Stuck in Flaunta: Undoing the Self and Paying Attention

Canadian poet Anne Carson (b. 1950, pictured above) was in town recently, receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival. Strutting onto the stage in a fabulous pair of red cowgirl boots, she eschewed the usual litany of thanks and opted, instead, to lead us all in a participatory exercise in snappy story-telling. It was fun and she was funny: what more could a lit-fest audience turned pop-up Greek Chorus ask for? The answer: an interview with the inimitable Eleanor Wachtel. What followed was pure magic, and theatrical to boot: Wachtel wrangling her way through the prickly and unyielding scrublands of  Carson Country; the rest of us unflinching witnesses to this unnerving showdown between unflappable doggedness and insouciant erudition. Once, just once, Wachtel lost it. A persistent cell-phone ringing out through the auditorium broke her concentration - and this, just as she was finally getting Carson on side, reeling her in. Like tumbleweed, Carson was gone again: a free spirit refusing to be fenced in; a bit of mischief on the make. It was fascinating and just a tad unsettling, watching these two literary heavy-weights tussle their way through an interview which will, on May 8th, be broadcast on CBC Radio's Writers and Co. Fascinating, because who would have guessed that the radio interview format would make for such rich and compelling viewing. Unsettling, because Anne Carson just is.

But then, we already knew this - those of us who had entered Carson's world during the third session of this current series in order to gain a better understanding of another unsettling character: the philosopher and activist Simone Weil. And aren't unsettling folk just like that? You think you've done them, ticked them off, when suddenly, you're back to square one. That's how it felt, at any rate, when we dipped back into Weilian workings of the self with a view to moving shame-wards, and found ourselves up to the eyeballs in alligators. That "swampland of the soul" - Brene Brown speak for shame - would have to wait. This other quagmire into which we had unwittingly waded - the actual technicalities involved in "undoing the creature in us" so as to successfully "decreate" a la Weil - required our immediate attention. And so, spurred on by Carson's insight into how to go about actually paying attention - "Attention is a choice of where you put your mind...And looking at the object of your attention to the extent that you forget you're doing the looking" - we embarked on a series of exercises designed to both instruct us on the ins and outs of destroying the "I," and sharpen our skills in the attentiveness department.

Of course, there was a lot of preliminary discussion as to whether destroying the "I" was a desirable thing in the first place. In a sense, that Weilian notion of carving out a void in the space where the self normally resides goes counter to the rah-rah-be-your-biggest-and-best-self kind of rhetoric on offer in Self-Esteem for Dummies etc. In a culture where Self reigns Supreme, doing away with it is unnerving at best, terrifying at worst - even if this negation is, as Weil contends, a necessary move if one is to fully open oneself to Truth and Knowledge and Whatever Else Truly Matters. For the self gets in the way. Like a shadow, it blocks out the light. Like unwanted baggage, it weighs you down. , Like the elephant in the room, it takes up all the space. Clear the shadow, the baggage, the elephant, and you're starting to get somewhere. A strange way to go about getting to the bottom of self-esteem, perhaps. But it seemed to offer something in the way of getting more out of life, and so we bit.

Simone Weil (pictured above) suffered from terrible migraines. She tried many ways of clearing them out of her head, but nothing seemed to work. One thing she knew for sure was that they got in the way of her being able to turn her full attention to what mattered. In April 1938 she found herself attending the Easter Mass at the Abbeye St-Pierre in Solesmes. She felt the Gregorian chanting of the monks enter her body, go straight to the space in her head filled with migraine. As the chanting poured in, her migraine did a peculiar thing: it emptied out. Soon, the space formerly known as migraine was awash with Gregorian Chant. It was a space rendered ready for paying attention: for "a patient holding in the mind," as Weil referred to the act of paying attention, which in turn would make thought itself "available, empty, penetrable by the object." This is a radical take on the role of thought in the life of the mind: not the light bulb switching on as it encounters its object, but rather, the necessary conditions for the object to come to light. In Weil's conception, thought must be suspended if the object of one's attention is to find its way in, gain a proper foothold. If thought is busy thinking, the object just passes it by. If thoughtfulness hasn't twinned itself up with attentiveness, the best we can hope for when it comes to thinking is a worrying - Weil would go so far as to say dangerous - mishmash of "partial attitudes."

That, at least, is the theory. We obviously needed to put ourselves in Weil's shoes to grasp what it felt like in practice. And so we experimented with filling our heads with the self-same Gregorian chants that had so impacted Weil, and making of the resulting void a luminous object-ready nesting ground. Yah, right. Weil, as I suggested earlier, was unsettling: not your average, run-of-the-mill, kind of gal. But we gave it a go, and then turned our attention to other aural stimuli: a metronome's steady tick-tocking, which brought the Weilian notion of time as "unvarying perpetuity" into the equation; a wind-up music box with its twirling ballerina and its ever-decelerating ditty, which prompted us to probe yet further how time, if invariably monotonous for Weil, could helpfully be categorized as either "time surpassed" - as in here comes the void, which is good monotonous - or as "time sterilized" - as in me just going round and round like "a squirrel turning it its cage" and never getting anywhere near the void, much less admitting to myself that I am going round and round (which for Weil is the worst sin of all, this kind of self-delusion) and which is, not surprisingly, bad monotonous.

This seemed as good a queue for a song as we were likely to get, so we broke out Anne Carson's Duet of What is a Question from her Weil-inspired opera in three parts, Decreation (2005), and gave it our valiant best. Improvising the vocal arrangements - Carson had only supplied the libretto - provided us with the perfect opportunity to pay attention to each other, and hone our deep listening skills. As for getting us closer to the void, we were still a little in the dark. Enter American poet Fanny Howe (b.1940, pictured below) and her beautifully observed prose poem, Doubt. If Baruch Spinoza is the physicists' philosopher, Simone Weil, it would seem, is the poets' philosopher. Though it is easy to understand why Weil speaks to poets like Carson and Howe, the writing that comes of their interest in her ideas and her personal narrative is as tantalizing and challenging as Weil herself. Sometimes. though, what poetry gives us that philosophy cannot is a line of such stark and heart-breaking beauty that knowing what the void, for example, actually is, or what it is to make one or find it or get there, no longer seems to matter. For a very brief moment, we just feel decreated - like the creature in us has unraveled, like we have completely come undone. No wonder, as Howe herself suggests, Weil would have loved to be a poet. And thank goodness, because she wasn't, there are poets like Anne Carson and Fanny Howe to step into the...void.    

A Question of Self-Esteem: Remembering Judy Stevens...Rethinking Selves

Early in February we lost Judy Stevens - a valued and much loved member of wine women and philosophy. Judy is widely remembered for having co-founded Share the Warmth: an organization committed to providing clothing and food for Montreal's homeless, as well as much needed services for at-risk youth. Less known, perhaps, was Judy's sideline as a philosopher queen at wwp's regular Thursday night salons and philosophy club. Judy managed to combine a deeply spiritual sensibility with a beguiling sense of humour, and this made her contributions to whatever topic we were exploring at once profoundly insightful, at once an unexpected pop of delight. She moved between the deadly serious and the gently irreverent with astounding ease, drawing on the one to shed light on the other so as to bring a fresh perspective to the matter at hand. As a thinker, she was probing and generous and inquisitive. As a participant, she was engaged and engaging and just occasionally bemused. Her tongue-in-cheek commentary on Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology will never be forgotten. Likewise, her triggering of the great wine women and philosophy missing boots scandal, and her measured response to the chaotic hilarity that ensued. Among the many things I learned from Judy, what comes to mind at this moment are words of advice she gave me when I was starting up a new venture and feeling somewhat shy about asking people for support. "People like to help out," she said - drawing no doubt on her experience with Share the Warmth. She told me to think about it in terms of giving people the opportunity to do something they naturally wanted to do; not as something that would put people out. I think that Judy always thought the best of people, and her way of seeing the act of giving was entirely consistent with her view of humankind.

Paying tribute to Judy at last week's salon evening, this generosity of spirit was something that members were quick to point out. So too was the sense that, though physically absent, Judy still felt present - a warm and luminous presence that continued to light up her usual spot on the sofa. The poet Mary Oliver speaks of the end of life as offering one small but significant consolation: "Surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms." Without a doubt, Judy's character shone and still goes on shining. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that this second session of our current series served as an introduction to the thinking of one Simone Weil (1909-1943) - a French philosopher, teacher and activist who Albert Camus once called, "The only great spirit of our times." Perhaps Weil's ability to see "every separation as a link" - a concept she referred to as metaxu - and to revel in the contradictions that this positing of absence as presence and presence as absence elicits, gave us an entry point into understanding the feelings we were having about Judy. Certainly, Simone Weil's deep investment in the suffering of others could be said to resonate with Judy's own desire to alleviate the malheur being experienced by the less advantaged of our city. And certainly, Simone Weil's parting words to her good friend, Gustave Thibon - that he remember her not with sorrow, but as one recalls a favourite book from childhood - could be something that Judy might have said. But there, I suspect, the parallels end. For whereas Judy's giving of herself in the name of a friend, a stranger, a family member, or a cause came across as life-affirming to all concerned, and that includes herself, the same cannot be said of Simone Weil's particular (some might say peculiar) brand of selflessness.

When Susan Sontag said of Simone Weil that she was "one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit," it is likely that Sontag's use of the word 'troubling' was chosen with Weil's proclivity for extreme self-denial in mind. From the time she was a very young child, Weil deprived her body of the most basic of needs. Giving her own rations away to WWI soldiers as a six year old, eschewing every bourgeois comfort she had been born into to demonstrate ongoing solidarity with the most disenfranchised members of society as an adolescent and young adult, Weil saw "embodied thinking" not so much as an acknowledgement of the body-mind connection, as a moral obligation to throw one's body out into the world. Once out there, that body became an experiential field: to be starved and scarred and overworked and underpaid not in the name of sacrifice - no trembling sacrificial lamb, Simone - but rather, in the the pursuit of truly knowing. This was a knowledge unlike that of most Western philosophers who, isolated from the people and left to reflect in peace, cast down their learned pronouncements from a lofty pedestal on high. On the contrary, Weil's was a knowledge that came of rubbing flesh with the real and turning affliction into concrete action into an embodied form of enlightenment. In her later years (not that late...she only lived to 34) a series of mystical experiences and with these, conversion to a strict if defiantly anti-church form of Christianity, led her to see these willful acts of deprivation as an "undoing of the self." While the Self was there, as Weil saw it, hanging around and blocking the light and taking up valuable room that might otherwise be filled with Knowledge, you were only a poor old sack of a thinking thing. But open that Self to the processes of decreation...Embrace the void and now we're talking! Or perhaps, not talking...Can an undone, decreated Self still talk? But hey, no matter. We're feeling that all-encompassing Knowledge pouring into us and filling us to brimming and wow, does it ever feel good!

And yes, there were some inconsistencies there: some screeching paradoxes and knobbly contradictions. But Simone Weil reveled in all of that: she loved a question that coughed up incompatibilities and an answer that propelled you back to the drawing board. What mattered - the cornerstone of all her thinking, in fact - was that you were paying attention: immersing yourself in the world and taking it all in and allowing it to flow through you and leaving no small detail unseen. Weil saw the state of paying attention as the only true state of Grace. To give the world, to give anybody, your undivided attention was, for her, "the rarest and purest form of generosity." And perhaps that is why she couldn't be a body herself: a body with all its pesky demands and earthly needs that only served to divert her own and everybody else's attention away from the task at hand, which was to pay attention. Perhaps that is why, with all her attention so keenly focused on the horrors of WWII and the question of how to rebuild a new kind of Europe when - if - the atrocities ever ended, she was unable to devote any time and energy to being a tubercular body in need of sustenance in a sanitarium in Ashford, Kent in 1943. That she opted to hold on to a principle rather than save her Self probably makes little sense to most of us today. But it must have seemed to her that the world itself had lost all its principles, and that the pact she had made to herself while working for the Free French in London - that she would eat no more than the meager ration allotted her compatriots in war-torn France - was just not up for negotiation. There are so many ways to be a body, to be a Self. For this most uncompromising of witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit, a way that most of us find troubling was probably a straightforward case of amor fati. After all, this was the philosopher who saw the self-directed annihilation of our  "I" as our only "free act"; the philosopher whose bare bones conception of the Self was one of pure and simple mutuality with a much bigger world.

As for all those other ways of being a Self, and in particular a Self that esteems itself, we proceeded to take a quick tour of self-esteem's journey into popular psychology: from its acquisition of a bump on the head in phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim's (1776-1832) early mapping of an individual's psychological attributes; through William James' (1842-1910) unpacking of the hierarchical "I-self"/"me-self" relationship and with it, the understanding that remains today of self-esteem as "the collection of an individual's attitudes toward oneself"; to German developmental psychologist Erik Erikson (yes, him again!) with his attaching of the boy-child's attainment of self-esteem to his mastery of the tools and technologies associated with the adult world around him, and his success as a measurement of his competence (a case of "industry" over "inferiority") when it comes to demonstrating the acquisition of these particular skill-sets.

Naturally, we called upon a couple of feminists to set Erikson right. Psychologist Carol Gilligan (b. 1936) took him to task not only for his initial erasing of girls from this schema, but for his subsequent framing of a girl's development of Self as a product of her intimate relations with others and, in direct opposition to her male counterpart, as successful if and only if it privileged connection over separation. Just how self-esteem is generated within such a conception, not to mention how whatever is generated is rated in a world that posits autonomy and individuation as the markers of True Selfdom, are questions to which we, if not Erikson, paid considerable attention. Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), for her part, made us see the benefits of being left out in the cold when it comes to any such developmental schema and their real life manifestations. The choice is ours: we can buy into what de Beauvoir calls the "ready-made" world of "the serious" - that industrious adult milieu into which Erikson's self-esteem-bent boys are busily muscling their way; or we can be free - making ourselves a "lack of being" and "casting ourselves out into the world" in order to live not as Slaves, but as fully realized Selves. If we're opting for the latter, then its girls and women - not wanted on the voyage, anyway - who have the least to lose and the most to gain in taking that precarious if ultimately life-affirming route.

Still mulling over the practical implications of inhabiting a cast-out Beauvoirian 'lack of being' Self, we turned finally to Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) contention that the only Authentic Self is a Public Self - the one that each of us presents to the world and to which the world, in turn, responds. So much for nurturing your inner child and wishing that people, if only they knew the real you, would totally get what you're all about. Given that what people see and hear is what you really are, says Arendt, you had better be sure that what is going on in the inside is entirely consistent with what is going on on the outside. That, for Arendt, is what it really means to be 'true to oneself.' That, for Arendt, is the bedrock of every encounter you will have in the world, and the basis of your self-identity in that world. If, when you speak and act, you are misunderstood, you have to keep hammering away until what you think and what others take to be your thought are the same; until how you believe you should act and how you are actually acting out there in the world are the self-same thing. It's your responsibility as an Authentic Self, this ongoing process of putting it out there and getting something back by way of a response and then putting it out there again...and again...and again. Selves change as a result of this dynamic process. So too do relationships. But the inner you and the outer you are indistinguishable: they are always an in sync Self.

Which is just about where we were when time ran out and we agreed to treat those hard working in sync Selves of ours to a much needed cup of tea. We'd been so busy expanding our sense of what it is to be a Self in the world that we had never actually got to the point of working out what esteeming one of these revamped selves might look like, much less how it might respond to being assessed as high or low. Sure, we shared a cackle over the stand-out title on the topic down at the local book store - Self-Esteem for Dummies. But beyond that, we'd barely scratched the surface...A glossing over of which Hannah Arendt would no doubt approve! We'll be picking up on a few of those self-esteem strands left dangling next time we meet. And then - fully armed - we'll wade out into the murky waters of shame.                

What, Where, When, How, Why is a Psyche?

There are ideas and entities that are so broad, so grandiose, that they slip into the realm of the arcane. Psyche, Soul, Mind, Self… Where on earth do we start when venturing into these terrains? How do we begin to even answer a question of the “What is an X?” variety when the X in question is so exhaustive? The group of women who came together last Thursday to kick off our new series, “…And if we went to the philosopher instead?” seemed anything but daunted by the ambitious task we had set ourselves for the evening. On the contrary, we tackled the A to Z of Psyche in much the same way that London cabbies make use of The Knowledge. If we couldn’t find our way into Freud’s Ego, Id and Superego through the traditional psychoanalytical route, we took a U-Turn back to Plato’s tripartite understanding of the Soul with its magisterial voice of Reason, its unruly workaday Appetite, and its law-enforcing Spirit. When we still found our Selves caught up in a gridlock (and indeed, 2000+ years might separate the ‘father’ of Western philosophy from the ‘father’ of psychotherapy, but both saw the female Self as essentially defective when it came to the make-up of her soul or psyche, and as deviating from the male ‘norm’ when it came to how it functioned) we tried alternative routes. 

Veering off the beaten track into the affective arrondisement of the poetic, for example, gave us Mary Oliver’s poem, Bone. Here, we glimpsed a basically unknowable soul or psyche – one that not only resists organization, assessment, and hierarchies à la Freud and Plato, but that is (like us) all the richer for it. Another creative detour landed the more artistic among us with the equivalent of a Monopoly Board ‘Get out of Jail’ card. Exchanging words for images, we drew our way in and out of psychically pertinent concepts both concrete and abstract. Even Thinking itself was subjected to our artist’s eye as we attempted to manoeuvre around yet another one of those impossibly vague-because-of-its-vastness questions: “What are we doing when we are thinking?” This question, which came to us courtesy of Hannah Arendt’s theorizing around the dialogic two-in-one in her The Life of the Mind (1978) and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s inspired discussion of Arendt in her Mind and the Body Politic (1989), provided much grist for the mill: our graphic representations of the thoughtful two-in-one (“me” and “myself” engaged in a passionate conversation in which “thinking and aliveness become one”) offering up GPS-like suggestions for circumnavigating the mental road block that had arisen the moment we tried to pin down just what thinking felt like and was; our positing of thinking as a potential cornerstone of any philosophy-based therapeutic or self-help program signalling a departure from the tree-lined streets of the city and our entry into the bigger picture of the forest.

For we had sallied forth and rallied our collective energies to embark on a project: that of testing out philosophy’s ability to give psychology a run for her money when it comes to alleviating our sorrows and feeling good about our Selves. True, those early Hellenistic philosophers had felt pretty confident about their youthful discipline's ability to furnish folks with "medicine for the soul" (Martha Nussbaum). But by the mid-19th century, philosophy was seen by many to have more or less run its course in this respect. Too much contemplation of how many angels might be squeezed onto a pinhead, not enough practical advice as to how to better oneself and improve one's prospects. Enter Scottish politician turned newspaper editor turned motivational speaker turned author, Samuel Smiles (1812-1904). Convinced that political reform had also run its course in terms of addressing the concerns of the masses, Smiles was an early advocate of the change-your-attitude-change-your-circumstances school of thought. A self-made man himself, Smiles would go on to self-publish the first self-help manual in 1859. Appropriately called, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, the book was a runaway best-seller and Smiles became an overnight sensation: our first self-help guru.

His timing, in true guru fashion, is fortuitous. We've come a long way since those ancient Pre-Socratics stared up at the big unknown skies and wondered what secrets the sun, the moon, and the stars might hold as regards the nature of human existence. Centuries of philosophical problem-solving have led us closer to home in our questioning, to the point that the experiencing human body is now the focus and our gaze is set firmly on what we cannot even see. Deeply concealed within that body is a psyche: a psyche so complex that only an expert trained in psycho-dynamics is equipped to guide us into its depths and help us fish out its secrets. The rich and well-connected have access to these kingfishers - to the early psychoanalysts who are spawned by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and who, in turn, develop their own methods for excavating the catacombs of the unconscious. But for the rest of the population there is Samuel Smiles: buy the book, and fix yourself. And call it what you will - fixing yourself, improving yourself, or (75 years and 50 million copies later) How to win friends and influence people (Dale Carnegie, 1936) - the fact is that self-help is soon big business. By the end of the 20th Century, it comprises books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal coaching, and it's a $2 billion a year industry in the US alone. By 2008, the scope of self-help has expanded (it now includes infomercials, holistic institutes and stress management programs) and the US figure has risen to $11 billion. 

Small wonder that critics like Micki McGee (Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, 2007) see the self-help industry as "a new sort of enslavement" and the self that results of this literary cotton field as "endlessly belaboured." And small wonder that alarm bells were starting to ring for us as we took on McGee's contention that the 21st Century preoccupation with "psychologizing the personal" and re-inventing the self has acted as a "tool of social control" - serving to "sooth" political unrest. Was it any coincidence, we asked ourselves, that psychology began its steady rise to prominence around the same time that the first wave of Western feminists were taking to the streets and committing acts of sabotage in the name of suffrage? Was it any coincidence, we asked ourselves, that women fast became psychology's primary target - the gender most in need of fixing - if not the gender authoring the actual fix? Was it any coincidence, we asked ourselves, that in an era where women were finally breaking out of the private sphere and entering the public sphere on some semblance of equal footing, a sphere even more private than the home - that of the inner Self - was being eagerly proffered to them in every self-help book and psycho-therapeutic form imaginable? 

In engaging with these questions, we brought Freud's "dark continent" that is the female Self into dialogue with abolitionist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton's (1815-1902) insistence that  "every woman exercise governance over her own inviolable self" (Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 2005). We also grazed the surface of Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's (1908-1986) argument that women must cease to be Other and become the central actor in their own lives. This, in order to begin our dismantling of some of developmental psychology's more troubling assertions about the adolescent girl's journey towards forging a "coherent self": the "empty and lonely" waiting game that is part and parcel of her acquisition of an identity, for instance; the "rescue" that comes in the form of a man "by whose name she will be known, by whose status she will be defined" (Eric Erikson, 1968...That's right, 1968!). Next time we meet, we will be turning our philosophical gaze towards the matter of self-esteem. When I say that we've only just begun with our dismantling, I mean it! 

2016 salon series: "...And if we went to the philosopher instead?"

Greetings, wine women and philosophy members and friends. And Happy New Year. Here's hoping that 2016 is a fine year for all of us. As for where we're headed in our upcoming salon series:

It is widely taken for granted that if we are burdened by shame, wracked with guilt, lacking in confidence, caught up in an addiction, feeling depressed, agonizing over our life choices, wondering (queue for song) What's it all about, Alfie?, we'll find the answer to it all in psychology. As a field, it's huge. Just compare the burgeoning Self-Help section in any bookstore to the paltry offerings in Philosophy, say. Just look at the inroads made by psychology into areas ranging from sport to business management, from education to politics. If we're talking about making things work better or feel better or look better or do better, psychology has the market cornered. Whether it's on-line, on-the-couch, or on-the-hoof, there's a host of psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and life coaches out there ready to be of service. So how did the relatively new discipline of psichiologia - the study (logia) of the spirit, mind or soul (psukhe) - become the panacea for all 20th and 21st Century ills? What was it seen to offer people (and particularly women) that religion, for example, or philosophy, no longer could? - or perhaps never had? And what is gained and what is lost when a discipline organizes itself around scientific research and the establishment of know-how, as psychology has, rather than a simple love (philo) of wisdom (sophia)?

These questions we will address in our first session together. Because this is a philosophy series, however, we are less interested in comparing psychology to philosophy than in delving into the contributions made by philosophers - in particular, female philosophers - to those aspects of life that have become the bread and butter of today's psychology industry: issues of trust, feelings of shame, and the matter of self-esteem. Drawing on philosophers such as Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Sara Ruddick, Gillian Rose, and Annette C. Baier, the plan d'action is to imagine together what a "self-help" (or help of some other kind) manual might read like if put into their hands, or what "therapy" might look like if arranged around their theorizing. Throughout the life of wine women and philosophy 's Thursday evening salon series (she's 8 years old this year!) we have argued that thinking philosophically can change your outlook and enhance your experience of the world. It could be said that in this particular series, we are putting our belief in the life-saving qualities of philosophy to the test, and struggling alongside you to come up with some practical manifestations of this vision. 

When Simone Weil was a secondary student in Paris in the 1920s, the standard teaching method in her high school was to focus in on a particular philosopher each year, and to twin him (it was inevitably a "him") with either a novelist or a poet. In Weil's first year at the school,  everything she learned linked back to Plato or Balzac. Riffing on this educational approach, we will link a particular work by a poet (inevitably a "her") to each of our five sessions: this, in the hope of creating a structure of feeling around the aspect of life we are exploring, and providing an additional entry point into the ideas of the philosopher(s) around whom the session is organized.

We kick off on January 28th, with a session called Psyche.

Lesson 5: The Modern World (1900-1950)

A plane flies into a mountain and everyone perishes. A loved one is taken by cancer way before her time. An earthquake rips through a country causing enormous loss of life. All events, these, that occurred over the course of our inquiry into the history of Western Philosophy. All events, these, that have happened before, and will happen again. In the meantime, we try to make sense of them: doing our thinking through what Marshall McLuhan terms "the rear view mirror"; turning to ideas that were circulating about life and death and everything in-between during the first half of the 20th Century in order to come to terms with these 21st Century personal tragedies and large-scale calamities alike. For as McLuhan insists, only the most prescient of visionaries can think the present through a philosophical lens which has actually arrived in that present, much less leaped ahead of it. And though we were feeling pretty primed with 2000 years of Western Philosophy under our belts and just 50 short Modern World years to go, we weren't about to presume that we counted among that number. Which meant that we hit the year 1900 running: pouncing upon Nietzsche's (1844-1900) pronouncement - "God is Dead!" - as one would a baton in a relay race; sprinting out into that brave new world of uncertainty like punch-drunk gazelles...And he doing the pronouncing barely in his grave.

But now that we were on the home stretch, the harsh reality of it all was beginning to sink in. Cicero circa 500 AD had argued that philosophy teaches us how to die. 1000 or so years later, de Montaigne - after a near-death experience had cured him of his paralyzing fear of the grim reaper - was suggesting the opposite: that philosophy teaches us how to live. And quite apart from whether our natural inclination was to see life and death as opposites or the self-same thing, and regardless of which philosophical camp we chose to align ourselves with - the life camp, the death camp, or the camp that sees philosophy as there to teach us something entirely different - the fact remained that we were entering the philosophical equivalent of a no-man's land. Gone were the usual touchstones: Truth, Faith, Reason, Science. Instead, we looked around and saw one great big gaping void. God might well be dead but so, it seemed, was everything else: either rotting away on the slag heap or hurtling hell-bent towards an inevitable and absolute end. All in all it was a tad depressing. Though nothing that a touch of philosophical tweaking couldn't put right.

Take, for instance, that plane - an event which, like the other two, is seemingly beyond our control. But somebody was at the controls of that plane. And if Nietzsche is to be believed, it sure wasn't God. So what to make of this horrific act of human volition? What to make (to incorporate the second event) of our ongoing insistence that people die “before their time” when no time, much less a defined time, is graspable when it comes to those we love? And speaking generally of that which is within our grasp (and specifically of the numbers to perish in that earthquake) how is it that one death can rock our world, whereas the deaths of tens of thousands will often barely register? These propositions or “pictures of facts,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) would have it, we considered; and the tweakers at our disposal were a mixed bag of early 20^th century German phenomenologists, French existentialists, and British logicians.

From the phenomenologist camp, we drew upon Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) idea that each of us is but a temporal being – a “being-toward-death,” as he terms it – and that to live “authentically” is to live each day facing up to the certainty of our own impending death. Against this idea, we pitted the contention of fellow phenomenologists Edith Stein (1891-1942) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): that it is in facing up to the deaths of others, and not our own, that the route to authenticity is to be found.

With all this talk of authenticity flying around the room, it came as no surprise to find an Existentialist or two weighing in on the matter. In addition to Nietzsche wandering around out there in a “Godless Universe” there was, for example, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936): the brave and outspoken critic of Franco’s violent methods and accompanying motto – “Long Live Death!”  Arguing that suffering is not only a “vital experience” but an essential aspect of learning what it means to exist, Unamuno made love the cornerstone of his existentialism: to love is, at the end of the day, all that matters; to learn how to love we must necessarily identify our own suffering with the broader suffering of the world.

And then there were those wise old owls of the Anglo-Saxon tradition: mathematician turned analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) shouting “Down with Work!” and “Up with Happiness!” from the barricades while professing life to be nothing more than the sum total of “muddle and accident”; American pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952) asking the question we in this new post-Enlightenment world could no longer avoid: What do we do when, in spite of taking control in every way we can, disaster still strikes?

We fittingly brought the evening to an end – and by extension, this series – by choosing an appropriate death for our philosopher self. Were we the kind of thinker who would die heroically, as Vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) had: taking sick after standing in line with other French Jews as they registered with the Vichy government, even though his fame as a philosopher had been enough for the Nazis to grant him an exemption? Or were our philosophical leanings more likely to incline us, like 101 year-old Hermeneutics philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), towards a somewhat gentler death: slipping into unconsciousness just hours after celebrating a clean bill of health from our doctor with a glass of wine? But whatever our chosen philosopher death – and we had a great number of them to choose from thanks to Simon Critchley’s surprisingly entertaining book on the subject, The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) – we parted this latest salon adventure a good deal more awakened to the story of Western Philosophy and the mostly his-stories that inform it. Thank you to all who participated. It has been quite the road-trip of a ride!   

Lesson Four: The Age of Revolution (1750-1900)

So there we were...

The year: 1750

The expectation: That we had finally arrived.

When suddenly, out of nowhere (well, Switzerland) a man walks down a street in France and sees a poster advertising an essay contest, sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. He sets about writing an answer to the question being asked: "Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to refining moral practices?". The Reader's Digest version of his answer to the question is a resounding "Non!" And just like that, the whole Enlightenment project begins to crumble. 

The man is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).  He wins the contest, but gains a posse of enemies too. This is, after all, a high moment in the History of Western Philosophy - a time when European thinkers are feeling pretty good about themselves and the state of thinking more generally, having picked up the shards of Classical Greek philosophizing post Dark Ages and, through a heady though not entirely resolved showdown between Continental rationalism and British empiricism, brought it up to speed with a world rendered infinitely more certain by Science. Exactly! It is one of those "phew" kind of moments that nobody in their right mind would want to challenge. But then along comes Rousseau, arguing that all this scientific progress and so-called enlightened thinking is for naught; that, counter to Hobbes, man in his 'natural' state and left to his own devices is a far more compassionate and empathetic and creative creature than the man produced of regulatory laws, of civilizing practices, and of the privatization of property. And there goes the neighbourhood...Faster than you can say "Counter-Enlightenment," the Age of Reason gives way to the Age of Revolution.

Though Rousseau died 11 years before the storming of the Bastille in 1789, his notion of a social contract organized around the General Will of the people and his contention that, though born free, it is the fate of civilized man to end up in chains, provide the philosophical underpinnings of the French Revolution. In fact, Rousseau even coins the motto that the revolutionaries will go on to adopt: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Like all good revolutions, however, the winds of change that sweep across France for a time soon morph into a case of plus ca change...That worryingly exclusionary third term in Rousseau's rallying call - fraternity - providing an insight into just one of the many oversights accompanying this particular man-led revolution. As Adrienne Rich would go on to comment some 200 years later, look carefully at the "R" word and you will see that, in itself, it contains "a key to the dead-endedness of male politics - the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place."  


And certainly, Rousseau  - for all that he speaks of equality and liberty for everyone - is content to leave women in their chains: deferring to their husbands and selflessly attending to the needs of the family unit. A firm supporter of the "vive la difference" school of thought when it comes to how girls and boys should be educated, Rousseau's radical curriculum for boys - a kind of back-to-nature, learn-at-your-own-pace, love-peace-and-granola affair that heralds in the movement known as Romanticism - is by no means applied to girls. On the contrary, Rousseau insists that the education of 'the fairer sex' should revolve around mastering those skills that equip girls to become good wives and mothers, and towards which they are naturally inclined - a point with which Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) famously takes issue. Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is penned, in part, to challenge Rousseau's different strokes for different folks approach to education: arguing that nature has nothing to do with it and that if only girls were given the same educational opportunities as boys, they would prove every bit as capable of developing their powers of reason and becoming fully fledged intellectual and moral beings. In insisting that "the mind has no gender," what Wollstonecraft brings to the philosophical table is a whole new way of understanding women and, by extension, a whole new slant on the nature versus nurture debate. Not that she is the first woman to voice this idea, nor indeed to even write it down. But she manages, unlike a good number of equally spirited and brainy female thinkers who both pre-date and succeed her, to claw her way into philosophical his-story and become generally acknowledged as the first feminist philosopher.  


So women are finally on the Western Philosophical map. But we're a mere blip on the Age of Revolution radar, and we'll have to wait another seventy-five years before we see ourselves and our concerns represented again - this time, in the form of Pragmatist Parliamentarian John Stuart Mill's (1806-1873) failed attempt to secure for British women the legal right to vote. In the meantime, there are serious metaphysical issues at stake and no more so than in Germany, where another one of those philosophical 'golden ages' that the discipline gets so excited about is underway. With Transcendental Idealist Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) at the helm and a whole crew of bright young men following in his wake - Fichte, Schelling, Hegel...they have grown up in the shadow of the French Revolution, they are giddy with the spirit of the age - yet another attempt is being made to settle, for once and for all, if there is another world out there that can become known to us and heck, while we're at it, just what in fact is Reality? Kant comes up with an answer that seems to knock the pants off of all those paying attention. Even Kant is pretty impressed with himself, judging his division of Reality into two spheres - the phenomenal world, which we can experience and come to know, and the noumenal world, which is so entirely external to us that we will never know it, and might as well give up even trying - to rank right up there with the Copernican Revolution. 

What affirms Kant's rock star status, however (in certain philosophical circles there is even talk of Before-Kant and After-Kant, which would seem to put him on a par with Jesus Christ) is a clever manoeuvre he makes with Time and Space: moving them out of the realm of the world external to us, where previous philosophers have lumped them; turning them instead into knowable phenomena that we ourselves create through a combination of a posteriori lived sensory experience and a priori innate understanding. It is for this reason - this bringing together of something we do as humans (perceive) and something that is already there within us by virtue of us being human (Knowledge with a capital "K") -  that Kant is credited with finding a way to reconcile empiricism with rationalism. It is also why, ultimately, he remains in the rationalist camp - the father of German Idealism, insisting that we come out of the womb not as a tabula rasa (pace Locke) but with a pre-determined grasp of the world that sets us up for being properly human. 


Of Kant's many disciples, it is Georg Hegel (1770-1831) who emerges as a German Idealist superstar in his own right. Though an admirer of Kant's philosophy, Hegel considers his notion of the noumenal - that world external to us that we can never know - to be a bit of an intellectual cop-out. Moreover, Hegel is troubled by the static-ness of Kant's conception of Reality, as exemplified by those a priori categories that he sets up to explain how we humans perceive Reality. Surely, says Hegel, the world is constantly changing. Surely, says Hegel, we too are part of that ongoing evolution. Evolution, here, is the operative word, for Hegel - in proposing that Reality is in fact a historical process - is insistent that this process is a positive one, that we are moving forward, getting better, becoming ever-wiser, progressing steadily towards a point where the world will indeed be a perfect place. 

Being a monist - that is, a philosopher who believes that everything is made of one and the same substance - Hegel is a 'we are the world' kind of guy, meaning that if the world is progressing along nicely, then so are we. He calls the substance that we and everything else out there have in common 'Spirit.' And he calls the steady progression towards that perfect endpoint the Historical Dialectic. The dialectic operates in a checks and balances kind of way, with each new era playing its part in advancing the human condition. It goes like this: A certain understanding of the world as it stands at that particular moment in time is put forward (the thesis); Because we still have far to go in terms of getting things right, this understanding naturally contains some sort of contradiction or oversight within it, which in turn is put forward (the antithesis); When we bring the thesis and the antithesis into dialogue with each other, a synthesis emerges, which can also be understood as a new and improved thesis from which to start the process all over again. And so on and so forth...Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis...Until way down the line in some distant future we reach what Hegel calls the place of 'Absolute Spirit,' and basically know everything. 


There is something rather reassuring about Hegel's dialectic. It's like one huge great project that past, present and future generations all get to be involved in, meaning that even after we are dead our own tiny contribution to the progress of the world continues to live on in Spirit, meaning that there is actually some purpose to our being here, to our everything! There are those, however, who find Hegel's eternal optimism intensely irritating. Among these, German Idealist Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who has no time for Hegel's Spirit - he posits instead an 'everything' that is erratic in its movement and indifferent to our pain and suffering and really, just a big oaf of an energy force without purpose or plan - and even less time for Hegel's dialectical approach to history. Instead, Schopenhauer sees our sad miserable lives as ultimately meaningless - a void only alleviated by immersing ourselves in the arts, especially music, and giving ourselves an escapist break from the harsh reality of, well, Reality. 

On that dreary note, we take leave of the Germans and drop in briefly on a melancholic Dane, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): bemoaning the general lack of interest in the individual amidst all this focus on General Will in France and non-subjective metaphysicality in Germany; foreshadowing Jean-Paul Sartre with his kill-joy (amidst all the Revolutionary hoop-la) observation that, "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom." Meanwhile, in Britain, anyone with a social conscience and a penchant for pleasure is signing on with the Pragmatists: Jeremy Bentham (1724-1804) is the one who gets the ball rolling with his felicific calculus - an actual equation designed to measure the precise amount of happiness that this or that action is likely to produce; John Stuart Mill supports Bentham's belief in the greatest happiness for the greatest number but, unlike Bentham and in spite of his egalitarian political agenda, insists that not all happinesses are created equal. And then there is Karl Marx (1818-1883), shouting "Down with the Bourgeoisie!" and "Workers of the World Unite!" and sparking a chain reaction of mini-Revolutions across Europe with the publication of his and Engels' pot-boiler of a best-seller, The Communist Manifesto (1848). While way over on the other side of the pond, in America - a freshly minted nation following its own Revolution and successful bid for Independence in 1776 - men like William James (1842-1910) and C.S. Pierce (1839-1914) are closing out the 19th Century by evolving their own brand of down-to-earth, action-based Pragmatism. 


Oh, there are others - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) picking up on Rousseau's Romanticism and urging us all to take to the woods and live "wild and free"; Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872) calling "God" a figment of our imagination and turning theology into a branch of anthropology - but isn't that just the way with revolutionary phases?...One bright idea after another cycling through at breakneck speed?...One brand new plan for remaking society being overthrown by the next faster than you can put up an Eiffel Tower, build a Crystal Place, colonize a Continent, mount an Industrial Revolution? 


All to say that the Age of Revolution is a busy 150 years. And that as the Modern Age dawns, we're busy catching our breath.

Lesson Three: The Late Renaissance and The Age of Reason (1500-1750 AD)

In Halifax, I bought a book called Philosophy Bites Back (David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, Oxford University Press, 2012). One of those snappy little survey books designed to demystify philosophy and render it accessible to ordinary folk – the UK has been churning them out at an alarming rate of late, and they aren't half bad either – this one asks a number of contemporary philosophers to name their favourite thinker of all time, and then uses the interview format to unpack, through a lively to and fro, the top 27 of these fave raves. The end result tells much the same story as that to which we have grown accustomed: the history of Western philosophy as a linear trajectory from where it all began with Socrates to where it all begins to unravel with Derrida; and like the others of its ilk, the 25 stops between these two seminal points would lead us to believe that that history consists entirely of dead white males. These reservations apart, the interviews themselves present a compelling way of engaging with philosophy – a kind of three-way tango between a philosophy-savvy interviewer, an enthusiastic philosopher fan, and a famous thinker that they dust off between them and hang out for a much needed airing. Though an exercise in writing, it oozes orality: the thinker in question coming to life on the page as he is excitedly and eruditely resurrected out of odd little personality traits and earth shattering eureka moments, out of unquestioned beliefs long since discredited and far-fetched ideas that continue to resonate.

The fact that I read the book while steaming through the snowbound Maritimes on a train certainly added to its allure. The total white-out conditions through which we were traveling had effectively transformed the 24 hour journey to Montreal into one interminable ghostly night: rendering any sense of where we were a matter of pure speculation; turning the train itself into a safety bubble for some, a capsule hurtling blindly down the track for others. In other words, it was just like philosophy. Moreover, the favourite philosophers to whom I was paying particular attention as I made my way back for the third salon evening in our current series fell as neatly into camps as the people on the train: there were those, like Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who were prepared to embrace uncertainty, treating doubt as the key ingredient – the very spice! – of life; and there were those, like Rene Descartes (1596-1650), for whom doubt was a necessary, if somewhat desolate, passage that you just had to grin and bear and basically get through in order to arrive, triumphantly, in the dazzling light of pure unadulterated reason. 

Okay, so we were out of the Dark Ages. But we still weren't out of the woods. And for all that the dawn of the 16th Century saw us shaking off the shackles of feudalism, found us questioning Christianity's hold on our lives and beliefs, found us contemplating the latest findings of science – perhaps the earth wasn't stationary after all! perhaps we humans, like the earth itself, did not occupy centerstage in the cosmos! – it remained that times were tough. And brutal! The Catholics and Protestants were slogging it out in an endless round of religious wars. The Spanish Inquisition and with it, the persecution of Jews, Muslims and anybody else deemed a heretic, was in full bloody flow. Kings and Queens could be riding divine one day, losing their heads the next. And fledgling parliaments taking a stab at democratic governance were taking flight and toppling all in the space of a week.

In short, as we floundered around in the late Renaissance before blazing a trail into the Age of Reason, it became clear that for all the new thinking taking root during this period, Europe remained a precarious place to live for the vast majority of people. It was especially so for women, who – though initially welcomed into some of the early grassroots humanist movements challenging the old authoritarian regimes and fighting for political and social change – soon found themselves relegated to making the coffee and sweeping up the hall after the meeting as the emancipatory ideas underpinning these movements began to spread among men of means. 

Foreshadowing the kind of sidelining women would experience during the American civil rights movement in the mid-20^th century, for example, or in labour movements of the 1970s and 1980s, eventually it was only the “exceptional” woman, as she was referred to by that most “supreme” of libertarians John Locke (1632-1704), who was considered capable of partaking in public affairs – that is, the rare woman who owned property and/or possessed the leisure time required to cultivate her powers of reason, which basically meant that you that had to be a rich widow or a reigning monarch to play any meaningful part out there in the big wide world. As Nancy Tuana has argued, it would seem that those advances made by the early male humanists in terms of greater equality between the classes, education for the masses, and the creation of the modern state all took their toll on women’s advancement: sending them back into the private sphere; making marriage and child-rearing their only viable career options. Small wonder that the heckles on many a contemporary feminist’s back bristles when Humanism is touted as a philosophical ‘ism’ that serves us all. This unease is only heightened by the knowledge that the persecution of women as witches during the 16^th and 17^th Centuries was highest in those European countries which most fully embraced Humanist thinking. Nor is it a coincidence, as Tuana points out, that philosophy’s cementing of Reason as Male and Passion as Female during this same timeframe drew largely on the particular framing of women – as mentally defective, as unable to control their passions – used to justify the witch hunts in the first place.

And so we come to the meat of the evening, the very gristle for our mill. But here’s the twist. Drawing inspiration from philosopher Catherine McKinnon’s refreshingly succinct and wonderfully pointed (amidst all the waffling reverence for those Dead White Males) response to the question, “Who is your favourite philosopher?” – “Oh, the last woman I talked to, whoever she is” – I'm turning that gristle (and the task of doing something with it) over to you. After all, we are dealing here with a philosophical epoch that revolved largely around epistemology – that is, around the building of knowledge and the question of how we go about making it both individually and collectively. And in the spirit of McKinnon, why should those DWMs have all the fun?  Below you’ll find a crib sheet. It contains names, dates, quotes, themes and, most importantly, QUESTIONS – everything we used to build ourselves a salon evening last Thursday, and everything you need to stage a mini-salon session of your own. Don’t be shy! Just jump right in there, bite off more than you can chew, and enjoy! And see you next time, in the Age of Revolution (1750-1900).

Crib Sheet for Lesson Three, March 26th: The Renaissance and the Age of Reason (1500 – 1750 AD)

Getting going: Theseus’s Ship (Hobbes)

Tonight’s Terrain: Natural Philosophy, Political Philosophy and Epistemology

The BIG issues:   

1) Observation, Measurement and Testing as the new grounds for knowledge about the world
2) Reconciling what's going on in our heads (individual consciousness) with the external world

Key “isms”: Idealism, Materialism, Dualism, Monism, Rationalism, Empiricism

Changing Things Up in the Late Renaissance:

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Political Philosophy – “It is much safer for a Prince to be feared than loved”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Natural Philosophy – “Knowledge is Power”

QUESTION: Machiavelli thought good leaders combined the qualities of a lion (strength) and a fox (cunning); Bacon thought Rationalists were like spiders (spinning magnificent webs from matter secreted within, which were structurally impressive but lacked connection to the outside world) and Empiricists were like ants (mindlessly collecting data, with only limited ideas as to what to do with it). In the way that you go through the world as a philosophical being, what creature are you, and why?

DUELING POLYMATHS: OPTIMISTS vs PESSIMISTS

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – The Pessimist (“Life is a war of every man against every man, and all outcomes are decided by force and fraud…Without society, left to our own nature, our life would be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – The Optimist (“This is the Best of All Possible Worlds”)

QUESTION: When it comes to how you see the world around you, are you Hobbesian or Leibnizian?

Some Questions to Launch the Age of Reason:

1) How do I know?

2) What can I know?

3) Are 1) and 2) the same question?

4) What does knowing feel like?

DOUBT!!!...(And how to deal with it):

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592): Doubt as a way of life – “To philosophize is to learn how to live”

René Descartes (1596-1650): Radical Doubt as a passage towards certainty – “Cogito Ergo Sum”

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and his Wager – Hedging your bets (or sitting on the fence-ism) re: Doubt

QUESTION: When it comes to how you live your life, are you Montaignian, Cartesian, or Pascalian?

Puzzling things out with THE BRITISH EMPIRICISTS:  IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, and PLAIN OLD COMMON SENSE-ISM

John Locke (1632-1704) and our memories, our desires and our mental attributes: If the prince and the pauper exchange bodies, which person is now the prince; which person is now the pauper?

George Berkeley (1685-1753) and his puzzle:

There was a young man who said God

Must find it exceedingly odd,

To think that the tree should continue to be,

When there’s no one about in the quad.

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd.

I’m always about in the quad.

And that’s why the tree will continue to be

Since observed by

Yours faithfully

God.

David Hume (1711-1776) and Miracles: Should we believe in them or not?