Conatus is the linchpin of Spinoza’s ethical system. This concept bridges Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance, his definitions of the affects, and his ethics proper. In this paper, I argue that conatus addresses a core problem in the Ethics: how to have ethics in a world of absolute necessity. I begin this paper by explaining conatus as it relates to metaphysics. In the second section, I focus on conatus and the affects. In the third section, I turn to Spinoza’s ethics proper and specifically his conception of good and evil. In the fourth section, I focus on the principle of moderation. In the fifth and final section, I conclude by showing how conatus relates to Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity.
Continue reading “Spinoza, conatus, and ethics in a world of absolute necessity”Category: Uncategorized
St George-of-the-River
Silver streams; Spires soar. The orange trees Bow with the weight Of their fruit; Aching towards the river Glistening with the sun's rays Shining through palm fronds. I leap around levees The water tumbles over boulders Strewn across meanders, Weaving a new tapestry From threads of green and silver Against blue and white. Sun sets; Swallows swoop.
Nightingales
This poem complements an essay I published in Taxis called “Who Remembers Paliomylos? From the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus.”
"T'aidonia de s'afinoune na koimetheis stis Platres."
— Giorgos Seferis, "Helen".
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
— John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale".
What do nightingales think of symbolism? Silver light fills the valley The fresh evening air resounding With the nightingale's song. My heart opens, my mind fills With memories of light: The fireplace, the Christmas tree The morning sun, the evening moon The comet, the stars, the milky cloud Etched like frosted glass On a clear summer's night. In the morning, the hammers pound. The voices of neighbors float From orchards to verandas. The birds bide their time Until winter rains and residents retreat. Life after life.
Habermas and Civil Society
In this essay, I focus on the concept of “civil society” in Habermas. I trace its development through the four phases of juridification Habermas outlines in The Theory of Communicative Action. To substantiate this development, I look backwards to Habermas’ foundation in the Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of civil society. I then turn to Habermas’ later text Between Facts and Norms, which argues for a strong relationship between the law and civil society. On the one hand, I deeply appreciate how Habermas elevates civil society, making its characteristic intersubjectivity the foundation of law. On the other hand, I worry about where this leaves civil society. In particular, I think the process presented positively in Between Facts and Norms contradicts Habermas’ own analysis of juridification in The Theory of Communicative Action. I think Habermas looks to civil society as a model because it is a space of spontaneous free interaction between autonomous subjects. But when the law assumes the functions of civil society, this space of freedom and autonomy risks disappearing. Before elaborating on this argument about Habermas, I will provide some motivation for why I see this as a risk.
Continue reading “Habermas and Civil Society”Objectivity in Kant, Hegel, and Marx
In this essay, I briefly sketch the trajectory of the “objective” or “objectivity” in three canonical German philosophers: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. My motivation for pursuing this essay is looking backwards from the place of “objectivity” today, especially as the word has been variously contested in the last forty years or so in the emerging field of science and technology studies (e.g., by Donna Haraway). Too often, in these debates objectivity is deployed as a strawman, a crude caricature of logical positivism to be hacked away at by (often equally crude) postmodern critiques. A more sophisticated account of objectivity is given by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their seminal 2008 book, Objectivity, which traces the rise of successive “epistemic virtues” through a close study of scientific atlases from around 1750 to 1950. There have also been recent attempts to recuperate objectivity as part of the broad coalition of movements grouped under the “ontological turn.” I think a move of this sort was anticipated by Hannah Arendt in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I think all these discussions would be enriched by a more nuanced understanding of the history of this word.
But enough of this talk. This paper is more proximately driven by a fundamental foreignness I perceived when reading the German philosophers of the early nineteenth century, for whom “objectivity” seems to mean something else quite different. For the purposes of this essay, I want to reconstruct as faithfully as I can the various meanings of objectivity and objects in the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I bracket both my motivations and the later development of the term to focus on an immanent account of each of these thinkers in turn. One more preliminary note: part of the foreignness can be attributed (as so often it is) to difficulties of translation. In particular, “subject” is also a Latinate term in German (Subject or Subjekt). By contrast, “object” can be either Object/Objekt (the Latinate term) or the Germanic Gegenstand, whence also Gegenständlich (“objective”) and Gegenständlichkeit (“objectivity”). Gegenstand has the distinction that it literally “stands against” something. Kant talked mostly of Objecte — but not really, since he divided the world into the realm of appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves. The Subjekt has a double meaning, of course: it is both subject-matter (“what is the subject of this book?”) in which case it can be rather synonymous with “object”; and it is the ethical or epistemological subject, the self that knows or acts. So much for a bird’s-eye view of the development. Let us now dive in and get our hands dirty.
Continue reading “Objectivity in Kant, Hegel, and Marx”An Articulation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
For Hegel, philosophy requires systematic exposition. It should not be a matter of feeling or intuiting. Nor should philosophy undertake the task of “edification,” a kind of “fog” of “inflamed inspiration.” Rather, philosophy has as its aim material completion that opposes “utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.” This kind of systematic, complete, ultimate truth is not in substance but in subject, namely the universal individual, the world spirit. Science consists not in an end, but rather in the reflection: the process is of absolute importance.
Continue reading “An Articulation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit“An Articulation of the Prefaces to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
In his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sketches his vision of philosophy’s task after the transcendental turn. For the purposes of this essay, I will limit my discussion to metaphysics, which is also the subject of this first Critique. Kant famously calls metaphysics “the queen of all the sciences” (A viii). He traces a path between the dogmatism (despotic tyranny) and skepticism (complete anarchy) that he says have characterized most previous metaphysics. Kant notes that Locke had attempted but failed to “put an end to all these controversies … through a certain physiology of the human understanding” (A ix). Kant puts this point more strongly still in the preface to the second edition, where he compares the path of metaphysics to other sciences. Logic has “travelled the secure course of a science” since Aristotle (B vii). The path of logic has been relatively easy, though, since it “has to do with nothing further than itself and its own form” (B ix). Metaphysics, by contrast, “has to deal with objects [Objecte] too,” and therefore “logic as a propaedeutic constitutes only the outer courtyard, as it were, to the sciences” (B ix).
Kant’s task is to put metaphysics on the same “secure course of a science” as mathematics and physics. The task of the philosopher is to undertake this kind of scientific inquiry with respect to reason itself. What does this path of metaphysics as science consist in? Well, Kant says, up to now “it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects.” Since this has “come to nothing,” Kant tells us, “let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition” (B xvi). Here he makes an analogy with Copernicus. Before the Copernican Revolution, celestial phenomena were explained as dependent on the motion of heavenly bodies alone, since the Earth was stationary; after Copernicus, these same observed phenomena were explained as dependent on both the motion of heavenly bodies and the motion of the Earth. Kant proposes something analogous: before him, the phenomena of human experience were explained as dependent on the sensible world, with the mind uninvolved in structuring these phenomena; Kant argues, by contrast, that the phenomena of human experience are structured by both sensory data and a basic structure supplied by the human mind. Instead of a sensible world orbiting around a stationary mind, both the mind and objects are involved in structuring the phenomena of human experience. “This experiment,” Kant says, “promises to metaphysics the secure course of a science,” not least because it borrows its structure from the very revolution that also set astronomy on the secure course of a science. Kant is thus “undertaking an entire revolution [in metaphysics] according to the example of the geometers and natural scientists” (B xxii).
Continue reading “An Articulation of the Prefaces to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason“Black Studies and Geological Thinking
In this time of crisis, I and many others find comfort in imagining what thinkers we feel close to would say about the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s idiosyncratic conception of the world. For her, it is human interaction that creates a world out of the earth; in The Human Condition, Arendt writes thatwe make a “home for men during their life on earth” by acting together and speaking to each other in a common space. It seems, then, that social distancing is quite literally the end of the world. What Arendt dreads has come to pass: men have become entirely private — that is, deprived of physical interaction with other human beings. What, then, do we do after the end of the world from COVID-19?
To answer this question, I want to suggest that we look to a bevy of recent works in indigenous and black studies that take seriously the ends of the world that have already happened. The apocalypticism of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 is not novel to people who survived the genocidal onset of modernity. The diseases that devastated indigenous populations in the Americas were many times more deadly than the novel coronavirus; the Middle Passage, too, cut short not just many lives but also spelled the end of entire families, languages, and cultures. In short, the creation and discovery of a new world spelled an end to many old ones. For people who survived these catastrophes and their descendants, the end of the world has long been on their minds.
Recent interventions have brought this rich legacy of thought to bear on the apocalypticism of the climate crisis. We would do well to turn to these recent works as we face another crisis. Just as we can learn much about crisis mobilization from the response to the pandemic, we can begin to imagine a different world post-pandemic by listening to the voices that remind us about the ends of the world that have already happened. In other words, we should think together the end of the world due to colonialism, climate change, and COVID-19. The point of this comparison is not to inspire unfounded hope: to say that the end of the world has happened should never be to diminish its severity. Yet the fact remains that people have always survived and persisted. We should turn to these voices to learn more about the stakes of apocalypticism and what to do after the end of the world.
Continue reading “Black Studies and Geological Thinking”Forest History of Southern New England
The following analysis uses data published in W. Wyatt Oswald et al., “Subregional Variability in the Response of New England Vegetation to Postglacial Climate Change,” Journal of Biogeography 45, no. 10 (2018): 2375–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13407. The spreadsheet I used is available upon request.
Key points:
- High-resolution data permits reconstruction of Holocene forest cover changes
- Initial forestation after deglaciation in 12 000 BCE led by birch and pine
- Dramatic decline in forest canopy between 1630 and 1708; almost complete recovery by 2001
Berry Pond is an unimaginatively named site north of Boston, Massachusetts (figure 1). Its low elevation (42 m), regular precipitation (1236 mm per year), and soil (mostly glacial till) make it a site typical of southern New England. The authors of this study present an impressively detailed pollen count stretching back to 16 000 years before present (BP), or 14 072 BCE. The sampling gives us data at a very high resolution. This data is freely available through the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. I downloaded this data and here present a brief analysis and interpretation with an eye to tracing the Holocene forest history of New England.
The graph tells a remarkably coherent story of the forest’s response to disturbance (figure 2). The canopy tree count includes species such as maple, chestnut, hickory, oak, and hemlock — characteristic trees of a well-established forest in southern New England. In this category, I also included pioneer trees, namely pine and birch. These trees like open canopy, so they are the first to “pioneer” an area that has no other trees in it. Thus we see that the initial response to deglaciation at 12 000 BCE is a steep climb in the percent of canopy trees, from 56% to 97% in less than 2 000 years. This dramatic increase in forest cover is led by birch and pine, which rise to their all-time high of 75% in 10 800 BCE. Over the next 11 500 years, the relative pollen counts stay pretty similar, with canopy trees at 95–100% and the percent of flowering grasses (indicators of open land) below 5%. In other words, the landscape that native people of New England encountered was mostly forest, without much open land (at least in the area of Berry Pond).
A Neglected Thinker of the Black Atlantic
Too few people today know of Anténor Firmin, a Haitian writer, anthropologist, and politician. He is important not just as an early anticolonial figure, but also as a thinker of what he himself termed an anthropologie positive. Firmin wrote his most famous work in 1885, De l’égalité des races humaines, a refutation of the classic 1855 racist tract by Arthur de Gobineau entitled De l’inégalité des races humaines. Firmin’s work is truly remarkable for its rigor and forethought. Scholarship over the past two decades has brought to light many of Firmin’s qualities, not least by issuing new editions of Firmin’s book and its first translation into English. Recent articles have also highlighted his surprising relationship to then-nascent Egyptology; his place in contemporary debates over Darwinism and polygenesis; and his philosophical heritage as traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The earliest of these was Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban 2002 article in the American Anthropologist, where she notes that Firmin provides a coherent challenge to race-thinking in anthropology decades before Boas. I want to delve a little deeper into Firmin’s work by highlighting a few passages that I think are particularly exceptional.
Continue reading “A Neglected Thinker of the Black Atlantic”