This is an old issue of mine: why are people afraid to have an opinion about something they obviously care about?
The answer is probably simpler than we are led to believe and it has nothing to do with being too absorbed, having to much information on a subject – due to the mass of information in the mass media century – or the fact that they can’t be bothered.

In a time where people with conviction blow up market places and bomb refugee camps and after a century where convictions killed millions of people, it is clear that the image of a person with convictions and a strong belief system – and I don’t mean faith here – has been tainted. Today it equals with ‘being zelous’, ‘being intolerant’ or simply with ‘being suspicious’. But that’s not the only reason.

People have become afraid of expressing their opinions and beliefs because the aggressions or disadvantages that they fear being subjected to could test their system. This, of course, ultimately lead to an underlying agreement that certain discussions or debates are off limits. And since debate – in this mindset – is necessarily conceived as a negative thing, every way a person will try to discuss will be interpreted as a casus belli if the enunciation doesn’t present the four-step attenuation markers, such as subjective tense (also known as I-sentences… “I feel…”, “I think…”), conditional tense, question form and a “…don’t you think?” at the end.

Having an opinion, having conviction and explaining what led to these convictions should be something that can withstand questioning. Even more clearer: it should be something we ourselves question everyday and expose it to further outside questioning, because an opinion that remains unquestioned and un-argued will always just remain an opinion, as opposed to a vision or something that could potentially change the world.

There is a series of sayings that push us to suspect opinions and favour a more active approach to life (and a lot of them are rooted in Judeo-Christian culture): “Make it happen”, “Just do it”, “Actions count more than words”, “Do or don’t, there is no trying…” etc.
Actions however need basis. Physical basis for once. You cannot act on air, and when it comes to change for instance you need an object to change. But what if we took conviction and opinion to be the actual basis of action? What if arguing your opinion and conviction is in itself the first act? Then ‘having an opinion’ and confessing to it publicly could become that much more than just ‘having a philosophy’.

If Human Sciences, are not proper sciences, then where will we stop to devalue human thought and its history? Can you even argue with people who can only accept their own ground of discussion? Why the study of philosophy and thus thought, truly is the only science around.

This week a rather interesting and revealing discussion broke out on my Twitter Feed. The initial kick-off was given by a list of ‘The best 100 scientific Twitterers’ and a revised edition as a twitter list published by @terrorzicke (Name ist Programm – her nick is program).
As member of the Human Sciences, obviously, a friend of mine immediately asked why there were no philosophers (or Scientists in the Liberal Arts for that matter) to be found on her ‘scientific’ list. The crude and simple answer that she reinforced through the subsequent (heated) argumentation was, that Human Sciences are not sciences. (Best laughable tweet out of that discussion: “Geisteswissenschaften kreisen im Gegensatz zu den Naturwissenschaften im Grunde um sich selbst.”  “Human Sciences revolve – to the contrary of natural sciences – only around themselves”)

I won’t go into the depths of that lion pit. It’s pretty much useless to try and reason with people who allow themselves opinions on things they clearly have no idea of. It would be more interesting to try and reason with a cup of coffee. At least, if there is no response, you get a decent shot of caffeine out of it.
I’ll only put one thought out there and it’s one that becomes quite clear if you’ve ever interested yourself for neurological sciences.
There are a lot of ‘natural’ things out there that we can study and analyse in many different ways. The purely materialistic, descriptive way, being one of them – the purely scientific way in the above cited way of thinking. The analysis of the language in which this is made however would already be a ‘human scientist’ way of looking at things.
Without the ordering and the reflection of philosophy which goes beyond the raw material, all we would have is nothing more than a huge stack of information such as the colour red solicits a neuron fire with such and such intensity taking into account the context and situation. But how it is that we can reference that red, or what it means for a thing to be red (even though scientifically speaking the colour red doesn’t exist) which will then lead us to the problem of accidental properties as opposed to essential ones, the theory of individuation and personal identity and so forth… all these questions are philosophical ones and per the cited definition ‘not scientific’.

It is a common misconception that within the confines of Human Sciences anything goes. People from the outside think that we continuously weave our insignificant web of thoughts around a comfortable glass of wine and a good laugh within our own idiosyncratic language, pleasuring ourselves in our own brain juice.
‘Scientificity’ realises itself within the confines of a method. If the method is faulty, no physicist can work. Neither can a philosopher or a linguist or a literate. Far away is the concept that ‘anything goes’. You might gain great popularity among a certain crowd by being without a method (Derrida for instance), but the fame is temporary. (Not one of Derrida’s direct students is still working with his thought. Parts of his method of deconstruction – which isn’t a method truly – but not the complete version and for the next generation of students Derrida will be a relic, not a school anymore.)

As someone who edits texts that have never before seen a printed edition, texts that remain unheard and inaccessible for the scientific community of Medievalists, I work with quantifiable method and scientific means such as distribution, probability, semantic quantities etc. to near myself as closely as ever possible to the original text which is most cases is lost. If you imagine that for the more popular texts you have between 30 and 50 surviving manuscripts and thus potentially 30 to 50 different versions of a text, it becomes immediately apparent why the claim that this can’t by any means be considered science is laughable. Not only do I have to go through that very materialistic part of my work, but after years of that exploring the material support of the text in question (it’s just the characters and the vellum really), I then proceed to the interpretation of the text itself, trying to explain what it’s all about. And only in a third last step do I examine that theory against the ‘bigger picture’ (does it make sense in itself? does it apply to opponents at the time it was written? what do we learn from it in terms of overall realisation? etc.)
In my particular case, as Historians of Philosophy, we are the badly loved kid of all the departments. For the historians, we’re not really historians; for the philosophers, we’re not really philosophers and for the editors, we know way to much to gain quick money with us. Truth of the matter is: we are everything and nothing. We need to have all the instruments a historian needs, all the knowledge and methods a philosopher does and we need to have a decent technical approach to texts and their transmission through the ages. We do it all, and yet, nobody takes us seriously.
So, it’s been long that I have taken anybody for full who claims that this is not science.

In some definitions ‘science’ is defined by the fact that you open up new grounds or that you create the basis for thought and study. It’s clear that with my work, I do just that. Without text editions, our look on a certain period will always remain limited, because the huge cellars of the major libraries of Europe are filled will texts that have never been read by a larger public after the 16th century.

Interestingly enough of course, none of those arguments which my friend made in said Twitter debate were accepted. Neither were mine. To the question why the person was ignoring me in particular, it was said that ‘who protects their tweets doesn’t want to be heart’.

Now, that brings me to another small truth, this time about our modern means of communication. Today, we’re always supposed to be online, always supposed to be linked to that behemoth internet, and if we don’t reply immediately to an email or a text, something is clearly wrong. And yes, if you are stupid enough to protect your privacy because you want to know who is following you, you do not want to be heard.
Yes, I protect my updates, I also protect my Facebook profile, but because the majority of users have lost all sense of the truth that on the opposite side of them sits a real person in front of that PC screen.

The fact that Terrorzicke didn’t want to see what I had to say to her (it would have been easy enough for her to ask for authorisation, it takes one click after all), just shows what happens to people when they don’t want to be reasoned with: they become a caricature of themselves.

Protecting myself from complete exposure over the internet doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be heard, it rather tells you that when I accept you, I have properly seen you and want to enter into contact without. You’re not just another one of the mass that I don’t care about. And it will tell you that I don’t like to be spammed and have a pretty solid knowledge of spammers, useless twittbots and the like.

It becomes very apparent, that people who cannot even reconstruct an act of volition without error, cannot be asked to qualify what is scientific and what is not. And that is why this whole discussion is pointless. Who doesn’t want to hear, will never hear, not matter how loud we shout it.
Human thought will always be an exhilarating subject of study, while the measures of ‘scientificity’ will always be subject to the last and current fashion of the times in which they are uttered.

We all satisfy our exhibitionist tendencies through the internet web 2.0, the social web. We give up our right to privacy in doing so, but the horror is great and the tears particularly bitter when someone takes us up on it.

The latest tornado of protest and rightful indignation that swept over the internet, the blogosphere and the entire western hemisphere (but thankfully didn’t manage to drop that proverbial sack of rice) concerning Facebook’s covert annexing of all their user’s datas and content from now on into eternity, is certainly an interesting jurisdictional case example. But apart from the power of the internet, the usergroups, the blogging community that managed to pressure Facebook to revert back to their old Terms of Service and consult their users before forcing their top-down changes, and apart from the usual observations that have after that flooded all the radio and online commentaries on how our society is circling the exibtionistic drain when everyone builds their online personality and streams their babies births online over ustream… apart from all that, there is a general question that begs to be asked here: what is intellectual property?

Through the history of thought there have been various theories on how the idea of personal property changed our view on reality and society as a whole. In Western History, the major change between the celtic tribal organisation where the common property of the clan was indicative of the standing of said clan towards a perception of personal property of land that represented wealth that was introduced by the Romans, hides an intellectual change. In later years, someone like Rousseau will go as far as to state that the introductioon of personal property by the colonisators in Southern America corrupted these societies forwever (cf. the Myth of the Good Savage).

The idea of intellectual property however is a relatively late conception in the history of ideas. It’s something that is completely absent in the Middle Ages for instance where authors copy motifs, characters and texts from one another at liberty since they are considered common property of their circle of culture. With the introduction of printing devices and the explosion of text production things change slightly, but the idea that an author has rights over the texts, ideas or even characters is still far away. As late as the 19th century, an author that had his works printed, sold his works and all rights over to the printer or editor.

The concept of owning something that is immaterial and that you’ve invented is one of the most difficult topics in a time where a simple manipulation of four keys copies text, annexes it, steals it, reproduces it.

Now, we all know that it’s part of our personal rights to chose when and how we want to be taken in pictures and that the gaining of money is an infringement of my rights. We also know that copying content that we haven’t ourselves produced is morally wrong and punishable by law per se, particularly so if we start making money from it.

Facebook thought it opportune to transfer an irrevocable license on all the contents their users upload to their (free) service, being free to reproduce it, sell it and mash it up (taking it out of context). Nothing in this world is for free and internet services that cost server space, hardware and time to set up and maintain are the least likely to be for free, no matter what. The reaction of Facebook users and bloggers is certainly justified and was needed, but ridiculous in it’s proportions of indignation. Not even to speak about the 99% of users that never read any of the TOS of the services they join.

Ridiculous? Like I said, nothing in the world is for free. And certainly not a site that needs to sustain itself to support 175 Million users such as Facebook. The question that needs asking is: what are you paying with? The same thing you’re paying Google for the greatest storage inbox on the net, the best Document storage online and the quickes and best indexing algorithms with: your personality. Your search patterns, your way of using the service, your statistical information constitute a huge flux of intel and exploitable information which makes it possible for services such as Facebook and Google to sell better targeted ads and thus earn their pay and the possiblity to uphold their service to you.

Now, while Facebooks tacit change of TOS certainly was abusive and unreasonable form a jurisdictional point of view – I certainly am not for Facebook having such a license on my artistic photographs or poetry that I’ve put on FB -, but the illusion of billions of internet users that they are entitled to complete privacy when they use free services provided to them is laughable. The second you step on the internet and start displaying your online personality through Twitter, MySpace, Plurk, FriendFeed, Flickr and what not, you willingly give up your right to a complete protection of your data. The advantages of interconnecting with your friends, to find new ones, to create communities… in short partake in the new version of the web, will never be just for free. You give up rights of your own. So, yes, the level of shock and outrage at the current example of Facebook is based on users not knowing what they’re doing. Not only is this a source of ridicule, but presents a paradox of epic proportions: on the one hand people consider their internet trails of insidious binge pictures, senseless tweets, 25 things about me notes and 10 random thoughts, their own property that needs protecting, but on the other hand they’re all too quick to hand over said property to save a few $ and use a free service instead of a paid one, simply because we no longer sign physically with our name such contracts, but with a simple click.

Wake up people. Learn to use the Privacy Settings on your services (Facebook Privacy Settings You Should Know About) , learn to read the Terms of Service before just hitting ‘send’ and get a grip on your own life: Nothing in the world is for free.

And lastly: you are not as important as you think.

NB: Don’t forget the latest trend: tweet your location

Amnesty International reports today that the request of three of the numerous – do we even know how many are there at this point? – detainees that have asked for asylum in Switzerland, have been denied (Bern rejects Asylum for Guantanamo Inmates – Swissinfo)

One of the widely awaited actions of US President Elect Obama once he is officially instated into his functions, is the closing of the law-free zone of the Guantanamo prison for terrorist suspects – infamously called Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta or even detention camp.
The name Guantanamo has become synonym with a number of things, fear of terrorism that leads to power abuse, unlawful imprisonment, governmentally ordered torture on prisoners, detention without trial only being a few of them. Throughout the world the name has become as evocative and shiver inspiring as Abu-Graib. The only real difference between the two is the status of soil: Abu Graib was in a far away country on the other side of the globe and on foreign ground, Guantanamo is – granted no around the corner from a European perspective – but factually American soil seeing that the Naval Base is extraterritorial in Cuba.
It takes a while even for the informed US American to understand that a a law-free zone has been created voluntarily and intentionally by their own government as to be at liberty to torture and hold people outside of any legal founding, given the current state of global fear that is maintained at a certain level to justify said injustice.
From a moral standpoint there are a few things that need to be raised as questions and that still have not been properly addressed as of yet either by the philosophical or ethical professional community, nor by the law professionals or even politicians: what is an unlawful combatant in the light of the system of clan wars and interaction as can be found in Afghanistan? Do the ends of saving and protecting the American people and military abroad really justify any means? To a point where the Constitution and Human Rights are flaunted so badly? Is the use of and redefinition of torture in order to make waterboarding not torture, really the way to promote the values of our modern world, as the US have written on their flag in this war on terrorism? (For more on the issue of governemental torture in the US and in Guantanamo, I point to the Documentary ‘Torturing Democracy Documentary’ which makes a shocking and sickening point on this issue. But beware, it is not for the faint of heart or the easily outraged. It’ll leave you shuddering and trembling.)

The problem however that will arise with a closure of the Camps in Guantanamo, is that these detainees cannot be sent home where they are likely to either be prosecuted, hunted, tortured or killed. Any country that knows of such danger is legally prohibited of sending them back. What the US have created here, is a Russian Doll of problems and solving them will entail much more than just a political decision to close Guantanamo. These prisoners need a safe haven and of course the American Government refuses to give them that. (Which is understandable due to their paranoia and reality – sic! – of domestic terrorism. If anything Guantanamo has created more people with terrorist intent than it set out of capture and… dispose of.) So now has started the scramble for other solutions. Other countries will have to step up and of course the EU and Switzerland are obvious candidates.

The three prisoners that have asked for asylum in Switzerland are from Algeria, Lybia and China. Now, I get that the Swiss Immigration Office cannot grant a Lybian citizen asylum in the current bras-de-fer with Gaddafi after the incident that had his son arrested in Geneva (take a look at the second paragraph) and that led to a complete diplomatic meltdown between the two countries.
I understand that France is a much clearer destination for an Algerian, but I do certainly not understand or condone the refusal of a Chinese. It doesn’t make any sense.

From these three, the Chinese prisoner is most likely to suffer prosecution and danger of death than any of the other two. It is safe to assume that the person in question is from the Uyghur tribe, who are Muslim Chinese of Turkic descent. They are a minority that has been persecuted for a long time and have turned to terrorist attacks to state their point. (On the Uighurs Problematic in China)

In my view Switzerland had the possibility to make a stand here and take the first step that would have permitted a lot of other countries to follow and help the US resolve the injustice that persists in the form of Guantanamo. My country has accepted over 40% of the overall number of refugees from the Bosnia war in the 90ies and has the highest percentage of refugees from former Jugoslavia (meaning from all the wars: First and Second Croatian War, Bosnia etc.) in the world, but we cannot find ways to accept a single Chinese prisoner that has been unlawfully kept for years without proof for suspicion of terrorist activity and has now been declared ‘not dangerous’ by the US authorities themselves?

I am ashamed.

Ashamed for a country that holds the chart of the United Nations and the Red Cross. Ashamed for a country that has been and continues to be the synonym for humanitarian action and speaking out against injustice and diplomacy.

Shame on all of us who stay silent.

We are how we talk and we talk like our parents have or have not taught us. Would teaching dialectics and discussion in school help with the current non-culture of debate and argumentation?

Prompted by the post on the communication style during the past US Presidential Elections, someone pointed out to me on plurk that they thought that communications, dialectics and the ethics of discourse should be taught in school to kids already and I gathered that for him that would mean a considerable improvement of certain things going wrong at this point in history when partisanship seems to be more important than the political, social et al. issue at hand.

I only half agree with that idea for one general reason: we talk like our parents. Or rather we discuss like our parents.

Let me explain this slightly exaggerated assertion. While I am all for teaching young adults the arts of talking properly, right and for effect on one hand and to analyse arguments and react to them on the other hand, I also believe that such a teaching is next to fruitless if it falls on unprepared ground.
Aren’t we much more influenced by the discussion style and culture going on in our parent’s house while growing up than shaped by what the teacher tells us at say… the age 14?

It is a common and widely accepted ground rule today that our way of talking, expressing ourselves in normal circumstance is shaped by our social upbringing, the surroundings we’ve been exposed to at tender age and the all the other socio-historical stimuli we’ve been subjected to. It’s shaped by what we read, when we read it, what we hear and process and finally who we consider our idols and personal heroes. (I had and still have a huge sympathy for the Roman Senators and it has pushed me at an early age to learn the history and nature of rhetoric making me real pain in discussions… )
If that is the case for ‘normal style’ communication, then it isn’t too far fetched to assume that the particular case of discursive discussion is just as influenced by our roots. As kids and adolescents we learn from what we see and if our parents have either a passive agressive discussion and confrontation style, or one that makes the roof blow off the house, as children we will either adopt that or refuse it completely depending our level of auto-evaluation and critical analysis of our actions.

The point I am trying to make here is simple really: an ethos is discussion and argumentation cannot be built by schooling and teaching alone, because these levels already assume a certain meta-level because they aim at teaching something. A good discussion style starts much earlier and parents are important in that process. The effect of an all-mighty father that can say ‘Yes, you’re right and making a good point there. I concede that I was wrong/hasty etc.’ are immense on the psyché of a child that will learn that even though a parent is the measure of all things in their life, conceding to being wrong isn’t the end of the world. This in turn will at a later age tell them that riding an argument even though you know that it’s flawed is a bad thing and that it’s better to learn from others rather than stand on your own viewpoint against all odds and the wrath of the gods.

I’ve seen people with a lot of kids being condescending with people who tried to have a decent discussion with them in the course of these Elections, who were deliberately mean and inflammatory and abrasive only to show how right they thought they were and it made me seriously worry about the example they give to their children, because I don’t believe that in their home environment they discuss differently than online. We are what we say and how we say it after all and if you don’t have a discussion ethos with the big topics, why would you have one in the most fundamental social cell, family?

Neither one of us has proof of the ultimate truth, if they did, the world would look differently and there wouldn’t be any need for discursive analysis and discussion or even so much as a teaching exchange. In such a utopian state of Eden, we all would know and thus wouldn’t need to exchange knowledge or different points of views. The second a person, locked in a discussion, assumes that they have the better point of view, the right way of looking at things, the respect clause has been violated and since at this point only condescension can be had from that person, the discussion dies a sudden death.
Now people will continue on, trying to work with such a person, to make them see other contrasting arguments to their view, or even pull the mother of all arguments: personal experience. (A well known ‘trick’ to try and bring emotion into the discussion and tone down the heat.) But with someone as fundamentally convinced as this, even that will be shot down.

There is no value to be had from such discussions. Not a social interactive value, not a personal one and certainly not a political one. All it serves is giving rhetorical bullies a box on which they can stand on their personal speaker’s corner. All that comes from it is insult.
Kids that grow up under such communication circumstances are bound to have a ‘strike first’ attitude in their discussion style and chances are such an attitude will also spill over into their general conflict resolution attitudes (hitting when no arguments are at hand etc.).

So, truly, as adults, we shape the future generation’s communication style as well as their ability to deal with information, process it and use it in discussion. A detail that often gets lost in the mayhem that can be child upbringing.

Sounds like an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? Why would the US elections keep me as a European, a writer or a philosopher from blogging my mind? The answer is easily given. There are only two ways to go about a topic that is so invasive in our everyday lives and has such a massive presence in the news: either you avoid talking about it completely, but then the avoidance will always show in your writing since it is what is on everyone’s mind after all OR you do write about it and open a can of worms that you cannot close again.

Of course I had an opinion on the votes and the elections, of course I have a personal stance and a professional one since I can rarely dissociate the one from the other. As someone trained in philosophy going about in the world, you can rarely not be influenced by the things and current topics around you and think about them with your ‘philosophical’ mind. So, even if I wasn’t to talk about the elephant in the room, I would in a way by avoiding it meticulously.

So the main question remains: why not blog about it if it’s such an important issue of our time?

Because in the myriad of comments, opinions, partisanship battles, demeaning thought processes etc. my word doesn’t count for anything. Not amongst the friends that I live around, close contacts over the internet that I’ve come to consider my friends on certain levels, not among the people that share my faith or convictions or the people I respect. Because just as the media coverage enlightens our knowledge of the world (not to be confounded with actual knowledge, I’m just referring to factual knowledge), it also taints and escalates the dialogue. There is practically no informed discussion to be had about anything in this respect. Not about the kind of dog Obama’s kids will get or the colour of Palin’s breakfast cereal.
I have in all honesty only seen ONE explame of a discussion that could be called constructive and instructive for both camps in all of over 2 years of following the whole circus called U.S. Presidential Election.

What a sad bottom line that makes.

And something I was not ready to expose myself to. There are only so many fall-outs with friends and family that you can get past and once certain things are being said… the going back is almost impossible. The Philosopher’s Attic isn’t about that. It’s about looking at the world in a different manner. It’s about getting a small spark of something else in your day and in mine. And that is what I’ll try to bring back now that this race is over.

A great weekend to all of you.

Our worlds are made of words and meaning. Words that bother and comfort, words that build and veil, words that confuse and break open those windows to our hearts that never get used. We use them everyday to speak, relate and cover up, to dissect and inspect, to see and hear and ultimately listen. Words and the things they represent are what makes a man… or not.

There is a word in all this wordness of the wordlessness. So fine in thought and phonetics, so balanced in reason and it’s labio-dental being, so trustworthy in it’s simplicity. So empty in all it’s glory.

It is moved around the pages of numerous books, moved by unseen hands of unknown placers. Pushed to the side of a line, to the beginning, the line-up of a paragraph, the title, the end, the last, the first, the whatever. Through History, through time, on pages worth a thousand others, thought and written by men and women worthy of the meaning, and so many that never grasped it’s true colour or … future. Slipped and flipped around the edges of an inspiring text, a daring pamphlet, a burning speech, a tearing poem or a heating novel. Thus said word, made its way through the eons and ages that long passed, have made the whole structure of words we live in by the day. An architecture of meaning, of synonimical rigour, building room after room, floor after floor, high into skies that bear no limit to what only lowest spirits call culture.

And our word? Stuck somewhere between the ground floor and apartment block 2A, right beside emptiness and vigour. Moved around the great pieces of human culture, like a forgotten furniture: always there, but not really fitting. Not entirely. So, they strip it down, sand it bland, paint it anew to the current times, make it fit wherever it needs to go, make it wear whatever we need it to convey. (grind it down, construct it completely new)

We move it around between the front room, the salon and the back of the house. Once in the first spot for everyone to see when it might serve a purpose. Only to have it removed and put into storage the next day when all sense has been lost and it doesn’t even have enough substance to bear a vase of flowers on its top.

And while it ages, wastes and dies away, this word’s carapace and empty shell is still being used as a ghost, a placeholder in our minds and thoughts. By people that greater and smaller than you or me who rip it apart, move it around, walk over it, tear it apart, defile it, crush it and rape it, while the word all by itself sits in a long forgotten room in some wonderful speech that tells us of a glorious future, whips us in line behind another empty hull of another mighty word that has lost all meaning.
A long forgotten room, in a house full of lost and deconsidered words that have lost reality or reference, that simply have lost being.

There is a word in all this dusty lostness and we used to call it truth. It used to be the making and the destruction of kings, princes and worlds. It used to be the greatest things of all, one of the greatest words with power.

Truth dies easy in the whispers of a thousand liars.

In a time where every minute of every day is filled with chatter and noise, solitude and silence do seem like an endearing thing. And while silence and solitude are bound to connect us much more deeply to ourselves and the things that haunt us, work on us, make us laugh or cry, they – just as anything else – can be the most oppressive and terrible things.
Being alone, lonely… maybe it’s for that reason that these expressions have become tinged with the sense of something negative. Or maybe it’s just our society that is suggesting that the more people you have around you that keep you from being alone, the more successful, more cherished, loved and popular you are. After all, who actually likes to be alone? Isn’t it rather the mark of a socially inept person to be alone, to seek loneliness, to find silence?

Another tradition runs against this. In it men and women have chosen solitude and silence as a way to holiness. For it is in the silence and solitude that we hear our inner selves proclaimed. It is in these lonely hours between the waking and the morning that we truly have to accept our own limits, our own fear and our own hardships that do not come from the world that surrounds us, but from the world that lives in us. But if holiness is found in solitude, why do we shy away from it?

Getting to know oneself is the challenge of a lifetime and some say that you can never achieve it until you’ve drawn your last breath. Be that as it may, it still is a hard task for sure. There never is a moment where we do not either surprise ourselves or are scared by our own darkness, meanness and gratious hardness towards either ourselves or the people that depend on us. Listening, hearing and accepting those limitations of our own being, of ultimately what makes us be the humans that we are… will break us or make us.

And thus solitude becomes a catalyst, a primer, a moment of hesitations before we launch ourselves back at the world to change it.

This is a tease post in a series of short essays or meditations that will sooner or later be published alongside with my poetry.

When is egoism permitted and when is it not? What is egoism in a relationship? And do we need to save ourselves before we can save someone else?

I am somehow not quite happy with Carry Tennis’ advice to Negotiating (a woman married to an alcoholic who has not accepted his problem as of yet) on Salon.com.

The major question is whether Negotiating should just leave or give her husband an ultimatum to get sober. Her problem is that she doesn’t know whether she can stay with him even if he gets sober:

Somehow, announcing that I am leaving unless he gets sober, then leaving even if he does, seems wrong. However, if I just announce that I am leaving because of his drinking, I don’t think he’ll have any motivation to quit. He is still the father of my children and still someone I care about even if I am having serious doubts about the marriage at this point.

Tennis advises:

The effect of your escape on this man is not something we can predict in advance. So do not premise your escape on any agreements with this man or any expectations about his future. He is not a person you can make agreements with. He is not a person whose future is predictable. He is, for the moment, a hopeless alcoholic. All you can do is save yourself.

It is a general rule that we cannot help anyone as long as they do not accept our help. In the case of addicts (psychos etc.) this means that, if the person in question has not accepted their problem and actually wants to change something, there is simply no way for external help to have any effect. In most cases it can be counter-productive even.

But isn’t it normal for a responsible person to reflect their own decisions and deliberate on the effects their actions might have on the people around them: their family, their friends? For all we know the fact of Negotiating leaving her husband and taking the kids with her, might be another notch in her husbands addiction. This does not imply any responsibility on her part. But its a fact that social isolation makes addiction even more hard to beat.
It’s normal for her not to know how she will feel about her marriage once he would be sober. How could she? If there are other doubts about the marriage and anger involved, they are clouded over by the most important problem: the addiction.
Why do people expect themselves to have it all figured out all the time? Leaving to reconsider and then after reconsidering would be a perfectly possible solution for Negotiating. But Tennis simply tells her to leave, be egoistic and save herself. This advice is perfectly fine for the acute problem. But is it the best way from a moral point of view?

I very much doubt that. To shed people because of their problems, their weaknesses or their ‘incompatibility’ is the easy way out. It is much harder to stick with them, love them anyway, fight with them and for them.

Analysing one’s actions and their impact on others is not simply a way to avoid a decision, it is also a way to appreciate the people around us. But everybody has their own free will to decide what to do or not to do. So even if I am concerned by somebody else’s decision, I can decide to have it affect me or not. And if my decision could affect someone else negatively, it does not imply any responsibility per se. Of course this is only valuable in ‘normal’ cases of decisions or actions, meaning: cases where the basic principle of benevolence for another person are satisfied. If I want to hurt someone, the hurtful act is surely my responsibility.
But we choose by what we are affected.It can be painful or rewarding. Being reflective about it doesn’t make us egoists, but concerned individuals.

Without an opening of their field of research and expertise… [the Human Sciences] will not be able to assume their responsible role that is assigned to them by radically new social problems appearing such as ecological change or the threat by globalised class society.1

I find that a bold thing to state for someone who is issuing this call to German academics working in the Human Sciences. Harald Welzer has been someone who has tried to address a lot of topics posed by current events and an actual need for explanation in society. Granted. I don’t see however why this call should be limited to Germany exclusively.
Galloping globalisation is a fact and although it has its downsides – especially for countries that cannot take part in this processes! – and the dangers of such a processes can only be addressed on a global scale as well. Like with any problem, you need the correct vocabulary and basic configuration to adequately describe it. Skulking protests and holding up banners “globalisation is bad” simply will not do.

It is rather obvious why Welzer’s article is coming out now. It’s WEF week in Davos. And while the Black blocks and other young anarchists start protesting around the world and especially here in Switzerland – Basel and Zürich are the official protest cities, please all tape your windows before leaving the house – and will tear the city centers apart to make a stand against globalisation, one can only wonder where Harald Welzer takes his ideas from. As someone who underlined the importance of accomplishment in public schools, rather than just pedagogical fun and pure knowledge, he seems to forget that in the real globalised world – as opposed to the secluded world of scholarly research – accomplishment is still as important as it ever was.
The opening of our field (Human Sciences) will only be accomplished trough dialogue and temerity, that much is true. When we look at the turn academic discourse has taken since a certain administration has deemed political correctness as the most important speech category or at the problems European intellectuals have with the phrase “Europe has a Christian past and culture…”, nobody can deny the need our society has for more conflictingly and more forceful dialogue. Too many things have not been addressed either by politics or academia while people are left alone with their problems and their musings. The shock of former East Germany voting a neo-nazi party back into local parliament shows how far from the needs and ideas of the polis we really are.

I share Welzer’s call. But not in the same terms. Not in the terms of a charm offensive by the Human scientists to attract more and more people to their topic or cause. The process can only be opened by accessing both ends: the polis and academia.
Like I have stated before, people need to reacquire a certain respect for the Human sciences (kind of hard when they pay for the education of the young generation and all they get is a Gender study in the Everyday Vocabulary of the ordinary working class in Moscow2 while academics have too take off their invisibility cloak and start writing in newspapers and feuilletons again to address what really is on everybody’s minds, rather than ignoring the hot irons of extremism, religious fundamentalism, terror of opinion etc.

Technorati Tags: wef, davos, germany, sociology, human sciences, harald welzer, die zeit

1. Die Zeit, Nr. 5 – 25. Januar 2007
2. This is not a joke. Happened in my year and I – with my The Quarrel around the Intellect in the XIIIth century: The case of the so called (non-existent) Latin Averroism – looked really nerdy alongside such a posh topic…