Two Ways of Thinking About the Blindingly Apparent

This title indicates slippage, an aporia. It would seem to point to a kind of irreconcilable contradiction in terms, much like if I wrote, "Two ways to think about the wheel in pre-Columbian civilization." The wheel, of course, didn't exist in pre-Columbian civilizations (by "pre-Columbian" I mean those Central and South Americans civilizations before the European Conquest). So, there's only one way to think about the wheel this context: not to think about the wheel at all.

Perhaps you can see the analogy.

One key aspect of the "apparent" is that it is, well, apparent. It is obvious; it doesn't need any explanation or interpretation. There's only one way to think about the “apparent”: the way it is, the way it appears to us.

Listen to the etymological overtones: "appear" comes from the Latin verb apparere, which simply means "to become manifest," "to become visible," or "to come to presence." This last rendering is the most important. That which appears is that which "comes to presence" or "is presented." Listen, also, to the three meanings hidden in "present." (1) It refers to that which is "present" (i.e., not absent). (2) It refers to "presenting" in the active sense (e.g., "I present this certificate to you..."). (3) It has the sense of a "gift" (as when we say "Christmas presents"). These senses are no doubt related. And here the Germans do a better job than the English. In German, the English existential phrase "There is..." becomes "Es gibt...": literally, "It gives...". So, when we say, "There is a present under the tree," a German would say, "Es gibt ein Geshenck unter dem Baum": "It gives a gift under the tree" or "It presents a present under the tree." We lose the connection between the verbal "to present" and the nominal "present" where the Germans do not.

Taken together, these three meanings of "present" amount to something like this: "The present (gift) is made present (i.e., not absent) by virtue of a presenting (a 'making present')." We can think of the second “present” (not absent) as the region, both spatial and temporal, within which the present/gift is brought to presence.

Now back to "apparent." I said that "appearing" means "coming to presence" or "being presented to." With this in mind, we can now say: "That which appears (i.e., 'the apparent', 'the present') appears (is present rather than absent) by virtue of an 'appearing' (a 'making present')."

This means that we shouldn't confuse my sense of "appear" with the common philosophical distinction between "appearance" and "reality." That which appears is simply that which comes to presence, that which presents itself for us to "see" (though not necessarily with the physical eye). So, if there is a distinction between appearance and reality, then we only have access to appearance. For as soon as something other than "appearance" appears, it is immediately transformed into "appearance"--that which appears, that which presents itself to us.

Now, a thought-experiment: what would happen if the present (i.e., the gift, that which is presented) did not fit within the present (i.e., the region where the present/gift is presented), but rather overflowed it? What, in other words, if we had a present/gift that exceeded the boundaries of the present--that exceeded the boundaries of the spatio-temporal region in which it is to be brought to presence?

In that case, the present/gift would certainly “appear,” but it would, at the same time, paradoxically, disappear--as, for example, when light, which is supposed to make things visible, is so bright that it blinds us and thus renders them invisible.

Thus it happens that that which makes appearing possible also makes it impossible. And, in such a case, the excess presence of the present/gift would also signify its absence.

That is what I mean by “the blindingly apparent”: the apparent that is brought to presence with such intensity that it exceeds the very region (the spatio-temporal present) in which it is supposed to appear, thus making itself invisible.

All this by way of a preamble: Of course, I still haven’t said what I think is “blindly obvious” or what the “two ways” of thinking about it are. And to that extent my title is a bit misleading. But more to come soon. I I think you’ll find the second part less technical--though, perhaps, less interesting as well.

Christian Ethics?

Or: why there can't be such a thing.

Ethics asks: What, if any, responsibility do I have toward others? It seeks both to justify my obligation and to delineate its scope.

But this questions signifies its downfall.

Two texts:

1. Genesis 4.9: After Cain has murdered his brother, Yahweh approaches and asks: "Where is your brother Abel?" Immediately Cain responds: "I don't know...Am I my brother's keeper?"

2. Luke 10.27-39: An "expert" in the Torah asks Jesus: "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" After Jesus' answer, the interlocuter, still wanting to "justifying himself" (thelon dikaiosai heauton) asks a further question: "And who is my neighbor?"

Both "Am I my brother's keeper?" and "Who is my neighbor?" are paradigmatic ethical questions--more or less concrete ways of asking What, if any, responsibility do I have toward other people? For contemporary ethicists, they are invitations to formulate theories that will delineate the nature of our ethical obligations and fix their scope. Without them, ethics as it is currently practiced dissolves.

What the biblical texts show, however, is that the questions themselves are a kind of impertinence. They are devised precisely (solely?) to eschew responsibility or at least mitigate its effects. In both cases, the divine response bears this out.

In Genesis, Yahweh refuses to give anything that resembles an intelligible answer to Cain's query. "What have you done?" he asks "Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." No theory; no attempt to define ethical terms ("brother," "keeper," etc.); no attempt to set out necessary and sufficient conditions that would guarantee responsibility in some cases and exclude it in others.

In Luke, Jesus is a bit more hospitable. He answers the question (sort of), but his new "definition" of neighbor is so encompassing and so explosive of antecedent categories that it hardly looks like a definition at all (and certainly wouldn't function as a general "ethical principle" that could be applied confidently in future cases).

But we must listen even more closely.

Not only does Jesus' parable invite conceptual confusion where we (ethicists) want clarity, but it actually subverts ethical theory, as contemporary philosophers tend to understand that term.

In general, ethical theory works like this. (1) You ought to treat P in x-and-such way. (2) A is an instance of P. (3) Therefore, you ought to treat A in x-and-such way. Or, stated in terms of neighbors: (1) You ought to treat your neighbor kindly. (2) John is your neighbor. (3) Therefore, you ought to treat John kindly.

Which yields this kind of entailment: You ought to treat John kindly because he is your neighbor.

In this sense, theory is antecedent to practice. We first have to know that (1) John is a neighbor and that (2) neighbors ought to be treated in such-and-such way before we can act at all.

But Jesus will have none of this.

Indeed, his parable works in diametric opposition to this kind of thinking. For Jesus, it is not that knowing whether X is our neighbor enables us to see how to treat X properly. It is, rather, that treating X in such-and-such way makes her our neighbor (or, perhaps, allows us to see that X is our neighbor).

Which yields this kind of entailment: X is your neighbor because you treat her in such-and-such way (which isn't really entailment at all, since "because" indicates not a logical conclusion, but rather a causal connection).

In this sense, practice is antecedent to (and deconstructive of) theory.

But this is not ethics; indeed, this is, if anything at all, a kind of "anti-ethics".

Oh, Saint Jacques!

Adversarial Philosophy

I have a friend. He's an analytic philosopher, and his favorite word is "objection". If you know anything about analytic philosophy, this should really come as no surprise. Philosophical debate, tuned to an analytic key, usually goes something like this:

For: I believe X, for reasons a, b, and c.
Against: X is dubious; I can easily show that a and b are false through the following thought experiment T. c is a bit more tricky, but it has a great deal of intuitive implausibility.
For: Your version of T is misleading because it has implications x and y, which, given thought experiment T1, seem unacceptable. c may be intuitively implausible, but that doesn't show that it's false.

And so on, ad infinitum (or ad nauseum).

It's easy to see why my friend's favorite word is "objection".

This leads me to believe that analytic philosophizing is essentially adversial. The metaphor I'm thinking of is closely related to hand-to-hand combat, perhaps in a kung fu dojo. In this case, the point is to isolate your opponent's weaknesses and then exploit them. Of course, being able to find and exploit weaknes will require a great deal of technical training on your part, but once you've got it, you should be able to disarm just about any aggressor.

This is what goes on in philosophy as well. The point, in this case, is to find the weaknesses in your opponent's position and then raise "objections". If you're skilled enough (i.e., if you've studied enough logic), you'll be able to disarm your opponent intellectually, regardless of his position.

This kind of attitude toward philosophy is quite clearly beneficial. It allows us to maintain a posture of cautious skepticism and keeps us (relatively) impervious to vague and questionable assertions.

But it's also debilitating. Most importantly, by looking for the weaknesses in our opponent's position, we run the risk of overlooking its strengths--that is, aspects of his position that have merit and might be profitably incorporated into our own. In a fight, the point is victory. Everything else is ancillary.

So I would like to offer a new metaphor: not fighting, but dancing.

More later.

Idolatry and Imagination

Consider:

1. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower [of Babel], which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do" (Genesis 11).

Note: The third time a form of the word "imagine" appears in the KJV's translation of Genesis.

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Primary imagination [is] the living power and prime agent of all human perception . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."

Wondering at the Clouds

I sat today, staring at the sky,
Watching a misty grey cloud
Sliding, grating against the blue horizon.
I wondered how the clouds move
And where they go. The kind of thing kids do.
I have not wondered at the clouds since I was ten.

Ten.

And I wondered: does that mean
The past eleven years of my life
Have been an utter waste?

'No one died when Clinton lied': Oh, really?

I think I would classify myself as politically liberal. I'm also quite a fan of former-president Bill Clinton. Keep that in mind as you read.

I was walking across the Rec parking lot a few days ago, when I stumbled onto something interesting: a car with a bumper-sticker that read, “No one died when Clinton lied.” I was shocked, I must admit—though not necessarily because I thought the phrase was obviously false, or even obviously true. No. I was stunned because I didn’t have a clue what it meant. And I don’t think the person who owns the car does either. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to suggest here.

So, once again: “No one died when Clinton lied.” To get a better idea of what’s going on, let’s unpack the phrase a bit. Basically, I think it’s saying something like this: “There was some time t in the past, such that at t (CL) Bill Clinton told a lie and (ND) no one died.” Now, as it stands, this is a very curious assertion. For one thing, it is framed in terms of temporality (indicated by the word “when”). In other words, it says that there was a time at which the two events I have labeled CL (“Clinton lied”) and ND (“No one died”) coincided.

Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, we make statements about temporal simultaneity all the time. I might say, for instance, “I was in class when the Twin Towers fell.” Or my grandfather might say, “I was working at such-and-such place when Kennedy was assassinated.” These are all fine statements, and they have a meaning that is more-or-less clear.

The problem, however, is that statements about temporal simultaneity (i.e., two events occurring at the same time) imply nothing beyond that—temporal simultaneity. More generally, to say that X and Y occurred at the same time says nothing at all about the relationship between X and Y. Specifically, it says nothing about the causal relationship between X and Y (i.e., either that X caused Y or that Y caused X). But if this is true, then our original statement “No one died when Clinton lied” is nothing more than an arbitrary observation about two events that happened to coincide at a single temporal juncture.

And, what’s more, on this interpretation, the original statement is almost certainly false. In fact, to falsify it, we would only have to specify the instant at which Clinton lied (perhaps the moment at which he said, “I did not have…”) and then determine whether any person died at that same instant. (Hospitals keep pretty good records these days, so it probably wouldn’t be that difficult.)

Or we could go about it statistically. Recent studies suggest that roughly 155,000 people die each day. That’s about one person every two seconds. So, supposing it took Clinton four seconds to utter those fateful words, it is statistically probable that at least one person died during that interval. But even if no one died at that moment, nothing much changes. Of course, the bumper sticker would now be true, but only trivially so. It might as well have read, “No one was wearing a pink spandex jumpsuit with Costa Rican bananas hanging from each ear when Clinton lied.”

But this is quite clearly not what my bumper-sticker-buying friend meant. Instead, he
wanted to say something like this following: “There was a time t, such that at t (i) Bill Clinton lied and (ii) Bill Clinton’s lying was not causally related to the death of any person.” Unfortunately, he didn’t. And, as it stands, his statement is either almost certainly false or only trivially true.

Now if you’ve continued reading up to this point (and I doubt most people have), you’re probably a little irritated. And rightly so. This has all been a bit of overkill. “You’re over-thinking it,” my roommate tells me. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’d all get along a little better if we dropped empty rhetoric and bumper-sticker nonsense and instead got down to the important business of deep, careful reflection. I mean thinking. Maybe even over-thinking.

A Conversation

-- Do you love her? he asked.
-- I think I do.
-- You "think"?
-- Yes, I think.
-- Perhaps you think too much.
-- Perhaps you think too little.
-- Nevermind.
-- ...
-- So how do you know you love her?
-- Well, I don't know, really.
-- Then you don't love her.
-- Why do you say that?
-- It's true!
-- ...and helpful.
-- No, seriously though: you must know that you love her.
-- But I don't know.
-- Then you don't love her.
-- But I do, I think.
-- You do, then?
-- I think.
-- You know.
-- I don't know.
-- ...
-- ...
-- Well, I can't know for you.
-- Right. You can't know for me.
-- I mean, I would if I could...
-- Right, but you can't. I see. No worries.
-- ...
-- ...
-- So, one more question.
-- Yea?
-- Do you love her?
-- I've said I don't know.
-- Yes, I suppose you have.
-- Yes.
-- Well, can you be saved without her?
-- ...