Sartre Society Wrap

Today's my first full day back from the North American Sartre Society. Lately, since Storm Heter specifically asked me about this, the blog writing process proceeds as follows:

1. Brainstorm. In this case: good conference, good people.
2. Read material for teaching. Why did I put this off until today?
3. Three weeks later.

So I'll write this now. I don't promise any literary quality. Notice how most of these sentences are structured as subject/verb/predicate. Only the second using any recursion?

As it turns out, the Sartre Society meetings are my favorite conferences. The papers that I attended were great, and ranged over a diverse set of topics. For a field that probably seems to outsiders to be fairly narrow, the papers ranged from politics and critical race theory to the meaning of groove, and in many ways Sartre himself formed the background point of reference but not always the immediate focus. I moderated the panel on jazz, and only one panelist made an explicit reference to Sartre.

If you're interested in tweets and pictures, we even tried the hashtag thing, #SartreSociety2015, which was temporarly derailed my comments about our attempt to absorb the nightlife in Bethlehem.

Finally, I left feeling motivated to reread Sartre and write more. I also with a strong idea of what my next Sartre Society paper would be about. My paper started like this:

This talk is the first part of a larger project that is currently entitled Negative Philosophy: Extinction, Humanism, and Animal Rights. While I cannot outline the entire project, I can indicate how today’s talk fits within the whole project.

[The talk was dedicated to a response to the thesis of extinction as defined by Eugene Thacker, who himself picks it up from Ray Brassier, who in a sense picks it up from Lyotard, Nietzsche, et cetera. Sartre also maintains that there is no ultimate--transcendent, teleological, ontotheological--meaning, but does not embrace (and for good reason) the pessimist aesthetic or the mysticism that Thacker endorses.]

In the second chapter, I will argue that Existentialism is a Humanism is a performative text, in which Sartre nihilates the anthropocentrism and human triumphalism present in traditional accounts—such as those of Pico della Mirandolla and Feuerbach—of humanism. The final chapter asks whether or not it is possible for a nihilist or pessimist to defend animal rights, and I will contend that it is possible to hold a position that sounds like a nihilistic Tom Regan.

Most of the questions I got during later, informal discussions had to do with the part about a nihilistic Tom Regan. People wanted to know what the hell that meant. Given that I also want to know, I'll be writing that up for 2016.

Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism

Forthcoming in Symposium: Jason Harman reviews Christopher Watkin's Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux. Harman writes:

Watkin’s text seeks to chart contemporary French thought’s attempt to attain “a thinking that is truly without God” (1), through an analysis and critique of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux. It should be noted upfront that for sheer breadth and depth Watkin’s work is astounding. Watkin, I am led to suspect, feels perfectly at ease inhabiting the minds of Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux. Further, where contemporary French philosophy often dallies in the obscure, Watkin’s rendering—with ample citations from a wide selection of primary texts—both clarifies and sharpens. Throughout this text, Watkin ushers the reader into the intimate circle of philosophy’s leading minds—certainly no small feat.

Despite these merits, Harman notes several shortcomings with Watkin's approach, that you can assess by clicking here and reading the review.

This is the second review that I have read of Watkin's book, and it (that is, the book) looks to be quite thought provoking (perhaps it also pairs well with Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life?).

Note that I'm no post-secular! philosopher. I think that the works of Spinoza (obviously the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) and Marx are still the best approaches for dealing with the relations between religion, philosophy, and politics--and from what I gather, they both avoid the pincers of Watkin's critique (go read it!). I do think, on the other hand, that many contemporary attempts to go, as it were, post-theological, don't take enough from these approaches.

Why I am not a New Atheist

I'm much more of an 'old' atheist, committed to social justice and to thinking about religion dialectically (as an institution that can at different times reinforce or challenge the inequalities of social relations). I've often complained that the  new atheists lack both of these commitments, broadly aligning themselves with Western imperialism, neoliberalism, and a patronizing dismissal of religion that reaches a fever pitch when it comes to discussing Islam. 

Concerning Richard Dawkins, Lenin's Tomb has (screen) captured how the latter position opens a number of problems that they can't resolve--but about which feel compelled to 'raise' questions:

Damn These Atheists...

From xkcd; hat tip to Scu via his comment on Philosophy in a Time of Error...see how confusing sharing the credit gets? (You might also want to read the comments on Derrida while you're there).

Immanence and Atheism

I've been preparing, over the last month, for a talk I am giving at the University of Toledo on Deleuze and Spinoza. After finishing the penultimate draft of my MA thesis at the aforementioned university (in 2002; I defended in March 2003), I spent some time reading some of the more contemporary figures in French and Italian philosophy, which included Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari. I thought it would be appropriate to return to some of them when I return to give a talk in Toledo.

The talk I am giving next week deals in part with what Deleuze* calls the 'plane of immanence.' He argues that philosophy is the creation of concepts, which has become somewhat of a motto for some Deleuzians, but what is more difficult is figuring out what he means by setting out, instituting, or tracing, a plane of immanence. There are several problems with the proliferation of his 'modes', as it were, of explaining immanence but I am going to leave them aside just to mention one of the compelling reasons in favor of his argument.

The third example of What is Philosophy? reorders the history of philosophy from the point of view of the institution of the plane of immanence. Much of this history becomes a refusal of thinking immanence in favor of contemplation (of the Object), reflection (of the Subject) and communication ('with' the Other); each of those capitalized nouns representing a figure of transcendence. According to Deleuze, these transcendent figures are  reappear in philosophy because they are illusions that arise on the plane of immanence. The decisive move is to attach the problem of immanence to the problem of the revaluation of values. The conceptual link gives us a clear way to assess why immanence has been rejected by so many philosophers,  and why so many have attacked the naturalism of Spinoza to 'save' freedom, because from the standpoint of transcendent values, all other values appear nihilistic, while from the standpoint of immanence, all transcendent values are illusory.

My question is whether or not 'immanence' is the best approach to talking about the philosophical commitments of atheism. An atheist cannot have recourse to supernatural or transcendent explanations or values, and I think immanence captures this. Nevertheless, it seems that Deleuze's plane of immanence neutralizes the divine name while keeping the image of the One-All. It's not even clear if Deleuze maintains a materialist position (this is something like Hallward's critique), so even Spinoza's naturalism might be more strict and more minimal that Deleuze's philosophy. Atheism and materialism reject transcendence, but which concepts are required to think immanence if the One-All won't work? While I can't go into it here, there are at least two options: contingency and inconsistency. Or even possibly the often rejected concepts of necessity or determination. In addition, no matter which concepts 'work', so to speak, there remains the question of relinking these conceptual questions to historical materialism.

*I am leaving aside Guattari, not because I think his approach should be separated from Deleuze's, but because I am also going to critique Deleuze's work on Spinoza. François Dosse's Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, biographie croisée also claims that much of What is Philosophy? was written only by Deleuze (pp. 538-539).

Brains, Beliefs and Religion

I am currently working on a paper in which I argue that the tradition of French atheism, starting with Sartre, presents a much stronger ethical and political commitment than that of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Sam Harris), who typically hold highly questionable political positions, ranging from a kind of status quo liberalism to being downright reactionary. The latter would be Harris, who argues that we should be not be afraid to torture people or install 'benign dictatorships' in order to further our 'democratic' ideals.

However, I often find the science that they utilize interesting. A study by Sam Harris (the same person I just criticized above), et al., is no different in this regard (for a summary, go here, for the study, here). It found that religious beliefs, such as whether God exists, are processed in the brain in the same manner as nonreligious statements such as, Alexander the Great was a very famous military leader.

While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent.

Content independence means that all beliefs are believed by the brain in the same way, even if we have a tendency to divide them by content. This indicates, Harris argues, that there is no distinction between beliefs that are commonly distinguished as facts or values (or faith). From this, Lisa Miller, writing in Newsweek, draws a questionable conclusion:

If a believer's brain regards the Second Coming the way it does every other fact, then debates about the veracity of faith would seem—to the committed believer, at least—to be rather pointless.

Now, remove that caveat between those em dashes, and from Miller you get the same old canard that it's pointless to debate religious beliefs. However, if they are processed like other beliefs, this lends credence to the argument that there is no reason to treat them as a special category (under the rubric of faith). Perhaps then, we can jettison the typical metaphor that faith is somehow deeper than other beliefs. Which is another way into the paper I was working on because the French philosophers I am working on all supply ways to think about truth, belief or ethics, without the appeal to 'deep faith' (i.e. blind faith).

Where I am going to differ with Harris, again, is science's role in all this. In the Newsweek piece, he argues that his results show that science can tell us important things about issues we often call 'values.' And while I agree that science may help us hone our perspective on 'values' it certainly is not the ultimate arbiter as the New Atheists sometimes imply. First, because science is often conducted through research governed by the profit motive (see Dan Hind's Threat to Reason, a must read really), or that science has gotten these issues so absolutely wrong (for example, with eugenics. See Robert Whitaker's Mad in America, and Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection). Nor do I think that science authorizes the view that we should install "benign dictatorships" around the world to further Harris' 'democratic' ideals. That is, Enlightenment does not come at the end of a gun. We ought to treat religious movements in their political context, because they cannot be separated from them. As Marx says, and as the New Atheists ignore, religious suffering is a expression of real suffering, and the abolition of religion suffering demands the abolition of the conditions that create real suffering.

Of course, there is already a tradition of thought that recognizes this, leading from Sartre to Deleuze and Badiou.