Martin Heidegger Saved My Life by Grant Farred
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unthought Racism

Preparing for a situation or encounter before we are forced to confront it is the role of thought if I read Grant Farred correctly. As he says, “There is a crucial difference between the response produced by thinking and the response devoid of it…” But, as Martin Heidegger pointed out, “We do not know what thinking is.” And yet Farred insists “Martin Heidegger saved me because it is he who makes me, made me, think about what to say before I was called upon to say it.” To think about thinking is indeed a tricky business.

The point of Farred’s essay is to provide a thoughtful explanation of his confrontation with a middle class resident of his prosperous neighbourhood. Seeing Farred raking leaves in his garden, she asks this distinguished professor at a renowned university whether he would like additional work, presumably to do the same in her garden. Central to Farred’s account of this encounter is Heidegger’s concept of the Unthought and its very practical relevance to the issue of race.

What we casually call rational thought is actually a very irrational response grounded in a set of unrecognised and therefore unconsidered presumptions about the world and how it works. Uncovering these presumptions (one can hardly call them interests since they may simply be symptoms of neurosis or ignorance) before an encounter in which they are employed is the function of philosophy as I read Farred. Accordingly, “The only proper political response to the question that is presented without thinking, the question that is rooted in an objectionable politics, is to ‘speak’ thinking. It is to think before, long before, you are called upon to speak.”

The routine racism of the woman’s question to Farred (he a Black man doing manual labour in a well-to-do part of town) is generated by an immense cultural Unthought. Such a condition cannot be penetrated by rationality because it is its own rationality. It is probably not even accessible through psychological therapy since it isn’t bothersome to its ‘bearer.’ An angry or hostile response is only likely to reinforce racial presumptions.

Farred has in fact anticipated the woman’s Unthought. Prepared by his experience in apartheid South Africa as well as the bourgeoise United States, he has thought not only her Unthought but his own long in advance of his encounter with her. Farred recognises the collective characteristic of thought which often pretends to independence: “In thinking we stand, by ourselves, gathered into the thought of others, gathered by the thought of others, gathering others into our thinking. All the while our thoughts seek to gather others unto us.” Thus he is able to make a response which punctures her thinking (and his own), a provocation directed precisely at her Unthought without ever mentioning it. Farred simply replies, “Certainly, as long as you can match my university salary.”

I can’t claim to comprehend the nuances and subtleties of Heideggerian philosophy. Nor have I experienced the pervasive subtlety of racism. But I think I understand Farred’s point. Argument, in any of its forms, is inadequate to change minds. Thoughtful discourse of the kind he reports may indeed be an alternative. Preparing that “statement for the moment” by thinking about thinking could be just the tactic to pursue in combatting racism as well as the many other human ills.

Postscript: As I was reading Farred, this showed up in my newsfeed: https://apple.news/AyIeNoI53TJqOhOwPq...

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The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bloody, Bloody Babel

Silvia Ferrara tells a fascinating story about writing using the device of nine as yet undeciphered scripts of the ancient world. Each of these scripts is fascinating in its own right. And Ferrara recounts what we know about each in a way that is both authoritative and playful. She is clearly a master of her trade and therefore confident enough to be poetic, humorous, and speculatively self-reflective in her exposition of what might be the most creative as well as productive of any human act, the invention of writing.

I can’t tell my agglutinative from my fusionals not to mention from my polysynthetics in linguistics. But I think there is also another story contained within Ferrara’s exposition of the nine scripts more accessible to the linguistic unprofessional. This is a 5000 year saga of linguistic sociology that is much more engrossing than the research results of the various linguists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and practitioners of geodesy and geomatics who are involved in Ferrara’s work.

This other story is somewhat subtly placed but it is there in her book. So her insistence on some established facts - that writing is a collaborative and experimental invention, that it creates enduring (but not all) societies, that it is the fundamental technology of our species which has allowed us to successfully engage in evolutionary competition - isn’t primarily about her trope of undeciphered scripts. Rather, what she shows is that writing is a tool of alienation as well as empathy, a decidedly mixed blessing just as the biblical story of the Tower of Babel suggests.

As I read Ferrara, this paradox of a linguistically generated empathy and alienation is inherent in written language itself. The paradox doesn’t assert itself suddenly but, like the slowly boiling frog, through an incremental process of development (except for Chinese which had the equivalent of the miraculous Virgin Birth in linguistic terms). For her, writing begins with drawing, particularly drawing of the things of everyday life - animals, plants, parts of the body, natural features. These are images that are purely expressive. They may evoke a response in others but their meaning is solely in that response. They are not functionally dissimilar to, for example, the warning call of the blackbird in my garden announcing ‘there are bipeds on the loose in the area.’ Except, of course, that in writing the warning can be communicated without the sound.

From that starting point, again as I read Ferrara, written language binds people together but at the cost of divorcing them from the rest of the world, including other people, and perhaps even themselves. Linguistic signs (hieroglyphs, ideographs, letters) emerge from the shapes of things drawn. In a sense, drawing promotes a sort of identification, perhaps even a spiritual sympathy, with the things depicted. But these innovative written signs ‘stand for’ something other than what they are. They indicate, or denote, or, direct.

That is to say, signs come gradually to exist in their own right - and clearly so, there on rock or papyrus, turtle shells, or in clay tablets. They ease into a new status of icon. Continuing the evolutionary process, the icon is transformed into a logogram. The logogram is a sort of independent icon, a free radical in chemical terms perhaps, which can change its meaning without changing its sound. Logograms attach themselves to other logograms like molecules of hydrogen and oxygen to form the equivalent of water in new linguistic substances. Writing has then become liberated from speaking and an entirely new world is opened up as linguistic ‘things’ proliferate.

Logograms most significantly form into the revolutionary (as well as evolutionary) invention of syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of all language, much like prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics. They can be mixed and matched in any number of ways. They are structured into words (or sometimes combined with pictograms in a sort of rebus) which are then mixed according to emerging rules called grammar. What might have been vocal convention now becomes a linguistic requirement of writing, which, while not entirely fixed, is much slower to change.

Freed from speech, logograms also can have different sounds without changing their meanings, as with many Chinese characters. Or, more problematically, they can retain their links to sounds and have multiple meanings. These are the homophones which exist in abundance in English as well as Chinese. English relies almost solely on context to distinguish meaning while Chinese developed special marks to denote what would be vocally ‘tones’ and so kept writing competitive, as it were, with speaking. And as Ferrara points out: “Using this one, small, versatile unit of meaning [the logogram], we can express two things on completely different ends of the semantic spectrum, and create humor.”

At some point grammar intrudes and provides structure. Written marks with no sound at all, - like the so-called ‘determinants’ which indicate the grammatical class of a word or the tonal designations in Chinese. Cases and declensions emerge directing how words relate to each other rather than to things that are not words. Words are created for things that aren’t even things - emotions, relationships, abstract concepts, God. Each step in the evolution of writing takes it further from the drawing which was a mere appreciative expression of the natural world.

In time, written languages start to breed with each other, as with Sumerian cuneiform and Akkadian script. Most remnants of any original ‘natural’ symbology are obscured or erased entirely (except, once again, in Chinese!). The array of written symbols themselves becomes totally abstract. In many definite ways they become the new nature in which we exist. Is it the laws of society that control us through language, or the laws of written language that controls us through society? It’s hard to tell.

Having become independent of speech, writing became a universal mark of social class and power. Simply being human is the only requirement for speech. Wealth, position, and education are necessary for writing. Nothing about writing is natural. It is the ultimate artifice, the primal human technology. No matter how much writing describes, recounts, or even directs the world, it is not of the world but an entirely human convention about the world to create “An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other.” And many of these fictions are meant to manipulate, constrain, and control.

The undeciphered scripts analysed by Ferrara are actually evidence that we have no certainty about how writing emerged or when. Her story is one of those infinity of fictions which writing itself promotes. And it is a fiction with theological resonance. In addition to being our fundamental technology, written language is also our fundamental religion. It seems to have created itself ex nihilo, out of nothing. We cannot imagine a world without it. It keeps us safe and it oppresses us with complete impunity. It is everywhere simultaneously and at every time and yet nowhere definite and timeless. It is within us, around us, and totally separate from us in the manner of the Christian Trinity. We trust it but we are wary of its capacity to deceive. When we pray, we honour it. When we recite a creed, we extol its power. We worship it through education in the hope of a better, fairer, more peaceful life… or just to survive.

We recognise not language itself but written language as the ultimate source of power. It is the power of contracts, of the design specs for nuclear bombs, of worldwide literary culture. And through science and engineering it is power over the natural world certainly, but also power over each other. Those brought together by language compete against others bound through other languages. Within each language ‘tribe’ we compete for power with each other, mainly the power over language itself in legislation, policy, rules of recognition and advancement. Particularly in democracy, power is sought through the language of persuasion and promise and exercised in written laws, regulations and codes.

The written word has become so dominant that we find it difficult to distinguish it from the natural world at all. The Egyptians scratched out the written names of people and animals on graves and monuments to neutralise their threat. The ancient Chinese created “flash fictions,” prophecies which gained credibility by being carved on turtle shells. Hebrews and Christians published bogus biblical genealogies to establish royal lineages. Isaac Newton devoted as much time to the arcane texts of alchemical magic as he did to his experiments in physics. Randolph Hearst single-handedly sparked the American War against Spain through his newspapers. And, of course, Donald Trump controls the American Republican Party, and Putin the Russian state through patent falsehoods via the internet, written words carried by the technologies built on and by previous written words.

So Ferrara is absolutely correct when she calls writing the greatest invention, or rather inventions since they were discovered independently in probably a half dozen places. Arguably it is written language which is the sine qua non of what we mean by civilisation, the collecting together into cities. And it written language that has enabled empires, industrial progress and vastly increased human numbers and longevity. But it is also written language which may eventually eliminate our species either through mutual self-destruction or the destruction of the minimal conditions for human living. Writing tears us apart as vigorously as it binds us together. Bloody, bloody Babel.

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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Malevolent Grace

Like Moses recounting his own death in the Torah, this memoir is a miracle from beyond the grave. The miracle is only incidentally theological, however, and much more importantly literary. Written by a self-educated descendant of African slaves brought to Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abandon slavery, the book’s wit and style are timeless yet unique.

Brás Cubas is a sardonic sceptic whom it is impossible to dislike. His honesty about himself and his insights about the world around him are witty, comical, and tragic in equal measure. Every institution - the church, civil administration, the military, education, even the family - is corrupt. They persist because of the delusions produced by the one disaster that Pandora did not release from her hand bag - hope.

The book is self-referential in the tradition of Cervantes and Velásquez. It is as ruthlessly doubtful of itself as Montaigne’s Essais; it is often as epigrammatic as Pascale’s Pensées; and as mystically profound as Meister Eckhart. Machado references everybody who’s anybody in the Western literary world from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, and alludes to dozens more. Fortunately Flora Thomson-Deveaux’s translation provides usefully succinct and entertaining notes on everything from currency conversion to contemporary world events to the sources of Machado’s quotes, intentional misquotes and creatively interpretive quotes.

As Thomson-Deveaux says in her Introduction, the book has a “malevolent grace and depth.” It’s humour is continuous but absurd. Machado plays with the reader while entertaining her. But as he says in his own Prologue, he did not write it for the reader but for himself. “[T]he esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, which are the two chief pillars of public opinion,” were of no apparent concern to him. He could offend everyone by laughing at them laughing at him.

A good cause for laughter is precisely how seriously we take the words we use and turn them into ideals toward which to strive. This includes the words Machado himself uses. For Machado the term ‘fixed idea’ is meant to designate our obsession with the symbolic at the cost of living. Brás Cubas dies precisely because he could not shake his obsession with his “pharmaceutical invention,… an anti-hypochondriacal plaster destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity.” But this is only the final stage of a life filled with such compulsive idealism.

What Brás Cubas sought in life was not a better world but a better position in it. He wanted power. As he says, “what drove me most of all was the gratification it would give me to see in newsprint, showcases, pamphlets, on street corners, and finally on the medicine boxes, those four words: The Brás Cubas Plaster.” Isn’t this the universal trap of humanity, power-seeking disguised as humanitarian idealism? We can rationalise any atrocity in the name of social improvement.

In his delirium while dying, Brás Cubas has an important vision of Nature herself who is providing some perspective on the significance of his life. Asking why she wants to kill him since she created him, Nature responds without hesitation, “Because I have no more need of you.” Nature also reminds him of her role in his life: “[F]or I am not only life, I am also death, and you are about to return what I have lent you. For you, great hedonist, there await all the sensual pleasures of nothingness.”

In his vision, Brás Cubas gets to understand why we delude ourselves that it could be otherwise. It is precisely that our idealistic verbiage has got us by the throat because in some mythical pre-history “[Reason] grabbed Folly by the wrists and dragged her outside; then she went in and locked the door. Folly whined a few pleas, snarled a few curses; but she soon resigned herself, stuck out her tongue, and went on her way . . .” This was the original sin passed down since. From its position of complete freedom, Folly formulates the ideals which seem to arrive from nowhere, and thence wreak havoc with our lives and the lives of those around us. Malevolent grace indeed.

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Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy by Jay L. Garfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A World of Pure Particularity

Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism is an extraordinary book in several respects. At a basic level it is an attempt to show the relevance of Buddhist metaphysics to Western philosophical discussion. This it does very well. At another level, it is a demonstration of that same Buddhist metaphysics in practice through its constant emphasis on the power of basic vocabulary, our “cognitive architecture,” to isolate philosophical traditions from each other. And, finally, through its poetic suggestiveness, it makes perhaps the most significant contribution possible to those unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy, namely imagination.

My imagination in particular has been stimulated and provoked in a number of directions while reading the book. But it is the specific problem of universals, a constant theme of European philosophy since the 13th century, for which I find Buddhist metaphysics immediately apt. It is this issue of particulars (I, you, that-over-there, Vladimir Putin) and universals (person, thing, cow, psychopath) which is the inherent subject of the modern philosophy of language, particularly that of Wittgenstein. Most remarkably, Buddhism anticipated Wittgenstein and the Western philosophical turn toward language by several thousand years.

From Garfield I understand that Buddhism cannot be understood as a faith, but is rather constituted as a set of ‘commitments’ which vary among its schools and which have evolved over time. These commitments can be summarised as:

Suffering (dukkha)- as the basic fact of existence - certainly undesirable, it is not associated with evil but with an inaccurate appreciation of reality (the primal confusion). This is the foundation of Buddhist ontology, that is ideas about the nature of being itself.

Impermanence - there is no ‘intrinsic nature’ or essence, to anything. Failure to realise this is the primary cause of suffering. We project properties, including continuity, onto the world as a matter of linguistically enabled cognition. This is the fundamental principle of Buddhist epistemology, the connections between reality and language.

Beneficence - a commitment to the welfare of other sentient beings, who are fellow-sufferers. Buddhist metaphysics implies the necessity for an ethics of empathy.

It is impermanence, I think, which is the pivotal characteristic in Buddhist metaphysics since any lack of appreciation of its importance is the source of both suffering and the lack of empathy. Among other things, impermanence means that there is no ontological foundation. As the American pragmatist, Richard Rorty, said: “Everything is surface, all the way down.” That surface Rorty refers to is language. And as the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, expressed in a way that conforms perfectly with Buddhist thought, “Language about God [the Christian/Western ultimate reality] conceals more than it reveals.”

Buddhists agree with Barth. While language is essential, the best it can supply is some kind of conventional reality in which we live and work together. But language cannot describe or encompass ultimate reality:

“Conventional reality is the everyday world, with its own standards of truth and knowledge—the world of dependently originated phenomena we inhabit. Ultimate reality is emptiness. They sound entirely different. Nāgārjuna argues that they are entirely different, but also that they are identical.”

To appreciate this claim, it is essential to understand that Buddhist philosophy is a “world of pure particularity” That is to say, “Buddhist philosophers regard universals of all kinds as conceptual projections, and as entirely unreal.” Therefore conventional reality is a useful fiction but must never be used as a standard of ultimate truth.

The reason for this is that almost all of language consists of universals which actually have no existential content at all. They are abstractions that make a certain kind of logic (Western) possible but fatally misleading. So says Garfield,

“Buddhist commitments to interdependence and impermanence entail nominalism with respect to universals, and nominalism with respect to universals requires some fancy footwork in semantics and the theory of cognition. Apohais that tango.”

This key concept of apoha has its own complex meaning which is almost impossible to translate but which has a relatively straightforward logic of its own. Take the universal ‘cow.’ There is no such thing as ‘cowness’ which can identify a particular Daisy as a cow. Yet we all agree she’s a cow. In Buddhist philosophy, this feat of perception is not accomplished by reference to some set of properties assigned to the animal in question. Quite the opposite, as Garfield says, “apoha theory is, to a first—and startlingly unilluminating—approximation, that Daisy is not a non-cow. The double negation is the apoha.”

If I understand this correctly, an apoha, as in ‘not a non-cow’, is a particular which is arrived at by a process of rapid elimination of alternatives. This seems to be a sort of double classification, almost a linguistic cross-referencing which combines, for example, Owen Barfield’s beta and alpha-thinking and C.S. Peirce’s Second and Third into a single ‘representational moment’ in cognition. And as Garfield notes, this is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s logic of representation and the prototype categorisation theory of the influential cognitive psychologist, Eleanor Rosch.

The implications of this extreme Buddhist nominalism are wide-ranging. From the philosophy of language to theodicy, it provides an enormous number of possible paths for development. But it also does something else. The ultimate ‘emptiness’ referred to above in the citation from Garfield is a crucial reminder that language is always misleading when discussing reality, including the reality of language itself. Hence the idea of ultimate reality is a linguistic expression which cannot escape this constraint. Emptiness, too, is a universal. Therefore conventional and ultimate reality end up being identical, and identically ‘empty.’

Another way of saying this is that emptiness is a lack of intrinsic nature. But emptiness, like existence, is not a property.* Perhaps, indeed, emptiness is another name for existence, for being, which might well be the inspiration for Heidegger’s idea of language as the House of Being. And as Garfield says, “language—designation—is indispensible for expressing that inexpressible truth. This is not an irrational mysticism, but rather a rational, analytically grounded embrace of inconsistency.” In short: the world of language is paradoxical, get over it!

* Another important implication of the lack of intrinsic properties in reality arises for the theory of measurement. See here for a discussion of what might well be a Buddhist theory of measurement: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Colour-Blind Gospel

Racism is the American Evangelical equivalent of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, only worse because so much more pervasive. Like the scandal of pedophilia, racism has always been a part of institutional Evangelicalism, embedded in their tendentious readings of the Bible and their historical practices. And like pedophilia, racism is considered as an individual sin rather than a systemic evil. And so, like pedophilia, racism can be forgiven rather than corrected. As Anthea Butler says, “Racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism.”

Evangelicals want to make race invisible, both existentially and politically. ‘All Lives Matter’ is the code phrase which summarises the strategy of erasure of race as an issue. The strategy allows evangelicals to ignore their own institutional legacy of racism, the continuing large-scale segregation of their own congregations, and the hurt, violence, and even deaths of people of colour. These are civil matters which are not related to the saving of souls. < blockquote>“[S]in for evangelicals is always personal, not corporate, and God is always available to forgive deserving individuals, especially, it seems, if the sinner is a white man. The sin of racism, too, can be swept away with an event or a confession. Rarely do evangelicals admit to a need for restitution.”

Evangelicalism practices its racism genteelly. In line with the Republican ‘Southern Strategy’, the racial epithets of the past have been replaced by euphemisms. Racial activists are communists, revolutionaries, promoters of civil disorder, un-American, and those who don’t share our Christian values. James Baldwin had it exactly right, white Americans fear their own spiritual impurity and project that fear on to black people as those who embody their own chaotic guilt. They huddle together for comfort under the guise of being an oppressed minority:

“The ubiquitous support demonstrated by white evangelicals for the Republican Party made them not just religiously or culturally white: it made them politically white conservatives in America concerned with keeping the status quo of patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and nationalism.”

The real religious personality behind the cloak of evangelical confidence, respectability, and morality has been self-outed in their support of quite horrible political figures and causes. Their fantasy of Trump as a modern King Cyrus freeing the new Hebrews is only one example. And their persistent resistance to gay and women’s rights, voting rights legislation, voter enrolment programmes, and anti-gerrymandering controls are manifestations of their real objective - not personal sanctity but political power. The evangelical coalition with fundamentalists, among white Protestant sects, and Catholics, show clearly that their dogmatic differences have conveniently evaporated. They are a racially-motivated political not a religious force, the Republican Party at prayer. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic evangelical, laid out the programme as early as 1980:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Racism is not an incidental component of evangelicalism, it is the central plank from which all their other policies emanate. According to Butler “Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism.” It still retains the attitudes of the “Religion of the Lost Cause” that mythical tale of Confederate civilisation in which black people knew their place. Blackness is so obviously inferior it is no longer necessary to debate the point. It is black girls who seek abortions; it is young black males who are the primary danger to law and order; it is black men who suffer from a lack of spiritual manliness; and it is black women who don’t know how to maintain the integrity of family life. Besides, black people in general have an agenda which is politically divisive. Meanwhile, evangelicals claim ‘colour-blindness’:

“[C]olor-blind gospel is how evangelicals used biblical scripture to affirm that everyone, no matter what race, is equal and that race does not matter [just as they had previously used it to justify racial segregation]. The reality of the term ‘color- blind,’ however, was more about making Black and other ethnic evangelicals conform to whiteness and accept white leadership as the norm both religiously and socially. It is the equivalent of today’s oft-quoted phrase ‘I don’t see color.’ Saying that means white is the default color.”

Evangelicals complain of ‘cancel culture’ when it comes to the positive contributions of white folk who, from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, and from George Whitfield to Billy Graham, have tried to minimise the monstrosity of the racism which has lived in the heart of America. That they won’t acknowledge the historical and continuing existence of that monstrosity is the greatest act of such cancellation possible. To use the gospel to promote such an erasure of suffering and injustice is just an additional obscenity added to their large collection.

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