A bit of an odd week for me. I have been writing, but it’s a mess as usual. This really should be a lesson to me to outline much more aggressively. What I’m trying to get to the bottom of, with this latest set of scattered notes, is what people mean when they accuse philosophical ethics of being alienated from everyday life. This is a sort of vague accusation that I’ve heard here and there, and it is obviously true to some extent. I want to clarify, for myself, what people mean by this criticism and what an un-alienated ethics would look like. It’s not a groundbreaking topic, but it’s worth spending some time thinking about.
My reading this week has, luckily, been very fitting for this topic! I made my way through Annette Baier’s Postures of the Mind which is excellent and challenging. I am certainly going to need to read it more than once, because several of the arguments flew right past me. It’s a really brilliant collection of engaged philosophy, though. Baier, I think, shows how technical problems are really and truly connected to our lives. She builds on writers like Wittgenstein and reads the canonical philosophers (particularly Hume) in a really constructive way, without confusing construction for dogmatism.
I found her critique of MacIntyre, in particular, to be very compelling. It tracks at least some of my thoughts as I’ve tried to grapple with him over the past few years.
I’ve also kept up with reading Edmund White. I’d meant to share this last week, but there’ an excerpt from the final chapter of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America that I want to try and keep in mind into the future:
“I remember a professor who came here from the University of Chicago; he tried to get his students to examine a passage from Plato and discuss whether it was true or not. Harvard students were confused. They could relate Plato to Christian thought or contrast him with Aristotle, they could discuss the liberal tradition and so on—but they didn’t want to consider whether what Plato said was true. The emphasis here is on cornering the market on one branch of knowledge—but not on fighting for a cause or taking a stand. That’s why Harvard turns out so many scholars but so few thinkers. This attitude defuses all political programs, including gay liberation. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Harvard. A gay man can find acceptance here; whether he can find self-acceptance is another question.”
One of my problems, I worry, is that I lack that scholastic discipline, but I also lack convictions. It’s very easy to persuade me to believe almost anything.
A handful of things I’ve enjoyed recently, just to round stuff out. I enjoyed the new-ish Tropical Fuck Storm album released earlier this year. You can listen to it here: https://tropicalfstorm.bandcamp.com/album/fairyland-codex.
I also liked the album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse by Wet Kiss. You can find it here. This was the album of the week at fbi radio, who are a really great community radio station in Sydney. They’re apparently running into funding issues at the moment. If you can, send them some money…
And, finally, I liked this excerpt from Brandon Taylor’s substack newsletter from aweek or two ago:
My goal in this post is two-fold: (1) to show people that even if you assume I am some authority who is sanctioned to write about things or ideas or whatever, I am really no different than you. I am amateur. You too can write about ideas. You too can learn about things that interest you. Or things that you find confusing. You can find out about them. You totally should. However works for you. PDFs. Video. Audio. A book. Many libraries have these wonderful reference guides and sometimes they even host talks. Community centers sometimes have resources for this sort of thing. You don’t have to be an expert in order to begin learning about something. Sometimes all you need is a web browser and Jstor. (2) I would like to encourage people to do that reading. If you think you have a thesis, a kind of fuzzy idea. Read two articles that prove you have an idea and try to find an article that proves you don’t. And then try to make sense of it.
I like the ‘simplicity’ of this approach. This is something that I find I often forget how to do, honestly. Research is something that’s often relatively simple, and you just need to remind yourself what the small steps you can take to do it properly are sometimes.