Author: Kleiner

Associate Vice Provost and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. I teach across the curriculum, but am most interested in continental philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy as well as Catholic thought, all of which might be summed up as an interest in the ressourcement tradition (returning in order to make progress). I also enjoy spending time thinking about liberal education and its ends.

Is Food the New Sex?

Here is an interesting article by the very impressive Mary Eberrstadt on Food and Sex.  She argues that food has become what sex was a generation ago.  Food is now charged with moral significance (framed in particular in terms of Kant’s universal law CI), while sex really isn’t.  

Whatever one thinks of the article, one has to praise any paper that has a section subtitle called: ‘Broccoli, Pornography, and Kant’.

Contemporary European Philosophy Class

I wanted to post a brief summary of what we have been working on in the Contemporary Euro Philosophy class, in case people are interested.  We’ve been reading Heidegger (Being and Time, Question Concerning Technology) as well as Levinas (articles from his Collected Philosophical Papers).

Here seems to be one of the central phenomenological insights (I’ll use mostly language from Heidegger’s BT):  Dasein (man) is not a being among others, and so our ordinary / ontic ways of understanding objects are simply misplaced when applied to man.  Heidegger calls the tendency to explain ourselves in terms of the ordinary objects of concern we encounter ‘falling’ and highlights, in QCT, the danger of man ‘being forgotten’.  Levinas wants to explain this using much different language (and wants to escape ontology altogether), but makes the same basic point when he suggests that the ‘face’ (the person?) is beyond being or ‘otherwise than essence’.

To give this some traction with other philosophical interests – I take it that Heidegger would find it simply absurd to think one could give an account of man in naturalistic terms.  The scientific method (fundamentally ‘technological’ in the Heideggerian sense) is a tool for manipulating (and ultimately reducing) objects, not understanding Dasein.  Frankly, we could say the same thing about more analytic philosophical arguments (phil of mind) that aim to prove the ultimate nature of the human being (arguments about the immortality of the soul, etc).  All of these arguments and approaches are fundamentally technological and reductive and so treat humanity as an object, not Dasein. 

Here is what is interesting.  While Heidegger shows that naturalism and materialism fail, any attempts to go further are basically inhumane – they reduce man to an object among others.  We are seeing the most radical articulation of this problem now in the course as we read Derrida’s ‘The Gift of Death’.  Dasein is mysterious (Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida all agree on this point), and the mystery cannot be explained away.  The transcendence of man makes it impossible to explain man in terms of some category. Hence Heidegger’s developing concern with ‘thinking’, and the morphing of his project into a task of ‘learning how to think without thinking’ (learning how to think without being technological and reductionistic about it).  

Obligatory Thomistic point:  Aquinas’ arguments against materialism are, I think, brilliant and pretty decisive.  But his attempts to say what the human soul is are really murky, and if you press on the Summa it is not long before you get mired in a really stretched notion of hylomorphism.  What it is to be human may not be irrational per se, but it is mysterious, and the attempt to explain man in simply Aristotelian terms will fail like all other ontic categorizations.  It is worth noting, though, that Aquinas was too wise to attempt such a thing when it came to the Person, something he considers basically irreducible.  

Might we be left with not only negative theology, but also negative anthropology? (the ability to say what man is not – merely matter, merely another object – but an incapacity to say what man is).  And how do we respond to this situation?  This is both a ‘how to think about the other’ question as well as an ethical question.  That is the task of the rest of the course in PHIL 3180 Contemporary Euro Phil.  We’ll be turning back to the great master Heidegger for more insight, then to Kierkegaard, Jean-Luc Marion, and even some John Paul the Great.  We won’t be reading Buber, but he has plenty to say about all of this too.  

A new communitarian conservatism?

Here is an extremely interesting article on the development of a new ‘Red Tory’ conservative communitarianism in Britian.  I am told by a Canadian friend that similar things are afoot in Canada (George Grant is apparently the person to read there).  Red Tory conservatism would be a culturally conservative movement that rejects neo-liberal economics.  There are substantial overlaps with John Paul II’s critique of ‘rigid capitalism’ in his encyclical ‘On Human Work’ (Laborem Exercens).  Both re-focus liberal economics on the common good and both reject the atomized relativism of modern liberal individualism (rooted in Lockean and Jeffersonian notions of the individual) in favor of an embodied communitarian and personalist ethic.  Students in Contemporary Euro will see shades of the Heideggerian and Levinasian critique of subjectivity here.  I find myself attracted to this Red Tory view, but wonder if American conservatives (at least, non-Catholic American conservatives) are anywhere close to being ready for something like this, or if they are simply too wed to liberalism.

Here is a taste of the critique, but link to the article for his list of concrete policy suggestions, most of which concern a re-localization of the economy and a call for conservatives to abandon big business.  

‘To understand why the legacy of liberalism produces both state authoritarianism and atomised individualism, we must first note that philosophical liberalism was born out of an 18th-century critique of absolute monarchies. It sought to protect the rights of the individual from arbitrary abuse by the king. But so extreme did the defence of individual liberty become that each man was obliged to refuse the dictates of any other—for that would be simply to replace rule by one man’s will (the king) with rule by another. As such, the most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a “self” is a fiction. A society so constituted would be one that required a powerful central authority to manage the perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals. So the unanticipated bequest of an unlimited liberalism is that most illiberal of entities: the controlling state. Even the most “communitarian” liberals—from philosophers like Michael Sandel to politicians like Ed Miliband—cannot promote community without big government. They see the state as the answer, when it usually makes the problem worse. The legacy of liberal individualism is the restoration of the very absolutism that it originally sought to overthrow—a philosophical tragedy that can be summed up as: “the king is dead, long live the king.”   ‘