Telefunken

From years of toiling I went colour-blind,
emitted sparks, was thumped, gave up the ghost.

Now drab and dumb I stand out in the street
and can’t help thinking of that empty mask

that’s gazed and gaped at me so shamelessly.
Parroted me. Adored. Left me kaputt.

The jerk. That he could fail to see how I
ate time so lifelike from his eyes. The jerk.

I gave him Hitchcock, tits, disasters, sikhs.
I gave him eyes. Fierce fighting. Northern lights.

But I’m thrown out. And he sees more TV.
Soon I’ll be carted off and dead hours by

the kilo will die with me at the rubbish tip.

by Menno Wigman
from Dit is mijn dag
publisher: Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2004
translation: 2007, John Irons

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Huw Price in The Conversation:

My main puzzle – about everyone who expresses views on these matters, from the most loyal monarchists all the way through to staunch republicans – is their apparent indifference to Baby Cambridge’s own views about whether she or he wants to be Queen or King of England (let alone Australia).

“That’s ridiculous,” you say, “The baby is not even born yet – how could we ask her?” Of course not. She (let’s call her she) won’t be in a position to decide for the best part of twenty years, at the very least – and perhaps not for years after that, since many young people don’t make up their minds how they wish to spend their lives until well into their twenties or thirties.

But that’s the point. Baby Cambridge’s peers – your children and grandchildren – will all have the opportunity that we now take for granted, to decide for themselves what to make of their lives. On what possible grounds are we, or the state, or even her parents, entitled to deny the same opportunity to her?

That’s the real question we should all be asking, in my view, and it is not about discrimination in favour of royal children. It is about discrimination against them – about the denial in their case of basic freedoms we take for granted for everyone else.

More here.

Leonard Knight’s first message to the world—GOD IS LOVE—was supposed to be airborne, painted on the side of a hot-air balloon. The balloon itself was a minor miracle of persistence, scraps patched together over years. He even built a stove to inflate it, drove the whole contraption out to California’s Salton Sea, about an hour north of the Mexican border. The day was clear, good conditions. But the thing just wouldn’t lift. Burdened by his failure, Knight prayed. God’s answer was to build a mountain. Photographer Aaron Huey first met Knight in 2006, during a road trip from Los Angeles to Santa Fe. Knight was seventy-five, and still strong enough to carry a forty-pound bucket of adobe up a thirty-foot ladder, but too weak to carry the eighty-pound hay bales he’d been using to build Salvation Mountain for nearly thirty years. Huey lent a hand, and a dozen hay bales later he experienced his own epiphany.

more from Aaron Huey’s photographs at the VQR here.

The entrance to Los Angeles’s original subway system lies hidden on a brushy slope next to an apartment building that resembles a Holiday Inn. Known as the “Hollywood Subway,” the line opened in 1925; ran 4,325 feet underground, between downtown and the Westlake District; and closed in 1955. After Pacific Electric Railway decommissioned the tracks, homeless people started sleeping in the old Belmont Tunnel. Crews filmed movies such as While the City Sleeps and MacArthur in it. City officials briefly used it to store impounded vehicles, as well as first aid and 329,700 pounds of crackers during part of the Cold War. By the time the entrance was sealed around 2006, graffiti artists had been using it as a canvas for decades, endowing it with legendary status in street mural culture, and earning it numerous appearances in skateboard and other magazine shoots. Now the tunnel sits at the end of a dead-end street, incorporated into the apartment’s small garden area, resembling nothing more than another spigot in Los Angeles’s vast flood control system.

more from Aaron Gilbreath at the Paris Review here.

Boesch doesn’t go as far as Frans de Waal in being willing to attribute to chimpanzees the rudiments of a moral sense that could be argued to underlie manifestations of what looks like righteous indignation at perceived unfairness. This, and the related question of capacity for shame or guilt which some observers have claimed to detect not only in apes but in other species, is perhaps the topic of most interest to a wider readership. But here, the hardcore opposition comes not only from psychologists or anthropologists but from philosophers. For Richard Joyce, for example, who in his The Evolution of Morality (2006) took issue directly with de Waal, “moral judgements cannot be legitimately and seriously ascribed to a non-language-user. Ergo, no moral judgements for chimps”. Well, maybe. Or maybe that categorical pronouncement will have to be revised in the face of well-validated empirical evidence which cannot be dismissed out of hand. Meanwhile, the topic on which Boesch reports some of his most intriguing observations is chimpanzees’ attitude to death. What conclusions are we to draw when they are seen to guard the bodies of dead group members, give immediate help to orphans, cover a dead body with leaves, and show signs of “sorrow” when leaving the dead and signs of “respect” by keeping youngsters at bay? “If”, says Boesch, “chimpanzees had an understanding of death, these behaviors would make perfect sense to us. If not, they make you wonder, to say the least”.

more from W. G. Runciman at the TLS here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Richard Marshall interviews Ann Cahill in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You say: “Intersubjectivity says the relation is first and constitutes the being of the parties involved in it, and the parties involved constitute the relationship… As humans we can not come into existence without someone caring for us. Our very being as existence is being with another. … Existence is intersubjective.” Does all your work rely on a notion of intersubjectivity? Is this connected to notions of postmodernity in that it decentres identity: are you a postmodernist philosopher?

AC: Yes, intersubjectivity is a strong thread that runs through virtually all of my work. It’s absolutely connected to postmodern theories that challenge the modern notion of the self as autonomous, self-contained, and ideally free from the demands of the other. I do identify as a postmodernist philosopher, and tend to work from and with postmodern thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, Irigaray, etc. But I don’t think the concept of intersubjectivity is contrary to identity, unless you understand identity as necessarily innate and stable. Focusing on intersubjectivity has led me to understand identity more as location. Just as one can’t have a location without reference to other entities, one can’t have an identity exception in relation to other beings. Which is not to say that one’s identity is reducible to those relations, or that one could predict aspects of a person’s identity simply by extrapolating from those relations; such assumptions would deny the dynamism of intersubjectivity. Identity and relations are co-constituting: who I am (at this moment, at this place, keeping in mind that identity is always a process) affects the kind and quality of relations I engage in, just as those relations simultaneously affect my identity. I should emphasise that I’m thinking here of the location of a being who can move, not the location of a static or fixed object (if such a thing even exists).

3:AM: You say that intersubjectivity is a ‘big word’, and by that you don’t just mean they are large but that they are unfamiliar. You defend them don’t you?

AC: Ah, I do defend them. I love big words. I understand the critique of accessibility, that is, that big words can serve to alienate and intimidate readers, and I certainly believe that philosophy (especially feminist philosophy) has a responsibility to be accountable and relevant to the real lives of human and other-than-human beings. When using big words gets in the way of that responsibility, we need to be careful. But big words also have the capacity to break through the fog of dominant assumptions, to do the hard work of substantially reframing familiar problems or questions so that we can gain new and better leverage.

Daniel Tutt reviews Christopher Watkin's Difficult Atheism: Tracing the Death of God in Contemporary Continental Thought, in Berfrois (image: Warkton, Northamptonshire: Monument by Vangelder, 1775, John Piper, 1964):

Declaring oneself an “atheist” isn’t what it used to be. Growing numbers of Generation Y prefer to remain agnostic, which is why so many of them go by the “nones,” or those with no religious preference. My wife used to work at a large university and she told me that on standardized tests many of the students write in “human” in the ethnic and racial identity box. A friend of mine launched a social media campaign to have “Jedi” recognized as a religion in Great Britain. It took off like wild fire and in 2006; Jedis were the fourth largest religion in all of Great Britain. Occupying these undecided identities: “none,” “Jedi” and “human” make a lot of sense. In so doing, one renders no judgment upon the status quo, nor does the person negate traditional religious identities for which many of us still have some allegiance to.

The truth is, declaring oneself an atheist is a difficult process, but we’ve lost touch with this difficulty. Kierkegaard notoriously said “the biggest problem with Christians today is that no one wants to kill them anymore.” What I think he meant by this is that a healthy sense of atheism is good for religion, and lest we forget, Christianity is perhaps the most resilient religion the world has seen. This resiliency is due in part to the fact that Christianity can handle a complicated belief in God and still retain followers. Hegel saw in Christ’s utterance on the cross, “my father, why have you forsaken me” a splitting in two of the absolute itself, a splitting in two of God. What this split represented was the death of the metaphysical God. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” mostly had to do with an epistemological death of suprasensory truths, a death that ushered in a new type of nihilism.

Most atheists today that are firm in their convictions tend to be in a trance by the so-called “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.” Despite news of their best-selling whirlwind and the larger discourse that has risen from it is on the decline, to the point of them now losing their followers, much of atheist identity is intertwined with Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris. The weapons they use against religion are as tired as they are outdated: Darwinian natural selection and evolution (Richard Dawkins), naturalizing reductions of religion via general science (Daniel Dennett), brash literary humanism (Christopher Hitchens) and quite paradoxically, racist appeals to reason (Sam Harris).

For the none’s and the atheists, as well as for the religious, I might add, a healthy debate about God is vital to sustaining a larger dialogue about religion, morality, and ethics in the public sphere. But we’ve been deprived of such a discourse. This is why it is a perfect time to ask: what is/can/should philosophy contribute to the question of God and atheism?

From The Guardian:

Nadeem Aslam was years into his second novel when the 11 September attacks took place. “Many writers said the books they were writing were now worthless,” he recalls. Martin Amis, for one, felt his work in progress had been reduced to a “pitiable babble”. But Aslam's saddened reaction to 9/11 was one of recognition. “I thought, that's Maps for Lost Lovers – that's the book I'm writing.” The link might seem tenuous to a novel set many miles from the twin towers or Bin Laden's lair, in an almost cocooned urban community of Pakistani migrants and their offspring in the north of England, where Aslam grew up from the age of 14. The novel was almost pastoral in its tracing of the seasons, with riffs on jazz, painting and spectacular moths. Each chapter was as minutely embellished as the Persian and Mughal miniatures Aslam has in well-thumbed volumes on his coffee table. But the plot turns on a so-called honour killing, as an unforgiving brand of Islam takes hold. In his view, and above all for women, “we were experiencing low-level September 11s every day.”

Maps for Lost Lovers, which took 11 years to write, and was published in 2004, won the Encore and Kiriyama awards (the latter recognises books that contribute to greater understanding of the Pacific Rim and South Asia). It was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac prize and longlisted for the Man Booker prize. His debut, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), set in small-town Pakistan, had also won prizes, and been shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel award. The books confirmed Aslam as a novelist of ravishing poetry and poise – admired by other writers including Salman Rushdie and AS Byatt.

More here. (Note: While I have read all his books, Maps for Lost Lovers remains my favorite. I strongly recommend it)

Jared Diamond in The New York Times:

You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall. “Really!” you may object. “What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?” My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough. Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475. This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I’ve learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.

I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us. Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent. I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view. Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

More here.

Pakistan. Quetta Hazara Shia Protesting With Dead. Jan 12, 2013.
More here and here.

AC Grayling in Prospect:

Frank Ramsey was 26 years old when he died after an operation at Guy’s Hospital in January 1930. In his short life, he had made lasting contributions to mathematics, economics and philosophy, and to the thinking of a number of his contemporaries, including Ludwig Wittgenstein.

When I taught at St Anne’s, Oxford during the 1980s, I was introduced by my colleague Gabriele Taylor to Ramsey’s sister, Margaret Paul, by then retired from teaching economics at Lady Margaret Hall college. As with anyone with some knowledge of the fields of enquiry Ramsey influenced, I was immediately recruited into helping with her research into his life and thought, though in a minor capacity; she had a formidable array of other helpers besides, from eminent philosophers like Taylor and PF Strawson onwards.

Frank Ramsey was 18 when Margaret was born, so her own memories of him were those of a little girl. A large part of her motivation in writing about him was to get to know him. In this quest she was equally tireless and scrupulous. Most aspects of his work require advanced technical competence, but she was determined to understand them; an afternoon at her house talking about him could be as gruelling as it was educative.

Her memoir has now been published. It is a remarkable book, a window not just into a prodigious mind—Ramsey translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a second year Trinity undergraduate, simultaneously publishing original work in probability theory and economics—but into the amazingly rich intellectual world of his day. The book’s roll-call includes John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and Wittgenstein, and the mise-en-scène equals it: Ramsey’s father was president of Magdalene college at Cambridge, his famously bushy-eyebrowed brother, Michael, later became Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ramsey himself, after scholarships at Winchester and Trinity, became a fellow of King’s, aged 21.

Suffering unrequited love for a married woman drove Ramsey to Vienna to be psychoanalysed by one of Freud’s pupils. It was there that he met Wittgenstein, spending hours every day in conversation with him, and later helping Keynes to bring him back to Cambridge. In the last year of his life, the 26-year-old Ramsey was the 40-year-old Wittgenstein’s nominal PhD thesis supervisor, the thesis being the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus itself.

More here.