Naivety was quite common those days

In the fifties of the last century the World Health Organization used the following definition of health: ‘Health is a state of total physical and mental well-being’.

The word ‘total’ in this definition is significant: apparently the ideal of a complete absence of any defect was held high, and the tendency was towards the formulation of absolute requirements and duties when it comes to the protection of health. If to that the faith is linked that all that is realizable, on the scale of the whole world, then that definition gets a little naive.

But such were the times. The horrors of the Second World War were still fresh in memory, and the ubiquitous reaction was: ‘The world must become a better place’. People started to reconstruct their lives, with a strong faith in science and technology and with an amazing optimism about progress. Thereby the leading elite, and therefore the authors of the declaration, was still largely recruited from the Eurocentric upper classes, who from their privileged position were inclined already to think according to strictly rational Kantian patterns and in terms of an undisturbed course of life.

Nowadays health authorities start from the somewhat more manageable concept of ‘positive health’: ie the ability to adapt. With this in mind, you can still be healthy with a chronic disease.

The aforementioned characteristics of the declaration on health, ie the universality of the definition and the totality of the concomitant protection, are also reflected in the declarations of human rights stemming from the same period. As in the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. It states inter alia that anyone who fears violence and persecution can count on protection in another country. By the word ‘anyone’, according to many current interpreters of that Convention, the drafters indeed meant: everyone on earth. And from the wording of such a universal right might very well speak the same naivety as from the idea of overall health.

Because if it comes to the point, according to the Convention, you are obliged to offer the entire population of a region at war the right to asylum. Even if the rest of the world does not participate. Even if would happen what Henri Beunders describes, that the region in war does not include ‘only’ 20 million Syrians, but also 6 to 7 million Eritreans, and another half a billion Africans if the situation explodes in Egypt, Libya and Nigeria.

The latter is not at all inconceivable, but the Convention does not allow to think about the practical managability of the situation we would then arrive at. The absolute terms of the Convention suggest that it really does not matter whether something is conceivable or inconceivable. That’s the way the Convention argues, with Kant and the fifties at its side.

Personally, I am not so sure about that. Theoretically I am, of course, but I mean in practical terms. Because unmanageable situations tend to create their own kinds of socio-political disasters.

Also see Values as natural phenomena and The whole world - or just a small part? 

Humanly spoken

Humanly spoken, in these difficult times one’s attention has to be with the victims of all this misery. And of course, with what we can do to prevent attacks. And fortunately, over the whole that attention is there.

But that does not prevent me to be interested in the underlying, almost philosophical shifts brought about by ever closer creeping terrorist violence.

Take this question of Leonie Breebaart in Trouw: “Is it really so bad that the Dutch sympathize more strongly with the victims in Brussels than with those in, say, Nigerian Maiduguri, where last week 22 worshippers were killed in a mosque?” And the sober reply from philosopher and ethicist Rutger Claassen: “What is close affects you more”.

That obviously has never been different, but for a long time we dared not say that aloud. From the sixties and seventies, at least for the progressive part of the Netherlands, solidarity with the oppressed was supposed to be limitless and global, without distinction as to geography, nationality or religion. Right now Breebaart asks: “Is not that a very abstract idea?”

Not so long ago it was considered unacceptably hypocritical to deplore one victim (eg a Belgian) more than another (eg a Nigerian). Right now Breebaart states: “But doesn’t it work just like that? Doesn’t there remain a tension between the idea of solidarity and the feeling that you have for people you know?” Say between thick and thin relationships.

As to me, these observations confirm an already very old Jewish truth. Namely that closeness and ‘the particularistic’ matter, and that relationships within your own community, or close in some other way, are of a different quality than the relationships you maintain beyond. Warmer, more intense, thicker. And that they are allowed to be so, without you being indecent to the rest of the world. That’s the way it may work indeed.

Until recently it was risky to formulate those thoughts, in a world where a noisy elite was universally oriented and put away all ethnocentrism and particularism as hopelessly outdated. That elite is resetting itself – and I hope it will not go into a neo-nationalistic direction but towards the recognition that charity begins at home. Because that seems to me an act of commendable realism.

What concerns me is that the spectrum is shifting in its entirety. For the West, I think that’s ok, it may very well return a bit of its haughty universalism. But Israel for a long time already is particularistic enough and could give some more attention to universal values. However, the recent Pew Report points into a different direction: a quarter of the Israeli population would want to trade democracy for theocracy and 48 percent of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement ‘Arabs must be put out of Israel’.

That does not feel right.

Also see Countries without borders

How counter-intuitive can you be?

It’s good for me – as someone who has broken with Christianity – to get the Christian faith explained by people I find congenial. Because then, if I feel objections arise, I’m sure they are not motivated by an opinion about the person that I listen to at that time.

One of those sympathetic interpreters is Marilynne Robinson, whom I saw recently on television. What I understood to be her main message is that Christians are called to become what they by nature are not. People are selfish, and they should be altruistic; they are not naturally compassionate, but they should be so; they are easily scared, but fear is wrong. In short, Christianity according to Robinson is one big change program, away from our natural state, leading to a victory over our nature.

So much counter-naturalness cannot convince me, however sympathetic the messenger may be. Indeed, from a pedagogical or andragogical point of view such a program seems to me to be doomed to failure, because how counter-intuitive can we be? It could even be that the frustration built into this program accounts for the phenomena in church and Christianity which Robinson precisely dislikes: the focus on power and on winning souls. The latter might very well be the ‘natural’ and inevitable compensation for too ambitious aspirations which run off the rails.

Besides, I am not so afraid of human selfishness, lack of empathy and fear. Selfishness can give us firm starting positions, from which we on our turn have something to offer to others. The duty of empathy and compassion can easily lead to the overstrained situation in which empathy becomes an achievement of the autonomous self, and in which the other is no more than an object for compassion. Fear finally can be a very good counselor, as evidenced indeed by the images of the Bataclan which were shown during the interview with Robinson: visitors ran away as fast as possible from the Kalashnikovs, and that was a good thing. The fact that there also may be fearful situations in which you need to think well, as Robinson propagated, does not diminish the importance of vigilance that is generates by fear.

The recommendation by Robinson that I can fully accept is that it comes to live deliberately, even with regard to experiences that transcend us. That may be unnatural enough already, and I don’t want to burden that endeavor with additional unnatural commands.

Also see Holy fire

Countries without borders

“For an Israel without borders”,  such was the chotspeous title of a book by the Dominican Lucas Grollenberg in 1970. In it he laments the fate undergone by the Palestinians by the creation of the state of Israel, and that’s legitimate of course. The chotspe lies in the fact that, barely twenty-five years after the bloodiest attack ever on the Jewish people, the author calls for conceiving of Judaism as a purely spiritual content that does not need a physical component, let alone borders. That’s quite impertinent if you know how Jews were threatened in their purely physical existence. And that precisely the lack of border security has become fatal to many of them at that time.

The utopia of borderlessness as an ideal is nevertheless very popular. The historian Henri Beunders calls it an important part of the current zeitgeist which cherishes the idea that all people can freely travel around the earth. That’s good for the economy, for communication between people and for the exchange between cultures.

Beunders views the emergence of the open borders movement as a relatively modern phenomenon, based on the idea that boundaries are unfair to the poor and that they are economically inefficient and counterproductive. In this modern dream of ‘the sky is the limit’, according to Beunders, we lost the sense of equivocalness of boundaries and started thinking in terms of borderlessness.

We pay for it now, Beunders says, and therefore we frantically start to reestablish boundaries and fences. That change can go fast, just look at our politicians who, still in October, explained passionately that you cannot stop asylum seekers, but now present a plan for strong border control.

I do agree with Beunders that Europe is chained to an ideology of boundlessness of which now it discovers the utopian side. But I do not share his analysis that this is a zeitgeist phenomenon – so something relatively modern. The roots of this absolute universal orientation go back much further, namely to a deep-rooted universalist orientation of Christianity. Already for the Apostle Paul the sky was the limit, and eliminating all differences between Jew and Greek, and other nations, his stated goal. In that respect Grollenberg stands in a tradition.

No wonder Christianity brought, along with civilization, also a lot of violence. Because generally people are rather attached to their own identity and its connected borders, and they don’t give up that without a fight in exchange for a universalist ideal.

Apart from violent, the ideal now appears also to be a bit too utopian. The open borders ideal encounters poverty, wars and refugees in the rest of the world, and in its propagated shape appears to be unsustainable. The question at this time, given our cultural heritage, is how fast we will be able to switch.

I-lit

Recently Naema Tahir called Die Welt von Gestern by Stefan Zweig one of the finest books she had read. For me actually the same holds true. It is 35 years since I read it, but its instructiveness and penetrating enjoyment are still standing sharp in my mind.

However, I completely disagree with the thoughts that she then connects to her appreciation of the book. She believes that Zweig reached that grand effect because he stays on the outside: he observes his surroundings and styles his findings in a masterly way. He does not speak about himself and this controlled distance creates depth and art.

She opposes that to the tendency of modern literature to expand extensively on the inner life of the author himself or herself, including physical and sexual aspects of private life. She calls that ‘I-lit’, with Karl Ove Knausgård and Jonathan Littell as its contemporary exponents, and she abhors it. Firstly because she finds the many sexual details repulsive. But in the second place, as she says, because someone else’s inner life is not relevant to a reader. And, as I suspect based on the tone of the piece, in the third place because of the old moralistic reason that attention to one’s own inner life is selfish.

Tahirs first argument is imaginable for me: I think too it’s often not really pleasant to, for example, get served the details of other people’s sex lives. But with her second argument, namely that it would not be relevant, I do not agree. For that reason, I also heartily disagree with her normative, condemning rejection of I-centredness.

I’m afraid that Tahirs considerations are derived a bit too much from the world of yesterday where she let herself be carried away by Zweig. That world of external control, elegant but compelling objectivity, distance and styling is completely outdated, so is my conviction. It relies too heavily on elements that are irretrievably gone, such as order thinking and the assumption of a cosmic harmony that we can bring near through control and, if necessary, by use of a little violence. In short, on an essentially Platonic conception of the world.

This underlying worldview over the past century lost its credibility. For the West, from a societal perspective, to this day the now eighty-year-old corruption of our political order by Nazism and Stalinism revealed a grim turning point. According to many experts the desire for objective order and control, deeply rooted in Western thinking, made possible those totalitarian regimes.

At the same time psychoanalysis and other humanities have increased our understanding of ourselves and our often murky motives so overwhelmingly, that Zweig’s polished gentleman existence has become unattainable for us for good. Indeed, we not even consider it to be desirable because of its unrealistic character. There is for us no choice but to descend into our troubled lives, so our literature does so as well.

And yes, that can bring up all sorts of revelations that Tahir abhors such as the conclusion  by a recent biographer that Zweig which was an exhibitionist. “I do not want to hear that”,  she exclaims, “It's a kind of defilement.” It obscures beauty and it is irrelevant.

I would say on the contrary: the very fact that Tahir’s lofty image can be brought down by the disclosure makes the disclosure relevant. Frankly, I think the focus on the inner life in all its aspects, not just the sublime, is progress. Not that I’m going to read Knausgård, but I appreciate the tendency that modern people try as best as possible to deal with their not so lofty but every-day physical, sexual and spiritual needs. And I tend to see recognition of the dark diversity of human strivings as a gain. Eventually it is a better means of averting social chaos than the controlling action of an outward ideal of civilization.

After all, how else do we ever get out of that often sterile, objectifying, communicatively poor atmosphere at our offices, schools and universities, than by systematically scrutinizing ourselves and expressing ourselves as subjects? To dismiss that as self-centered I would call old-fashionedly normative. I would like to cite Wittgenstein in this regard, in conversation with Friedrich Waismann: “At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person: I think that this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person.”

La Belle Epoque is definitely in the past. But that loss can be very livable, and indeed the more so as our inner life is more involved. That much faith in a certain order I still have.

Also see Escape

Levinas as I (can) understand him

Chancellor Merkel must be careful not to run too far ahead of the troops. But for the rest it is quite nice to see so many people come to the rescue. Volunteers distribute bread to refugees at border crossings, doctors and translators welcome refugees in German refugee centers, municipalities improvise extra care.

That’s nice to see, as long as it does not get simplistically ideological in the sense of: let everyone come here so that finally there is global justice. I’m sorry, but I do not believe in that. But I don’t think it is like that, I think most people help because they can not bear the misery of the refugees, and that seems to me a good motivation.

Like the motivation of the former Dutch parliamentarian Jacques de Milliano, who in an interview recently told that he became a physician because he is moved by the concrete suffering of individuals: “The essence of being physician is to truly make a difference for that one person. On the battlefield or in the office, it does not matter”.

De Milliano did not stop there. He wanted to do well on a larger scale, and together with others he established Doctors Without Borders Netherlands and therewith did many good things in a more structured manner. However, gradually something simplistically ideological crept in, in the sense that at one point he took as his task: to be always ready for anyone in the world. There in my eyes ideology starts to become uncomfortable and megalomaniacal.

Fortunately, in the eyes of De Milliano too. The doctor without borders must then learn to draw his own boundaries. He became a general practitioner in Haarlem. “The general practice was a reset. I had to catch my breath, get my head to be in one place.”

For the philosopher Paul van Tongeren, in a conversation with ethics professor Ingrid Robeyns, the current refugee crisis raises the problem: why is it that I do nothing, while I feel I should. Because that would be “morally the right thing to do”. Robeyns believes it’s because you need others for that. As long as people around you do nothing, it all has to come from yourself and that is too much to ask.

Actually, I think the latter is not quite the case, for there are various groups of volunteers. One could easily join them. But one way or another, Paul van Tongeren does manage to do so. He once more states that action for refugees would be the only correct thing to do and then concludes: “My problem is that I don’t do it.”

I would say Van Tongeren’s problem is rather that he speaks of ‘the ultimate morally right answer’, as if there is only one moral position possible. That seems to me to be his real problem. For matters are not so clear and unequivocal, as also may appear from the story of De Milliano. Van Tongeren’s statement departs from the idea that one’s responsibility is infinite: it relates to every other human being, always, wherever on earth.

I find that questionable. I maintain that keeping up a decent democratic and tolerant society like ours just as good embodies an important value. And that for that we badly need to people who have their heads in one place.

What the hell, I hear people think, how do I reconcile that with my favorite philosopher Levinas? Indeed, the one of ‘the infinite responsibility’?

Admittedly, the latter characterization is true, according to the interpretation by which Levinas has become popular in the Netherlands and which is actually nothing more than a continuation of Christian beliefs with Jewish means. Including an infinite guilt. And, to be honest, the late Levinas himself gives ample reason for this interpretation, through concepts such as ‘vicarious suffering’ and ‘unconditional responsibility for every other’.

But that’s not my Levinas. Because my Levinas is the one of his earlier books, including Totality and Infinity. These indeed dó speak about the Other and responsibility and infinity. But these words then don’t have the color yet of the later universally valid claims that fit in so well with Christian thought.

In Levinas’s early and middle period infinite responsibility must not be taken as valid always, everywhere and in respect of everybody. But rather in the sense in which the philosopher Derrida later expresses one of his key points: as the occurrence of the extraordinary (infinite) in the ordinary (finite). And it does not have to last forever and not to concern everyone. It can refer to a split second, in interaction with just one other person. Thereafter, the finite takes over again, until a new strike of infinity hits you, and so on and so on. Thát Levinas appeals to me. And I think to De Milliano too.

In rejecting the later Levinas, I am not alone. Many right-minded people reject his position as being impossibly radical and demanding, so for the same reasons why Christianity for many people turned out to be untenable. Besides, the Netherlands Refugee Council also does not recommend radical solutions, and does not encourage people to take a refugee in the house.

But strangely enough attention to the much less radical, but more viable Levinas from the early and middle period is scarce. It is partly due to the Leuven philosopher Rudi Visker that we have good understanding of this valuable variant of Levinas.

Also see Levinas and Empathy and Compassion or Competition

Not that bad

It is time for Europe to wake up from its decades-long sweet sleep, says Caroline de Gruyter in her column. She believes that for decades an immense allergy to power politics is the foundation of the EU. Foreign policy, according to the leading politicians, is mostly about trade, human rights and humanitarian development, while America takes care of our military protection. We must, according to De Gruyter, learn to understand again what True, Big Politics is: land grabbing and treasure hunting.

Measured by the standards of De Gruyter Israel does not do that bad. As to land grabbing it takes part even quite literally, although De Gruyter will not encourage that. What does fit into her vision is the sharp Israeli awareness of geopolitical threats, such as IS or Iran. Obviously, because their hostility towards Israel is no secret. But one of the results is that Israel does not make one step without a thorough assessment of the power political consequences. And it will continuously try to influence these effects. Failing to do so the country simply can not afford.

Well, de Gruyter tells us, no civilization can afford it, not even Europe. Continued neglect of the great political power game might once seriously break up Europe.

In terms of character and disposition I do not feel right at home with the approach propagated by De Gruyter. I do like peaceful sanctuaries, where art and culture and thinking can flourish. But she undoubtedly has a point. Paradise reserves don’t remain in position just by itself, and when you are realistic you will see that scary power political formations such as Russia and IS come closer. Without power thinking Europe will never find an answer.

It’s just very hard not to end up on a slippery slope, as Israel in the occupied territories. Or would appropriating them be a power-political and military necessity?

Also see I don't understand

Measurability

The time that students rode through town in carriages is over, fortunately. True, in those days there always were a few of them that used the very same pool of money and time for thorough study of their subjects, in breadth and depth. Then quality could just spontaneously emerge: Bildung we can only dream of.

Because of the affluence on which that Bildung mostly rested, the latter had a decidedly elitist and exclusive character. I’m not sorry to see it gone, and I welcome the fact that large groups of other people now share in academic education.

So I also understand that a lot of public money goes to the universities. And that one wants to have some control over it. And that directors and managers should monitor that. And that inevitably some form of counting and measuring is always involved.

In the debate about the return on investment at the universities, I therefore disagree with the proposition that there is nothing to measure. Because immeasurability would make large-scale universities unmanageable. Then intellectual and cultural formation would again be accessible only to those of whom also the means are immeasurable.

In addition, there is another, more fundamental reason why I do not agree with the inmeasurability thesis. I think that measurability dóes exist in this field. However: not in the form of the brute performance indicators that managers and financials invent and apply nowadays. As if it were thém who provide the added value of education and research.

As to measurability in a realistic form, I rather think of the kind Ben Tiggelaar recently referred to in his NRC-column. People with serious ambitions, he wrote, also on the field of arts and sciences, often put themselves all sorts of standards – as countable and even rigid as imaginable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright for example got up every day at four o’clock to work three hours in quiet. “Like the bureaucratic habit of many writers to count the number of words they daily produce and to impose themselves quotas. Hemingway: 500 words per day, Stephen King: 2000”.

The difference: these professionals know exactly what is needed for fruitful results. Tiggelaar’s advice to managers and financials would therefore be: go talk to the professionals and do not decide for thém what standards they must meet, but let them decide themselves. Let a professor describe his personal ideals and benchmark her own performance.

Because professors (and students) are no less keen on return than managers. But they have more sense of it.

Also see Grief

The pedantic novel

There is a number of things in our society that are surrounded with an aura of loftiness. I think of the prestige of getting to know other cultures, distant travel, and reading novels. In itself there is nothing wrong with that, because these are all venerable activities.

But there is one recurring aspect of that prestige that bothers me, and that’s the moral pretension that is (too) often linked to it. By traveling and reading you’d become a better human being, because you learn to enter into the world of others.

Let me premise: any insight into a different way of thinking is a broadening of the mind. Therefore, travel, cultural exchanges and novels certainly have an added value. What I object to is the pretentious claim that may go therewith.

Take reading novels. Recently Beatrice de Graaf said to believe that the novel is an irreplaceable source of knowledge, because it is the only way to get into someone else’s head. “Only the novel does justice to the complexity of feelings, thoughts and motives that guide our behavior”.

That’s simply not true, because there is at least one other way, which is that of the confronting real-life encounter with another human being, a phenomenon that in my workshops I extensively explore with participants. It indeed háppens that a person, in conversation with someone else, is convinced that his interlocutor will think so and so about a certain matter. And that then the sobering surprise appears that the interlocutor thinks totally differently. If that happens to you, you have for one moment been right in the other’s head.

So it is not true that reading novels would be the royal or even only way to that end. Therefore that pretension bothers me, but perhaps even more because of the underlying scheme leading to that pretension. Namely that the real life confrontations are ignored, in favor of a spectator’s confrontation. Priority is given to the situation in which you sit down into your armchair and have chosen a particular story; over the situation in which life itself, in the person of another human being, confronts you with another universe.

In the end, we intend to retain control. We draw back, decide when and how and how far to be confronted. That’s legitimate, and broadening of our horizons will certainly occur. But please let’s not pretend that it is the only way, nor that it enables you to know the world. In ordinary daily life, even of non-readers, often more world enlarging confrontations occur than we would like to have it.

Also see Sacred imagination and Levinas and Empathy

Professional philosophy's sad course

What do the philosophers Levinas and Nussbaum have in common except that they are Jewish?

What strikes me – and I don’t know to what extent that’s Jewish – is that they both started off with  similar good philosophical intentions. Ánd: that in both cases the trade somewhat has been spoiled.

Levinas’s good intention consisted in his wish to, while reasoning, escape the tyranny of reason. That was bound to fail, you might say, but nevertheless he díd it, a large part of his philosophical life. He showed, up to the very way he formulated and argued, how Western philosophy, at least from Plato onwards, can be called an exercise of equalization of diversity through the uniformity of reason. He called that equalization the ‘domination of the Same’, and opposed to that the Other.

Nussbaum formulated her good intention as: getting away from the Platonic abstractions to which our society and science in her eyes are still too much attached. By that she was referring to an unhealthy privileging of mind over body, of policymaking over implementation and of abstract ideals over concrete goals. To get rid of that, she sought to draw upon he thinking of Aristotle, because he would do more justice to the concreteness of human existence than Plato did.

But then the philosophical lifes of Levinas (1906-1995) and Nussbaum (1947) are quite different, as much as the areas and subjects they dwell upon diverge widely. Levinas worked until about sixty at a Jewish school, first as a teacher, then as director. Besides he published a lot in the fields of philosophy and judaïsm. 

Nussbaum, after graduating, taught at Harvard, Brown University and Chicago. In addition she – often in collaboration with development economist Amartya Sen – does research in the field of economic development, ethics and pedagogy, and publishes extensively on these subjects.

ut amidst all these differences I discover a parallel, and one that to me is pretty shocking. Namely that, as the philosophical careers of Levinas and Nussbaum develop, they seem to get further away from their original intentions as mentioned above.

In itself that needs not to be a wrong development. Indeed, advancing insights are always welcome. But it does not look like advancing insights. Because in that case the changes of direction should have taken place in an argued way, in the sense that Levinas and Nussbaum convinced us that Plato might have been more right than they first thought.

But that’s not what they do. It seems, rather, that they fall prey to the cunning suction to which philosophy is easily exposed and through which especially professional philosophers – by the absence of confrontation with compelling practical issues? – slip into the trap of universalizing reason.

So, I make the connection with Levinas’s and Nussbaum’s professional philosophical positions. In the case of Levinas, because I see the disappointing about-face displayed when, after a long life as a philosophical outsider, he in the sixties reached the academic position he so coveted. From this position he published the book Otherwise than Being, which – unlike the work of his early and middle period – abandons the anarchist, undecided openness between the Same and the Other in favor of a fundamental, foundational position for the Other. I tend to see in this philosophical hierarchy the reflection of the academic, in a sense Platonic, hierarchy into which Levinas then had entered.

Nussbaum from the outset sincerely sought the connection between her thinking and pedagogical and developmental work. But in the eyes of many commentators those efforts soon after her breakthrough with the book The Fragility of Goodness got stuck in excessively theoretical and abstract arguments. In the formulation of medical doctor/philosopher Bert Keizer: “The problem with people like Nussbaum is that they only deal with people like Nussbaum”.

So, the decline into an intellectual Platonic schema in her career occurred much earlier than in Levinas’s career. However, a parallel can be found in the idea that a position at the academy may have played a role: Nussbaum has from the outset been a professional philosopher.

Should we, therefore, better not mourn when independent philosophy faculties are threatened with closure, as in Rotterdam and Amsterdam?

Maybe not, as long as there continues to be philosophizing.

Also see Levinas and Spinoza

Sacred Imagination

As long as I hear people use the word ‘imagination’, an exalted tone is connected with it. Imagination stands on a pedestal. But, I asked myself many times, why is that?

It may be because imagination helps people – writers and readers – to, if only temporarily,  escape the unruly reality and to experience a rush of oblivion. Publishers seem to aim at that effect when promoting new books, as happens now with a new book by Leon de Winter that is touted as “a dance on the high wire of imagination”. And writer Adri van der Heijden once told that in his youth he was so bored at home that he fled in imagination.

Nice that it exists that way, but a second explanation appeals to me more. It associates  imagination with nurturing and enhancing the inner human space. In the same vein as philosophy can broaden your horizons by presenting new ideas, literary imagination can produce that effect by the portrayal of emotions and psychological complications.

But what I think is less appealing of this valuation of imagination is that it often in one go is linked to a useful side effect of imagination: the latter would help improve interpersonal communication because people learn better to empathize in each other’s situation. Even, some philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty say, in order to really improve the world, you should employ literature.

I do not like that argument. Firstly, because between the study room, where imagination unfolds, and reality in a disturbing way light remains. Something of irritation thereabout was voiced lately by critic Rob Schouten in his cautious appreciation of novelist Arnon Grunberg. Who refuses to reassure us in his novels, and his reversal of the feel-good-Swiss-Life-sentiment does not leave Schouten unscathed. “His work has to do more with human trauma than with sacred imagination”.

Secondly, and related, I do not like the idea of world-improving manufacturability that is expressed by Nussbaum’s and Rorty’s plead for instrumental imagination. Of course, one can never be against broadening horizons in the philosophical or literary field, that is only too right. But the underlying idea is wrong, because it argues that if only you think and feel broadly enough, you can eliminate misperceptions. And that thought is counterproductive in an insidious way.

Indeed, the range of human thoughts and emotions is infinitely large. To think that all that can in advance be made to fit in your imaginative world, by definition does not reflect the reality of people and is therefore, in its pretensions, potentially violent. Because how will a self-conscious large imagination deal with a reality that yet appears to dwell outside of it? Something múst be wrong with that.

And this last conclusion I would not draw too quickly. But that means that, conversely, there is something wrong, not so much with imagination itself, but with the pretensions of imagination. We will, in spite of the pretensions of Nussbaum and Rorty, keep being surprised time and again by the reactions of others, however big our imagination is. Because the other is different, by definition.

All things considered, we need to know – or, if you prefer, to imagine – only one from the whole range of human emotions: grief. Because then you will usually be able to recognize the situations in which you have hurt someone else, notwithstanding all your imagination.

Defining the world

Define the world, we múst do so, because otherwise it will be chaos in our heads. So that’s why do we all do it. It is a matter of evolutionary survival, and it becomes manifest as our tendency to categorize and stereotype.

It is very well possible to speak dispassionately about it. That’s what, for example, Daniel Kahneman does in his book Thinking, fast and slow. “Stereotyping in our culture is a loaded term, but as I use it here, the meaning is neutral. One of the main features of our intuitive system is that it interprets categories as standards or prototypes. This is how we understand horses, refrigerators and police officers.”

But that it múst be done – because in order to survive in emergencies we have to be able to act immediately  and cannot allow any doubt – does not mean that our definitions are correct and our judgments founded.

So there is a fair chance that you put animals, people, things in the wrong box. And that is less innocent than it seems. Especially when you do that with people, because people in the last resort want themselves to have control over their own lives. If another puts them prematurely or wrongly in a certain box (that’s to say: defines them), it can feel like a border crossing: you don’t have anything to say about me! That feels like violence.

But at the same time, as I said, our lives are made up of definitions and labels that we impose on the world and others. And their obviousness sometimes is so big that it seems far-fetched to problematize them.

Thus you would think that the distinction between men and women is one of the most basic and easy ones that we can make. So that we may assume that everybody can be classified in one of those two categories. That’s why it is quite natural for us to ask: is it a boy or a girl?

However, what we then actually do, says Lies Wesseling, is that the many differences between people are thrown on just two heaps. Then everything that does not fit under the headings of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is seen as deviant or as irrelevant.

But nature is not that clear cut, at least not always. And more importantly, individual human experience is not so clear. Someone in a woman’s body may feel himself a man, or vice versa, or something in between. If you pin such a person, as a matter of course, to a stereotype, you can cause serious damage.

How hurtful that obvious categorization can be may appear from the experiences of people for whom those categories were not suitable and whose stories only recently are being taken seriously: the transgenders. Those stories are pure sadness. And in the Netherlands their number easily runs into 50,000.

Now there is a new Dutch law that confirms that identity is something that only you yourself can feel and name. Transgenders can now administratively change sex, even without changing anything to the body. For example, it may happen that a man gives birth to a child, and is regarded as the mother.

The new law does not abolish the categories, so there is still spoken in terms of male and female. The dream of many transgender continues, such as Vreer puts it: “I dream of a birth certificate and an identitycard without gender designation. Even an X, as recently is allowed in Australia, can be an improvement. That means ‘not specified’, and so it is with me”.

But anyway, the new law infringes on stereotypes and definitions that until recently seemed to be cast in concrete. The law may therefore be seen as a Levinassian answer to the problem that Levinas treats with great tenacity in all his works: of the injuries that with our defining thought, seeking stable categories, we inflict to others.

Could possibly the Dutch Black Peter (Zwarte Piet) be such a dubious stable category as well?

Also see Kol Nidrei and other illusions

Israel as a 'Jewish' state

How weird is it that some Israelis want to see their country recognized as a ‘Jewish’ state ?

Pretty weird, according to many Western observers. Their reasoning is that, under customary international law, formally established borders are inviolable and that that’s all that counts. Within those limits, the inhabitants of a country are entirely free to determine their own identity. Recognition of Israel as a Jewish State therefore does, in an international legal sense,  not have any added value in addition to the recognition of Israel as a state .

According to this argument, the reference to an ethnic identity – within international law – is irrelevant. It refers to an outdated organizing principle, for example of the ordering of Central European states after the First World War in which ethnic self-determination was an important principle, and therefore determination of ethnic identity was so too. After the Second World War that principle moved to the background in favor of the principle of inviolability of borders and of once established territorial integrity. So, what proponents of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state do – according to this argument – is: they want to have it both ways. They mix up in an obsucre fashion the outdated principle of ethnic self-determination with the only principle that really matters: territorial integrity. So, their desire is anachronistic and therefore a little weird.

Personally, I think that desire is not so strange. I’m more inclined to find the above reasoning flawed, because it is rather abstract and because it only with difficulty assigns space to factors of a historical, ethnic and linguistic nature. That these can confuse the issue is certainly true, but they are therefore no less real or effective.

That may appear from interventions made in the last decades by the very same West. It is true that thereby actions were frequently based on the principle of territorial integrity, such as the beating of Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. But the West was certainly not consistent, the principle of ethnic identities also at some times played a major role. For example in supporting Kosovo when it broke away from Serbia. Enough reason for Putin these days to claim that the West applies double standards.

Furthermore, the crisis in Ukraine makes it clear that to simply stick to territorial integrity is not always the solution, and even less so to the degree to which ethnic and linguistic factors have a greater weight.

It could therefore be quite adequate when a country for its integrity appeals not just to its borders, but also to a certain historical and ethnic identity. Because these are real and authentic factors. Having your principles both ways could very well be a necessity, and in fact Western countries act accordingly.

What makes the situation in Israel hard to swallow is that a third principle is in play there: to conquer as much territory from the Palestinians as possible. Because that principle bites with the other two. It is both contrary to the observance of internationally recognized borders, and to respecting the Jewish character of the state. At least as long as democracy is part of that character, and I can not – as yet – view that not to be the case.

Also see The heroic, cosmopolitical Individual

Immune

To remain equanimous and unperturbable, preferably under all circumstances. Thus was, traditionally, described what philosophy was about and so it still is by some.

Last week I was reminded to that view in an interview with the French philosopher and sociologist Frédéric Lenoir. He told about his admiration for the stoic Dutch Holocaust-victim Etty Hillesum because she had reached the situation that philosophers always considered to be supreme, namely the one in which nothing can hurt you deeply anymore. “Philosophers have always said, since the early Greeks: happiness does not depend on the situation you are in”. It is easy indeed to recognize in this statement Socrates’ goal of equanimity which he preached up to his poisoned cup, and which is the goal of many other philosophers to our time.

I can very well understand that man, in the midst of so many earthly turmoil and instability, looks for a kind of invulnerability. Still, I'm glad there are philosophers who questioned that desire for absolute certainty or exposed it as a pursuit of power. Nietzsche started doing so, and the twentieth-century postmodern philosophers followed in his footsteps. But these trends are far from being taken seriously on a broad scale. May that be called true philosophy, it is asked then. Because, true philosophy strives for absolute certainty, doesn’t it?

The problem is that the latter aim produces, besides certainty and safety, also a lot of nasty things, mostly of an uncanny character. I think of the deep-rooted tendency in our society  to objectification and measurement which can give our work floors and manners the sterility that many periodically suffer from. I think also of the extent to which people live alongside each other, safe but untouchable, and more chilly than they might want.
This way of communicating, which has learned not to touch core issues any longer, could very well stem from that age-old philosophical program that tries to reduce our touchability. With its help we have managed to develop to a high level the art of communicative immunity. The result is a safe and efficient society, but one that sometimes is nothing about any longer.

But how, then, is that communicative poverty to be related to Etty Hillesum, with whom I started this piece? Isn’t she an icon of openness and engagement with what was going on around her? Yes, maybe. If it is not the case – as some said of her – that she idolized her teenagegirl-like commitment; so if her engagement was sincere, then that matches obviously very well with the widely sought immunity.

You could say that the Etty Hillesum’s sacrificial heroism (as also eg Mother Theresa’s), and the communicative sterility of our behavior are two sides of the same coin. Both are strategies for achieving immunity, and the one succeeds through total surrender and the other by screening off touchability.

What falls out is the daily mix of vulnerabilities, in which injuries and excuses, dullness and success alternate. The trivial touchability gets orphaned . That is to say, to simply exchange about things that matter becomes problematic. It is true, there is no heroism involved in such exchange, but by rich and warm communication it's that which may hold off sterility.

Too few philosophers know about this. I cherish those who make it a subject of their speculations, and I continue to call them philosopher despite everything.

Also see Taylor, Levinas and Emptiness, The Trap of Universalizing Reason and Progress after all

For and against shame

It is not always convenient that Levinas – and I in his wake – works a lot with the concept of ‘shame’. Because although in a levinassian context that word has no negative connotation – shame can help people to break free from their illusions and mental limitations – nevertheless embarrassment for many people has strong unpleasant connotations.

In everyday language the word shame certainly cán evoke the just mentioned positive associations. But at least as often people’s first association with the word is negative in nature. Then applies: shame, that’s what you obviously want to get rid of. In such cases, it’s difficult to still use the word as having a potentially helpful meaning.

A striking illustration of the heavy negative load of the word is provided by the Dutch sociologist Goudsblom in the introduction to his memoirs. “A beautiful summer afternoon with a clear blue sky. On the street along the new Provincial Road a mother cycles with her son back in the basket. They are both good-humored, the mother cycles, the boy sings a cheerful song. Then they pass a few playing girls. One of the girls says: “Listen to that boy singing”. That’s all she says, but the boy has heard something scornful in her words, and he immediately stops singing. He feels caught, without knowing why”.

Goudsblom begins his memoirs with this event “because the fight against shame remained a constant in my life”. Here shame and the determination to finish it appear as a guiding theme and program for an entire lifetime.

A slightly different approach to shame I find in A.F.Th. van der Heijden. This writer also departs from the negative interpretation of the concept but he ultimately bends the negativity into something positive. Shame is a dismal experience which should be avoided as much as possible, but yet it may excite feelings of honor and encourage people to exceptional performance.

Following the death of his son Tonio, Van der Heijden notes that he has become grimmer and more pretentious. “From Tonio's death I have learned to never do something just like that. That has to do with a process that I call ‘enshaming’: things I used to be proud of have lost their luster. This shame challenges my creative ambition: to get above it, that’s what concerns me now”.

A third, more positive, view of shame is presented by Coen Simon in his book Guilt. About the things we do not need. Guilt and shame with him are no ‘sin’ or something that you have to overcome. They are implicit in the human condition and therefore things to be accepted. Because of the lack of an absolute starting point we never know how to act. But we pretend we know it, says Simon. And then get ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is a way to come closer to reality.

How is it possible that the associations with the word shame are so varied with  different  people? I think the differences in approach can to a large extent be explained because there are different kinds of shame at stake. In the more positive views of the word (as in Levinas and Simon) it is in fact all about think-shame: the realization that all thinking – that is: also your own thinking – produces illusions. Being caught producing illusions can certainly be painful, but it does not necessarily feel as a failure-shame, because illusion production is too much linked to the nature of thought itself, and thus to our human condition.

The other – more negatively experienced – kinds of embarassment involve failure-shame: you  perform sub-standard, at least below the level that you or others expect from you. You feel put on show in front of collegues and others. And that’s what you are determined to avoid henceforth.

I do not think it is wrong to use the word ‘shame’ to indicate both the feeling of embarrassment that occurs in the unmasking of an illusion, and the awkwardness which comes with underperformance. But it is good to keep in mind which type of shame can be associated only with negativity, and which type can also be interpreted positively.

Also see Hazardous and Something small

Begging for Feed-back

I recently read that in the short term we in the West must not expect revolutionary new technological inventions. Technological innovation will mainly need to build on existing technology and therefore productivity increase on this basis will be modest in size.

If that’s the case indeed, more profits and faster productivity growth are to be expected of social innovation. By which I mean the fixing of the energy leak which in many organizations exists because people do not or too little cooperate. And also I mean the stopping of the waste of money, time and talent which results from dysfunctional beliefs about management.

That energy leak and waste are usually not caused because employees or managers have bad intentions, but because the organization through budgets and powers is sometimes arranged in such way as to set people against each other instead of bringing them together. And that in its turn is caused because we are saddled with obsolete, dysfunctional beliefs about management and organization. These limit, consciously or unconsciously, our space for movement and improvement.

Take the views on management and leadership. In most organizations it are still mainly forms of hierarchical thinking and command structures that determine which concepts are associated with management. These include concepts such as power, competency, the ability to override others. And far fewer – apart from exceptions – a serving and facilitating attitude.

Then this is what you get: managers who get a kick out of their decision-making-power and who in intimate moments don’t keep secret that they are in that position because they cannot stand that others tell them what to do. But who at the same time do not but expect that others are able to do precisely that.

And you get relatively many frightened employees, who have effectively been silenced.

That pinches of course, and those managers may as well feel the pinching. They largely, despite their formal power, fail to achieve what they aim at. And they feel that more is needed, and – above all – something else: they should engage in genuine consultation with “their” people. But at this point also impotence enters the story: they have to listen but because of the way they have organized things and because of their character structure that does not work properly. They beg for feedback, but what follows is a deathly silence. Touching, almost.

This is not managable any longer by hurling in a top-down way some more behavioral science and communication tricks into the organization. Here another way of social interaction is required. Which justifiably may be called: social innovation.

Also see Trust

Unlearning

A human being can learn, but can she also unlearn? I don’t mean that she can forget, for example in the sense of a skill you get unused to and lose. No, I mean that one has gained insights and then returns them. And not so by progressive clarification, but because these insights have become socially less desirable. In that case the question is: did you really get rid of them? Is the situation as it was before you gained the insights?

If that would be the case, unlearning would indeed exist. But if you still carry the learned things with you and simply don’t talk about them, then there is no question of unlearning. Then anyway the situation is very different from what it was before you started to learn.

These thoughts come to me because the last two years at my work were geared to collective learning. By focusing, with the help of external consultants, on our customer (the Amsterdam citizen) and our primary staff the permanent question was: where do our management concepts and controldrive hamper us more than they help us. When the management factory becomes dysfunctional?

In the process, we learned that the reality of the customer and the workplace may sometimes be very different from the manager’s reality. And that, in order to bridge the gap, and especially in order to somehow “have a control dashboard” often too quickly ICT is embraced, forgetting that a subtle network of connections between people and between people and machines determines the quality of information. We learned that there is no quick route, and that only constant attention to these connections eventually guarantees quality.

Those are insights indeed. Can one just shake them off once they are there? It seems so. At my work I already heard the simplicities pass again: just name some goals and implement them, and then the desired information rolls with the push of a button from the machine. As if not information is the result of a multitude of dependencies and delicate interactions. But maybe that kind of talk comes from people to whom the insights of the past two years have gone by, that is: who didn’t learn anything anyway. Of course, in that case you also cannot dislearn.

With people who díd learn something the past few years I suspect that the situation is different. There, I think, things have definitely changed in a way that is not easily reversed. Once you have seen how dysfunctional an organization can operate, your alertness to sham management will be aroused for ever. Dislearning and return to a naive embrace of command-and-control management have become impossible then. A broken egg cannot be repaired.

Of course, a stiffer regime and tight economic conditions can curtail the space to give effect to these insights quite severely. But people do not just lose their insights like that, so something under the surface will be different from what was the case before the insights came. Completely back to before will therefore not really be an option.

Also see Blowing bubbles and AAA

Fair Play

For fourteen days we were experiencing the fever of sports performances, in the spirit of global brotherhood and fair play. And the world enjoyed it.

But I can not resist making a few comments, it’s probably to do with my underdeveloped interest in sports. What keeps me hooked in particular, is the often unthinkingly acclaimed concept of ‘fair play’. 

Because fair play is a concept that belongs to winners, it is used mainly by those already in control. Within communities that are - politically and economically - comfortable, losers are still relative winners and in such a situation fair play thrives.

That explains why the term stems from the British Empire, which at the time of the founding of the Olympics was at the height of its power. But, says Professor of sports history Tony Collins, this gives an indication of the illusory aspects of fair play: “The British expanded their empire by force and manipulation. The idea of fair play can only be maintained if you are the dominant world power”.

Also in politics we cling to fair play: to the idea that reasonable people talk to each other in a reasonable way and look after their interests in rivalry with others while respecting the rules of the game.

Daniel Gordis articulates these thoroughly courteous and optimistic view of politics in a retrospective on his youth: “In the American suburban home in which I was raised, we were taught that war was an aberration. Conflict is solvable. If war persisted, the both sides had been less bold than they needed to be. If Americans and North Vietnamese wanted to, they could figure out a way to end the conflict; the same was clearly true of Jews and Arabs”. And then he poses the question whether one, as with fair play, must not belong to the winners already in order to afford oneself such a high moral view of conflict management and politics.

Gordis comes to these thoughts after his move to Israel. “The Middle East is not a Hebrew-speaking version of the comfortable, safe, conflict-free suburban Baltimore in which I had been raised”. Perhaps completely different rules apply there.

Those thoughts are strengthened with him by the recent death of Yitzhak Shamir, the uncompromising right-wing Israeli Prime Minister of the nineties. Gordis has mixed feelings when retrospecting his life. He knows that in life already Shamir was not very popular because of his staunch views, and for his funeral hardly any interest appeared to exist.

But, Gordis observes, Shamir did not stem from the comfortable suburb with its fair play. He had very different experiences with the world. His father escaped the Nazis only to be murdered, when he returned to his birthplace Ruzhany in Belarus, by his former neighbors. Shamir could not help but see the world as hostile to Jews, against which Jews should stand vigilant and combative.

Therefore, Shamir at the time of the British mandate until 1948 was not inclined to let his terrorism against the British to be taken away from him because it would be unfair play. Following the assassination attempt against Harold MacMichael, the Commissioner of the British Mandate, for example, he said later without any regrets: “There are those who say that to kill Martin (a British sergeant) is terrorism, but to bomb civilians is professional warfare. But I think it is the same from the moral point of view”.

At this moment, says Gordis, Israel belongs to the winners. “Ours is not the world that Shamir and his generation inherited. Ours is a world in which the Jews are secure, and largely safe”, and that is in no small measure due to controversial actions of Shamir, Begin and Ariel Sharon.

The irony of the story is that Israel, now it is relatively comfortable, in its turn makes play with fair play: there will be no talking with terrorists (read Palestinians).

It's not fair.

Also see The Green Line and the Red Line

AAA

Obviously they have all been asleep, the Moodys, the Standard&Poors and the Fitches, when the banks wholesaled their worthless mortgages and doomed debts. The credit rating agencies just continued awarding them top status unblinkingly. With the result that the bubbles grew bigger and bigger, as did the explosions which followed.

But now we are four years from then and now it are mostly state debts which are at stake, I am slightly more inclined to listen to them and to the markets. It might be true that the rating agencies at the moment puncture as much bubbles as they create.

I think so firstly because the rating agencies themselves are shocked by the extent to which they have let themselves be carried away in the financial charade. They seem to have resolved to be more critical in their assessments and to explicitly name and shame obscure and misleading financial constructs.

And secondly because the credit rating agencies, with in their wake the markets, seem to operate in a way which is less speculative and alienated from reality. This I gather from the fact that on the rare occasions that the EU and individual governments show some willingness to really put their financial affairs in order, markets react immediately. At such a moment the interest rate on government bonds goes down and the stock markets go up. Apparently then serious calculations are being made by rating agencies and financial institutions that demonstrate that trust is justified again and that investing can pay again.

The circumstance that what governments announce is generally felt not to be enough for a lasting effect, in my opinion does not alter that conclusion: apparently there are bottoms and ceilings. To that I connect the conclusion that, despite the disproportionate financial fictions, there still is a connection to the real economy. So that there is question of a reality check which aims at serious returns on investments.

The importance of this can be clear when you consider that it could be quite different. It is not inconceivable that markets at some point do no longer respond at all to political initiatives, that there is not any inhibition left whatsoever to interest rise and to speculating the euro to death, and that you no longer need any credit rating. Except for a number of speculators, that’s what we rightly fear the most.