The Philosopher's Attic

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.

yseult Issues communication, debate, Disputes between Scholars, Philosophy, science

In times of the internet and the quick use of any copy/paste function, where the transmission of thoughts and discussions is so immediate, does the term of Plagiarism even still make sense?

This week two topics concerning cheating in writing (also known as: Plagiarism) have hit the major media. They are – at first sight – diametrically opposed, but reveal a lot about how we see the art of creation, the writing business and how web 2.0 and modern means of communication are shaping our intellectual food and why it is that we are starving.

The first case involved star philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French self-made thinker (in every sense of the term applicable)¹ who has construed his career on said media exposition for the last decades. His latest book ‘On War in philosophy’ – which with the according exposure and the current need for answers on this topic – has been longingly awaited by the chic well-meaning, slightly world removed circles of professional brow frowners of the current Zeitgeist circles ². It is only a small ironical value of that BHL (his official trademark) has now been beaten down by the same feuilltons that usually hail him and applaud every undertaking that the great mind publicises ³. Yes, the man has been proven to be unable to do proper research. He can be seen citing a fictitious writer and his slightly less fictitious texts in his latest work. Less fictitious? The author in question is an invention by a French satritical writer Frédèric Pagès from a renowned satire paper called Le Canard Enchaîné (The Chained Duck) and was meant to wear the armour of champion of the 20th century Anti-Katian movement. The character of Jean-Baptiste Botul had so much success upon his invention that the journalist then went on to publish the invented oeuvre.
Apart from BHL missing the very basic sense and curiosity – which should and can be expected from a ’professional thinker’ – to solidify his own thought based on his sources (it would have taken him a simple Google search to unverify this quoted author), the interesting point here, is not the King’s dethronement. At least not for me. It’s as usual the scene around the throne that interests me more.

The moment in the book where this fictitious source ⁴ was used (or so they tell me, because I confess to not having it read yet), is a critical one: it quotes back to a conference the dear BHL had given last year at the Ecole Normale Supérieure ⁵, using it as what science calls an argument of authority for his own thought and he is quoting a real text written by a satirical journalist (who per se has nothing to say on the matter of wars, thought or metaphysics) who himself has invented a well thought out author with a fitting biography. Now Frédèric Pagès didn’t have in mind to gully people into thinking this was true thought by an actual thinker when he published the works of conferences by Jean-Baptiste Botul. However, BHL’s quoting – even if it’s a funny story – validates the thoughts within these conferences supposedly given in Brazil after the end of WWII.

The point to be made here is the following: No matter how a thought, a critique or a stance came into the world, through satire, through joke, it’s validity isn’t given by it’s author alone, their standing or by the measure that modern booklists give them, but by their applicability to the world. Clearly, something must have sounded right in BHL’s ears to have quoted it that way.

The second event has been breaking across the internet and the major media in Germany. About three weeks ago a certain Helene Hegemann (18) has published her first novel: Axolotl Roadkill. The feuilltons and critics hailed the book as the best portrayal of the current young generation, the generation of the zero years (ie. 2000 to 2009), a new ‘Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’ for a new generation, even though it’s content merely shows – using a crude and current language which involves barely anything above the belt line – the general loss of orientation of kids today. Helene Hegemann is no Christiane F., she lacks the genuine problems that allowed other artists to be inspired by her fate. (cf. for instance Cristiane F., the album by David Bowie or the movie). In all truth, all these two girls have in common is that they both showed us their state of mind. Where the one from the 70ies was in no area of her life adapting or working things out and spiralling deeper and deeper into drug addiction and the follow up tragedies, the other one at the start of a new decade of a new millennium shows how much she really has adapted herself to the world and how it works.  Not a single so-called intellectual writer has dared to ask the proper questions, the only newspaper that didn’t review the book was the Zürich based Tagesanzeiger, they found the book apparently too bland and polished ⁶.

It took a simple blogger. A citizen journalist to find out that Hegemann had copied most parts of her first novel off the internet and a particular blog. A fact that the editor immediately declared a detail which the author however failed to mention anywhere. The journalists that had cherished her before… did not drop her. They were ready for the 360 for her new found prodigy, suggesting in all earnestly (the editor and author later confirmed that idea) that copying and using like that was part of the new generation’s ways of communicating, of appreciating the world and that it was completely acceptable for youngsters today. And that’s where the big division is taking place. Nobody seems to want to believe the feuilltonists at this point, because the internet is exploding with people crying outrage ⁷.

Why is that? Because plagiarism is a crime? Because we have a right to what we create? Because… they should know better?

For me personally plagiarism is the worst possible kind of intellectual cannibalism (there are nuances in my head, yes) and just as with real cannibalism, some people might find it acceptable, others might not even consider the idea, for people that live from what they write and accomplish with words, the ethical dimensions are similar to real cannibalism. In a time where students at university think that research means ‘looking it up on google’ and where plagiarism is becoming the standard (in the Philosophy Dept. with three profs alone here in Geneva, there are at least 3 cases per semester), who honestly can be shocked about a girl copying her novel?

It’s the main paradigm of post-modernism that nothing in the world can be reinvented, that everything has been said and thought and that we are all just quoting, thus rendering true art as an act of creation obsolete. This has been the first step to devalue and invalidate the creative act and it is the first paving stone of the road we are on now.

The main question to ask is obviously how the critics can hold on to their prodigal kid by claiming that copying is actually ‘ok’ as long as it’s a ‘thing that kids just do’?

The answer is pretty simple: because plagiarism only makes sense in a written world. Where the written (and printed) word has meaning and a certain authoritative value.
The internet has a colloquial sense to it, and kids today are much more geared towards conversation and immediateness. It’s no wonder they are so in-to-the-net. It satisfies the basic need of every kid or teenager or tween: I want it now and I want it all ⁸. Add to that that an author in the internet or of a blog is a very abstract entity. The fact that bits and bytes represent the text don’t help. A text in printing ink just is so much more imposing and… real.

Two cases, two countries that seemingly have nothing to do with one another. In my view they do. Whereas in BHL’s case, the scientific research, everything is given to the authority of the text, in Hegemann’s case, a novel, nothing is given to the source and there is no argument of authority other than the one of the critics who elevated her. In both cases the reader is left under-nourrished and disappointed.

We buy books and pay authors for various reasons. But no matter what the context is, be it scientific, intellectual or fiction, we pay them for their creativity. We pay them because they spent time on something that we haven’t thought of or don’t have the time to, they created something. They thought and had a will to do something with it.
The discussion about plagiarism, what it is and what it isn’t, what it should be and what it can’t be is an ongoing one. The latest book on the subject has only just come out ⁹. As readers, we live from the illusion that we are reading something new. Whether it’s true or not, is secondary. When German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer ¹⁰ stated that when we read a text, we throw ourselves (as the complete being with our social realisation etc.) in front of the progression of the text, that we assume and accept the text as an authority that has to tell us something, he revealed the non-dictum that others fail to see today. Texts are universes. They are very talkative universes. They manipulate, they play with Gadamer’s basic assumption, they shock and they hurt ¹¹. And we all take it. We take it because we believe that the authors have done their work. They have created something. For us.

It’s when we realise that they have cheated and lied that the whole building collapses on itself. Not only does writing become insignificant – limited to the simple machinality of a couple of keystrokes between ctrl+c and ctrl+v -, but ultimately reading is nothing more than listening to the constant jabber of everyday life when it should be elevating us, should inspire us and should make us dream or think.

ADDENDUM: Meanwhile, the Book Expo of Leipzig as nominated Axolotl Roadkill for their 2010 book prize (45.000 Euro). Looking at the standing now, it might not win, but who knows. To not completely throw out their chances, the editor has now issued a nervous telegram stating that in the fourth edition of the book, a ‘list of sources’ would be included. I’ve been fortunate enough to take a look at it and it’s seven pages long and presents itself as an evident alibi. The last paragraph of said list states: “Dieser Roman folgt in Passagen dem ästhetischen Prinzip der Intertextualität und kann daher weitere Zitate enthalten.” which translates to this: This novel follows in certain passages the aestetical principle of intertexuality and may thus contain more quotations (than listed here).
Intertextuality, dear friends, is a scientific concept that became popular in the late 60ies and early 70ies (under Kristeva and the rising movement of psychoanalytical thought in literature and critique of structuralism ie. poststructuralism. It’s not an aestetic principle, it’s a variation of what I referred to as the postmodern principle (“nothing can be said without quoting anything”). Intertextuality uses any given text as a marking point. It doesn’t necessarily quote it, it doesn’t necessarily plagiarise it and it certainly doesn’t use it in a cannibalistic sense. Shame on the editor who obviously were looking for a new child prodigy and through people weren’t intelligent enough to notice their foul play and now try to hide behind scientific concepts that they have no idea of. The King is truly naked.

yseult Big Words, Issues literature, Philosophy, plagiarism, text

Why do we even have friends? Why do we link ourselves with others when there’s only heartache, abandonment, betrayal and pain to be had from it…?

The question is as old as society itself and probably even as old as language itself. Consequently philosophers, thinkers and good people have produced a varied catalogue of ideas on the subject that range as far as just stating that man is not made to live alone to a completely utilitarian approach: because it serves us.

But even if the simplistic theory that we can have ethical considerations and moral decisions towards our peers and fellow human beings only because we recognise ourselves in them falls short on several accounts, the intellectual approach that we care because we can or must, doesn’t help much more to understand what it is that makes us connect to this person, but not that one.

Quite generally speaking we are brought up with the idea that caring for others is an ideal to aspire to. That stepping out and away from the weight of your own needs and make someone else’s fears imperative for yourself, brings you something more, offers you some kind of insight into your own soul and one step closer to a ‘good life’.
There is no religion and no social system or idea that does not operate on this basic idea either by reinforcing it or by negating it.

But is the abstract idea of some heavenly reward in an afterlife or aspiring to the ideal of a good life or being a good person, really enough to account for the fact that we do against all odds, against adversity, despite rejection, hurt, desolation and frustration reach out, touch others, take up their burdens, listen to their fears, soothe their minds again and again?

Because secretly we hope that the people we care for will do the same for us, for even if I am someone who’s not used to facing the problem of not caring enough, but rather too much even for strangers that cross my path… even I am sort of speechless when in one of my weaker moments I am ignored by my friends.
That fundamental element of ’shared love and shared burden’ doesn’t make us manipulative or even interested in the way we deal out our affections and our readiness to help, but rather it points to the next even more fundamental characteristics of our human condition: we need care.

We need people taking care of us and our emotions, people noticing us, recognising us for what we are and who we strive to be, listen to what we have to say or teach or even cry about and what makes us passionate. We don’t need it just to feel better or inflate our egos, what I am referring to is much more basic, much more unreflected. It’s not so much different than the impulsive touch towards a pet or a baby and the basic level of need either the animal or the baby feel for that touch and proximity.

Thomas Merton wasn’t the first to use the phrase ‘no man is an island’, but he certainly took the concept to a completely different level. His reaching out seemed to know no boundaries and looking closely at his biography might even suggest that it bore dangerous self-annihilating traits. And yet, his generosity of heart has become an ideal… because, no man is an island.

But what does that mean? Truly? That ultimately we’re flawed and can’t ever be enough on our own, for our own? I shouldn’t think so. I find it much more inspiring to think that our actions, however small they may be cause a light to shine (or ripples across existence, if you prefer that image) that – not unlike a seed – will grow over time, be reinforced by connecting to others and caring for them and it will eventually affect people outside of our immediate range of action… if we cannot believe that our actions influence others around us and our surrounding society, what else keeps us from not shutting down and surfing the ego trip to self destruction?

In times where dehumanisation is something that is so quickly achieved, where the mass of people in our immediate focus has grown exponentially through internet and modern media, where friends can be nothing much more than a few points on a computer screen and a name (maybe just an avatar), the danger of limiting people, shutting them out, casting them off or simply not taking care of them is even bigger than before. Not only does the internet make it much easier to connect with each other, it also makes it much easier for us to lose focus on the most important thing in life: nothing remains. We can’t take anything with us. When we die, all that remains will be the people we’ve loved and the ones that have loved us and the icon of a memory of that love.

So, we better start minding our friends, caring for their hearts, accepting their limits and loving them for what they are. Not because they deserve it or because we might need them one day, but because there is no greater and more effortless gift than love.

Be generous with yourself and someone you haven’t dared to reach out to today. It’ll make their day a brighter one and your heart shine harder.

yseult Issues, The Odd Philosophical Question ethics, Philosophy, vices, virtues