Werner Herzog on Avatar
“Die ZEIT: Ist die ekstatische Wahrheit letztlich ein religiöser Begriff?
Herzog: Ja, so etwas gibt es da auch, etwa bei spätmittelalterlichen Mystikern. Ich will aber weg vom Religiösen, Mystischen, weil Sie dann ganz schnell ins trübe Wasser von New Age geraten, was die Krönung aller Abscheulichkeiten ist, die Sie sich im geistigen Bereich vorstellen können. Man begegnet dem übrigens auch in einem Film wie Avatar.
ZEIT: Das ist nun mal ein New-Age-Kinomärchen.
Herzog: Was mich daran stört, ist diese Romantisierung oder Idolisierung von Natur, die der Film betreibt. Das ist ein neuer Paganismus, der da gefeiert wird und bei dem ich Knoten in meinen Eingeweiden bekomme, wenn ich nur dran denke.”
The Postgraduate
Beneath the headline that education cuts in the UK will cost thousands of jobs was another attention-grabbing line: ‘postgraduates will replace Professors’. Anyone who studies or works in a UK university will know that this has already been happening for years anyway. Given that a fightback to these proposed cuts is in everyone’s interests it is important that postgraduates recognise their own role in education struggles. And here one must acknowledge how tempting it is for postgraduate students – up to their eyeballs in debt and hoping to forge a tenured career – to accept every offer of academic teaching and the status which goes with it, even when they know it is a form of hyperexploitation and not so much an honour as an expediency. This however is highly short-sighted. If you are a postgraduate who is offered such work think very carefully about whether it is actually in your or the long-term interest of the university to accept it. In the UK think about joining the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU). Tell your fellow postgraduates about it too. It would cost you only a couple of pounds a month and would allow you to take strike action to resist these cuts, resist being used as mere reserve army of labour, and also ensure jobs for your future.
Between the Walls
Entre les murs comes highly recommended. I come down on the side which says the teacher made a mistake, but I wonder what others think. Also recommended is a BBC programme called The Virtual Revolution, which says in a more long-winded way (and with pretty pictures) the point I made a while ago about the internet as double-edged sword. Finally an interesting piece about Coleridge, uncovering the real man behind the Ancient Mariner. Apart from that, been too busy with work to surf or write. Thanks, though, to Mark Woods who has sent a lot of traffic this way. It’s always an honour to be noticed by the quality bloggers.
From Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)
With the tremendous acceleration of life, we grow accustomed to using our mind and eye for seeing and judging incompletely or incorrectly, and all men are like travellers who get to know a land and its people from the train. An independent and cautious scientific attitude is almost thought to be a kind of madness: the free spirit is brought into disrepute, particularly by scholars who miss their own thoroughness and antlike industry in his talent for observation, and would gladly confine him to a single corner of science…. Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar. An indication that esteem for the meditative life has decreased is that scholars today compete with active men in a kind of hasty enjoyment, so that they seem to value this kind of enjoying more than the kind that actually befits them and, in fact, offers much more enjoyment. Scholars are ashamed of otium.
Zoon Politikon
When reading about the opening of Aristotle’s Politics one comes across the following assertion frighteningly often: the definition the Philosopher gave of man, the political animal “excluded women and slaves from politics”. The very familiarity of this charge can make one forget that it is neither what Aristotle said nor intended. As is undisputed, Aristotle said that humans are the zoon politikon: they are distinguished by reasoned speech (logos) and a moral sense of right and wrong, just and unjust, which other animals, for all their gregariousness and cooperation, do not share (I leave aside the question exercising many a zoophile mind today – minds which seem to take Timothy Taylor’s parody (see below) in earnest – as to whether animals and things are actually the more wronged by Aristotle’s definition). Yet for Aristotle being a political animal is not the same as being a citizen, and it was from citizenship that women and slaves were excluded in his time. A citizen (politēs) is a subset of humans (zoon politikon); whether one is a citizen or not Aristotle says will depend on the polity of which one is a member, the particular rights ascribed by particular constitutions; he is explicit that an individual who in one polity counts as a citizen, may in another not (1275a2). It is here that the exclusion from politics of women and slaves is relevant, a historical fact rather than something inherent in Aristotle’s definition or something condoned.
From Timothy Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792)
[p. 9] It appears at first sight somewhat singular, that a moral truth of the highest importance, and most illustrious evidence, should have been utterly unknown to the ancients, and not yet fully perceived, and universally acknowledged, even in such an enlightened age as the present. [p. 10] The truth I allude to is, the equality of all things, with respect to their intrinsic and real dignity and worth. But indeed, a little consideration will soon enable us to account for the ignorance of mankind in this interesting particular; and will teach us, that it solely arises from those baneful habits of perverse reasoning, which have from time to time immemorial taken root in the minds of men, and have at last sunk so deep, as to render their final and general extirpation, an immensely laborious, if not a ridiculous, attempt.
I perceive however, with no small delight, that this sublime doctrine is daily gaining ground amongst the thinking part of mankind. Mr. Payne has already [p. 11] convinced thousands of the equality of men to each other; and Mrs Wollstonecraft has indisputably proved, that women are in every respect naturally equal to men, not only in mental abilities, but likewise in bodily strength, boldness, and the like.
But all this, however, is only an approximation to the great truth, which this Essay is designed to promulgate and prove, that there is no such thing in the universe, as superiority of nature … and that any thing, when minutely and accurately examined, however vile and contemptible it may falsely appear, will be found to be of inestimable value, and intrinsically [p. 12] equal to a thing of the greatest magnitude and worth.
[p. 13] On comparing the nature of a lion with that of a man, we find that bodily strength is the apparent characteristic of the one, and reason of the other. I say apparent; for, as will shortly be proved, brutes possess reason in common with men, though not in quite so exquisite a degree; and hence, the deficiency of reason, combined with superiority of strength, renders the lion an animal equally excellent with man; in like manner, the swiftness of the hare united with hare-like reason, puts the hare upon an equality both with the lion and the man; the advantages of flying in a bird, united with the reason of a bird; the subtilty [sic] of spinning in a spider, with spider-like reason; and the microscopic eye of a [p. 14] fly, with the reason of a fly, will severally be found to be equal to each other, and of equal dignity with the reason and bodily advantages of man.
[p. 18] But as our more immediate business at present is with brutes, and their rights, in order to accomplish in a becoming manner this arduous investigation, I shall prove, in the first place, that they are rational beings, as well as men; and in the second place, I shall enumerate some out of the numberless advantages which would arise from endeavouring to understand the language of brutes, and restoring them to their natural equality with mankind. At the same time, I would with the Reader to take notice, that whatever is here [p. 19] asserted of brutes, is no less applicable to vegetables, and even minerals themselves; for it is an ancient opinion, that all things are endued [sic] with sense; and this doctrine is very acutely defended by Campanella, in his Treatise De Sensu Rerum, et MagiaDe Sensu Rerum, et Magia On the sense of things and magic, and is indeed the natural result of that most sublime and comprehensive theory, which is the basis of the present work. So that there is some reason to hope, that this Essay will soon be followed by treatises on the rights of vegetables and minerals, composed by persons of far greater abilities than I possess; that thus, the doctrine of perfect equality will become universal; dominion of every kind be exiled from the face of the earth; and that beautiful period be realized, which at [p. 20] present is believed to exist only in fable, when
‘Man walk’d with beast joint tenant of the shade.’
It is a true and opinion, that every soul participating sense and memory is rational, and is endued with speech as [p. 21] well internal as external, by means of which, animals apparently irrational confer with each other. But that the words they employ for this purpose should not be distinguished by us, is not to be wondered at, if we consider, that the discourse of many Barbarians is unintelligible to us, and that they appear to make use of indistinct vociferation, rather than rational speech. Besides, if antiquity is to be believed, and the testimony of those who existed in our time, and that of our ancestors, there are some who have affirmed themselves capable of hearing and understanding the speech of animals …
[p. 103] And thus much may suffice, for an historical proof, that brutes are equal to men. It only now remains (and this must be the province of some abler hand) to demonstrate the same great truth in a similar manner, of vegetables, minerals, and even the most apparently contemptible clod of earth.
The Philosopher’s Haiti
Along with the Mike Davis (excellent, by the way), I very belatedly (it was published in 2000) got round to reading Susan-Buck Morss’s essay ‘Hegel and Haiti’ (available through the usual sources). This is also well worth a read. And I see no strong reason why her thesis can’t be true, that Hegel’s ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’ was inspired in part by the revolution in Saint-Domingue occuring whilst Hegel was writing the Phenomenology. Pretty strong evidence is adduced by Buck-Morss via details of the political journal Minerva, which Hegel read, and which was covering the uprising for a European audience. With this interpretation Buck-Morss seeks to ‘rescue’ this famous theme in Hegel from being solely philosophical (though in criticism I’d say it’s undeniable that Hegel did have Aristotle, Hobbes and Fichte also in mind when writing it; philosophy and politics were inextricable for him) and in so doing radicalises our picture of Hegel, who is now seen to treat an empirical event which for all their humanitarianism few other Aufklaerer touched. For Buck-Morss the dialectic of Master and Slave needs to be rescued from the appearance of concerning only feudal social relations and seen as a critique of the enslavement of Africans which had created the very ‘wealth of nations’ which the Aufklaerer now enjoyed. It should be said that such a particular inspiration, if true, would not detract from the wider resonance, a relevance to any relation of dependence and independence which Hegel clearly intended, and this is no doubt the enduring appeal of the passage. Again one could criticise Buck-Morss for downplaying precedents for the critique of slavery amongst les Lumières themselves – her reading of Rousseau’s silence on the Code Noir is unsympathetic, as she herself acknowledges. In Rousseau’s defence the point of asserting freedom as a universal right was that the reader would see the injustice of particular unfreedoms; these didn’t need to be named. It was arguably the very generality of Rousseau’s claims which made them incendiary – they could be applied to any form of inequality, whether in Old Europe or the New World. These fine points aside, I think Buck-Morss’s thesis holds much water.
Who Will Build the Ark?
“In the first section, ‘Pessimism of the Intellect’, I adduce arguments for believing that we have already lost the first, epochal stage of the battle against global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, in the smug but sadly accurate words of one of its chief opponents, has done ‘nothing measurable’ about climate change. Global carbon dioxide emissions rose by the same amount they were supposed to fall because of it. It is highly unlikely that greenhouse gas accumulation can be stabilized this side of the famous ‘red line’ of 450 ppm by 2020. If this is the case, the most heroic efforts of our children’s generation will be unable to forestall a radical reshaping of ecologies, water resources and agricultural systems. In a warmer world, moreover, socio-economic inequality will have a meteorological mandate, and there will be little incentive for the rich northern hemisphere countries, whose carbon emissions have destroyed the climate equilibrium of the Holocene, to share resources for adaptation with those poor subtropical countries most vulnerable to droughts and floods.
The second part of the essay, ‘Optimism of the Imagination’, is my self-rebuttal. I appeal to the paradox that the single most important cause of global warming—the urbanization of humanity—is also potentially the principal solution to the problem of human survival in the later twenty-first century. Left to the dismal politics of the present, of course, cities of poverty will almost certainly become the coffins of hope; but all the more reason that we must start thinking like Noah. Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias.”
Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’, New Left Review 61, Jan-Feb 2010
Smile
“’Elitists’ are those whose thought is abstract because it is concerned with the deadly abstractions which dominate our lives”. Bravo.
Just as laughable (or irresponsible) as the charge of “elitism” is the charge of “negativity”: apparently there are too many people going around critiquing “whatever one might critique”, too many professional snipers, or, one suspects, too many politicised philosophers.
Could it perhaps be that these politicised philosophers see something you don’t, that philosophy was always linked to the good life, and that the good life is sorely absent? In a world gone awry positivity can no longer be approached immediately, with naivety; it emerges if at all in what is unsaid in critique. Critique itself does no more than attest to the contradiction, the illusions in what is. Approached immediately the positive courts reaction, and affirmation lends a semblance of legitimacy to injustice. It was no coincidence that Nietzsche championed affirmation but wilfully rejected democracy and socialism. He who “cautiously adapts to this world by this very act shares in its madness”, Adorno once wrote. To those who have an inkling of the “a priori pain” (Sloterdijk) which critical theory articulates, affirmation and positivity always smack of the luxurious, the deck-chair rearranging, the smile which is now paid for with your coffee.
leave a comment