![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I see yahoo hockey is now running some Sports Illustrated columnist who thinks the RIM guy wants to move the Penguins to Kitchener-Waterloo.
That ... is ... HILARIOUS.
The volume in the library is steadily increasing. In at least a couple of senses. Mid-terms are coming. I really ought to look into earplugs. Except that this brief spell of abnormal normalcy has just concluded, anyway, and who knows when the next one will be.
Mostly Sartre books today. It's fascinating how differently different commentators read the bad faith chapter, especially how differently they spin the examples, adding details to fit their own interpretations (for instance, Joseph Catalano, "Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective", says that the young woman on a date must be habitually flirtatious or coquettish, because Catalano wants to exempt most of us, most of the time, from bad faith, because he wants to make it an ethical category), and how differently they read the difference, or lack thereof, between good faith and bad faith. Gary Cox, Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, says that bad faith and good faith are "ontologically identical"; Catalano says that "ontologically, good faith and bad faith are two radically different kinds of things". Cox may be the commentator I've seen who's most inclined to read bad faith as denying facticity as well as denying freedom (though Bell, on further inspection, does seem to get that too); Catalano is probably the one who most unequivocally only has it as denying freedom. Unfortunately, Cox is pretty much no one, as far as I'm aware, while Catalano is a bigshot.
It seems so obvious that the overemphasis of the denying-freedom aspect of bad faith is politically (if unconsciously--in bad faith?) motivated, a product of knee-jerk, more or less romantic, liberalism: the herd (but isn't it funny that Nietzsche identifies liberalism with the herd?) wants comfort and security instead of freedom--bad herd!
Last week the WLU paper ran a piece by a guy saying that women dressing provocatively were setting back the women's movement. (I'm not sure what he had in mind by "dressing provocatively", but these days, generally speaking, it's not just a matter of skin--a lot of female undergrads have things like JUICY written across their backsides. (I am vaguely given to understand that JUICY may be a brand name.)) This week there are several angry letters from women, and at least one from a man, saying that feminism is about choice--and at least one of them takes the line that how she dresses doesn't mean anything to anyone except her, and if anyone thinks it means anything to them, that's their problem, not hers. This is an obvious case of bad faith in its denying-facticity aspect: she's taking the position that nothing she does has any significance except what she freely decides it does, and denying any relevance to the cultural and material situatedness of her decisions. (Of course, if you really want to defend romantic individualist liberalism, you'll say, yeah, so what? But the thing is, no one would have JUICY written across their butts if "juicy butts" didn't have some cultural significance that escapes the power of individuals to decide what it means.)
If there's one thing that bad faith evades, it's not freedom but responsibility--responsibility either for your freedom (which, in the present case, would amount to something like: I can't help dressing like this; it's how you have to dress if you want to get a boyfriend, or whatever (and notice how embarrassing it would be to say something like that now)) or your facticity. (I wish there was a more ordinary word for "facticity". In Heidegger, more or less the same thing is "thrownness", which is even more opaque.)
And then, some more Prado. At one point, I flipped to the end of it, and saw that in the last paragraph he says that Rorty's general view of philosophy as an exhausted discipline is probably right, and that "the professionalism of the '60s" is, in any event, surely over. Now, I'm not quite sure what he means by "the professionalism of the '60s", but on the most obvious ways of reading that--i.e., having to do with specialized research programs--it seems wildly and woefully (oh so very woefully) off. But what would be interesting, then, would be that in 1987 it actually looked right, which, unless Prado's point of view was idiosyncratic (which is certainly possible), would make the current hyper-professionalization of philosophy a creature of the '90s. Certainly the waves of cognitive science and professional ethics are creatures of the '90s. Anyway, related to that, I am struck, again, by how much actual, personal, conversation--especially those wonderful Queen's philosophy colloquia--is brought into this book, even more than in the Foucault book. This is something that is very close to the way I work in philosophy--it is, after all, why I'm reading Prado's book (and it is why I got into the moral luck business, in conversation with Domsky)--and it is something which is now (though I can't say I know it wasn't ever thus) very rare.
Recently on Leiter's blog--and no one symbolizes the hyper-professionalization of The Profession as much as Leiter (who runs the infamous "Philosophical Gourmet" ranking of philosophy departments)--there was a call for an end to "in-house" editorship of major professional journals. In the comments, someone from Philosophical Review, which is one of the top general philosophy journals and is edited in-house at Cornell, said that in the olden days (the '30s or so), submissions would be passed around at department meetings, and that, alone, was how they'd decide what got in and what didn't. As far as I'm concerned, that's bloody well marvellous. Generally, I'd like for journals to have characters, to carry on ongoing conversations, and not to just run whatever is deemed most widely respectable by the most widely respected authorities. But that kind of idea looks like another casualty of the liberalism of the age.
That ... is ... HILARIOUS.
The volume in the library is steadily increasing. In at least a couple of senses. Mid-terms are coming. I really ought to look into earplugs. Except that this brief spell of abnormal normalcy has just concluded, anyway, and who knows when the next one will be.
Mostly Sartre books today. It's fascinating how differently different commentators read the bad faith chapter, especially how differently they spin the examples, adding details to fit their own interpretations (for instance, Joseph Catalano, "Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective", says that the young woman on a date must be habitually flirtatious or coquettish, because Catalano wants to exempt most of us, most of the time, from bad faith, because he wants to make it an ethical category), and how differently they read the difference, or lack thereof, between good faith and bad faith. Gary Cox, Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, says that bad faith and good faith are "ontologically identical"; Catalano says that "ontologically, good faith and bad faith are two radically different kinds of things". Cox may be the commentator I've seen who's most inclined to read bad faith as denying facticity as well as denying freedom (though Bell, on further inspection, does seem to get that too); Catalano is probably the one who most unequivocally only has it as denying freedom. Unfortunately, Cox is pretty much no one, as far as I'm aware, while Catalano is a bigshot.
It seems so obvious that the overemphasis of the denying-freedom aspect of bad faith is politically (if unconsciously--in bad faith?) motivated, a product of knee-jerk, more or less romantic, liberalism: the herd (but isn't it funny that Nietzsche identifies liberalism with the herd?) wants comfort and security instead of freedom--bad herd!
Last week the WLU paper ran a piece by a guy saying that women dressing provocatively were setting back the women's movement. (I'm not sure what he had in mind by "dressing provocatively", but these days, generally speaking, it's not just a matter of skin--a lot of female undergrads have things like JUICY written across their backsides. (I am vaguely given to understand that JUICY may be a brand name.)) This week there are several angry letters from women, and at least one from a man, saying that feminism is about choice--and at least one of them takes the line that how she dresses doesn't mean anything to anyone except her, and if anyone thinks it means anything to them, that's their problem, not hers. This is an obvious case of bad faith in its denying-facticity aspect: she's taking the position that nothing she does has any significance except what she freely decides it does, and denying any relevance to the cultural and material situatedness of her decisions. (Of course, if you really want to defend romantic individualist liberalism, you'll say, yeah, so what? But the thing is, no one would have JUICY written across their butts if "juicy butts" didn't have some cultural significance that escapes the power of individuals to decide what it means.)
If there's one thing that bad faith evades, it's not freedom but responsibility--responsibility either for your freedom (which, in the present case, would amount to something like: I can't help dressing like this; it's how you have to dress if you want to get a boyfriend, or whatever (and notice how embarrassing it would be to say something like that now)) or your facticity. (I wish there was a more ordinary word for "facticity". In Heidegger, more or less the same thing is "thrownness", which is even more opaque.)
And then, some more Prado. At one point, I flipped to the end of it, and saw that in the last paragraph he says that Rorty's general view of philosophy as an exhausted discipline is probably right, and that "the professionalism of the '60s" is, in any event, surely over. Now, I'm not quite sure what he means by "the professionalism of the '60s", but on the most obvious ways of reading that--i.e., having to do with specialized research programs--it seems wildly and woefully (oh so very woefully) off. But what would be interesting, then, would be that in 1987 it actually looked right, which, unless Prado's point of view was idiosyncratic (which is certainly possible), would make the current hyper-professionalization of philosophy a creature of the '90s. Certainly the waves of cognitive science and professional ethics are creatures of the '90s. Anyway, related to that, I am struck, again, by how much actual, personal, conversation--especially those wonderful Queen's philosophy colloquia--is brought into this book, even more than in the Foucault book. This is something that is very close to the way I work in philosophy--it is, after all, why I'm reading Prado's book (and it is why I got into the moral luck business, in conversation with Domsky)--and it is something which is now (though I can't say I know it wasn't ever thus) very rare.
Recently on Leiter's blog--and no one symbolizes the hyper-professionalization of The Profession as much as Leiter (who runs the infamous "Philosophical Gourmet" ranking of philosophy departments)--there was a call for an end to "in-house" editorship of major professional journals. In the comments, someone from Philosophical Review, which is one of the top general philosophy journals and is edited in-house at Cornell, said that in the olden days (the '30s or so), submissions would be passed around at department meetings, and that, alone, was how they'd decide what got in and what didn't. As far as I'm concerned, that's bloody well marvellous. Generally, I'd like for journals to have characters, to carry on ongoing conversations, and not to just run whatever is deemed most widely respectable by the most widely respected authorities. But that kind of idea looks like another casualty of the liberalism of the age.
