conversations

Heidegger, Mindfulness, war

It is interesting to read this review of Heidegger's Mindfulness (Besinnung) by Miguel de Beistegui in the context of Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron.

de Beistegui says that Mindfulness (see § 10) provides a very clear description of the situation of Germany, and Europe in general, in 1938-1939: according to Heidegger, world-events unfold against the backdrop of the "military thinking that comes from the [first] World War" and "the unconditionality of armament." Yet these are only manifestations of the "completion of the metaphysical epoch," which has turned the human into a technical (and technicised) animal, and a predator (a Worker-Warrior). It is possible to reconnect this time to the 'war on terror' today, with its strong emphasis on military thinking and warriors.

de Beistegui adds for Heidgger in the late 1930s:

The War and the Peace of our time are two sides of the same coin, two possibilities that arise from the same onto-historical configuration, and which fail to bring us face to face with what's really decisive. The real decision, according to Heidegger, is whether we, as human beings, will continue to think our relation to the world, the earth, and others (whether in war or in peace) metaphysically (and this means as a situation in which the human, as worker and predator, is the central concern, as a situation that witnesses the convergence of power, violence, technics, and worldview), or whether we will be able to open ourselves to the essence and truth of this metaphysical situation, and this means to the essence and truth of be-ing itself, in which man can finally come into his own (and which, as we'll see shortly, implicates a unity of war and peace of a different kind, a very specific harmony between opposites engaged in a constant strife).

Heidegger's Mindfulness

In this review of Heidegger's Mindfulness (Besinnung) Miguel de Beistegui states that the text is the second of a series of seven books written between 1936 and 1944, and published posthumously in the third section of the Gesamtausgabe entitled "Private Monographs and Lectures." All those books are specifically and intimately connected with the first and most important of the series, Contributions to Philosophy: On Ereignis, written between 1936-38 and published as volume 65 of the Complete Works.

de Beistegui says that part of the Mindfulness text gives us valuable indications and clarifications regarding Heidegger's earlier work, and Being and Time especially.

Being and Time is neither an anthropology, focused on the analysis of man as Dasein, nor a metaphysics, focused on the investigation regarding the beingness of beings. Besinnung goes further still in that direction: the human being is no longer the origin of the meaning or the truth of being, as was the case in the period of fundamental ontology, but only one of the four "poles" in the tense or strifely relation of which nature and history become manifest and unfold.

de Beistegui adds:

By the same token, this development signals a further move away from philosophy as anthropocentrism: "man" is not the measure of all things nor, as Sartre famously claimed, and Heidegger will go on to criticise in the Letter on Humanism, the only plane on which we find ourselves. The humanity of the humanity is rather derived from its position and role within "the fourfold" (men, gods, earth, and world). The technological age is the age of the ultimate abandonment of the truth of being, which translates into the triumph of the human as the sole point of reference, or the standard by which everything else is measured.

The Mindfullness text belongs in the "crossing" into the other beginning inasmuch as it tries to dislodge the human from its central position -- one that Heidegger believes to be destructive, for the human itself as well as for the world -- and to open it up, historically and existentially, to its forgotten essence.

Besinnung or Mindfulness approximates in English to what Heidegger regards as the very unfolding of being-historical thinking: an inquiry into the self-disclosure of being and differs from reflection since the latter belongs to the domain of a thinking that is not being-historical. The translators say that the word 'mindfulness' has a pliability that is denied to reflection -- a pliability that does not let mindfulness become rigid and unyielding and end up in doctrines, systems, and so forth.

image as capital

In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 Frederic Jameson interprets the visual, or the "image" in Guy Debord's sense of "the final form of commodity reification" as follows:

The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it, that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological maneuver and not a creative resource.

I would like to explore this by turning to Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist analysis of cinema as a mode of production in what many call “post-industrial” capitalism. Beller's argument is that cinematic images are not just representations of capital, but that they actually are capital.

I have briefly looked at the Introduction to the Cinematic Mode of Production over at junk for code (here and here) but the text deserves a closer look in terms of the subject

re-considering postmodernism

The term 'postmodernism' implies some rearrangement of features and some shift in presuppositions and procedures in the visual and verbal culture of the past thirty years. This turn has to do with modernism—with turning it, or turning it against itself, or turning away from it in some way. Many see this turning in a negative way, as a turning away from they---as modernists---hold most dear. In defending the sweet dream of rationality (universal reason) they forget the nightmare vision of the iron cage.

We can interpret Fredric Jameson's "intervention" in the "postmodern debate" as a way of avoiding what has been foreclosed by the phrase "po mo." Jameson effectively transformed what had been a number of diverse usages into a set of issues over which debate then became possible.

In The Origins of Postmodernity (1998) Perry Anderson had argued that Jameson enabled this by making five moves:
1) posing pomo as not a "mere aesthetic break or epistemological shift,"but nothing less than "the cultural logic of late capitalism";

2) an evocation of the new psychic Lebenswelt--the boredom, the "waning of affect"--concomitant with the achieved hegemony of consumerism;

3) a conspectus of the cultural surround embracing specialized discourses on pomo that had theretofore remained
discrete (literature, architecture, philosophy, science), and extending further to several in which it had not yet played much of a role (film and media, postcolonial studies);

4) a consideration of the social effects ("dedifferentiation," bourgeoisification of the proletariat and vice versa, "identity" politics displacing those of class) of the shift from production to service and information economies; and

5) "Jameson's final move a wholesale removal of the discussion from the plane of mere opinion and facilefor-and-against "debate" on which figures such as Habermas had left it: before Jameson, postmodernism was the stuff either of jeremiads or panegyrics; since, it has become a key to allmythologies, an ideology of ideologies, but also the theorization that newly enabled their comprehensive critique as well.

television as image management

In this brief article in New Left Review T.J. Clarke reminds us that Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:

was not a book that proposed a periodization of capitalism. It deliberately did not say when ‘the spectacle’ arrived. The spectacle was a logic and an instrumentation inherent in the commodity economy, and in certain of its social accompaniments, from the very beginning. No doubt that logic became clearer as the instrumentation became more efficient and widespread—why else the peculiar mixture of lucidity and desperation to Debord’s very tone? But the logic had always been relatively clear, and the instrumentation notable—in a sense, pervasive.

Clarke says that the arrival of the society of the spectacle the colonization of everyday life. Television is the key technology here in this matrix of the new apparatus of symbol management, and self-management via the symbol.

Clarke adds that:

‘Image’, ‘body’, ‘landscape’, ‘machine’—these (and other) key terms of modernism’s opposing language are robbed of their criticality by the sheer rapidity of their circulation in the new image-circuits, and the ability of those circuits to blur distinctions, to flatten and derealize, to turn every idea or delight or horror into a fifteen-second vignette.

Strauss + Levinas

Though Strauss and Levinas originated intellectually from the same place---Heidegger---they went in very different directions, and they made very different assessments of modernity. According to this review of Leora Batnitzky's Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Strauss argued for the following:

1. Judaism and philosophy are based on irreconcilably opposite "attitudes" since the former requires absolute obedience to revealed law, whereas the latter represents the "unending quest for the nature of the good" (p. 5). If this is true, any attempt at reconciling Judaism and philosophy fails either as Judaism or as philosophy, and possibly represents neither.

2. Modern philosophy represents an internalization of the medieval, Thomistic coordination of philosophy and revelation, attributing to this new philosophy qualities derived from revelation. This secularization of philosophy constitutes a bastardization of both philosophy and revelation and it is based on medieval Christian metaphysics. As law, and as opposed to philosophy in the classical (pre-scholastic) sense, Judaism (or, as Batnitzky puts it, Jewish revelation) remains, or ought to remain, aloof from both the medieval and the modern forms of Christian thought.

3. The amalgamation of biblical faith and philosophical metaphysics characteristic of modern philosophy has imbued philosophy with unrealizable salvific qualities on the historical and political plane.

Levinas, in contrast, was an example of modern philosophy. Batnitzky holds that Levinas is committed to a thoroughly modern philosophical project that comes with all the problems diagnosed by Strauss.

revaluing the humanites #2

As blogging will be light for the next few days, as I am off on a five day holiday to Kangaroo Island. I've linked to this discussion at Culture Machine between Simon Morgan Wortham and Christopher Fynsk about Christopher Fynsk's The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities I posted on this book here.

I thought that this material is dense enough to take a few days to work through. Some background material is Samuel Weber's The Future of the Humanities and The Future Campus.

The discussion initially takes up Fynsk's the counter-institutional ‘possibility’ which arises in the name or on the grounds of the humanities. Wortham says that this calls to mind Sam Weber’s powerful critique of Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, and perhaps helps us to move ahead in its terms. He says that in his essay ‘The Future of the University’, Weber takes a close look at the way in which Readings presents the concept and practice of corporate-style ‘excellence’ as a characterising feature of contemporary academic institutions. As Readings puts it, in a passage quoted by Weber in his own essay,

the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has lost all content. As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information. (1996: 39).

Wortham says that Weber detects a problem here. The ‘self-reflection’ implied in the movement and measure of excellence—albeit of an apparently extreme technocratic and bureaucratic kind—constitutes a certain sort of reference? Perhaps even the very kind of self-reference found in that which inaugurates Enlightenment thought, rather than in a 'post-historical' present to which the Enlightenment tradition is irretrievably lost?

Wortham says thatWeber goes so far as to tie the formation of 'excellence' described by Readings to the determination of the Cartesian cogito itself, thereby suggesting that the supposedly 'posthistorical', 'dereferentialised' university which emerges from the pages of The University in Ruins in fact repeats and reinscribes longstanding formations, modes and processes of knowledge, representation, reference and self-identity.

On Weber’s view, then, it is as though Readings, in the very attempt to apprehend what is distinctive about the contemporary university (i.e. its ‘excellence’), nevertheless unwittingly repeats a longstanding tendency to view the university as an institution that is essentially self-grounded and self-contained. Far from exposing and confirming the radical transformations to which academic institutions have been exposed and which they have undergone in recent times, Readings might therefore actually be seen to resort to habitual thinking as a defence against the violent shock of change.

This critique allows Weber to suggest that Readings’ analysis (which he views as resting on an idea of the pure self-reference of the contemporary university) in fact fails to take into account the complex play of virtualisation which constitutes contemporary reality in the world today—a play (or, indeed, an economy) in which dynamic relations of spatio-temporal dislocation fundamentally rule out ‘self-contained realms or fields’.

early analytic ethics

The traditional accounts of John Maynard Keynes downplay connection between Keynes's philosophy and his economics. This is reversed in The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, which links economic theory to economic policy and philosophy. Keynes held that capitalism was the system most likely to sustain the ‘actual life’ of basic economic existence as well as the one most apt to create an adequate surplus for sustaining the ethical life based on Moore's ends of art and friendship.

In this review by Tarja Knuuttila we find an interesting account of early analytic ethics that makes sense of its underlying conservatism. Knuuttila says in one of the essays by Tiziano Raffaelli entitled "Keynes and philosophers" Raffaelli links Keynes back to G. E. Moore, who tried to move beyond the simple calculus of utilitarianism.

Moore had argued in Principia Ethica (1903) that virtually all previous ethical theories have been erroneously based upon the fallacy that there is some thing in the world (e.g. utility) that always entails the good. In place of this view, Moore argues that good is an indefinable entity that cannot always be attached to some thing in the world. Utility may be good, or it may be bad. Only good is always good.

Knuuttila says that Raffaelli:

remarks how Moorian supreme values of love and beauty influenced Keynes's conception of economics as only instrumental to the good life. Keynes was, however, also critical towards Moore, whose conservative conclusion that right action would consist in obeying the customary norms led Keynes to write A Treatise on Probability (1921), which is the other major book of his along with The General Theory. Moore argued, to Keynes's dissatisfaction, that knowledge is never complete enough to guarantee the good results of actions, and that resorting to probability does not change the situation, thus making customary rules of conduct the best option. Yet the probability-relation proposed by Keynes falls back on Moore's (and the early twentieth-century Cambridge's) "naïve epistemology" since Keynes claims that probabilistic knowledge rests on "direct acquaintance" with probability-relations. Consequently, the probability-relation was for Keynes the same kind of unanalyzable notion as good was for Moore.

So we live our live according to customary rules of conduct in liberal society. It is not very persuasive for leading a virtuous life in a consumer society. May '69 stands as a rejection of that kind of liberalism.

philosophical aesthetics: a critique

In his review of Michael Kelly's Iconoclasm and Aesthetics J.M. Bernstein says that Kelly contends that iconoclasm - understood as a "combination of disinterest and distrust in art that stems from a tendency to inscribe a deficiency into the very conception (or ontology) of art" - is a pervasive effect of the way in which even philosophers apparently sympathetic to art conceptualize it. Bernstein adds:

Hence, the way in which Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, and Danto are interested in art turns into a systematic and corrosive disinterest. More precisely, the philosophical interest in the universality of art - interest in its truth or essence or meaning or transcendental conditioning or definition - becomes for these philosophers constitutive of art, overwhelming other considerations and leading them to abstract art from its historical condition. But insofar as art is conditioned by its historical particularity, then to abstract art from those conditions is equivalent to disinterest in art. Iconoclasm, then, is the upshot of a systematic dehistoricizing of art in the name of a putative universality the philosopher brings to his encounter with art.

Adorno systematically dehistoricizes art in the name of a putative universality? That bought me up short. So did Kelly's claim that Adorno is disinterested in art. I thought that high modernist art was extremely important for Adorno.

Kelly pointedly triangulates each philosopher with both an artist and an art critic or historian in order to demonstrate exactly how a philosophical interest can reveal itself, in a concrete and specific instance, as disinterest, which can thus stand for the iconoclasm of that position generally.Bernstein says that:

More tendentiously, Kelly construes Benjamin Buchloh's famous 1986 interview with Gerhard Richter as a dialogue between an Adornoian theorist and a skeptical practitioner, with Richter parrying each of Buchloh's extreme analyses of his paintings (as end-of-art anti-paintings) with quiet demurs and denials.

Buchloh instead of Adorno? Painting instead of music? That's strange. An odd way of arguing.

Bernstein rightly comments that Buchloh's ascription of a systematically negative practice of painting to Richter cannot easily be aligned with the Adorno of Aesthetic Theory since there, as everywhere, negation dialectically turns into affirmation, art's materialist promise of happiness.

So whats going on here?

Bernstein says that Kelly's argument about philosophy's iconoclasm as a refinement and extension of Danto's idea that every encounter between art and philosophy becomes a philosophical disenfranchisement of art, and that indeed historically philosophy has assured itself of its authority through its dissolution of the authority of art. Philosophical universalism comes to trump artistic particularity. However I agree with Bernstein when he says that the above philosophers turn:

to art precisely because it represents something that is constitutively deficient, that is, finite, sensuous, material, non-self-sufficient, ephemeral, opaque, mortal, indeterminate. Where Kelly sees the inscription of a deficiency to be overcome, I see the deficiency itself as the attraction, as what is to be affirmed: art stands for precisely what traditionally and dominantly philosophy has sought to repudiate, and hence the transformation of philosophy can best occur by the theoretical appreciation of art and the assimilation, as appropriate, of philosophy to art.

For Adorno, an authentic artwork lodges for what is irreducibly sensuously particular and expresses what has been expelled from the precincts of enlightened rationality and capital/technology/rationalized society.For Adorno philosophy and art stand respectively for a reified universality and a blinded sensuous particularity that have become reified and blinded because of their separation; hence philosophy's abstractions require the corrections of art's concretions, whilst the artwork's blindness requires the refinements of conceptual reflection.

Romanticism: distortions

So this is where the entrenched view that the Romantics were anti-enlightenment came from--Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.According to this review by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert. Isaiah Berlin says that Romanticism represented not only a transformation of values, but a rupture with the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and objectivity. Millán-Zaibert states:

Berlin’s lectures perpetuate the myth that Romanticism is basically an anti-Enlightenment movement, it must be so because it is an anti-rational movement, and, as we all know, the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason, and any movement that renounces reason would also renounce the Enlightenment.....Berlin continues with his insistence that to be romantic was to be against reason, to embrace the irrational desires of humans rather than the rational explanations of the scientists ... The roots of Romanticism are those of irrationalism, anti-rationalism, unconscious drives, the dark forces of human nature ....Berlin portrays the Romantics as a group of thinkers lost in swells of passion and a will guided by nothing more than the indulgences and excesses of the individual creative spirit, thinkers bent on a path of the destruction of reason and science.

This view was deeply held by analytic philosophers, where rationality is associates with the theoretical, the scientific, the deductive and the certain; romanticism with narrative, rhetoric, the historically situated and the emotions. Romanticism makes the shift to aesthetic reason and the ethical in the nineteenth century.

Millán-Zaibert states that of all of the features presented in Berlin’s portrait of Romanticism, it is the passionate embrace of the self-creating will that is pivotal for the development of what Berlin claims were the two prominent consequences of Romanticism: existentialism and fascism. According to Berlin, existentialism is rooted in the turn toward the inward aspects of human life. This shift, argues Berlin, could not have taken place without the transformation of values carried out by the Romantics. While the Romantics assault reason, they also clear a space for a deeper look at the inward aspects of human life. Fascism joins the romantic clan "because of the notion of the unpredictable will either of a man or of a group, which forges forward in some fashion that is impossible to organize, impossible to predict, impossible to rationalize" .

Simplifying this we can say that f the heartbeat of philosophy is the separation of appearance from reality, and if the lifeblood of art is interrogation of the world of appearances and philosophjy is concerned with reality, then philosophy will approach art with the severest mistrust - either denying the legitimacy of art's adherence to mere appearings or, turning art against itself, showing that the appearances point to a reality separate from themselves after all.

revaluing the humanities

In his review of Christopher Fynsk's The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities in Rhizomes Jonathan Glover asks a good question:

In a university system based on “excellence,” a mere codeword for corporate utility, how can the humanities (with their troubling moral, ethical, political, and philosophical questions—questions that never bode well for the ethics of rabid business expansion and capital accumulation) exist in anything other than a position of unpopular antagonism? Consequently, in this atmosphere of compulsory “excellence,” devaluing and disempowering the humanities becomes nothing more than good business practice.

Fynsk's text, which argues for the importance of humanities research in an era of globalization and technical reason, returns to Bill Readings argument in The University in Ruins that the ‘idea of culture’ on which the modern research university was founded has given way to a notion of ‘excellence’ that lacks any referent beyond technocratic standards of productivity and market performance”. Hence the the precarious position of the humanities under a neo-liberal mode of governance.

In response to the university in postmodern liberal society being shaped by the technical imperatives of capital Fynsk calls for a revitalization of the humanities. Fair enough. How so? In what way? Isn't the erosion of financial and administrative support for the humanities an effect of the academy’s technocratization?

The general story of the humanities’ decline:is that it is caused by globalization, the advent of so-called ‘late’ capitalism and the readjustment of the labour market; the advance of technics and technical instrumentality on a worldwide scale; the intensifying commercialization of higher learning and the rise of institutional discourses, programs and practices tied to the notion of ‘excellence’; the changing meanings and values of nationhood, culture and the subject, and so forth.

Surprisingly, Fynsk's case for the humanities places the failure of the humanities to emerge legitimized and ready to do the good work of sociocultural reflection on the doorstep of critical theory. Glover says that:

what Fynsk really seems to take issue with is the misuse or abuse of theory, what might be considered “bad theory” or “poor reading.” In light of his argument for the humanities as a powerful tool for ethico-political reflection, the implication of Fynsk’s argument appears to be that bad theory—those overly abstract theoretical approaches he alludes to — endanger the humanistic enterprise by politicizing theory and forsaking research in the humanities to ideological — liberal, libertarian, multicultural— imperatives. Fynsk may refrain from citing specific theoretical abuses in an attempt to spare legitimate theory-driven political activism from undue censure, but ultimately his argument pays the price for this discretion.

Not again. Not another anti-theory text given the “end of philosophy”. Glover says that

Fynsk will... finely elucidate the power of the humanities to challenge and undercut the eclipse of “excellence.” It is at this point, perhaps, that the Granel material would be most useful as further evidence of how the humanities can help stall the downward plunge of the university into a multinational trade school/manufacturing complex.

That's a start I guess. But it doesn't take us much beyond Bill Readings or Derrida's argument in ‘The University Without Condition’, that the humanities are a way to think the question of the university’s future in a neo-liberal world.

Putnam: undermining fact /value

I remember reading Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other essays and thinking that finally we have an analytic philosopher critically engaging with one of the deepseated dogma's of analytic philosophy that has its roots in the texts of David Hume.

This dogma holds that the objectivity of scientific investigation is to be paradigmatic of a rational methodology and that it was not influenced by the caprice of subjective values. It is broadly held. Max Weber Weber in making a distinction between facts and values, contended that there is no rational way of arbitrating between values and therefore, that there is no solution to the problem of practical judgment.

As Thomas Keith points out in this review review of Putnam's text, what Putnam calls the “Final Dogma of Empiricism,” is one whereby philosophers of language and science have attempted to expunge values from the hallowed ground of scientific investigation and logic. Keith says:

Putnam argues that value judgments creep into our preferences for one scientific view over another when we attempt to determine why one view is more reasonable than another. We are typically offered, as a response, the claim that views must be adjudicated on the basis of their plausibility, coherence, or simplicity. Putnam, however, argues that such “standards” of objectivity are themselves infused with value preferences.

Epistemic values are also values. When we decide that judgments must be coherent, plausible, reasonable, and simple, we are drawing normative judgments about how we ought to reason.

death of a culture

In his review of Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, which is analysis of what is involved when a culture dies, Charles Taylor says that:

A culture's disappearing means that a people's situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can't draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, "the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."

This is what happened to Australian aborigines---their culture died. Taylor says that one of the great contributions of Jonathan Lear's book is to articulate clearly and concisely what it really means:

The issue is that the Crow have lost the concepts with which they would construct a narrative. This is a real loss, not just one that is described from a certain point of view. It is the real loss of a point of view.... The very physical movements that, at an earlier time, would have constituted a brave act of counting coups are now a somewhat pathetic expression of nostalgia.

The text goes beyond simply describing a state of despair and describing the consequences of closing down a culture.

These consequences are well known: widespread demoralization, abuse of alcohol and drugs, domestic violence, and children who drop out of school, perpetuating the pattern in the next generation. Many well-meaning (and sometimes not so well-meaning) interventions from governments, such as setting up poorly run reservations, seem just to have made the situation worse. It has been difficult to break the cycle of apathy, despair, and self-destructive behavior, and this induces further apathy and despair. What way out of this impasse is suggested by Lear?

The suggestion Taylor makes is that this would require finding something in one's own culture or tradition that would enable one to draw new meaning from old definitions that are no longer appropriate.

J.S. Mill + aesthetic education

In Australia John Stuart Mill is best know for his essays on liberty and his utilitarian ethics in which right and wrong action is determined by the principle of utility. Running through Mill's work is a concern about the kinds of lives we should lead--experiments in living--- and the kinds of dispositions---character---we should strive to develop.

This reviewHenry R. West of Colin Heydt's Rethinking Mill's Ethics: Character and Aesthetic Education highlights the role of aesthetics:

Heydt claims that a stimulus for Mill's focus on aesthetic education was his concern about the tendency of industrialism and urbanization to homogenize culture and to alienate people from one another. Another stimulus was his reaction to his own education, which focused so much on intellectual development that it ignored the development of emotions. Mill concluded that a broader education was necessary for a sense of fulfillment in life. And in his critique of his education, he came to the conclusion that a utilitarian should not focus exclusively on the ultimate goal of happiness but on other goals with happiness achieved as a by-product.

The overall theme of the book is Mill's theories of aesthetics and aesthetic education broadly conceived.

The concept of aesthetic education is commonly associated with Schiller's Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, (1794) which was a response to Kant’s theories about the nature of aesthetic experience and its relation to moral freedom. Schiller’s basic idea is that, rightly understood, aesthetic experience is not a matter of merely private taste or feeling but has a civilizing function as well.

The argument is that we find ourselves torn between conflicting impulses, between reason and desire, duty and inclination, our purposes as individuals and as members of a community. Modernity, Schiller argued, exacerbates those conflicts. The progress of science has encouraged our analytical powers at the expense of our sensuous powers, whilst the demands of specialization make it increasingly difficult to achieve a sense of wholeness in life. The aesthetic encouraging the “enlarged mode of thought” that Kant spoke of, and aesthetic experience promises to heal these rifts and provide a vision of wholeness.

This text championing of the humanizing power of aesthetic experience influenced John Ruskin and then J.S. Mill. If we come back to Mill, West says that:

Heydt claims that Mill's later aesthetic views, although not sharing the metaphysical and theological components of Ruskin's theory, reflected these points. For Mill, in this later theory, the experience of beauty takes us outside of ordinary life, connecting us to ideals, and the culture of the individual -- our ennoblement -- depends upon our rising above known reality. Heydt ties these views in with Mill's conception of life as art. Life is not something merely to be enjoyed, but is capable of different kinds of perfection.

I guess we have the roots of social liberalism's ethical development, the separation of art from industry and commercialism, linking aesthetic to beauty etc.

Levinas, Heidegger, dwelling

David Gauthier says that his doctorate, entitled Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Politics of Dwelling, will consider:

the German philosopher’s attempted philosophical homecoming from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’s pointed critique of Heidegger’s place-bound view of human existence. Taking aim at the ontological, anti-humanistic, and pagan elements of Heidegger’s thought, Levinas posits an alternative that is ethical in emphasis, humanistic in thrust, and transcendent in scope. Supplementing and correcting Heidegger’s homecoming ethos with a philosophy that stresses hospitality (l’hospitalité) towards the Other (autrui), Levinas suggests that our ethical responsibility for the stranger, widow, and orphan supercedes our attachment to place.

Place has never had that much resonance in the Australian academy outside of environmental philosophy. It is our ethical relation to the Other that has taken grip.

sex crimes + perversion

I understand this event to signify a shift away from this kind of activity:

Garland, Kids Stuff

In the above story a female teenager was brutally raped by a gang of boys who filmed the scene on their mobile phones, then sent the footage to school friends at a private school and posted on the internet. The category here is 'perversion', which is understood to combine feelings of revenge, triumph and control. In the psychoanalytic account of perversion these feelings are understood as a defence against experiencing trauma and helplessness.

It's what you 's see on free-to air television --say Law and Order Special Victims Unit, which is concerned with crimes involving sexual assault.

The explanation for perversion on Law and Order is a conservative one---primal biological instincts.It is the medical-legal view of perversion, whose history is a moralism with respect to sexuality, a desire for social control over sexuality, a schema of the fragile population and the "dangerous population" , and a process where society condemns the criminal himself – “pervert” – and instead of punishing the act, criminalizes a person or a category of the population. The focus is changing from criminal acts to the definition of dangerous individuals.

Foucualt says :

what is emerging is a new penal system, a new legislative system, whose function is not so much to punish offenses against these general laws concerning decency, as to protect populations and parts of populations regarded as particularly vulnerable. In other words, the legislator will not justify the measures that he is proposing by saying: the universal decency of mankind must be defended. What he will say is: there are people for whom others' sexuality may become a permanent danger. In this catagory, of course, are children, who may find themselves at the mercy of an adult sexuality that is alien to them and may well be harmful to them. Hence there is a legislation that appeals to this notion of a vulnerable population, a "high-risk population,"as they say, and to a whole body of psychiatric and psychological knowledge imbibed from psychoanalysis - it doesn't really matter whether the psychoanalysis is good or bad -

ethics: a note

Zygmunt Bauman in Alone Again Ethics After Certainty published by Demos

To put it in a nutshell: the chance of counteracting the present pressures towards draining intimate and public life of ethical motives and moral evaluations depends at the same time on more autonomy for individual moral selves and more vigorous sharing of collective responsibilities. In terms of the orthodox ‘state vs. individual’ dilemma, this is clearly a contradiction and promoting it seems like an effort to square the circle.(p.35)

That's rather paradoxical.

gnawing loneliness

A quote from Michael Schluter and David Lee's The R Factor:

We wear privacy like a pressure suit. Given half the chance we’ll stuff the seat next to ours in a café with raincoats and umbrellas, stare unremittingly at posters about measles in a doctor’s waiting room… Anything but invite encounter; anything but get involved… (T)he home itself has grown lean and mean, wider families being broken up into nuclear and single-parent units where the individual’s desires and interests characteristically take precedence over those of the group. Unable to stop treading on each other’s toes in the mega-community, we have stepped into our separate houses and closed the door, and then stepped into our separate rooms and closed the door. The home becomes a multipurpose leisure centre where household members can live, as it were, separately side by side. Not just the gas industry but life in general has been privatised.

It's a bleak paragraph. But everyday life has become increasingly privatised in a shifting, drifting world where communal ties tear and break and common interests fade into the background. It is impossible to shake of the sense of gnawing loneliness. We sense a lack, an absence, an emptiness in our everyday lives.

For many it is back to the family. But the processes of privatisation reach deep into the heart of family life.

ethics in a fragmentary world of flows

We live increasingly under conditions of globally and systemically engendered insecurity and uncertainty where the the emphasis is on consumer freedom and individual responsibility in a postmodern world of fluid and fragmentary social bonds and individual identity. Does this suggest a new ethical landscape in which we live?

In some ways yes. Postmodern life has become privatised in the sense of our everyday lives and concerns making us more concerned with our own space and less willing to make commitments. Privatisation in a consumer society means the escape from the constraints and bonds of community. So ethics increasingly rests with the individual with his or her choices rather than the old certainties of yesteryear.

Zygmunt Bauman takes up these themes in Alone Again Ethics After Certainty published by Demos

He makes these comments about bureaucracy and business in modernity:

Bureaucracy strangles or criminalises moral impulses,while business merely pushes them aside. Horrified by the totalitarian tendencies Horrified by the totalitarian tendencies ingrained in every bureaucracy, Orwell sounded an alarm against the prospect of ‘the boot eternally trampling a human face’. An apt metaphor for the business variety of morality-bashing would be perhaps ‘the blinkers eternally preventing the human face from being seen’. The short-term consequences for people exposed to one or the other of the two strategies may be starkly different, yet the long-term results are quite similar: taking moral issues off the agenda, sapping the moral autonomy of the acting subject, undermining the principle of moral responsibility for the effects, however distant and indirect, of one’s deeds. Neither modern. organization nor modern business promotes morality; if anything, they make the life of a stubbornly moral person tough and unrewarding. (p.16)

In other words, no one else but the moral person themselves must take responsibility for their own moral responsibility. However, there is discontinuity and change in our everyday life and we experience the world as a collection of
fragments and episodes, with one image chasing away and replacing the one before, only to be replaced itself moments later.