymer, my father, pointed out. Every walk of human life involves status, because status-consciousness is human. Rousseau made this point well, and he simply developed it from Plutarch. We are "recognition-needing creatures". Our status locates us in a symbolic universe shared by our community and its tradition. It memorializes us for the future, defraying mortality. Status meets many needs and performs many functions, not least the feeling of being worthy of love and of being loved for one's efforts.

Moreover, my entire society is status driven to seek exclusive status. In Rousseau's terminology, my society trucks in "inflamed self-love" ("amour propre", not "amour de soi", which is *care* of the self). Inflamed self-love is a passionate, desiring habit taught to us through many media and backed by powerful incentives to be in some way outstanding, elite. It fills many souls with shame and self-loathing, and many others with vanity and pride. And this passionate, desiring habit is found in seemingly every institution. To take the big trucks: it is found in government, business, all disciplines of academia, research science, the arts and entertainment, sports, and even religion (!). It is found on almost every downtown and every suburban block. So, I shouldn't fix it exclusively on Philosophy (this was Dave's point).

I agree. My point's better put in terms of the *kind* of status we seek, we professional "philosophers". There is nothing wrong with wanting recognition ---it's a basic human need. The question is about the kind of recognition, the meaning of the status we seek.

My immediate problem is with a "discipline" that seeks exclusive status that is not geared to the logic of the discipline's public meaning. Philosophy is supposed to seek *wisdom*. So its status should be keyed to wisdom-seeking. However, it is not. It is geared to a pretense -a fantasy- of knowledge-seeking, organized by the formalism of a way of writing and talking that must be mastered by highly focused feats of intelligence centered on distinctions and developments of positions for their own sake. Very little checking back in with our orientation toward wisdom is done, if it ever is at all (and it rarely is). The discipline is plagued by inflamed self-love which exhibits itself not just in persons but in institutional norms! It wants to be exclusive, not wise.

And this has costs --which is the deeper problem I have with it. It is costly to sell out wisdom-seeking's public face. It has such costs! Wisdom is earthly, and in our age it must involve our life on Earth -- an environmental philosophy. But Philosophy is unearthly -- driven like a narrowing spiral into an imaginary sky where the celestial brilliances shine on each other.

I would have no problem if philosophers --no scare quotes, no capital "P"-- were driven to seek the status of wisdom-finders, even of sages, which the ancients made regulative ideals of the practice of philosophy. A real sage is not an unearthly person --but a very meaningful, helpful one. I have no problem with that status, because it is good, and because it will not be aimed at exclusion, but at relevant and helpful sharing. I have no problem with a discipline that, unhypocritically, competes to find wisdom on Earth and competes, inclusively, to share what it has found, all the while learning from the even vaster wisdom of the sum total of people with whom it shares.

351-4: Movement wisdom

351.365: Lack of trust in authoritative advice also appears around science. Few people have lived long, hard hours in the antagonistic but collective mind of science. As a result, many don't appreciate the hard-won nature of strongly supported scientific hypotheses or of powerfully effective models. Most importantly, many can't tell bad science from good. The scientist seems to give just an "opinion".

But if people saw objectivity work as an ideal guiding -and often regulating- scientific practice, saw the work day in and day out across many (sometimes thousands of) similarly-focused scientists, if people developed appreciation for both the hiddenness and authority of facts, for the fragmentary and revisable nature of explanations, there would be more trust in science.

There would also be more discrimination of bad science --for science defeated by profit-mongering or status-seeking, sometimes even by outright political pressure. In the minds of non-scientists, these motives understandably intensify perceiving science as arbitrary. If more of us had labored long in science, we'd see that selling out science, making it vain, or co-opting it are the vices of our own construction. Checks and balances must be in place. And that's part of the labor around science, too, not to be missed.

But because we late Moderns keep the practice of science hidden from everyday people, cordoned off behind bureaucratic and technical structure; walled-in by diplomas, credentials, and oversight; made remote by increasingly worse science education (at least in U.S. public school), the conditions of judgment around science are shaky at best and precipitous at worst. Good, scientific judgment doesn't have the hold on our imaginations that it should. And neither does the incompleteness of our knowledge --the need to tread carefully.

All this is very, very bad for the millions of life forms still wildly propagating on Earth, and even worse for us in our largely unknown planetary environment.

(It seems that we need to bring everyday people into science and dismantle the walls around science while ensuring its transparency in the public mind.)

352.365: Is environmental virtue possible? The so-called "situationists" say that character is a lark. All's the surrounding condition. Is your head hot? Yes? Then say goodbye to good deeds. Did you find a spare $20 on the sidewalk? Well, today you feel generous. Virtue's a fiction.

It's hard to know where to start with such quick inferences. Certainly, virtue is hard -and so we shouldn't expect everyone to be virtuous. But the social science work being done suggests the phenomena are widespread.

I would think, too, that the experiments are often poorly designed and so rush to generalizations, without the explanation being filled in or even the meaning of what's reportedly recorded. But the question can be made theoretical: what if we are vulnerable to our environments when it comes to acting well or ill? That certainly seems both plausible (to say the least!) and in need of a reply.

Well, then, what if? Two things. (1) Virtue involves judgment about putting oneself in situations that won't undermine one's judgment or will support it. So the worry about contextual factors becomes a factor in virtue. The virtuous person sets herself up to act well. So the situationists have described virtue too narrowly, almost as a straw man.

(2) Virtue is supposed to be human. What's at stake is *human* excellence. And none of us are perfect. We are gappy. So an adequate account of virtue should not expect total compliance, but rather reasonable compliance.

Add to (2) that the situationists still need to account for the undeniable presence of character. There are -look at them!- excellent human beings who stick at and do good things even given all sorts of disincentives. They make a habitual priority out of the good, even in the face of adverse conditions. The situationists can't explain these ones.

All to say, I don't see a problem with environmental virtue, provided that it is conceived as a part of imperfect human beings who will typically be overwhelmed or undermined by their situations at a point. And I see a large loss in not getting us to think about the habits we work at so as to produce patterns of good behavior.

353.365: As Elaine said this morning, it is hard not to react with the odd mixture of excitement and cynicism upon hearing that climate talks have finally progressed at Cancun, compromise and conciliation in the air among all the major polluters -China, the U.S., India- and with Japan also in agreement ("Consensus Emerges on Common Climate Path," Andrew Revkin, The New York Times, December 11th, 2010). The mixture is odd, for two reasons. First, the excitement does not mix well with cynicism. Second, the excitement involves relief, and it is hard to be relieved about cynicism. The cynicism is reasonable: the major polluters -and states in general- act self-interestedly; they have every reason to, understood within the narrow confines of their administrative structures and the active life of the typical politician. Moreover, their implication in attracting the support of multinational corporations which are even more geared to what I called Presentism (cf. 280) is deep and pervasive. I'd be unreasonable not to be wary of my own excitement and its relief.

Clearly, the thing to do is to send a shout out to our governments at as many levels as we can, and in the papers too. To talk up this compromise happening to our friends around the world and to our far-flung families. Once the opening happens, the thing to do is to crowd in on it and to make it appear as the thing everyone was waiting for, a restoring of reality, so that the opening comes to appear a given part of the landscape, an assumption from which everyone has to work.

I should also add that there is undoubtedly a cynical interpretation of why this compromise has begun to appear. The costs associated with waiting longer and doing nothing but making things worse must be showing up faster and faster on the desks of bureaucrats and businessmen world-wide. My responsible cynicism makes me hypothesize just this.

354.365: Last night, I went to a communal dance of sorts -a movement form called "NIA" which Elaine does. It uses music with a combination of moves that the choreographer develops into a routine to produce a kind of movement therapy or movement revitalization for people dancing. The choreographer -in this case Elaine- leads the group. The group last night combined people well over 70 with many middle aged people and a late teenage woman. The body types are all over the map -from difficulty rising from the floor to people who do not appear to be athletic to some people who seem instantly to be dancers. The emphasis is on each person establishing -through trial and repetition of well-designed moves (but also some improvisational ones), through finding her groove- her sense of her body in a way that is open to communal movement. Variety is encouraged if it feels right, and no body is supposed to be driven or perfected in the process. The metaphor's the river, not the chisel.

It became evident to me once again last night at the end -- I was videoing the event as a gift to someone the community wants to thank -- that there are so many forms of philosophy that the academy hardly touches, actually -- touches not at all. I have read theorists chalk this up to Plato or to Descartes or to some form of mind/body dualism which disvalues the body to the privilege of the mental. I don't deny that these could support philosophers almost never considering movement as a form of philosophy, but Plato clearly valued movement and the body in the Republic. And Descartes was no stranger to the passions. Neither seems powerful enough to explain the near total cordoning off of movement-wisdom (let's give it a word?) from philosophy.

There is of course the more recent phenomenological work on bodily being (from Merleau-Ponty on). But this is largely about re-awakening bodily experience, not about making the body do philosophy. At least not explicitly, although Bataille comes close to making such a point (he is also, not a phenomenologist, but a kind of anthropologist by way of limits). (Also, I concede to being only mildly acquainted with this literature -- I am willing to bet there is work countering the point I will make here.) And what around (not "in") this movement does seem about doing philosophy --say a certain interpretation of Deleuze's exploration of desire or of masochism, or a certain interpretation of the late Foucault on the uses of pleasure or the "subjectification" of the self through various kinds of quasi-corporeal habits-- seems squarely avant garde --- about the body as a site of rupture, transcendence of "the machine", or of freedom. And there is much to be said of such ideas, such experiences --- but they do not begin with the body as a site of wisdom.

And this, really, is what struck me last night -- how the body is a site of wisdom. This is another way that wisdom is ecological. It is in our bodies. People after the session? workshop? event? ... were opened up, emotionally and physically, and they also were warmer and more comfortable with each other, less restrained in sharing their views (talk erupting from outside the dance studio) or their natural way of being.

What really do we professional philosophers know about pursuing wisdom? Sometimes I think not a lot. And this, because we are professional.

I come back in my head again and again to the structure we take for granted in our education and how it blocks out what is ecological, what is wisdom-seeking.

Are you for the real deal, or what?

350. The conditions of judgment

*



350.365: One of the things undermining the viewpoint of people with sound ecological advice is the shuffled nature of our society. We shuffle ourselves constantly like a deck of cards at a poker match, moving from one town to the next, doing school in few year intervals, changing jobs (as one's parents did when one moved as a child). "Everything solid melts into air", yes. Such as gradually gained authority in the eyes of others. And with it: the capacity to be a trusted advice-giver.

By contrast, consider a small, sedentary town. People grow up with each other, and over time, some people get a reputation for good judgment, based on their actions and past advice they've given which has proven true. In such a town, a wise person might say, "Look, we should really suspend some present interests for the sake of our town's future", and others will listen, taking the evaluation to heart. The person has earned epistemic authority over time in everyone's eyes.

But in a shuffling society, there is always a qualification on hand, a place a challenging value can stand. And since values so often depend on experience, it becomes easy to distrust another's -or at least to see no extra reason to consider it- especially when one has no basis on which to trust the other as a wise judge, no built-up experience of the other as especially sound of judgment.

What I'm saying is that, in our shuffling world, the conditions of judgment are troubled, quaked. That organizational problem at a societal level undermines the grip our best judges ought to have on our imaginations.

349. Poetry

~



349.365: One of the frustrating things about philosophy is how little it knows about poets -- about what they do for us. And this has ecological consequences, to which I'll return in a moment. Almost without exception, Philosophy -- the discipline -- romanticizes poets and adopts one of two attitudes: either it adores poets mystically or it denies them categorically. The exceptions are mostly ornamental -- a poem as an illustration or an epigraph. The poet's mode of work isn't philosophy.

What is that mode of work; what is poetry? The adoring mystics make poetry into some form of salvation, soul-juice. Whether by Heideggerians or Deleuzians, the consequence is the same: poetry's the slippery dissolver of categorically restrictive things. Its lovely or violent meaning gets romanticized -- a form of freedom or transcendence.

On the other hand, the categorical deniers take poetry to be epistemologically flawed and conceptually confused -- basically, a form of rhetoric, importing the distinction between imitative rhetoric and accurate logic that Plato worked so hard to barricade against good sense.

This split between the mystics and the deniers reinforces itself through each side -- for the deniers are enemies of the mystical, and the mystics are enemies of the categorical. It is no surprise, then, that the split overlays the infamous "Analytic / Continental split" that was so prevalent throughout the 20th century.

One might think that nowadays the romanticization of poetry will fare better in the so-called "Pragmatic return" which is supposedly dissolving -- as water to sand castles -- the twin fortresses left over from Analytic and Continental philosophy. After all, pragmatists want to find what is useful; they value what works and what gets things done in life. They are vitalists -- logical enough to function well; mystical enough to appreciate meaning's wondrous blur in the daily midst of movement. Moreover, poetry is at root a making: as Aristotle said of poieisis -- creating -- its end is in a good separable from the act. "Poetry" was originally any making producing a good that stands alone, separate from the action. (The action being the means to the good; the action not terminating in the end; the end outliving the action and being judged as good apart from the action.) Poetry, then -- the act of making things that are good -- is useful by definition. Poetry's pragmatic through and through, the poet a worker.



But on what? All this is academic. What matters first is to look and see what poets do and how poetry works. Etymology is only as useful as convention. Look: poets draw attention to meaning's cluster. Sometimes they are useful, and sometimes they are useless.

Use to the side, mostly irrelevant. Poetry lodges before usefulness sets in. Sensitizing us to the lay of our land, here's the dis/order of our intimate time. Poetry works unfolding time and space as we experience them intimately in our meaning -- the space of our lives, our time (or others's times) -- here, we get a grip on what could be useful or useless at all. If anything, poetry works to disclose an existential condition of possibility on our ethics, understood most broadly as our pursuit of passionate, real, value-laden life. Poetry is then more than pragmatic, far from mystical; it is anti-romantic, categorically important. Hey, poetry's not fitting into School, at least Philosophy School (right now).

( Professionalization counts against it -- we are not supposed to be tattered in any respect (we are supposed to be only useful, even if we aren't quite human in so being). But that is another reflection. Professionalization has become anti-philosophical in many respects, this on both sides of the old, so-called "divide". And none of this parenthesis is supposed to mean that it's okay to be unethical when we work -- far from it. )



Now the anti-ecological consequence of romanticizing poetry -- or of reducing it to usefulness (which is the true antithesis of the romanticization shared by both the Analytic and Continental camps) -- is that we do philosophy outside our ecology, blind to our meaning's cluster. Meaning's as wild, nascent, ill-formed, tuned, hard-formed, ropey, cut and dry, ... as life in our biosphere actually is. You see, poetry's an ecological mode of making sense, the poet a kind of ecologist. Poetry lets us view (our) surging life and brittle decay as what it is. In us, or on Earth (and in the universe).

.

348. Daily life

348.365: I'm waking up this morning concerned about philosophy. Or Philosophy -the discipline- which seems sometimes structurally incapable of promoting genuine philosophy. But I think I'm a small-town guy on this one. Things look different when one is in a living community, daily junk and all. And all -getting the kids to school, fixing plumbing, working on good communication with the one you love, all of that. Then wise guidance is philosophy -- not the big, abstract stuff. And yet the small things give way to the big, and the abstraction can be quite useful, perceptive and true in the midst of busyness or tension, or ambivalence caused by time compressing and emotions sloshing around in the rush. Then the systematic pursuit of knowledge can be quite helpful, a luminosity.

To position knowing, and to give it its circuit back toward wisdom, its pursuit needs to be in our ecology.



&

345-7. Key

345.365: What I said Monday about Kant is not right. It is not that simple (it never is with Kant). It is of course only reasonable to respect every reasoner qua reasoner. The problem is that morality also includes it being reasonable to respect more than the rational. For instance, we have reason to respect the sentient.

What the analogy across human form powered by empathy does is to give us access to an array of values from which we might find it reasonable to respect others. So, for instance, even if someone is mentally disabled -and so not rational- there are still other, human connections involving values and providing reason to respect him or her. For instance, again, his or her sentience.

All sorts of issues come up here. One of them, a very simple one, is that much of respect involves more than what (practical) reason alone sees, at least on the face of it. And Kant, discussing morality, was talking about practical reason.

To respect another involves sensing her, being able to connect with her --to connect enough that one sees, for instance, that it's best to disconnect for a time out of respect. It involves what I call "relational reason". This was the rationally ordered process I discussed when I said on Monday that empathy involves a kind of reason. Relational reason demands more of us than simply conceptualizing what respects another's will. It demands that we respect another's being.

My points are, (1) respecting only (practically) rational being isn't respecting our whole being, and (2) growing respect from our whole being gives us more sensitivity to the plurality of values we have reason to respect as humans. It is more accurate and also more respectful.

So the problem is that Kant shows us it is reasonable to respect every reasoner. But he doesn't show us how it is human, nor what being human makes possible when it comes to respect and moral attentiveness.

346.365: If I had to develop an image for these Earth thoughts, what would it be? Most certainly a child's structure -- wild and built in many directions, left hanging. Suggestive, not a representation, but a series of lived connections, provisional and there for a time (only a time). A structure by which to integrate the complexity of ... "you know, it all. I don't know what it means." Well said! A practical and relational thing, with a little theory built in, so that we can see where we're going if we build late ... .

347.365: There are several views of thought. Let's take a walk around them. One is that thought should be systematic. The unified theory, the grand design. Another's that thought should be exciting -- -- the warm vibe, the interesting "whether". And ... only "several"? Well, there are as many as toads in a pond in summer. Of course. My version's in the middle (of the pond). That thought should be *rigorous* while aspiring to no more than a step sufficient for the day. You see, I live thanks to thoughts. They take time, build up, solve problems bit by bit. They acquire, by shaping, an ethos. They are distinct, but not fashionable. Often rather plain. What is needed for any given day. --

(Isaiah's photo, December 5th, 2010)

.

341-44: Activists

341.365: By virtue of what do we do what's rational for us? Must there be a difference between "we" understood as a family, a nation, a present generation, humanity across generations? Kant's idea was that the rational and humanity across generations are essentially linked, and I think he was on to something. Where I don't follow him is in his way of making the connection on the basis of humanity being essentially rational, with some -odd- limits thrown in. It's not that I think we aren't essentially rational -we are, and Aristotle already made this point clearly through an a posteriori analysis in his ethics. Our dynamism works through purposes and meaning. No, the part I don't follow in Kant is his sense of the connection. He thinks that reason demands we respect all reason, and hence both all reasoners and the conditions for reasoning now into the future. But I hardly know how to make sense of such an idea, since all my reason tells me to respect is what I find reasonable. And it may be unreasonable to respect all reasoners now and into the future. Perhaps not -but the stretch is so unclear.

At the same time, I do easily transport myself to the position of my fellow human through empathy -a complex, rational process embedded not in pure reason but in our human form. And, from that position, I readily imagine the possible life of future humans. In that way, the virtue of humanity in us can find a groove of thought from which what's rational for us proceeds from a generic "we" inclusive of future generations. We are so good at locating this groove that we call it the perspective of thinking about what's rational for humans, period. The concept of the human already carries the scope in it.

Given that we can readily access this groove of thought -even have a virtue named after it ("he's a mensch"; "that's humanity for you")- I find myself hard pressed to stretch toward pure reason where humanity is in part an *obstacle* to humanity. Rather, I want to look into the virtue of humanity formed out of the complex rational process of empathy and understand its authority and imagination.

342.365: The only difference between our technosphere and the biosphere is scalar -a matter of scope or rate. At the ontological level, all is natural. The question is what kind of nature. And human nature drives the technosphere that outstrips the biosphere. Beaver nature does not, though it has its own technosphere. So think about it: the overdriving scope and rate are ours -our nature's- and not a result of technology per se.

And why does our nature overdrive when other natures are whittled into compliance with the globe? Because we have reason, thought --possibility, deliberation --because we have, accordingly, freedom. Our reason, our freedom --two sides of the same coin-- overdrive the biosphere and separate off our technosphere into something unsustainable.

Not that we can do without reason, we who deliberate about reason. Problem and solution in one, damnation and salve.

343.365: Earlier this year, I wondered whether human rights drive environmental destruction (cf. 165, June 6th). The obvious reply is that if human rights include the rights of future generations, then most of the objection fades. The objection holds, then, only as a criticism of the *discourse* of human rights and their effective *institutions* since their main founding in 1947/8. It is not a criticism of the normative possibility of human rights -of the very idea of human rights.

Add to this the obvious missing rights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: (1) a right to an environment that doesn't kill us or make us ill, (2) a right to an environment in which our conscience is not "outraged" (the language of the Declaration). (1) provides protection from pollution and its effects; (2) provides some form of protection for non-human life, even though it is the most vague as stated. (2) does this, because a clear and pervasive phenomenon in humanity is valuing the intrinsic value of non-human life, biodiversity, etc., and to violate these values is to violate people's consciences on a massive scale.

What we have, then, is a rather simple formula: if human rights are conceived (a) with future generations included, (b) with environmental health in mind, and (c) with the non-violation of conscience protected, then human rights seem perfectly able to resist environmental destruction and no longer drive it by driving the demands of "development".

All this said, I am skeptical, because of (2) / (c). Human rights are individualistic and deontological -absolute, except in the case of conflicts of rights. Then, the violation of even one person's conscience should be anathema. But consciences vary -one reason why *freedom* of conscience ought to be upheld. (2) is too strong, because it could drive the most absurd demands -for instance if someone felt violated when we did not protect an especially pretty asteroid between Jupiter and Mars, or whenever we did not protect the sky from air planes which blemish it (is this absurd)? Too much is unclear and potentially subjective here.

But without some space for the intrinsic value of non-human life -or lacking the rights of such life (I have been considering only human rights)- human rights *do* seem blind, enablers, even drivers, of environmental destruction. For they then drive us to *instrumentalize* the Earth as a vehicle for our rights now and into the future. The pressure, exerted by billions, is to then streamline the Earth's functions and the use of non-human life so that the rights of the present and the future can be upheld. And that does appear to me, in the abstract, to create a destructive vice. For global warming will now be protected against --and also toxicity caused by pollution, and so will overfishing, overlumbering, and resource depletion in general-- but everything else, much of the Earth's biodiversity included, will ("rightfully"!) become subject to the human-development machine.

344.365: The activist is a site, not a sight, although they often are sites by being sights. People relate to activists as idols or as icons, the latter being preferable for all involved. I admit to being fascinated by activists, more so once I knew that I wouldn't be one.

I'm using a distinction Jean-Luc Marion made -between the idol and the icon. The idol is Heideggerian, the icon Levinasian. Marion's often grouped with "the theological turn in French phenomenology" (Janicauld), but his work is hardly theological in a sense that's recognizable to most academics. Marion's interested in honoring intuition, and he thinks -rightly- that many people do have religious experience. The issue, then, is to describe it without introducing "metaphysical" -non-empirical- concepts. It's to read religious experience as poetry --figurative, and real in just that way. In this way, contra what Megan Craig seems to imply in her recent work on Levinas and (William) James, Marion's work is close to James's, rather than being in some way (Craig is vague here) experience-deforming. The fact is that "givenness" -Marion's figure (taken from the early Husserl) of evidence- is as supple as the best literary description, or the most nuanced scientific one.

The activist -to return- is often an idol, focusing the presence of a way of life in himself. His givenness is that he gives himself as a hero, a site of the ideal. In this way, too, to see him is to see the ideal. He is a sight, and people love him for it.

While exceptions may be found, for the most part, being a sight site is bad (like that English is bad). It takes people away from themselves and their own responses. It blocks out the rest of the world, even covering the problems the activist works on. It makes the issue about desire for a person, rather than desire -say- for justice. In general, vanity and whatever feeds vanity are to be watched with caution.

But if an activist is an icon, then things look different. The activist, then, *gives way to* a problem, an ideal, a responsibility we all share (whichever "we" is in question -neighborhood, city, country, world). The activist is not the answer --not the sight-- but simply a site for seeing the problem more clearly. The activist, then, is the window.

334-340: Knowing vs. acknowledging

334.365: I have been thinking of high school lately, of the assumptions of my world growing up. I grew up in Reagonite America and was a punk at a time when being so took some guts (leering, jeering, bullies, and many uninvited discussions about politics that challenged the status quo). I was lucky to attend one of the better public high schools in the United States -New Hartford High, in New Hartford, N.Y. (near Utica). My parents were exceptionally open minded for the day. And I gravitated toward biology, history and English -with natural strengths in math. So I was well-placed to learn and be schooled about our planet from a challenging perspective. Nonetheless, I grew up with the idea of freedom's infinity around me. I internalized a sense of myself as an actor -of us humans as actors- on a stage in the bright and open life of the world, daylight, or night, fresh air or rain surrounding our deeds as a condition. But not as a limit. What I mean is that while I certainly understood we had constraints on our actions due to our nature and the stage of our technology, I did not think of our actions as in a push-pull with fundamentally limited resources --but only with temporarily limited ones. I certainly did not think of my actions as in a trade-off with future generations -all innocent as far as I'm concerned. In fantasy and ignorance, once I got to college I enjoyed Phenomenology, a bastardized Spinoza, Mallarmé, and many other figures of infinity. 1989.

Now, my pervasive feeling's that action is a trade-off against the future, against other forms of life. Not all such trade offs loom unjustified -many sit quite justified. There are ways to set the future up. Still, not so many --not so fast-- as long as we exist within the industrial age and its energy / engineering paradigm. Oh, I exist now as a tethered, negotiating being who doesn't identify with the pure fantasy of a wide open stage of freedom.

335.365: What do we make when the counter-example has been avoided? Imagine an ethics book in which not a single thorough argument is given. Instead, facile characterizations of opposing positions are offered. Perhaps a rights-based thinker is painted as "wanting rigid rules" -the implication being that this is irresponsible given the ambiguous flux of experience. But tell that to the journalist illegally imprisoned and tortured in a despotic regime -- "You're being rigid." "Your trauma will increase life's ambiguity." The counter-example has been avoided. Critical thinking and scholarship -- depth-consideration of objections; documentation of evidence; the patient, thorough exploring of reasons -- originate there, in the counter-example. And institutions can deliver on this -or fail to. For instance, when I was at Yale, I saw the institution fail to deliver critical thinking in many cases. Who wants a counter-example when Goldman Sachs beckons and "Rocks for Jocks" is considered a legitimate class? However, when I was at University of Chicago, I saw the institution succeed in rendering objectivity a palpable value with across-the-board commitment in the curricular structure of the institution -the vaunted common core. This problem is echoed among environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, too, with romantic environmentalists eschewing objectivity for feeling, and the hedonists of the corporate world discounting long-term concerns because cocaine and sex beckon.

Of course, much of what I say admits of counter-example. And I haven't given evidence, have I? Just so, this fragment --these entire Earth thoughts of a year-- are not critical thinking *yet*.

336.365: Big bright day, and around us, electric lights.

337.365: Thankful for an atmosphere that isn't 3 degrees ( C ) warmer than it is. (Gratitude I won't be able to have by the time I'm expected to die, and which any of my descendants will count as part of the Golden Age?) But that -this feeling- is hardly Thanksgiving. The holiday should leave one replenished, ready to live some more. And how does one find that sentiment within sharp awareness of a passing chance? I am thinking: through what Cavell calls "acknowledgment", rather than through knowledge -and not, as Kierkegaard thought, through faith. In my words: through relational reason. By being held, holding, a friend and family affection, by being caught up in the great -- since modest-- reconciler and unknown: togetherness.

338.365: Yesterday, I didn't find what I'm grateful for in a way that left me free. So I will try again today. I am grateful for living in this point of time and for Isaiah, Elaine, my parents, Ruthie -- Steve, Stuart, and all my friends living in this point of time. For Allen, who is a true colleague, and for my colleagues at work, and for work, and for my health, and for the great globe of life that makes us all possible. And for my teachers, too, who helped me see all this. Gratitude is an outpouring, and once it comes, it comes flowing out. Action is an outpouring, too, and once it comes, it comes flowing out. When will we unfreeze action to prevent our Earth's destruction? When we do -when that action is *like* gratitude, *born* of gratitude and an acute sense of loss, a new world will come pouring out.

339.365: "What sane reason could there be for moving away from this paradise? I think I may have felt a glimmer of madness, with no concept for the feeling." (Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know -Excerpts from Memory, 2010, July 7, 2003) And we exist in this mad age. Crutzen calls the geology the Anthropocene. And we, inside human history, should call our era within the Anthropocene, "The Blindness". It is the era in which we denied reality, would not acknowledge our home on Earth, with its limits and tricks and benefits. Its limits, tricks, and benefits -LTBs- and we, mad as can be, but lacking a concept for the feeling of this blissed out, anxious, half-irritated, mostly ecstatic existence inside our malls, cars, and short-sighted states.

Outside, in the "non-developed" world ("non-developed"?!), the silence is both calm and unsettling, with sadness admixed. Looking at the shining bubble of "globalization", at the Blindness, one hardly knows what to think, since the Earth, clearly, is changing. You can't Pollute and Destroy ad nauseum without consequence.

340. 365: What kind of government can represent future generations?

[Tokisdotis –“toe-kiss-dah-tiss”- movie #1 ]

327-333. The morally invisible

327: The acidification of the ocean is not much discussed, but what shall we say of ourselves if we make barren the womb of life?

328: If, as philosophers after Kant discern, the essence of humanity is freedom (a point Pico della Mirandola intuited three centuries prior), why on Earth ought we to be concerned about oceans? The answer, on the surface, seems easy --because they are instrumental to the conditions of our freedom. Without oceans functioning well in the biological frame within which we have evolved (they could function well, otherwise, for different kinds of life), we have limited options --less land (a rising sea), less food (depleted fisheries, mass extinction), deadly weather (hurricanes over warmer water) and so on. In countless small and many large ways, oceans *enable* our choice. But is that all? Are oceans merely instrumental. No, they are *majorly* so. And missing that shift of scale has been our undoing since the earliest record of homo sapiens. We tool living nature in the short and local term. But living nature works on the long and global. ... Interestingly, once one sees it does, there are instrumental reasons for preservationist-style policies, for letting life systems be, or for highly selective use. Then our freedom appears conserving of life, and sometimes life preserving. ... And yet, the answer does not stop there, because, as creatures of evaluation, we also recognize value. That is how we think good choices are made. And we see, interestingly, that the ocean has more than just instrumental value. Its life is a source of wonder. Freedom is not free when it precludes the things of value. And so preserving our freedom to "choose any form that we prefer" (Pico) ought also to involve preserving the things of deep value. This is a thought typical post-Kantians -the philosophers and activists of freedom- have not typically understood. Evaluation is dependent on freedom, bound up with it, but it is qualitatively different than freedom. Moreover, it -not freedom- discerns the possibilities in terms of which freedom is. Should we then say that out of freedom we ought to preserve the intrinsic values of oceans? Yes, but the questions only begin there. We now need to discern what, exactly, is the object of wonder. I believe that it is not life frozen in a non-evolving preserve. To be continued.

329. In memoriam national democracy: which a year ago next month managed to imperil future generations around the globe by not producing climate policy at Copenhagen. Shall we discuss a crime against humanity?

330. Snapshot 1 -The life in the ocean does not have rights, and I do not feel (and don't know) we have obligations *to* it, but I do know that we have responsibilities *regarding* it, and that these are grounded in part on the intrinsic value of ocean life living wild.

Snapshot 2 -Now I consider a whale, marvelous, intelligent and communicative. I *know* I have obligations to it, even if it does not have rights. Why do I know? Because it can relate to me. The presence of -minimal- relational reason opens the space of duties *to*, not just duties regarding. So relational reason introduces a categorical distinction, and focus, in the vast set of marine life.

Snapshot 3- Outside that subset, in the non-relational life of the sea, around what do my responsibilities form? Around individual lives? Around species? Around ecosystems? Or around myself and my impact on any one of these or on all of these? Responsibilities regarding individuals produces a reductio ad absurdum -I can't possibly discharge the responsibility, and so I can't have one (responsibility, recall, is a practical notion). Responsibilities regarding species are both epistemologically flawed and anti-wild. Individuals fray and expand species, and species are pragmatic markers at best. Moreover, the speciating process -not the species- is where wildness is. I agree with Holmes Rolston. And ecosystems are likewise problematic -epistemologically imprecise, or fictitious if turned into objects of precise preservation, and not the site of wildness moreover. Rather, the ecological process is (the process by which interdependent and mostly competitive living beings -most of species, some between them or at the edges- lock into working arrangements and then respond to new conditions, living beings, etc.).

So I have -it seems- responsibilities regarding the speciating process and the ecological one, two processes by which wild life is, and I have them because wild life is intrinsically valuable. All I mean is that I find reason to value it for its own sake, not for some end to which I want to it put. (What reason? Its wondrousness -I side with Aristotle.)

And this leaves one last element: me, us. My responsibilities form around these two wild processes. But they fall on me, and ours fall on us.

Snapshot 4- Do my, our responsibilities regarding the two wild oceanic processes invoke a duty? Yes, to myself. To ourselves. As agent-relative a duty as you can get. Because it is a failure of what is best in us to be wanton. We have a duty to ourselves -I have one to me- to not waste and destroy things of intrinsic value without a damn good reason. Destroying, being wanton, I fail humanity inside me, a crying shame. And so we have duties regarding oceans that center around letting ocean wilderness be and which are duties to ourselves. The object of the duty is the ocean, and the source of the duty is myself, ourselves.

331. I wonder if we can achieve a focus inside our oceans, a swirling analogy of life. I drove 55 MPH yesterday instead of the 65-70 around me. As I did, time slowed down as cars rushed by -I passed no cars on the road- and in the slow, I felt unrolled inside the good memories of life-chapters that had bad times. The deliberate staking of quality worked -my wanting a quality drive. And I felt inside my ocean, its zones of life, swirling, in eddies as rain splashed down and wicked off the window in refracted taillights.



332. I am sitting with Isaiah having pizza after a long bike ride through the secret field and the hidden station, through the mud and the wind. I am complete. No climate change, nor environmental destruction. There are two ways to go here: one, I tell myself to forget about those big things. Two, I tell myself to remember this moment so that I can understand why we should care about the big things. The first dishonors the child. The second honors him.

333. Hard-working, industrious we -and, churning underwater, the morally invisible. Here isn't malevolence, but tragedy. And if there is malevolence, it's in the streamlined few -the ordering class- who manage to divide and sharpen everyday life through the subtle incursion of economic imperatives fluttering down around a decision to maximize profit. Malevolence's face is ignorant in this epoch -ignoring what obstructs the higher profit. In this way, too, it is not actively cruel, but cruelly negligent. Hard-working, industrious we -and, churning underwater, the morally invisible.

320-326. The death of facts

320.365: The anti-intellectualism in U.S. culture resides even in intellectuals, who love to take aim at Reason (they are monolithic, these intellectuals --and just so, their enemy). A cruel irony, since it feeds anti-intellectualism with good reason. You see, if the intellectuals can't see good sense, why should we listen to them? And Reason, of course, is plural, not monolithic --their first failure of intelligence. It is theoretical, practical and relational. There are many kinds of rational processes. And each of these processes involves different goals, different forms of knowledge, different sensibilities. Usually, when intellectuals rail against Reason, they have forgotten practical or relational reason. The point is: to look and see, to know how to hold or grow or fix from experience, these are not anti-reason. They are an achievement of relational reason (the holding) or of practical reason (the growing food and fixing). Sense is sense; and the sensible thing is to acknowledge it in its different reasonable logics as it is given. ... So the environmentalists who denigrate reason to "intuition", "experience", "practice", "poetry", "religion", "spirit", "touch", "dream", "wildness", "compassion", "life", etc. Etc. Well, they simply are contributing to a culture that is out of focus, abstract, and not patient enough to find the way things fit and make sense in the evolved body of humankind.

321.365: I knew a place once that, though an educational program, openly contributed to the death of facts. It was a small, liberal arts college nestled in the Rocky Mountains ~ its Philosophy Department. Though many parts of the institution disagreed, this department cultivated sentimentalism and arbitrariness among its students, discounted objectivity, and eschewed argument in favor of the personal voice. It did not matter if a position was well-argued so long as it felt authentic. Authenticity replaced veracity, but since authenticity depends on veracity, the program cultivated flights of groundless opinion sanctioned -or so it felt- by feeling. Meeting this department was my first introduction to how intellectuals can hate themselves and undermine the conditions of reason and, so, of responsibility. Who would think the well-coiffed, well-spoken elite in this program nestled its hands within a public that thinks there is no reality, no better or worse evidence for or against climate change's anthropogenesis? But it felt easier that way, didn't it, to not have an intellectual duty to the surrounding world? To be objective, I have heard that things have changed in this department as new faculty arrived. It is chilling to think, though, that an entire generation of philosophers openly propagated subjectivism or become so self-absorbed that, practically speaking, objectivity died.

322.365: On March 25th, 2009, Congressman Schimkus (R-IL) testified before the House sub-committee on Energy and the Environment. In this brief testimony, he appears to have taken Biblical quotes out of context to justify his view that cataclysmic climate change can't happen -God being providential. I believe this to be the most tragic video clip I have seen all year, in large part due to the utter banality of the badness shown. Measured next to what it says about democratic politics, hundreds of millions of future humans, and countless species of animals -the effect is jarring. No screams can be heard from these chambers, and yet we witness the kind of mind -currently lobbying to be head of the sub-committee after the success of last week's election- which will work to ensure that the U.S. does nothing substantial to slow climate change's worst reaches. The death of facts is consequential. And it apparently applies to the blogosphere as well, where I first found the C-SPAN clip of the congressman. Environmentalist critics lampooned the congressman using editorial techniques overlaying the video. They, too, kill facts --for the lack of objective data -or the overwhelming presence of data taken out of context or filtered through strong editorial judgment- itself contributes to undermining critical reasoning and the scientific method. All of this is utterly banal, utterly bad for humanity and other species. And to think - he quoted from Noah's legend.

323.365: Here is a fact -- I have obligations to Isaiah (5 yrs. 8 mo. old). You who have children in your life -- you have obligations, too. And this care-taker-relative-fact is a despair-stopper. For the following reason -- my obligation demands I do my best to protect future generations from my generation's collective stupidity, prejudice and inertia. It doesn't matter how I feel about this, and if my feelings get in the way of my duty, then they are -in this case- obstacles.

324.365: What should I see in this, in this photo? I suppose the meaning disturbs: industrialism pollutes the waters. Still, here is our world now. The clearest thing is to see it. There, there are many complex reasons for why we've ended up as we have -- some good ones, some bad. Unworking what we've wrought takes *clearness*, to be fair all around both to ourselves and to our ancestors.

(Near Tacoma by Judy Twedt, 2009)

325.365: "The summer day says we should become a festival." And so does the winter day, or should I say, "late fall"? How do *days* do that --not nights, not customs, but the bare ecology? Well, but the sun, crisp in its unseasonly season, surprising the last remnants, and the passage --- the rolling circumference of time.

326.365: There are two elements to taking time -(1) the Push-Back, where you resist the rush and the voices; (2) the Settle In, where you let yourself be in the world, let things rise, riSe, rISe up. I'm going to take my time with facts, and focus on the ones we need to hear so that we keep ourselves focused on our home, planet Earth.

313-319. Keeping our heads

313.365: How can the globally linked university help us adapt to climate change? Just so: as globally linked. In this crucial time, this "bottleneck" (E.O. Wilson) of a century, it will be helpful to have networks conveying information and best practices around the globe -and at a deep level, not at the superficial level of the internet (and of aphorisms like these). What would a global curriculum look like for adaptation to climate change, where the scale would be found not only in the content but also in the form?

314.365: On this election day, I can think of the worst thing for the environment in this election season -- the death of facts.



315.365: So beautiful, to be of the field, or in the field. The farmers home after the season, the urban farmers, working small farms for more than an economic reason.

316.365: My magic, my organic magic was:
-to be alive to significance.
-to have relational responses (to not turn away from you).
-to not fit in, to
Be awkward and unending even
When I tried to end.

Thank you, good bad magic. Thank you, friend.

Like Earth -- around
The bend.

317.365: There is some literature that gives one the sweetness and infinity of life, like aspects of Kierkegaard or parts of phenomenology --but even more much poetry, and some religion, and art, too, welling up from street level, or cocooned inside museums where masses of people turn it over in their talk. In its own way, also, I've found meditation to do this work --to bring the edges of daylight into the sentiment of anticipation. And as I watch students now who have grown up under corruption of the highest order -Clinton deregulating our future so that his time could be honeyed; Bush sacrificing young people and families to a war based on lies; and corporations who have used globalization to pollute and rend the environment; common people forgetting what citizenship's basic civility means; people losing it, fighting, insulting others over five minutes or seconds of time; the death of journalism as a source of facts that stick in the public mind ... Well. It would help to find ways to build in the recall of the sweet infinity of life, at least for these young people who should be our hope, but who are so lost, they do not even know they are.



318.365: The first thing I did is to go into the chapel. Why did I do that? Because the focus was pure -and purity as muddled, struggling, bending commitment, not purity as exclusion, Victorianism, fascism, anorexia, repression. The chapel was a teaching device, at the center of which was intelligent, loving flame. There is a single-mindedness that is more thoughtful than endlessly nuanced complexity. Here, for instance, with the Earth, whose scope and lag are wide and long, long term. What does it take to focus on them, to genuinely care? An intention to see and to think beyond the endlessly proliferating trivia -the baroque complications- of our short-term, individualized, media and economic worlds. It is not thoughtful to get caught up in the epiphenomena of the quarterly return, the viral and fractal dance of identities and desire amounting to an individual life. Even the philosophies which do this, the smooth, self-consoling painters of globalization who cast themselves as its left-wing critics -- all these modes of life remain mired in the here and now. The long intention, the love of Earth that demands the reaching simpleton of our collective imagination and abstraction beyond our life and world... it is lost in the generalized thoughtlessness that is the presiding feature of our civilization. So pull yourself up, pull yourself up then, out of the mire, out of the sweet desire. Focus on the next thousand years.



319.365: To let alone reasons, and to not let reasons be alone, so that: we are not trying to make life more orderly than it is, either by denying its pull and sense or by denying its funny buzz and unsettling blur ~ that involves patience, and humor, and not making a big deal out of one's life. And it also involves insistence and care ~ moral attachment. ... I'm thinking of this today in the early morning, feeling warm, and imagining a citizenry that can handle talking, working and living together while it pulls apart the rough and tough tangle of industrialism and the cynical systems that organize today's irresponsibility. It's about keeping our heads.

306-312. The use of time

.


306.365: Let me suppose, then, that the idea of a relationship with an impersonal system of life, personified by our analogical thinking, is not absurd. The question still remains, "what standards are internal to it?" Only then can promissory justice with respect to the Earth begin to get a grip. The standards cannot be generated by an expectation or even a work to be done. An impersonal system expects nothing of me, and the system does not generate a job, even a normative niche (a role). No, the expectations have to come from me, from what I expect myself to honor in my relationship with the system. And where can I locate those self-expectations *from* my understanding of the relationship? The immediate answer would be: from what I value or respect in the system. These each generate specific self-expectations, i.e., to honor what is valuable, to respect what is respect-deserving. In other words, the impersonal system of life can demand behavior of me, behavior I ought to live up to, from what is valuable and respect-deserving in the system and from my self-expectation to recognize these things. My relationship can consist of norms that I attend to in respecting myself in the relationship. "The Earth's given me a chance to live. Do I act to show I deserve it?" Only if, you might say, I honor the Earth's value, respect what deserves respect in it as a mode of respecting myself! Of living up to myself.

307.365: In today's corporate-style-managed militaries, soldiers, too, are often treated like the Earth under industrialism -squeezed to produce effective results, trained, equipped, even drugged or biotechnologically modified, they are used up and left over, so often polluted by the process. The ones responsible for it all sit back, far away from the destruction and left-over toxicity (real and psychological), and drink cab blancs. ... Against this dishonoring of the tragic seriousness of self-defense, military conscience and honor are like the outdoorsman or farmer who know how to use the Earth in respect.

308.365: I was shocked tonight to see that the same depersonalization that allows corporations like BP to turn the Gulf's ecosystems into numbers without sentimental value, much less moral value --this depersonalization is present in the U.S. government's discharging and treatment of combat veterans. These women and men are just numbers, boxes checked off -"Did you kill anyone?" "Were you wounded?" "Have you ever had thoughts of suicide?" Check, check. "Thank you. That will be all.". Resource used. This "human resource". This object-non-person who is really a person. ... Around us all, vast, impersonal bureaucracies -governmental and non-governmental, public and private - organize our economy of scale; we have chosen it and them; and they run our veterans down, run down the Earth, drive wars based on lies from being seen for what they are, defer and dissolve responsibility. Here, there is a unity of problem across many domains, a unity, too, of cause. The problem is depersonalization -even of the system of life to which we can relate personally- and its root cause is the economy of scale without which industrial society would not be. In this light, from veterans too, we need a post-industrial society whose organization is also post-bureaucratic. A post-mass society. A society that maintains the relational, the personal and the responsible so that in any part of its large, large reach -there is a community. Should it be a sin, a flagrant violation of professional responsibility, to be impersonal?

309.365: The sound of the bell in the wind.

310.365: \In memoriam, R.W.S./ The leaves -red, and green, and red - are tonight like so many other things, red, and green, and red. Our sore eyes, the newness after crying, the love of trust.

311.365: Jumbled and thrown together --and apart-- our personal histories (and *our* personal history, when we are in families, friendships and all kinds of loves) emerge out of unknown origins and the translucent, blurry, disregarded texture of our youth. As we gain our footing in this life, forms become clear up ahead and some clear markers appear in our sense of the past. But where in all this can nature be a part of what made us, a part in this most personal memory that burdens the insomniac at night? In the analogy, of course, in the textured chorus of trees as wind rises through them along the hills. In the sense of time and the open system all that nature brings. It let's us be obscure and clear at once, a living thing which is mostly energy and a good part blur...

312.365: As I complete these "Earth thoughts", I become aware of time and of the decisions I make. Each day, what I write is significant in small ways to me, and what I don't write is -in a sense- more significant. In the space of possibilities, the actual carries responsibility --the responsibility of having chosen how to use my time and to locate and take up space. This elementary awareness -awareness of decision, opportunity, and resource- is a good part of what environmentalism ought to be about. Analogously, we ought to be aware of our time on Earth, inside Earth-time's limits and contours, and cognizant of our use of space, of what opportunities we have and resources we have used. The good, short writing is then like the house we decide to build, or occupy, or restore. Is it respectful of time, of Earth?
.



.

298 -305. Promissory justice

298.365. "Promissory justice. The Earth's given us a chance to live. Do we act to show we deserve it? (Compare: you're given a job; do you prove yourself worthy of the hire?)" ... The analogy here is between an opportunity and an appointment. But the disanalogies are many -did I seek being born? I sought the job, by contrast. Is there a role in being alive? There is in a job; there are, for instance, qualifications. In fact, to think that there's a role in being alive seems incoherent. Being alive is the condition for any possible role, except the rare role fulfilled only in being dead (the role of ancestor, for instance, although it is a stretch to call that a "role", although one might prepare for it, for instance by leaving a legacy). Being alive isn't a role! So what can the fragment mean? Also, the Earth hasn't *given* us anything, certainly not as an employer gives an employee a chance. Figurative language here misleads us in countless ways... .

299.365. The idea of promissory justice still interests me. But what is its anchor? I do feel -merely an intuition (of course, could be a prejudice)- that I should live up to the chances I've been given, including being alive. (And I find it grossly inaccurate to say, as some might in this context, "merely being alive" -what is "mere" about living?) The chances, too, come in many forms -the chance of being alive on the Earth, the chance of being a citizen of a somewhat domestically just nation, the chance given by my parents and family, the chance afforded me by my education, etc. But in what sense can the chance of being alive on Earth generate responsibilities to live up to it? There'd need to be standards in the way a job has them (for excellence). What are the standards involved in having the chance to live on Earth?

300.365. One way to think of standards involved in being given a chance to live on Earth is through analogy with a relationship, not a job. A job's in the domain of practical reason, a structured pursuit of an end, and a job is usually a means to a further end (as when I am a carpenter so that a house gets built). But as I said two days ago, it's hard to see how there is any practical end built into being alive on Earth. The living is not a means to some further end, certainly not without a further philosophy or religion to provide the meaning to life. And the living isn't a job, but the condition of any job, of any end. The *practical* analogy fails. But perhaps not the *relational* one. Suppose that being alive on Earth were the chance of a relationship, as when I am lucky to have met and become involved with the woman of my life. Or as when I am lucky to have become good, good friends with a buddy who is like a brother. Or as when I inherit my parents. Relationships do have standards internal to them -the standards according to which I relate well or poorly, honoring the relationship or betraying it, etc. Can promissory justice regarding the Earth make sense from within this relational logic?

301.365. So, if promissory justice with respect to the Earth makes sense within the logic of relationships, what would follow? The question, of course, is what the relationship would involve. And though one might turn to analogies with other relationships, clearly the kind of relationship one might have with the Earth is its own kind. So, what's in that kind? Well, the Earth gives us life, makes us work for it. Gratitude would thus be involved, and strenuous effort. Is the Earth fair with us? Yes, in so far as it treats all beings impersonally and in that way impartially. A fair, giving, demanding relation. And? And this: the Earth doesn't literally "give", "treat" or "make". It's not a person --it's a system of life. The first problem is that relational reason needs to make sense of a relation to an impersonal system of life.

302.365. "Depend on your neighbor." This is the principle of the great community. Here, environmentalism has no different task than justice, than the Bible. (And the list goes on -would I know about Buddhism more than by acquaintance, I would mention it. And likewise with Confucian "ren".) Our expectations are often doused in a puddle where our book's been -inadvertently? enviously?- kicked. Pick it up, sigh, wipe off the muddy spot. Shrug. And depend on your neighbor. The great love's unlocked by the great love.

303.365. As in so much Shakespeare, _Hamlet_'s a play involving a crisis of authority, and this crisis is focused in, not just on, the main character, Hamlet. There's a good case to be made, too, that the crisis involves a particular Renaissance and later Modern problem: who we are supposed to be, where the question arises because we "may fashion any form for ourselves that we prefer" (Pico Della Mirandola, the Renaissance humanist). Though it may seem simplistic, I would like to hazard this thought --the ecological reality we increasingly face gives the lie to the Renaissance and Modern fantasy. We may not fashion any form that we prefer; we have limits. The tempest -what Stephen Gardiner calls the "perfect moral storm" of climate change- betrays our limits. Perpetually short-sighted in our 10,000 year recorded history --with evidence of that shortsightedness before-- capable of fashioning an economy that acts against our enlightened interest, tending to let our complexity and technology outrun the common person -- we are prone to an ecological situation made reactive by industrialism, one which will increasingly limit our choice. There are limits on limits here, and environmental maturity and general maturity coincide at this point, where the crisis of authority is not in the individual or of the individual -the Modern fantasy- but in the failure to see the individual in his larger, ecological context. I am not saying the ecological would square away _Hamlet_ --it is art, it was then, it showed us things. I am saying the persistence of Hamlet -the character- now can be read as a symptom of the Modern fantasy given the lie by the very real tempest. Hamlet does not represent the crisis of authority -his resonance with us is a symptom of it.

304.365: My "perfect moral storm" -- 1. Citizenship is a dying art. 2. Many institutions organize irresponsibility. 3. We have evolved as short-term thinkers.

305.365: How can we have a relationship with an impersonal system of life? Here's a place phenomenology finds sense. There are cultural examples of such a relationship -the thing to do is to study them. These examples are not always spiritual either. Aboriginal experience, Native American experience -these are most often cited. But there is also the experience of farmers who appear to develop a relationship out of long sedimented experience interacting with a field and the climate which attends, inhibits, enables it. Here the system of life filters down into the mind, the heart (both, first, in different ways). And it does too for rangers and many outdoorspeople. The system filters down -it is impersonal but is also not inert. One develops a sense of give and take, push and pull, gratitude and respect. There's the idea that we're lucky to be in it, and of limits, too, of how one should be so as bring out the good things in it. And since the system is animate, there's a way to connect, empathize, and in that space all sorts of personifications slip out. In them, we relate.

Here's to focus on materials, the gut-bare fantasy, the orienting

.


(from here)

296 / 365: Manuel Castells also speaks of the "post-industrial", which he positively names as "informationalism" --opposed to "industrialism". His idea is that the Information Age involves a new mode of production -information production, which, in turn, is the major commodity (think of global finance, currency exchange; think of biotech, gentech, etc.), or at least the commodity on the basis of which other commodities circulate (think how global supply chains would fail without real-time information flows through integrated satellite, cellular and telecommunication networks). But his ecological blindness weakens his argument, because the question is how information hardware is produced and what energy powers it, and that is industrial production -cradle to grave- and industrial energy -extractive, non-renewable. The Information Age is materially grounded in industrialism, same as always. The Information Age is late-industrialism, that's all!

297.365: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) is an impressive film, a single, continuous shot of 96 minutes, panning and flowing through a historical dream set at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The cast of 2000 is impressively costumed, most as courtiers or ball-goers, the rest as docents, musicians in formal wear, and only a few as contemporary museum-goers. The dialogue is likewise dream-like and mostly historical, echoing the court of Catherine the Great and other pre-Soviet times. This is a virtuoso film, a single take with flawless costuming and lighting and almost flawless acting on the part of 2000 people. And it evokes extremely well a particular metaphysics of time, of time as flow which cannot be stopped, which continues onward. But it is problematic -a particularly manicured fantasy, an abstraction, not a concretion of history or time. Consider, after a century of Marxist or modernist cinema in a country that wrestled with class and the critique of bourgeois consciousness (which, whether you are leftist or not, is real) -a film about the Hermitage without a single servant! (What servants there are are impressively clad docents and doormen.) This is history in a romantic bubble, and time likewise. All is light and airy except for the bad mood of the central companion, an aesthete diplomat who refuses to leave the 18th century. Time as the concretion of mood is barely understood -of the bad and the good, the troubling and the relieving. History as a struggle for the mass of people is seen not at all. And, similarly, the outdoors -seen at the end as a steaming sea- is practically left out, the bright lights on, the material basis of this society barely seen and never a problem at all. Here class denial, the abstraction that wants light and airy flow (we call it "positivity" now, us New Age-bearing contemporaries) -- these are part and parcel of a world called Denial. And as the old saw goes, Denial is not a river in Egypt for these folk. No, no real rivers are anywhere, no outside home against which we must struggle, just as there is no sweat or oppression in sight. This river of time is an opiate. Unhistorical history, unhuman humanity, wishful --not gut-bare-- fantasy. No different conceptually than the make-up section in a high-end department store.

286-95: Goal: Post-Industrial Society

286 / 365: An odd connection -the University of Albany cancels most of its modern language programs, breaking tenure, and I think about climate change. Surely neurosis is reaching skyward. But: the failing state of a university with the motto "the world within reach" (!) is symptomatic. Of a shattered economy, a state legislature that has become so uneducated it simply does not see the point, and of economism that has driven universities to model themselves increasingly on corporations, hiring top-down managers, leaders who don't understand scholarship, or who don't honor academic process. And climate change? But everywhere we squeeze the durable, long-range and intrinsically valuable things --squeeze them right out of existence. We run the world down.

287 / 365: Could we speak of a virtue of adaptability? This question matters in the context of, not just climate change but, our society's entire movement to a post-industrial age. I would agree with Peter Senge this much, that the material architecture of the industrial world -and the behaviors grown around it- are unsustainable. We simply cannot go on much longer polluting the world and letting our abundance explode as if the Earth is unlimited. A generation, maybe, but not much more -that would be my guess looking at figures for pollution, food production, population, economic expectations --though I am no expert. And if/when -to be logically precise- our fundamental economy changes, the reorganization will be likewise profound, even as it happens piecemeal. And so will behavior that accompanies it. To take an example, people had to adjust to urbanization following the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, and the knock-on effects of growing, massive cities permeated the 19th century to this very day under globalization's massive (truly massive!) centripetal urbanization. What will we have to adjust to in a post-industrial age? In any event, I see no reason to believe the adaptation will be minor or easy. Hence, the idea of the virtue of adaptability. And my question is -can there be such a thing? Or is it a vague place holder for a set of related virtues, such as patience, creativity, ingenuity, Ron Sandler's "reconciliation", and the like?

288 / 365: As our limits arrive, on a quick-speeding plume, rolling over the land, enveloping trees, houses, fields, fences, cars, roads, mailboxes, ditches, porches... I see it in slow motion, this metaphor for our industrial civilization meeting our Earth's limits. ... As our limits arrive, my sense of bedrock personal time has liquefied. Oh yes, my impersonal time is now geological, but my core personal time is no-longer eternal. The core has vaporized. I used to think that to do things well, really well, had on its side a background stability: "this, too, shall pass". But no longer: "the form of the world is passing away". Literally, and with it, my deep personal time is now urgent, a tremor on its liquid face, an eddy of wind blowing away the vapor. To do things right, I no longer have all the time in the world; nor do we. Our limits fast approach, the seasons change, change their *form* -not just their rotation- and I no longer count on the re-assuring, re-appearing Same.

289 / 365: I came of age in academia hearing of this thing, "post-modernism". A strange, amorphous jest, indeed, and -to my mind even after many years- simply without a referent, because the expression is either vague or equivocal. Nonetheless, it dominated academic discourse -as much in reaction to it as in exploration of it. It was a publishing industry. ... However, I think there is a "post" that's worth pursuing, whose referent is clear enough: post-industrial society. And I think we should aim for it, as a normative goal. And I think we will be dealing with it, sooner or later; my descriptive speculation. Our industrial society is kaput. Give it fifty years at most. We'll have to come up with something different -where the biosphere is mimicked, not devoured. And post-industrial society is something all areas of the university can cut teeth on -the applied sciences and the general ones supporting them, the social sciences, humanities... . One thing, however, is not "post" about the post-industrial. It's not post-modern. It's modern. To achieve a post-industrial society will require more self-consciousness and innovation than the human species has ever shown, because we will have to achieve harmony with the biosphere, and we have never been able to do that in all our time as a species. We have always been short-sighted. Post-industrial society, depending on a view of the whole, on integrated knowledge, and on novel forms of social, political, economic, technological and cultural innovation will be full square in the modern, Enlightenment tradition.

290 / 365: I looked for a time yesterday at kids playing in a playground -really looked. Their glee, optimism, life-force. It seemed to me that ethics isn't about argument, then, but about really looking. The abstract numbers tossed around by environmentalists dissipated on the spot, including the dire and cynical world.

291 / 365: Goal: post-industrial society.

292 / 365: And 'post-industrial society' aligns my materialism, too. Marx's materialism always appeared profound to me in its critique of Hegel. Self-consciousness depends so much on the patterns of behavior in which we are locked by incentives and disincentives and in which the objects that build our world are lodged, even trapped -the objects themselves trapping, or at least guiding, the behavior reciprocally. That's economy for you -an unconscious all too often; usually no better than a semi-conscious. Robert Jackall alone has shown this well. ... In such a thicket of heteronomy, where do self-consciousness and autonomy grow? Not just in the idealist groups -the artists and thinkers, the therapists and dreamers- but in the un-construction of an industrial economy, in its energy patterns, patterns of production, guiding metaphors, legal and accountability schemes, in its externalities and internalization (failed) -and in their reconstruction. Their reconstruction, now post-industrial, in bio-mimicry of Earth's biosphere, a low-to-ground, materialist self-awareness serving as a condition on all future autonomy.

293 / 365: I frequently feel the need to gather my time together, my disparate interests, the meanings of the places I've lived, the jobs I've done, and -more importantly, urgently, frequently- the meaning of the relationships I've formed. Each lost friend -most from drift- poses a question in my heart. ... It is not easy to exist within the currency of meaning, where things are eddies that only slow their dissipation. ... And when I feel this or that kind of longing, I often feel split, shaved off, and vulnerable. ... But last night, I began articulating something that's come to mind recently as life has rushed into the breach of its own newness again, and that is to cling faithfully to the fragmentation, to the widening split, until I am as much a witness to my life's meaning as anyone else. This anti-religious faithfulness (anti-religious, because it relinquishes the binding and gathering together of the lost whole) is underneath my sense of being in history now, where, like it or not, I and many of my contemporaries feel charged to produce a post-industrial society for the sake of the next generation.

294/365: As John Ruhl commented, "post-industrial" could connote at least two bad things, (1) a world beyond civilization -think "Mad Max"- or (2) a mind-set that thinks we can develop while eschewing the benefits of industry: "but don't we need industry to make our solar panels, wind-farms, and light rail?" There's a reification here as well as an understandable misunderstanding. The latter is that we think of the word "industry" along with its word family -"industrious", for instance. And industriousness connotes hard work. So "post-industrial" sounds off. But it refers to the Industrial Revolution, which is a very specific form of production. It does not refer to all hard work and invention. That, in turn, leads us to the reification. Our world has equated industrialism with civilization to such an extent that industry has come to be seen as the *only* form of developed production that can sustain civilization. But that is false. There could be other forms of production that would not only sustain civilization but make us *more* civilized. Take cradle to cradle production, for instance, or waste equals food, or non-extractive, renewable energy. Those are not industrial, technically speaking. Then, think of the virtues of industrialism seen as vices and overthrown: think of maximal efficiency without regard to waste as the vice it is and the new virtue as maximal sustainability. Now isn't that more civilized? It's the Industrial Revolution that starts to look like "Mad Max", not its dissolution. After all, both industrialism and Mad Max rely on this principle: if it doesn't work, hit it harder (pour more energy in). Post-industrial society is a society produced non-extractively, sustainably and with a new set of productive virtues and vices. The scales and sources will be different.

295 / 365: There's a deeper point about consciousness here. We need to learn to hear words like "industry" and think straight to the backlife and frontlife they involve. We need to scope them out instantly as forms of production, not as quasi-natural, vague entities that are taken as essential lifeforces. We don't do this with "breathing" (air), for instance. We have biological focus. We breathe; fish don't. We know breathing is just one mode of respiration. So, too, with "industry". It's just one mode of production. And its backlife is: extraction. It's frontlife: waste (that is not designed for re-use; that is not food). There are alternatives to "industry" conceptually, but our industry-dependent culture has yet to imagine them, including their names.

Two eight five. Have I gone amiss from a comment, made much earlier, to this effect: I want the fragment form of these exercises to speak in a voice that's neither poetry nor (academic) philosophy, a maturing voice? "Better count on evolution. / Better way to start a revolution." (Chan Marchand / Cat Power) The fragment form's so powerful -Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Schlegal ... Adorno, Wittgenstein. It's easy, to me, to get sucked into their didacticism. A good didactic fragment's like a jungle gym -you climb around it and pivot your head upside down, hair hanging down, legs locked around a cold and sturdy bar. But the thing's also alienating -the relating pushed off, ironic (necessarily so, Kierkegaard, Schlegel, Adorno would say), the defensives high. The defensives high. Like sea-rise barriers. And I'm thinking there's gentleness in humor, in letting be, that allows a relating-attempt to be non-fantasy, out into the anonymous world, in search of indirect eddies, community. I'm wondering whether that form's the fragment's evolution. I feel like we need what it's about now, need the earnest humbleness of self-organizing community working on a major set of challenges. I'm thinking internal ecology, human ecology, the thing to internalize broken ecologies of the planet.

Two eight four. Be gentle. Then, first, be grateful. Then, first, find acceptance. Here is this beautiful planet, whose life we are destroying. Here is this beautiful planet.