The results of the United States military's latest mental health assessment of soldiers in Iraq are rather demoralizing. Reading the full report, I was especially troubled by the section on battlefield ethics. The causes of lapses in battlefield ethics, as explained in the report, are understandable. There are steps that can be taken by the military to improve the situation. However, I doubt that the core problem of emotional reactions to violence can be solved by better training and better leadership.
I often see that war is contemplated as if the people involved were more or less than human. That is folly. It bothers me to see such views, and it makes me sad.
Labels: ethics, humanity, war
In his introduction to The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Jean-François Lyotard entertains the idea that if humans were born human it would not be possible to educate them. This is not exactly a viewpoint Lyotard adopts, but I want to consider it before getting to what Lyotard's view actually is. I don't know how long it takes for a human being to fully develop. Several decades at least, and most people should like a little longer than that. Is there any stage at which one, finally, becomes human, any stage at which one ceases becoming? What is the truth in the status of "adult"? Is it really a cultural universal, and what does its apparent universality suggest? Hannah Arendt (in Life of the Mind) put forward the idea that all living beings reach a point of epiphany, a full flowering of their potential which irrevocably defines them, after which they have only senescence to look forward to. Can that really be true? Don't we all know people who seem to undergo multiple epiphanies, who never cease to develop? If lifelong development represents the true potential of the human being, then isn't wrong to regard any stage of development as marking a boundary between the human and the inhuman?
For Lyotard the dilemma is this: "What shall call human in humans, the initial misery of their childhood, or their capacity to acquire a 'second' nature which, thanks to language, makes them fit to share in communal life, adult consciousness and reason" (p.3). He comes down on the side of the former:
Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to be more human.
....That it always remains for the adult to free himself or herself from the obscure savageness of childhood by bringing about its promise–that is precisely the condition of humankind.
(pp. 3-4)
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Having expressed some reservations, I can't quite fully agree with Lyotard on this, though it does resonate with me. Does my view on freeing oneself from the obscure savageness of childhood become necessarily Sisyphean? Is there any reason to think Lyotard's view of the task isn't Sisyphean? What do you make of Lyotard's description of the human condition?
Labels: Arendt, childhood, development, humanity, Lyotard
I was flipping through Eugen Fink's Existenz und Coexistenz when the following sentence sprung out at me: "The human being exists as a relation" (Der Mensch existiert als ein Verhältnis). I'd like to play with that as an ontological proposistion, but I'll make some modifications so as to end up with this sentence: The human being by nature is a person who relates.
The first problem I see that I should want to guard against is a substantialist reading of the human being or person. This is not in the letter or spirit of what Fink is talking about, and it's not an interpretation I should want to slip into or allow to be nurtured as a subtext to my own sometimes fuzzy thinking about the matter. I used the phrase "by nature" as a nod to Aristotle, but my understanding of nature is rather existential, and I certainly don't mean to import Aristotlean metaphysics wholesale. However, I do mean to personalize the problem, to embody it in a person, a who, a who who acts in this characteristic way of relating, always as a person. So I definitely do not mean that the human being is by nature a being that relates or even a person that relates. The human being is always a person, a who.
The personal relation implies a plurality. There is always the person who does this or that, and there is at least one other person who is addressed by the very fact of personhood. Speaking in the third person can we imagine a kind of other that is not another person, and we can imagine another kind of action, but the essential addressivity of being a person cannot be wiped away. The addressivity of being a person is not merely a matter of a reciprocity of viewpoints implied by speaking. It is a vital aspect of our whoness, of how we naturally relate to the world.
Is there an intentional structure to human relating? Must we always relate to something? I don't know. In personal addressivity we are always already relating to other persons, but it is not clear to me, dear reader, whether such persons may not be allowed to remain vague and undifferentiated. Evidently we can relate to the possibility of another person as if it were actual. I won't dare to call this possibility Other. It could after all be me.
Labels: Fink, humanity, ontology, personhood, relationality
Ernesto Grassi (The Primordial Metaphor, p.10, footnotes omitted) muses:
Is there a tradition which offers a foundation for a conception of knowledge rooted in the historicity of ontological experience? Does the humanist tradition offer us such a possibility? A correct understanding of Humanism has been hindered by the pre-eminence of German idealism, which denied it any philosophical value precisely because it is grounded on rhetorical and metaphorical thought; by Heidegger's antihumanistic thesis; and by the interpetation of Humanism as essentially a Christian reflection on Platonism.
With regard to the concept of knowledge, Western philosophy rejected, from the very beginning, the speculative function of rhetorical language for its being anchored to the here and now of existence; consequently, it expressed a negative judgement on metaphor, since metaphor transfers and transforms the meaning of a word and, in so doing, destroys its rational precision.
We would like to propose a different thesis: That which is–namely, individual beings, participants in and participles of being, for only as such do they exist–manifests itself in reality exclusively in a concrete historical situation, defined by the here and now of existence. All beings, in their openness to being, are expressions of a call, an appeal that must be answered in the urgency of every moment. The appeals, in whose realm we exist, are everchanging and new, and the meaning of beings is transformed according to the modality of our responses to the appeals.
We shall reformulate our question: Is there a tradition which allows us to identify a nonrational foundation of knowledge, by virtue of which metaphor and rhetorical language acquire a philosophical function? I have tried elsewhere to reconstruct this tradition and here I shall summarize it with references to De Laboribus Herculis by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).
Although Salutati holds that knowledge is enabled by the activity of the Muses, not just one, but all nine, Grassi considers only six of them, excluding Urania, Terpsichore, and, if I'm not mistaken, Calliope (the passage in question seems to describe Thalia, though she is not named).
So what's it to me if Grassi neglects to mention Terpsichore? So she doesn't appeal to him, so what? Does a defense of erudition–for that's what Grassi offers, its urgency unmistakable if you travel in certain circles–require anything like a Terpsichore?
Terpsichore, in any event, never seems to get any respect. If you live in the Bay Area of California, you can see a painting of Terpsichore hanging in the Fine Arts Museum of San Fransisco (which, incidentally, has claimed for itself the domain "thinker.org"). The painting, by Jean-Marc Nattier, shows Terpsichore with one breast exposed. Her cheeks appear a little rosy. her eyes glazed over. She's a little tipsy. But this isn't precisely what I mean by no respect, not the all of it. The very idea of a museum is an offense to the Muses, especially Terpsichore. Who dances in a museum? It might as well be a mausoleum for the narrowness of the inspirations it permits. And I say this as one who loves graphic arts, one who loves the feeling that comes after being in a good art museum.
I know that many fine art museums have made attempts to cultivate an appreciation of performance art, hosting poetry readings, jazz recitals (ahem) and the like. It's just not the same as permitting people to dance. The seediest discothèque provides a more fitting tribute to Terpsichore than any museum ever will. Is this perhaps at the heart of the reason why Terpsichore gets no respect? Is the company she keeps just a little too democratic for modern sensibilities?
The promise of human order, or culture, concieved without room for dance is revolting. Always, in every historical epoch, the people will revolt with their feet. Kwassa Kwassa is but one example, the greatly maligned and misunderstood Chic another. The denigration of Terpsichore is unacceptable to the masses of humanity, yet every political movement that claims to speak for the masses or to represent a perfection of humanity begins and ends with the denigration of Terpsichore. What's up with that? It doesn't speak well for intellectuals, to say the least.
Labels: dance, existence, humanity, metaphor, muses, Terpsichore