Interviewed by Garrett Heaney
Philosopher seems to be a rare title for humans today. Why does it seem that philosophers are a dying breed?
I tell people I am a philosopher and I expect them to laugh: ‘No, really, what do you do?’ Well, I spend my days working out the question of the meaning of being, fine-tuning my logic and rereading Platonic dialogues about the essence of love. But this will not register with most people, because most people think that who you are depends on what you do, or perhaps what you have. But with philosophy, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing much; your body sits there at the desk, reading a text, typing away on the laptop. And aside from some books, a desk, and maybe a word processor, you don’t have anything to show for yourself. So, from a certain standpoint, the philosopher qua philosopher is nobody and has nothing. You can be a waiter at a restaurant but you can’t simply be someone who thinks. Philosophers will always seem like a “dying breed” according to a capitalistic understanding of “life.”
What can you do with philosophy? How is philosophy useful in the real world?
I’m willing to think, along with Heidegger, that I cannot do anything with philosophy; however, the point is that philosophy can do something with me. The point of a philosophical life isn’t so much to have our way with things, but rather, to engage with something other than ourselves and to let ourselves be transformed and opened up in this process. But approaching this other is difficult and unnatural because we are taught from an early age to see ourselves in a very specific kind of light, a lighting installed by science no less than religion: Each man is an individual free to pursue his own good. “Every Man For Himself,” “Be All You Can Be,” and on and on. In short, sciences and religions already tell us who we are, so why philosophize about this?
The silent caveat here, and the central problem of all of Western civilization, is that this self-conception, this very conceiving of selfhood, involves an exclusion, and generally a hatred, of the other: If they aren’t our soldiers then they are terrorists, for example. It is this model of thinking that lies at the root of our racism, patriarchy, environmental destruction, homelessness (both existential and material), and violently human-centric understanding of the universe. I believe that it this model of thinking – this historically determined understanding of being – that leads to the very real problems we face in our everyday realities. To put it simply, the goal is to become aware so that others can become aware. To the extent that I am correct here, the discipline of philosophy is uniquely suited for saving the world.
Then why does it seem like philosophers are absent from the public realm?
This appearance cannot be denied. But philosophy never pretends that it can directly set forth change. Philosophy shapes culture only indirectly, putting in the preliminary work necessary for “real changes” in the future; we are more like architects and less like the handymen you see doing the building. To say that this job is important runs counter to a naive materialism that today runs rampant: “I’ll believe it when I see it, when I see it materialize.” I tend to take the opposite position: No, you’ll see it when you believe it. As Gramsci shows, there would be no established social order without the “social cement” of ideologies; ways of thinking are responsible for structuring the form and content of our everyday material realities. In this sense, as strange as it sounds, we have figures like Aristotle and Descartes to thank and blame for our iPhones and 9/11s.
At what point in your life were you drawn to philosophy?
Growing up, I was obsessed with WWF wrestling. Some friends would say: ‘Wrestling is an act, it isn’t real, the winners are predetermined, and so on.’ Right? Parents say: ‘Wrestling is violent and full of sex and it will corrupt your young virgin soul.’ These are, from a certain point of view, correct statements of fact. But as a kid I started to wonder why wrestling isn’t “real” or how it could “corrupt” the youth. I see that it’s staged, but when it comes down to it, how exactly is wrestling less worthy of reality than, say, the staged spectacles of presidents declaring wars, or the small talk that fills up most of our lives? Isn’t a fairly fought battle between Bret Hart and Owen Hart, two brothers who love each other, actually rather peaceful compared to, I don’t know, the story of United States history in its entirety? (By the way, we should not forget Thomas Jefferson’s key American insight: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” America’s birth is soaked in murderous blood.)
I once told my born-again Christian father that a man named Mankind getting thrown off the top of a cage in a Hell in a Cell match was, in fact, more real than his faith in Jesus Christ. I wasn’t being facetious. These are pressing ontological and ethical provocations. Where are we to draw the line between appearance and reality, between right and wrong, between peace and violence? How have these distinctions been drawn and redrawn, by whom, and according to what sorts of assumptions and agendas? When you start asking these questions you begin to experience the draw of philosophy, regardless of whether or not you find yourself sitting in a philosophy classroom.
In your opinion, how valuable are diplomas and degrees from educational institutions?
Bennington College blew my mind on a number of levels, and I’m just beginning a PhD track at the University of New Mexico, so I’d be inclined to say that educational institutions are great. On a personal level, these degrees matter for a lot. My brother and I are the first generation of our family to get through undergraduate college, and there is no question, no matter what Kanye West happens to think, that education opens more doors than it closes. The sad truth is that, without the status symbol of a degree from a reputable institution, certain employers and academicians will want nothing to do with you.
But as I see it, the diploma is nothing more than a tool, useful for some in certain cases, and altogether useless in other cases. I want to be a philosophy professor, so a higher degree is a necessary condition for that to happen, but it is by no means sufficient. At the same time, some of my “smartest” friends are the ones who dropped out of various schools and are now developing their own research programs. And the omnipresence of the internet is opening up more and more sites for this knowledge to be shared, contested, and redeveloped, without the checks and balances of institutions.
The value of a piece of paper lies in how you got to it and what you’re going to do with it. A diploma is never sufficient, never a culmination, always a beginning.
What are your thoughts on the role of educational institutions in regards to philosophy specifically?
Schools have their problems. Understatement of the year. But at the end of the day, when you’re a student, it is very convenient to find yourself in a room with twenty other students who have read the same text as you, along with a knowledgeable professor who can facilitate dialogue and provide constructive criticism. I’m describing an ideal situation that often fails to materialize for one reason or another. But I think it is important to understand that a classroom is not an empty three-dimensional room inside a building we call a school.
A classroom is the possible sorts of situations that these rooms try to open up: learning through discussion, confrontation, etc. This type of possibility might be less necessary in, say, a mathematics course, where there is less room for discussing possible answers to questions. But in the discipline of philosophy, where the point is to open yourself to questioning deep-seated assumptions (and seeing that just about everything is questionable), it is crucial for there to be dialogue and exposure to other understandings. This can happen in bars, airports, websites, and major accredited universities. Philosophy emerges in the dialogue.
You were fortunate enough to earn your Bachelor’s at Bennington College. How did the learning environment at Bennington help you prepare yourself and allow you to grow?
In more ways than I can imagine. This won’t surprise people who know me, but I’m a big proponent of the Bennington way: an interdisciplinary approach to learning-by-doing with small class sizes, intensive independent studies, and really fun parties. It seems like everyone there wants to be there; how often can you say that about a single building, let alone an entire institution? And it doesn’t hurt that it all takes place on a pretty hill in my home state of Vermont.
The learning environment at Bennington has this tendency to subvert the usual distinctions between life and art, work and play, man and woman. I came away from Bennington with the conviction that I never studied an academic discipline named “philosophy” in college; rather, I came to embrace philosophy as a form of life and a way of being in the world. A world of difference emerges here.
I think I did some cool stuff at Bennington. But in retrospect, the most educational moments at Bennington for me were the occasional breakdowns and moments of insanity, the failed relationships and missed deadlines, and those rare and difficult experiences of an entire community sitting together in a cramped room, not knowing exactly what to say. This is when genuine learning happens.
You just completely avoided talking about the Bennington nudity scandal, which you started.
The shock and horror of nakedness is built into the very beginning of our Judeo-Christian narrative, in the Book of Genesis. At the beginning of time when God first made man in His own image, man gets to sit around in an awesome garden with woman and come up with names for all these crazy animals God keeps throwing into the world. God even tells them they can eat the delicious fruit from the garden, as long as they don’t eat any fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A serpent tells the woman that she should eat the fruit and, of course, what do the fuckers do? They start eating the fruit, the one thing they’re not allowed to do. God gets pissed, and what is God’s first vengeful act? “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Genesis 3:7 NIV., my italics). He installs into humanity a body-image, beginning a tradition of thinking and being that understands the nude body as a site of shame. This is itself a shame, the biggest shame, and God should be ashamed. My decision to be naked in public was a resolute response to the core prejudice of Western civilization.
What do you recommend for someone who is interested in philosophy but does not want to read the books?
Watch and listen to some Zizek lectures and try to figure out whether you agree with the dude.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEtmZZvGZA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhDuYfZa5dE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw
According to Zizek, we are who we are precisely to the extent that we fail to become properly human subjects. An utterly unimaginable void exists within the very core of the human being, and what we call the ’self’ is the failed attempt to avoid this void. [I borrow this interpretation from Adrian Johnston's book, Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity.] Furthermore, Zizek locates this non-human monstrosity at the very heart of Christ, the Cartesian ego, the Kantian transcendental subject, Freud’s unconscious non-subject, and Heidegger’s Dasein. For me, right now, this is where philosophy becomes very intriguing.
On Facebook you’re a member of the “Speculative Realism Entheuziast and Appreciation Fan Club.” What’s that about?
Speculative realism is a contemporary philosophy that speculates about what is real independently of its relation to human beings. It is a rejection of parts of Kant’s philosophy. Put briefly, Kant stipulates that philosophy be a discussion about human subjects and their correlates: objects such as dildos and race cars and stars which, strictly speaking, are not human entities, yet entities that are nothing but entities brought into existence by the hands and measurements of human beings. The idea here is that what we observe in nature is not nature itself but, rather, nature exposed to our methods of questioning and calculation.
The problem with this ontology, the problem with this model of what exists in the world, is that it is too anthropocentric, too centered around human phenomenality, so that what we have is not an understanding of what exists in the world, but our limited, finite appropriation of what exists in the world. But most of us believe, and rightfully so, that a certain state of affairs existed before human beings, that there are things which exist now that we cannot access, and that a world will continue to exist after human beings implode upon themselves. In short: we know that stuff escapes our models (whether these models be ontological, epistemological, or normative), including this very model of human time which allows me to speak at this very instant (past, present, future).
At this juncture we have two options:
1. We can cling to the human(izing) model, accept the fact that all we can understand is what exists within the realm of possible human experience, and let go of chasing the utterly non-human; this seems to be something like Wittgenstein’s point when he says that what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.
2. Or, conversely, we can operate at the Kantian limit between human phenomenality and its marginalized outside, its wholly-other-than-human, and push the issue a bit further. Do we really want to maintain an austere silence regarding the things-in-themselves (i.e. the things independent of human grasping and groping)? Are we really okay with calling it a day and letting go of this mysterious x? Are we really content with denigrating noumena to an irrelevant or meaningless realm? Shouldn’t philosophy at least attempt to concern itself with those things which subsist and mutate apart from any relation to human access (whether represented by human subjects, subjective communities, or human signifiers)? As I take it, these are the sorts of questions speculative realists are asking.
Do you think that everything has been considered by now, or have you developed philosophies that are independent of other philosophies and philosophers?
I am starkly opposed to the idea that “everything has been considered by now.” There is simply too much that we do not know about ourselves and our relation to the universe, let alone how the universe might be in itself independent of our finite theories and models, to make such a claim. And you need not talk to a philosopher to hear this. The gist of quantum physics is that the ultimate constituents of matter and the universe are utterly unimaginable. To say that everything has been considered by now is to operate according to a very limited understanding of the present, and to understand man in a very limited time span, which Nietzsche famously refers to as “the congenital defect of all philosophers.”
What I see in America on a daily basis is the embodiment of what Derrida calls a “metaphysics of presence.” We are a bunch who operate according to a certain aversion to history, living inside a total obsession with the present. Instant messaging, Twitter, immediate satisfaction of all desires. Now Now Now. However, philosophy is about thinking historically and becoming capable of looking beyond what is merely present, while trying to retain some sense of humility in the process. On that note, have you checked out the cosmic calendar lately?
