Two Discoveries, by Kevin O’Neill, MOSTLY (NOT) ON MCSWEENEY’S! blog, July 21, 2009

In addition to the discovery of Little Tiny’s Book of Objects (1880) and discussion of Victorian style in relation to McSweeney’s, there is a discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Congress”, and I am cited:

The problem in “The Congress” is that the society which the narrator was involved in grows to become too similar to the world. Its leader disbands it upon making this realisation.

Ralph Dumain explains this well:

The Congress of the World tends to an infinite regress of representation; it is impossible to duplicate the world in all its detail and interrelationships, and approaching this limit constitutes a menace. Bosteels asserts that Borges begins many of his stories with a utopian premise, that when carried to its logical conclusion, bears completely opposite results from those anticipated.

The nauseation continues, this time in a major reference tool, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to wit:

Chinese philosophy by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames

This site http://texttribe.com no longer exists. The Wayback Machine captured only 7 pages, not this one.

However, Routledge itself offers for free its article on Chinese philosophy:

HALL, DAVID L. and ROGER T. AMES (1998). Chinese philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved December 29, 2011, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G001

I assume, then, that this is the same thing. See also:

AMES, ROGER T. (1998). East Asian philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved December 29, 2011, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G218

Hall and Ames, whom I have blogged about numerous times, are deplorable examples of the toxic combination of legitimate scholarship and ideological mystification.

In the article on Chinese philosophy, the authors emphasize and attempt to explain the alleged historic Chinese indifference to abstract cosmological speculation and logical argument. The see Chinese philosophy as overwhelmingly concrete and practical and obsessed with social harmony as opposed to the quest for truth. The propensity towards the harmonization of differences is exemplified, so the authors claim, in the Neoconfucian synthesis of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. The authors contrast Chinese and Western conceptions of order, claiming that Chinese philosophy is oriented toward ‘the art of contextualizing’ and ‘correlative thinking’. Science and objective knowledge take a back seat to social relations. If Plato defines Western philosophy, ‘all of Chinese thinking is a series of commentaries on Confucius‘.

In the section on Confucianism, the whitewashing of Chinese history becomes more evident. For example:

Excellence or virtue (de) achieved by members of the community empowers them as likely models of propriety for succeeding generations. Because the authority of community so constructed is internal to it, the community is self-regulating, dependent for its effectiveness upon authoritative leaders rather than the application of some external apparatus such as law and punishment.

And:

The distinction between a society of principles and a society shaped by models of propriety helps us to understand the distinctly ‘aesthetic’ quality of Confucian morality.

And:

The failure to understand the aesthetic character of Confucian ethics has reinforced the tendency for Western philosophers to understand Confucian ritualization (li) as the imposition of external guides to conduct, mere forms imposed upon one from outside. Hegel’s depiction of China as a culture without Geist in his Philosophy of History is representative of interpretations by the best minds of Europe and America. This truncated reading has in turn perpetuated the stereotypical opinion of Confucius as a purveyor of trite moral truisms, rather than as a founder of a social order which, by its dependence upon the sort of balanced complexity associated with aesthetic creations, has lasted longer than any other on the face of the planet.

The dishonest and propagandistic apologia presented here is truly brazen, as if the sanitized self-conception of ideologists explained the real character of a society. This nonsense could only have passed without scorn on account of a century or more of retooling and reframing Eastern philosophy for Western consumption.

The section on Philosophical Daoism adds little understanding. The section on The ‘Hundred Schools’ is unwittingly humorous:

Granted the disposition on the part of the Chinese to promote a harmonious narrative of China’s cultural development, a closer look at the actual events yields a slightly greater sense of conflict.

A hilarious understatement. The authors ponder why the logical methods developed by Mohism and the School of Names did not prevail. Their explanation is in the absence of urbanization and the presence of a common written language as the engine of the civilizing process. Again, we see the germ of a social analysis cut short by arbitrary presumptions.

You can see how their historical analysis plays out in subsequent sections: 7 Xunxi and rationalized Confucianism, 8 First millennium syncretism, 9 Neo-Confucianism: Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. In this last period, Chinese metaphysics reaches its apogee. But the trend towards abstraction, which one is tempted to think retrospectively alarms the authors (threatening the ‘art of context’), does not last. They conclude:

Historically, the speculative, cosmological turn in Chinese philosophy came under formidable attack with the founding of the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century. Evidential research (kaozhengxue) brought with it an attempt to get behind the ‘empty’ commentaries of neo-Confucianism and a return to the philologically-centered historical scholarship of ‘Han learning’ (Hanxue). On the premise that new problems require new solutions, the abstract theorizing and universalistic tendencies of Song–Ming ‘dao learning’ gave way to the analysis of particular historical events and cultural artifacts as a resource for finding answers to the specific issues of the day. Thinkers such as Wang Fuzhi and Dai Zhen recovered and reaffirmed the correlative and interdependent relationship between historical event and the principles of order. Once again, it can be seen how the pragmatic concerns of most Chinese intellectuals militate against the exercise of philosophical speculations that move too far afield from the concrete problems of human beings, or which could conceivably serve to introduce contentiousness among intellectuals.

Finally, we come to The modern period. Here we find the Western influences of Russell, Dewey, and Marxism. But lest we think that Marxism westernized Chinese thought:

The Chinese transformation of Marxist into Maoist thinking in contemporary China reveals the inertia of Chinese tradition. The single most distinctive change that Mao made to Marxism was a commitment to particularity and site-specificity.

Contemporary China retains its original Confucian contours. The authors’ conclusion more than confirms their wholly reactionary perspective:

As a ritually-constituted society, without grounding in the objective principles associated with reason or natural law, contemporary China is defined by the exemplars of its tradition. The members of the society are themselves possessed of their ‘humanity’ not as a gift from God or a common genetic inheritance, but as created by ritual enactment. The Chinese have no inalienable rights. Citizens have been deemed to possess only those rights granted by China’s various constitutions. The Chinese would see the Enlightenment insistence upon the universality of certain values and principles as an instance of ethnocentric dogmatism. Chinese ethnocentrism is, perhaps, more consistent than its Western counterpart since it is grounded in the self-conscious insistence upon the centrality of its peculiar ethos, defined by racial and linguistic identity.

China remains a culture grounded in the model of the family which cultivates filial dependency. Thus, the Chinese have no means of cultivating that ‘healthy suspicion’ of governmental power which we take for granted without undermining the community of affect that binds ruler and people. As a rational means of organizing social and economic interactions, the technology so prized in the West cannot but erode the ritual grounding of interpersonal relationships. One of the catchwords of the Tiananmen protests in 1989 was ‘democracy’. But, in a society where individualism remains a symptom of selfishness and license, and freedom of speech must be qualified by the Confucian understanding that not only saying but thinking involves a disposition to act, Chinese democracy must certainly take on an unfamiliar form. Indeed, the inhibition of individualism and freedom of speech is not a modern invention of Chinese communists but a persistent feature of a Confucian society in which ideas are always dispositions to act.

One can hardly look closely at the intellectual culture of contemporary China without coming to respect the power of China’s traditions. The intransigent sense of ‘Chineseness’ which coalesced in the Han dynasty continues to determine the shape of Chinese intellectual culture. For good or ill, the Chinese remain the people of the Han.

Not only has Marxism, even in its degenerate Maoist configuration, been defanged, but the ruthless, repressive state capitalist regime of the present has been whitewashed.

One will have to go elsewhere to find the evidences of how seriously contentious and unharmonious ideas in the history of China have been, and to find serious ideology critique and sociohistorical analysis. A serious historical sociology of philosophy would at least begin with the attempt to correlate the nearest equivalent of what we call ‘philosophy’ with the state of scientific and technical knowledge and the social organization of the time.  China was, until the scientific revolution in the West ultimately leaped ahead, the world’s most advanced scientific and technological civilization. How do logic, mathematics, science and philosophy relate to one another in this scenario, especially considering the marked differences from Western development? How are these relationships undergirded by the structures of social institutions and communication? The authors,  emphasizing harmony, apparently are not impressed by the history of warfare, exploitation, and class conflict endemic to China. In this they are entirely consistent with the historically dishonest retooling of ‘Eastern philosophy’ for Western consumption.

The authors glamorize the worst tendencies of Chinese philosophy, but even with its serious limitations, it is not as horrendous as this general portrayal unwittingly makes it out to be. These authors, like so many of their predecessors, deploy the duplicitous comfort language of ‘harmony, ‘stability’, and ‘context’ to cosmeticize the repugnant, oppressive, and ideologically bankrupt.

Leibniz (entry in old blog)

. . . in reference to this book written for a popular audience:

Stewart, Matthew. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York: Norton, 2006.

Stewart highlights Leibniz’ fascination with Spinoza and the decisive challenge he presented. Now Brandon C. Look has taken up this topic:

Brandon C. Look (forthcoming). Existence, Essence, Et Expression: Leibniz Sur ‘Toutes les Absurdités du Dieu de Spinoza’. In Pierre-Francois Moreau & Mogens Laerke (eds.), Spinoza et Leibniz.

That Leibniz finds the philosophy of Spinoza horrifyingly wrong is obvious to anyone who reads Leibniz’s work; that Leibniz finds Spinozism so seductive that his own system is in danger of collapsing into it is less obvious but, I believe, equally true. The difference here is not so much between an exoteric and an esoteric philosophy suggested by Russell2 but between a thorough-going rationalism on the part of Spinoza and Leibniz’s “mitigated rationalism” – mitigated by the exigencies of his orthodox Christianity. In other words, it is Leibniz’s traditional view of the nature of God and his creatures that leads him to abhor Spinoza’s vision, while his own commitment to a number of principles and ideas pushes him to rationalism. And if Kant is right that the mind naturally desires a system, then Leibniz ought to see the Spinozistic consequences of many of his philosophical principles. Of course, there is nothing new in saying that the God of Spinoza and the God of Leibniz are fundamentally different, but I believe that if we focus on Leibniz’s critique of Spinoza’s account of the nature of God and a constellation of related concepts, we can come to a deeper understanding of the thought of both philosophers.

I guess I’m ultimately to blame for this by having uploaded  Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth, which is volume 1 of  the trilogy Dialectical Materialism: An Introduction.

Nobody should have to read this old diamat stuff anymore. You’ll get a lot more out of Cornforth’s critiques of positivism, pragmatism, linguistic philosophy, and Popper:

Science versus Idealism: In Defence of Philosophy against Positivism and Pragmatism

Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy

The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A Reply to Dr. Karl Popper’s Refutations of Marxism

But if you must read Cornforth’s primer, all three volumes are available at leninist.biz:

Volume 1: Materialism and the Dialectical Method

Volume 2: Historical Materialism

Volume 3: The Theory of Knowledge

On my web site you will find some more pieces by Cornforth, as well as links to writings about him. I uploaded this particular book not because I like it, but because it is a piece of intellectual history. As I’ve indicated, Cornforth’s books criticizing various idealist and other bourgeois philosophical trends are far more worthwhile.

Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence [v. 2]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Wright, Richard. Haiku: This Other World; edited and with notes and afterword by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener; introduction by Julia Wright. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998.

Bradley, Adam. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From “Invisible Man” to “Three Days Before the Shooting”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. viii, 244 pp. (See previous post for commentary)

Authority, Culture, and Communication: The Sociology of Ernest Manheim, edited by Frank Baron, David Norman Smith, and Charles Reitz. Heidelberg: Publishers, 2005.

Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation, from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. New York: Harper San Francisco, 2003.

Wright, Richard. The Outsider (1953). Restored text: Works. Volume 2. Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger); The Outsider. New York: Library of America, 1991. (The Library of America; no. 56)

Watson, Ben.  Honesty is Explosive!: Selected Music Journalism, edited by W.C. Bamberger. Borgo Press, 2000.

Piaget, Jean, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy, translated from the French by Wolfe Mays. New York: World Publishing Company, 1971.

Colebrook, Claire. Irony in the Work of Philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Watson, Ben.  Adorno for Revolutionaries. London: Unkant Publishers, 2011.

Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, edited by Morris B. Storer. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1980. (Book available online for Questia subscribers.)

Tolerance and Revolution: A Marxist-non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue, edited by Paul Kurtz and Svetozar Stojanović. Beograd: Philosophical Society of Serbia, 1970.

D’Angelo, Edward. The Teaching of Critical Thinking. Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1971. (Philosophical Currents; vol. 1)

Sviták, Ivan. Man and his World: A Marxian View; translated by Jarmila Veltrusky. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970.

Rational Radicalism and Political Theory: Essays in Honor of Stephen Eric Bronner; edited by Michael J. Thompson. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.

Bronner, Stephen Eric. Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. (I am listed in the bibliography.)

In 1999, an abbreviated selection from Ralph Ellison’s notoriously unfinished second novel was published. [1] Last year, a more extensive version, based on the entire extant corpus, was published, co-edited by Bradley and Callahan. [2] In this book Bradley analyzes Ellison’s writing process, also addressing the much-discussed question of why Ellison could never finish his second novel. Bradley traces Ellison’s process in reverse chronological order, covering the writing of the second novel, Invisible Man, and selected other writings. The contents are as follows:

Introduction 1993
Part I
Chapter 1: 1982
Chapter 2: 1970
Chapter 3: 1955
Part II
Chapter 4: 1952
Chapter 5: 1950
Chapter 6: 1945
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Here are the notes I took on the Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2, the Conclusion and the Bibliography. Page numbers are in parentheses.

Ellison noted the fast-changing American culture while working on the second novel (13). Rampersad gives it short shrift in his biography (15). Ellison’s intensive engagement with personal computers is important. Also, he aimed to sum up what the nation was about (16).

Chapter 1: 1982:

Ellison bought an Osborne portable personal computer in 1982 and did his writing on computers until 30 December 1993. This was a quantum leap in the compositional process. Bradley compares Juneteenth to the fuller version of the second novel he co-edited (31). The digital age proved to be a two-edged sword (34). Ellison is compared to Henry Roth.

Examination of the computer files shows that Ellison was not significantly advancing: his priorities were weird. He squandered his time on making endless inconsequential revisions while neglecting to ties the pieces of his narrative together (36). Bradley discusses the writing process fostered by Ellison’s use of WordStar (38). Ellison returned to much earlier drafts, which were far less developed than what ended up in Juneteenth. Bradley discusses why the character Hickman matters (51ff). Ellison lost his mastery of the writing process (53). The computer, which allows more radically greater flexibility than the typewriter, has drawbacks: flow isn’t everything; in fact, it inhibited definitive, finalized revision (55).

Chapter 2: 1970

Ellison was under siege in the heat of the black power movement. Ernest Kaiser in Black World accused Ellison of being an Uncle Tom, an accusation thrown at Ellison over and over (57). Larry Neal trashed Ellison in 1969, recanted a few years later (59). In the corridors of power, Nixon turned his back on the social amelioration set in motion by Lyndon Johnson. Moynihan’s notorious formulation of “benign neglect” bolstered this policy (63 ff).

At this moment Time Magazine solicited Ellison’s article “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” Black Americans are too defining of and embedded in American culture for either segregation or separatism to be viable, racism be damned. Black people are the quintessence of the American Dream.

Various incidents of that time period are cited. A hostile letter from an avowed white racist and Ellison’s tongue-in-cheek response are documented (72). Clifford Mason in Life magazine argued for the superiority of Richard Wright over Ellison (74), to which Ellison issued a rejoinder (76-77). Ellison rejected oversimplification and compartmentalization of the black experience (78). Ellison had been in political hot water for some time, for example, for his refusal to boycott LBJ in 1965 over the Vietnam War (80). Ellison delineated his own social role as a writer, which he maintained did not involve instrumental politics. In a radio interview in 1970, Ellison argued for the superior vantage point of Black America (83). Ellison was both a race man and an emphatic American.

Ellison was attacked by the left, and was the object of co-optation by the right (85-86). In the early 1970s Ellison reached the height of his vigor in working on his second novel.

In a note written in 1975 on the back of a course listing, Ellison claims that prior to the 1960s blacks lived by the principles of religion and aesthetics; in the 1960s a reduced vision took hold (87-88).

Here I must object that Bradley’s treatment of Ellison is overly idealized. You will get a very different picture of Ellison’s behavior from Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Bradley engages in some overblown platitudinous rhetoric all too characteristic of Ellison’s apologists.

I have yet to engage chapters 3-6 spanning the years 1945-1955. I don’t think this would change my overall picture of the controversial issues, because Ellison could not be counted out of touch with the times in that period. Bradley notes a key passage in the second novel that went through significant rephrasing between the time that Black Americans were “Negroes” and when they had become “black”. Yet we don’t learn much of the specifics of radical cultural change since the 1960s of which Ellison presumably took cognizance.

Conclusion 2010

Toni Morrison’s criticism of Ellison’s self-entrapment is cited. Several explanations have been offered for Ellison’s inability to complete his second novel. Bradley reiterates that Ellison was interested in summing up the American experience. Podhoretz wryly notes that Ellison was psychologically dominated by the example of Faulkner (211-212). Nevertheless, Ellison’s computer files remain valuable even if the writing is weaker.

At the time of his last writing, 30 December 1993, Ellison claimed to be near completion of the novel. He was wrong. He left behind no instructions as to what should be done with the drafts.

Here are some noteworthy authors in the bibliography: Baker, Baldwin, Baraka and Neal, Bentsen, Timothy Brennan, Burke, Callahan, Jacqueline Covo, Beth Eddy, Barbara Foley, Gates, Michael S. Harper, Michael D. and Lena M. Hill, Posnock (Cambridge Companion), Jerry Watts.

My conclusions

I have stated my general misgiving above. Bradley’s account of Ellison’s writing process and progress is valuable. He cites other writings by Ellison and correlates his overall concerns with the times. It should be glaringly obvious that, since Ellison’s practical engagement with the cutting edge of the American experience ceased at the very moment of his stardom, more critical scrutiny is needed as to just how Ellison could sum up the American experience after the American experience left him behind, for better or worse. To be sure, his general model of the American experience inflected by the place of Black Americans in it could offer some perspective, and could remain to some degree relevant in contrast to the simplistic mentality of the Black Arts Movement, but the two massive cultural/generational shifts that have transpired in the past six decades have rendered not just Ellison’s generation a relic but the baby boomers as well. Surely by the mid-1980s it should have sunk in that the old symbolic models of (black) American culture could not fit the present. At that juncture, advertisements for the blues aesthetic, jazz as the essence of democracy, etc. have passed beyond real history into the realm of propagandistic metaphysics. Consider the progression Ralph Ellison → Albert Murray → Stanley Crouch → Wynton Marsalis and the ultimate sterility and obfuscation on board this train at the end of the line.

It is not really Bradley’s responsibility to answer to these larger cultural questions, given his focus on Ellison’s compositional process. Bradley’s plumping for Ellison is far too abstract. Let’s see what we can learn about Ellison’s ongoing imaginative life from the posthumous publication of his manuscripts.

[1] Ellison, Ralph. Juneteenth: A Novel; edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1999. Publisher description. Sample text.

[2] Ellison, Ralph. Three Days Before the Shooting . . .; edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley. New York: Modern Library, 2010. Publisher description. Sample text.

The Archive of Lost Dreams

The amazing underwater National Marine Park of Yucatan is the subject of . . .

What Lies Beneath…

. . . Jan. 24 post in Linda Hedrick’s marvelous blog Cerebral Boinkfest.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist singling out an artwork about archivists. As Linda describes it:

El Coleccionista de los Sueños Perdidos (The Archive of Lost Dreams) is another of the installations. This unusual depiction is of a male archivist who tends the archives of messages in bottles. According to the artist the archivist is cataloging and sorting the bottles into categories:  fear, hope, loss, or belonging.  Communities from a wide variety of cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds were invited to provide the messages in an attempt to document their values and hopes for future generations.

Margaret Burroughs: Co-founder of DuSable Museum, prominent artist
By Kristen Schorsch, Chicago Tribune

“She started Chicago’s renowned African American history museum in her living room nearly 50 years ago”

Commemorating another milestone in black achievement and saying farewell to one of the greats . . .

Anarchists are much more childish than games will ever be.

Nevertheless, because one of my hobbies is board games, I picked up issue 66 of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, devoted to ‘anarchist games’.

First, here are sources available from the magazine’s web site:

Soma – An anarchist play therapy

Kriegspiel: Anarchist war gaming (blog)

Next, these are the other relevant articles in this issue:

“Debord’s Kriegspiel in Historical Perspective” by Simurgh, pp. 32-41.

“A Funny Thought on a New Way to Play” by Alejandro de Acosta, pp. 48-57.

“Anarchy Eights: A Crazy Card Games for Two or More Players” by Lawrence, pp. 62-64.

“Anarchy & Strategy: Unconventional War” by Aragorn!, pp. 69-70.

Peter Manicas: Selected Published Papers

Now here is the link to the paper originally referenced for this post:

Review of David Hall and Roger Ames, Democracy of the Dead (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), Metaphilosophy Vol 30, No. 4 (October 1999)

To give the gist of what this book is about, let me quote from the first paragraph of the review:

The main claim is that there are resources in Chinese Confucianism for a version of democracy which, seen through the eyes of Dewey, has a potential for China, and which, concurrently, could serve well in a much needed civilizational conversation. Fans and critics of both Dewey and of Confucianism will need to listen closely to what Hall and Ames have to say, especially if, as with the present reviewer, there is a pre-disposition to think that “Confucian democracy” is a contradiction in terms, the title of Chapter 8 and the problem of the four chapters of Part IV, “The Democracy of the Dead.” This neat idea was inspired by Chesterson’s remark that “tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. ” Indeed, for Hall and Ames, it is the “ironic genius of history” that “China is in many ways closer to Dewey’s communitarian ideal of democracy than his own native land” (166). Of course, since this is a relative matter, even if true, our hopes may not be encouraged. But Parts I-III, essential to the plausibility of the argument of Part IV, also have independent merit, worthy in their own right.

Manicas is an intelligent man, but he should have been much more skeptical and much less respectful. If anything, his summary reveals the utter bankruptcy of Hall & Ames and the intellectually dishonest appropriation of Chinese philosophy in the West (which is now colluding with the dishonesty on the part of contemporary Chinese philosophers). The brazen idealism and sophistry of the philosophical argument should make one’s jaw drop open.

Read my previous posts on Chinese philosophy for my view of the ideological bankruptcy of the whole field.