The defenceless tomatoes and aerial display.

Mrs unenlightened's new book.

Well I think it's rather good, but then I am so close to it that I hardly trust my own judgement. But here is an unsolicited response from someone we had not seen for forty years, that we gave a copy to.

I'm reading Isabel's book and I more than love it, there is a pureness about it that I find so refreshing.

Have you ever thought of making it into "radio novel", everything about the book, so far, is full of images, history, psychology and incredible human feeling. The whole content, read so far, is an experience that would help so many, many people though their changing moods and life's experiences.

Isabel you have written a book that I will read over and over again, thank you for giving it to me.

So jump in, folks, and invest in a first edition now, and when the film comes out and a major publisher takes it up, you'll be quids in.

Everything you always wanted to know...

Here is an interview with yours truly from the philosophy forum where I waste most of my life these days. It's less than a year old, so hot news.

An evening with unenlightened

Caldwell: Hello, unenlightened. It's my pleasure to spend some time and expose some enlightening moments with you. Your humor and witty remarks make your posts philosophically readable and engaging. Tell me what you think of that style of writing.

unenlightened: I've never tried to create a style, just to be as clear and simple as I can. But I do like to play with words, and sometimes a little humour can clarify something that sometimes gets forgotten - that the world is not constrained by what we have to say about it, even if we can 'prove it'. How many times has it been proved that nothing has any meaning? But it is only talk that needs meaning, which it gets by reflecting the world; the world itself is not a reflection. So as long as one doesn't live entirely in one's head, one is quite safe from meaninglessness and can afford to be amused by it.

So I suppose my style comes from that philosophy that thinks that philosophy is important but not serious, or do I mean serious but not important? Whichever, it's not life.

Caldwell: As long as one doesn't live entirely in one's head. The natural language philosophers would agree with you. Our interaction with each other, through our language, injects and reinforces meaning in our words and action. So, how is philosophy not life? Most especially in the kind of work you do, working with the disabled, how does philosophy play a role?

unenlightened: Yes, I suppose I should qualify that by saying that from the point of view of life, there is no separation, language and thought are part of life; but in thought there is this divide, which is inescapable in that it is the way language works.

It is quite a privilege to work with disabled people, and I find in general, that they are kinder, happier, and more positive than the average. When someone needs help to go to the toilet, for instance, it is so simple, natural and intimate that words are unnecessary and ineffectual to describe it. Ego and intellect find no purchase there, sentiment has no place either, but there is a relationship of life to life. So I think I would say that it is my work that plays a role in my philosophy, rather than the other way round, in that I am always aware of the limitation and emptiness of all theory; there is much that it cannot capture - everything important in fact. I think that disability tends to hold one close to the physicality of life, and the necessity of relationship, and there is to be found the joy and significance that one cannot match in thought. Talk is part of that relationship, but cannot capture the whole.

Caldwell: Let us, then, try to capture the image in your avatar. What is it, or what is it about? I think it has some significance in the work you do.

unenlightened: It's a picture my daughter, Yemaya, drew when she was two and a half. It's the terrace where we lived, and it says "I live here." for those who can't read phonetically. If I was being extravagant, I might say it is her 'cogito' - the beginning of a philosophy. Anyway, it is a joyful expression of the beginnings of conscious thought and the power of image and language. Plus to me it is a sentimental reminder of innocent times gone by. she's doing her A levels now: English, maths, sociology, and plans to study journalism at university. So I expect to see her in a few years on the telly, announcing, "I am here outside 10 Downing Street..." or some such.

But I'm thinking of changing it to a picture of one of our local goats.

Caldwell: A nice beginning. A cogito, yes. It is also Wittgenstein in a way. Your daughter says "I live here." with certainty. I think it is melancholic to look at it, now that you have explained what it is.

You have a blog. You write prolifically, like many blog writers. Tell me about this need to have a blog. Is it like a shrine? Certainly, it's not a private place.

unenlightened: A shrine? More like a garbage dump! But I haven't done anything with it for ages. These days I tend to empty the rubbish from my head straight into the forums. Looking back at various things I've written, I tend to think, 'well that makes some kind of sense', but it doesn't seem all that important - I'm much more interested in what I'm doing now; this question, not the question I was trying to answer a few years ago. So it sits there in case anyone wants to know some background about me; it might be useful if one wants to understand what I am saying now, I'm not sure. There again, it might be an idea to update it; I could put this interview on there maybe. I think I started it out of a certain frustration and loneliness that probably quite a lot of forum members feel, that there are very few people around that one can really engage with. It is quite a rare thing, even on this forum, to achieve a real meeting of minds that is mutually productive, and that is what I think I am mainly concerned with - how communication can breach the walls that isolate the self. That is the attraction of religion and nationalism, is it not, that they give the illusion of participating in a greater whole? Ha! Philosophy Forums as a new religion... Being banned is going to hell! Oh dear, that makes me some kind of a priest.

Caldwell: Very well put. I think that is a very good reason for having that blog, that need to connect, which is, as you rightly said, common to many forum members. PF as a new religion. Hmmm, not bad. Yes, it is communication to a wider group. So, now, let us test your culinary taste. Tell us your attitude about food. And while you're at it, how you do you spend your leisure time when you're not here at the forums?

unenlightened: Ah, my stomach is a subject close to my heart. I blame Tolstoy for making me a vegetarian; I decided long ago that I didn't want to be responsible for someone else having a job of killing animals for me, and I found I didn't much like doing it myself, although when I kept chickens, and they stopped laying eggs, well they got recycled. But I like making and eating bread, and all kinds of cake and pudding, although, come to think of it I haven't contributed to the recipe thread yet - maybe a Danish pastry would be good?

Otherwise, I'm very much a home-body, repairing the house and so on. I used to keep an allotment (a rented vegetable patch, for the non-Brits) but my back is not in a fit state these days, so I go for longish walks most days instead. In my youth, I was involved with alternative education, and I lived for some years in a commune in France, but these days I am tediously conventional and small minded. House, family, work, and snarling at the telly; that's my life outside the forums - which explains why I'm here more than I'm not, I suppose. My partner writes, paints, and tutors primary school children after school, and I tell her where she's going wrong in all those of course. It's a small, unimportant life, but I do enjoy it, by and large.

Caldwell: Tediously conventional and small minded? Small, unimportant life? Strangely, this short description of your daily life sounds just about right; and not preoccupied with tech gadgets. Isn't that the life conducive to philosophical pondering? You did, at one point, write something about Eastern philosophy. What do you think of this philosophy as it relates to today's fast and quick-changing exchange of ideas?

unenlightened:That's a heck of a big question, and calls for some outrageous generalisations; so leaving out Confucious, and all the other stuff that doesn't fit my prejudices, I think Eastern philosophy is more psychologically sophisticated. When you talk about 'the exchange of ideas', it rather nicely indicates the Western tradition, which is that the goal is to bring thought to order using thought itself. If we can get the right ideas, and properly organise them, then all will be well. There is not the same faith in ideas in eastern philosophy, rather they are seen as a hinderance to 'the good life'. There is something of this in Wittgenstein, and perhaps others, but the state of mind of the philosopher is really not much considered in the West, only the coherence of the ideas therein.

So my best understanding of the depth of Eastern philosophy, is that thought cannot bring thought to order, and that when there is a very clear realisation of this fact - which means a direct, immediate insight, not another thought - then there is a natural quieting of the mind, and in that quiet is the order that thought seeks and never finds. But when one articulates this, it is just another idea to add to the 'exchange of ideas' unless one is actually following the movement of one's thoughts, and seeing how everything is transformed and distorted into more ideas. Which is back to the problem of living in one's head again. It is the nature of thought and ideas, rather than the content, that is the concern of the East.

Caldwell: I think that is a good distinction you make between the East and the West. While the West focuses on ideas, the East concerns itself with the state of mind. Incidentally, do you practice meditation or some form of yoga? It might be good for your back, no?

unenlightened: No. I do some exercises which are vaguely yogic, but the practice of meditation, or premeditated meditation, is a contradiction to my mind; it is a form of self-hypnosis, and I am looking to de-hypnotise myself. I like to spend some quiet time, sitting or walking, and pay attention to what is running through my mind, but I neither practice nor perform it, if you see what I mean. There is a danger, I think, if one has seen the problems of Western thinking, to leap instead into the problems of Eastern thinking - they are not necessarily an improvement. Understanding where one is requires not rushing off to become something else, and only a deep understanding of oneself can bring about a real change, not this or that practice, which is just the creation of another habit.

Caldwell: Ah, that is a breath of fresh air. A deep understanding of oneself is a good philosophy. Well, unenlightened, this has been a very nice evening. I enjoyed it very much and I wish we could do it more often. We'd like to see you cook in the food thread. Also, you promised to post a picture of your local goats, so I'm going to wait for it. Is there anything else you want to say to our readers?

unenlightened:Well thank you Caldwell for some interesting questions and kind comments. There's a whole lot more I have to say, but I will save it for the forums; That seems like a good place to stop for now - suspended between East and West. And I'll try and fulfill my promises in the next few days.

Caldwell: My pleasure. Stay unenlightened.

Postmodernist bollocks...

So there I am thinking about ‘mixedness’ and suchlike and I come across this:

Extract from 'LEVINAS, TOTALITY AND THE OTHER' BY MARTIN JENKINS

Second article in http://www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue126.html

Western Philosophy and ethical systems devised within it, have practiced a methodology of systematic foundationalism. In other words, consequences and corollaries are developed and deduced from founding first principles constituting a closed, reflexive system. As phenomena are categorised and judged from within such epistemological and ontological monoliths, 'Identity' and 'Sameness' are practiced. The system is total in its explanation and account of phenomena -- hence Levinas' term, 'Totalisation'. Whatever is within the system is legitimate because defined by and identical with it. Whatever is outside the system is either incorporated into it (thus repressing its otherness and extending the violent sameness of the same) or is denied any existence whatsoever.

Existing ethics such as Immanuel Kant's Deontology[4] and Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism[5] operate totalisation. Kant's defence of the individual as an end in itself intrinsically deserving of autonomy and respect, practices a totalising sameness of the same in its emphasis on rationality inherent to each and every individual. Utilitarianism treats the individual as an instrumental cog in the felicific calculation of the sum total of happiness. The individual qua individual is smothered and definitively pre-judged by prior existing categories. As such his/ her Otherness to the totalisation of sameness is deemed insignificant.

Transcendence

Although totalisation is unavoidable in its acting as an operational guide for everyday human interaction, it is subject to Transcendence. The Other founds the self and society as it is the primordial and original relation. It constitutes the beginning of everything human as it is only through the Other that I can become myself, so that the event of the Other marks the beginning of language, of community and of course, the beginning of ethics. The sheer presence of the Other is unavoidable: it demands my attention by charging into my world and disrupting it in a profound way that a rock or tree does not. Although established upon the revelation of the Other, subsequent culture smothers the Other under the edifices and categories of totalised sameness.

The Face of the Other is not a physical appearance but an Epi-Phany. This epiphanic event of irruption disrupts the sameness of the self and breaks its expectation of linear totalised categories of Being constituting the world. Its revelation demands a response and the nature of the ethical is to provide the appropriate response. This event is so profound it evokes an Infinity which from its exuding plenitude, overflows and transcends the existing representational structures of totalisation. For example, the presence and caress of a lover is such an instance of transcendence. We may use a word to thematise the event and those involved but the sheer presence of the Other, as lover, cannot be contained in a mere description as a theme or event. Overflowing mere conceptual representation, it transcends totality.

This event of the Other cannot -- on pain of being re-absorbed into the existing schemas of conceptual totalisation -- be represented. It is an event of such magnitude and height that it discloses 'signification without content'.

And much as I hate the way these postmodernists write, and keen as I am to dismiss it all as waffle and mystification, I can’t help noticing that I’m thinking, oh yeah, that’s what’s going on with this new obsession with mixed race identity. What is outside the system is being incorporated into it (thus repressing its otherness and extending the violent sameness of the same). So I have to look for what else one might do… um what’s an epiphany? “A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.” The meaning of what though, God? Oneself perhaps? I’m not too sure, but it does seem to me a little that for society at large and for the individual who is mixed race, there is something threatening and dangerous in the undefined nature of mixedness which academics and politicians are trying to control and absorb into the pervasive sameness of the liberal democratic monoculture. These strange ‘others’ must be made part of ‘us’ in order to enter the ‘same’ moral framework. The CRE conference is a desperate attempt to cope with people who somehow fail to be part of the total scheme of things. But in this case, the ‘other, as lover’ is equally keen to be absorbed into the system. It is so hard to be the constant occasion of another’s transcendence.

Graduation: a Question of Judgement.

The sizes of stones vary from the finest dust particle to enormous boulders. There is a machine which grades stones; it is like a sieve with a mesh which can be varied in size - say for building a road. The mesh size that separates sand from gravel, or gravel from pebbles is a social construction; it is arbitrary in relation to stone in the sense that the largest grain of sand is closer to the smallest piece of gravel than it is to the average grain of sand. Nevertheless, the grade is set to suit the purposes of the builder, and in relation to the builder it is not arbitrary but meaningful. No one is going to try and tell a builder that there are no such things as ‘sand’ and ‘gravel’ really, that they are just social constructions. Of course size isn’t everything, colour, hardness, chemical composition may be more significant for some purposes…

The grading of students at graduation is similarly arbitrary at the margin between, say a 2/2 and a 2/1. Students don’t divide into ‘natural’ kinds in this way, but academics find it useful and meaningful to make these distinctions as social constructions. There is an important difference from the case of stones though, that academics have themselves been through the grading process - 2/2s don’t generally ‘make the grade’ of becoming academic graders. It is as though sand itself decided what was gravel and what was sand, and gravel had no say in the matter. Academia constructs itself, or defines itself, by this recursive process.

‘Human nature’ is similarly constructed in a recursive way; the Catholic church, for instance, operates according to a ‘one cell rule’, where a fertilised egg is already human, whereas the legal position in this country is rather different. Where exactly we draw the boundaries of humanity is debatable, but whatever falls outside the boundary, has no say in the matter because ‘having a say’ is a human attribute - we do not ask chimps to comment! It seems that we have explored the limits of the world and established or decided that there are no debatable individuals as ‘races’ or ‘subspecies’. Yet we know that it could have been otherwise; Neanderthals could have survived for example, talking hairy apes might have been discovered.

The boundary of human nature is fundamental to morality in the sense that what is not human may be treated instrumentally - as an object, whereas what is human may not be so treated. This boundary has changed over time in this society, and indeed in academia. In particular, black Africans were excluded from humanity, and treated ‘like cattle’, as possessions. Women have also been excluded in this way - by the recursive process of self-definition, from that very process. We still have to remind ourselves occasionally, that ‘mankind’ includes women. It is tempting to believe that we can escape from this recursive self definition into an objective view of human nature, but my thesis is that this is impossible, and that recursive self definition is the defining feature of humanity. And there is no escape into vagueness available, because the boundary of what is human defines what it is acceptable to eat, to exploit, to have sexual relations with, etc. We cannot do without a clear distinction here. Whether one analyses philosophically or not, life decisions are continually being made on the basis of sameness and otherness, as to who/what one has to care about, take account of etc.

Ideas of Race are similar to, and closely involved with the idea of human nature; they are in a sense, (at least nowadays, and according to respectable opinion) subdivisions of ‘humanity’ and partake of the same features of recursion and arbitrariness. The one-drop rule sets an arbitrary limit on blackness; it is at the extreme end of the black/white spectrum, so that on one side the distinction is very fine (the finest sand) and on the side there are many variations (gravel, pebbles, great boulders). In South America there is a different grading system. But remember, the grader in this case, is also a stone and whatever mesh you are using, you have to jump through it too.

In this country, people do not generally eat dog or horse meat - horses are regarded almost as part of the family, human by association, and therefore taboo. Intellectual rigor gives way to ‘gut feeling’. It seems likely that notions of race are subject to similar non rational associations; what is familiar, close to me, similar to me, I am inclined to treat more respectfully. ‘Human’ always means ‘human like me’. If I could think of myself as an animal, and not morally distinguish ‘humanity’, I would, by my own definition, either be a vegetarian or a cannibal. There is an inevitable short-sightedness. If I am sand, I’m on the look out for other grains of sand, I know about sand and I am very good at discriminating. If I am gravel, I have a different point of view.

In matters of race the speaker has a (short-sighted) point of view, a race to be taken into account. When people say of other races, as they do, “they all look the same”, it’s human nature; for the qualities that are close to me are more meaningful than those that are far away. However you set your scales of difference and sameness, the chances are that you give yourself more importance. What is taken into account at the graduation of students is what is important to those who set the exams. And who is important, is who passes the exams, because who passes is who sets. And those same people, the leading thinkers, to a great extent also define the categories of thought, like race and human nature, which are the social constructs which construct society.

There is inevitably a question of power, here. Whose writ runs? The Judeo-Christian (white?) tradition has an origin mythology in which humanity is characterised by the fall from the state of nature into (self) knowledge and shame for the naked (animal) body. It is hardly surprising that the sight of Africans with different facial features, different hair, different skin, and above all shamelessly naked, would raise questions of human boundaries in the minds of the first Europeans to encounter them. Likewise, the Africans probably saw the white men as angels or ghosts. But whose writ runs? Who has the guns! The academic tradition has its roots in the monastic tradition, and follows the mythology to the extent at least of emphasising knowledge as being of primary significance in characterising human nature. The tradition long was that women were excluded from universities, and on the whole, they are still dominated by white males. And everyone ‘other’ has to prove their humanity first, before they even get to have a voice, leave alone a say, in what constitutes good, rational, human, thinking.

We like to think we have moved beyond all this now; we used to be racist and sexist individually and institutionally, but these days we are egalitarian and inclusive… but who is this ‘we’? The story is still being told by the white man, a black woman cannot subscribe to it. She would have to say that we used to be racially and sexually oppressed and excluded – and it looks like we still are.