The
world in which we live today has little to do with the world in which most of
the academic disciplines that comprise the human sciences were founded. What
does it mean to study “the human” in our times, and what are the limitations of
this practice?
These questions are the very center of the work of Tobias Rees, 2018-2019 Reid Hoffman Professor for the Humanities at The New School, and affiliated faculty in The New School for Social Research’s Department of Anthropology. Rees draws on various sources of knowledge, and his fields of study range from brain science to artificial intelligence (AI), and from microbiome research to global health.
Weaving
a rich and multidisciplinary tapestry — he holds degrees in philosophy, art
history, and anthropology — Rees argues that “the world has outgrown our
concepts” — that many of our most taken-for-granted concepts are inventions of
the modern era that are no longer fit descriptors. He invites us to consider
how this sort of intellectual shift might be due to the inadequacies of these
concepts themselves, and that a transformation of the human sciences is perhaps
not something to be fought against but rather considered and, in some ways,
welcomed.
Take, for example, society. Meant to distinguish ‘the human’ from ‘mere’ animals, ‘society’ has also been synonymous with ‘race’ or ‘people’ or ‘nation’. “The idea that humans are social beings, that what defines them in their essence is that they always –– everywhere and every time –– live and have lived in a society, this is an idea that first emerges in the late 18th century, in the context of the French Revolution,” Rees said.
Since
our notion of society, and of what kinds of beings we are, has changed very
little over time, the term carries significant conceptual baggage and presents
a problem for contemporary scholars. “There are many aspects of the present
that we cannot subsume under the heading of the social as it was conceived of
in the early 19th century,” Rees explains. “They range in style and might not
add up. We can begin with the observation that ‘the social’ is usually tied to
‘a society,’ and that arguably not all people who live on a national territory
are members of national society. Or we can be more provocative and point out
that the assumption that what sets humans apart from animals is their sociality
is somewhat untenable: If our neurotransmitters are made of bacteria living in
our gut, then where does the human end and its microbiome begin? Are microbes
part of society? Or, different example, the learning and thinking machines that
artificial intelligence (AI) engineers are building?”
A radical rethinking of society may have profound consequences to our political lives. A question that preoccupies Rees is this: “How can a reformulation of our notion of the social –— maybe even a replacement of that term, given its strong anthropocentrism –— give rise to a new concept of the political, of political theory, of justice?” In other words, how can we understand ourselves and critique our conditions without ideas that rely on outdated assumptions about ourselves?
At
present, Rees is exploring how fields like AI, microbiome research, and neuroscience
challenge and change our concept of the human. “Your microbiome
contributes more gene function to your organism than your own genome,” he says
in a recent film.
“It’s as if the ‘human’ is such that the thing that human sciences study
doesn’t exist.” Similarly, his book Plastic
Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms
(2016) explores the scientific discovery that new cellular tissue emerges in
mature brains, proving that the brain is plastic rather than fixed and
immutable, and raising new possibilities about what is human.
At
the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, he leads the Transformations
of the Human project, which places philosophers and artists in key
research sites to foster dialogue with technologists, aiming to “render AI and
Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our
vocabulary for thinking about ourselves.”
Rees
is attracted to heterodox institutions like the Berggruen Institute and,
currently, The New School for Social Research. He believes they hold promise
for a new kind of human science research that does not rely on unquestioned concepts
and thereby foreclose the emergence of new models. In fact, he names The New
School for Social Research “as one place I can actually imagine genuinely new
kinds of experiments that could reinvent the human sciences.”
“Every
science or discipline assumes that there is a reality sui generis that requires that science in order to comprehend it,” he
states. These theoretical assumptions can wear old with age, but more
importantly, they restrict our ability to understand the world by defining it
in advance. “The cultural anthropologist will always find culture. The
sociologist always finds society. Whatever knowledge is produced is either
determined or conditioned by the assumptions you start with. It’s always more
of the same.”
Social science, insofar as it presumes to understand what a
society or the human can be, forecloses genuine discovery of challenging,
novel, facts that run counter to our current notions of what humanity is.
Rees’ antidote is what he terms ‘exposure’ or ‘field
sciences.’ An ethnographer approaches his subject with conceptual humility, not
assuming that any of her concepts will be the same to those used by a different
culture. In this humility and openness to understand without reducing the new
information to predetermined frameworks, the field ethnographer makes space for
genuine discovery.
“Imagine doing fieldwork in order to find out if there are
things that escape the concepts of the human implicit in the analytical tool
kit the human sciences have been contingent on. Imagine fieldwork as a kind of
exposure of miniature concepts of the human, and the job of the researcher were
to detect mutations of these miniature humans. Imagine, furthermore, that this
would be an ongoing, never-ending project,” Rees explains.
His latest book, After Ethnos (2018), aims at de-anthropologizing anthropology –– and to provide a rough, tentative sketch of what he refers to as philosophically and poetically-inclined field science. “I’m trying to build research projects that make these new emerging fields visible as experimental laboratories for a ceaseless reconfiguration of the human, as fields that open up new epistemic spaces that allow one to explore possibilities for being human after ‘the human.’”
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
The year 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of 1968, the iconic year of a seismic decade in the U.S. and around the world. Amid countless museum exhibits, academic conferences, and media retrospectives, many drew comparisons between 1968 and today around increasing global turbulence and sense of unease.
Professor of History Jeremy Varon is an American historian specializing in the 1960s, and in 2008 co-founded The Sixties, the first academic journal solely devoted to scholarly study of the decade. He recently reflected on the 1968-2018 comparison, and on the ways in which we study, celebrate, and remember our past, for Public Seminar.
Research Matters spoke with Varon about the topic, and the more personal dimensions he brings to his research. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Research Matters: In your work, you discuss the idea of nostalgia, and of the “anniversary glut” as a double-edged sword. You open your Editor’s Statement [of The Sixties] by stating that what you want to do in the journal is not traffic in nostalgia but provide an actual professional history–provide a memorialization of the period that is more nuanced. What do you see as the pitfalls of nostalgia? And what do you think is its power or allure?
Jeremy Varon: The 1960s, and 1968 in particular, are endlessly memorialized, especially in those societies that, during that time, underwent profound transformations. Part of that memorialization is often a reliving of that past by those who shaped it, and that memorial culture can be either superficial or substantive depending on the media. This can be a wonderful point of entry for younger people who aren’t familiar with this period, and a wonderful incitement to memory for the people who lived through it. But for a discerning professional scholar, it’s a mixed bag: there’s exposure of an important era that I’ve dedicated my life to studying professionally, but yet a kind of reduction of history to a set of ruling cliches.
I define nostalgia as an affection for one’s past simply because it was one’s past. Engaging the ‘60s beyond nostalgia involves a combination of assiduous historical study that tries to understand the alchemy that produced a singularly robust era of global revolt in the history of human civilization. History never fully goes away; it is with us, and we live with it. Still, half a century later, the ‘60s represent an epic frame of reference–partly mythological–to which people appeal when they want to champion justice, confront illegitimate power, and advance the project of human liberation. In my work, and in the journal, we try to honor both: detached scholarly analysis, and then ethically and existentially engaged connection with a history that I see as an unfinished project.
RM: I’m interested in the personal aspect of it for you. What are the elements of the ‘60s to which you’re most drawn in your research?
JV: I was born in 1967. As a child, I was obsessed with the ‘60s and wanted to participate in whatever of it was still available to me. [By college in the 1980s], my life consisted of reading philosophy and literature, playing the guitar with friends, and ceaselessly protesting, while living in what was essentially a campus commune. I saw myself as in some sense trying to deeply realize the ethical vision of the 60’s movers and shakers: Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, people I saw as these larger-than-life moral superheroes. When I started to study the era in a more sophisticated way, I remained inspired by the genuine heroism but also very curious about the moral and political complexities of the era.
RM: You write that your hope for The Sixties journal, which celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2018, is to sharpen and expand the terms of established debates and open up new ones. What debates about the ‘60s were ongoing in 2008?
JV: The journal was founded during a time at which there was no such thing as “1960s Studies.” It was explicitly meant to be a catalyst for an emerging subfield as opposed to a disciplinary reorientation. I think the journal has succeeded in being that kind of home that has helped the field evolve. The single greatest evolution has been the maturation of the idea of the global ‘60s–that there were spirited revolts that were happening almost synchronically in diverse settings throughout the world, and that to understand the ‘60s deeply you had to understand the causes of this unbelievable synchronicity far transcended coincidence. By now, the global ‘60s as a framing concept has achieved a kind of hegemony and I think it’s increasingly understood that the grand narrative in which the revolts of the ‘60s participated was decolonization: the “Third World “trying to liberate itself from the chains of colonialism, inspiring in the process all kinds of freedom struggles that might exist outside of an explicit colonial context.
As to where we have broken new ground, I would point to an essay about East Germany’s adoption of the paper dress, which was invented by Andy Warhol and other Western pop artists as a kind of disposable art that made some comment on mass consumer culture. In East Germany at the time, they had a shortage of cotton and needed to produce things cheaply. So they marketed this paper dress as a kind of wearable fashion. Though it was the product of decadent, bourgeois Western modernism, East Germany also wanted their youth to participate just enough in the global youth culture so they wouldn’t feel left out and disdainful toward their elderly communist masters. That’s what I call a “global ‘60s adventure story,” where you have the migration and resignification of certain texts, artifacts, and impulses in disparate geographies, conditioned by geopolitical and economic conflicts.
A second landmark essay is a major rethinking of the counterculture by David Farber. He used the concept of “right livelihood,” a Buddhist idea–that young people wanted to separate themselves from the crassly materialistic mainstream and live lives of meaning, but also had to earn enough money to have a proper livelihood. The essay provides a reinterpretation of the counterculture not simply as the enemy of white-collar, soul-deadening bureaucracy, but a movement of young people who went to work to try to build, if only in small ways, a more humane society. Farber’s essay is absolutely required reading for anybody who does anything new with the idea of the counterculture.
RM: Bill Clinton once said, “If you look back on the ’60s and think there was more good than harm, you’re probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.” I’m interested in the way that the ‘60s, and especially the memory of this time and the way we make meaning of this era, defines political lines. How do you see that playing out?
JV: I would argue that the memory wars over the ‘60s are ongoing. Clinton’s diagnosis more or less still holds. Many people have said that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is a reference to a pre-1960s past, where white supremacy was substantially uncontested; [second-wave] feminism hadn’t yet happened; America was very much a white, Christian nation, as defined by the people at the top of social and cultural ladder. Progressive America, broadly defined, wants to deepen values of pluralism, ecological stewardship, emancipation–the hallmarks of the ‘60s.
There are, however, twists. For example, a lot of conservatives see themselves as today’s great rebels, fighting against the politically correct, progressive, Hollywood, beltway establishment. The younger set of conservatives feel like they are the ones who are authentically fighting a new kind of liberal establishment.
RM: As a historian, what are some of the ways in which you have been challenged and have challenged other people to push past that kind of easy division of the 60s between “it was mostly good” or “it was mostly bad”?
JV: I would say that the single greatest example is how I present the ultra-radicalism of the Weathermen. People who denounce the Weathermen think that I’m an apologist for terrorism, while people who are closer to their vision think that I represent some kind of liberal mainstream that marginalizes radicalism. I don’t think that either of these accusations is true or fair, and neither speaks to the complexity with which I try to present a morally and politically complex history.
My other intervention is to get my colleagues to recognize that our sustained interest in the 1960s isn’t simply because a lot of important stuff happened then. Its enduring appeal is the power of its political and moral, world-changing vision of a more just and more free world. And more and more as I get deeper and deeper into this identity, I’m owning that sense of wanting to sustain a legacy of contestation in how I do my scholarship and, in a deeper sense, how I live my live. And that has meant a return to that sense of awe I had as a young boy looking at this history just out of my reach, one that seemed almost infinite in its mandate to future generations to struggle in their own times and in their own terms to make a better world.
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Over the decades, faculty and students in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research have earned a reputation for advancing scholarship of contemporary Continental philosophy, especially that of Germany and France. But since 2014, those interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, history, language, and culture have received a tremendous boost thanks to the Onassis Foundation Fellowship. By providing generous funding for several doctoral students as well as a dedicated lecturer, the fellowship is helping emerging scholars access critical sources, develop new interpretations, and draw important connections between ancient and twenty-first century thought.
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy (above right), helped bring the special philanthropic relationship to life. Having worked closely with the Onassis Foundation for nearly a decade, he felt “able to show them the kind of work that our students and faculty are doing and its close relation to ancient Greek thought, [as well as] the importance that learning Greek has to philosophical studies at The New School for Social Research,” he says. “I have been absolutely delighted with the collaboration.”
One of his first acts as fellowship program director was to hire Mirjam Kotwick (above left). Originally from Germany and trained as a philologist, she is creating an academic career that bridges the classics and philosophy. “In my work I strive to connect my background and interest in classics with all of these philosophical questions that I have. That can be institutionally challenging. But right now at The New School, the Onassis Fellowship is really bringing both things together. That’s the perfect, ideal setting for me,” says Kotwick, whose recent research includes a book on the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient Macedonian text, and several papers on Orphic poetry, philological methodology, the textual transmission of Aristotle, and allegorical interpretation in the ancient world.
As the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language, Kotwick serves as both a teacher and an expert guide to undergraduate and graduate students interested in a wide range of topics. Her ancient Greek language classes attract philosophy students as well as curious students from other disciplines. “Just learning a language is different than studying philosophy,” she says. “I really try to keep the interests that my students bring to the class by confronting them with original philosophical texts from as early on as possible.” She also informally advises students whose projects touch on her fields of expertise, working with them to ensure they’ve translated or understood those original texts correctly and sharing in the excitement of discovering new ideas.
Kotwick also leads more intensive, topic-based graduate seminars with titles such as “Death in Ancient Greek Thought,” “Aristotle’s Search for Wisdom,” and “The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry.” Onassis Fellows and philosophy doctoral students Samuel Yelton and Dora Suarez have found the latter class particularly influential for their academic journeys.
PhD candidate Samuel Yelton
An alumnus of St. John’s College and its Great Books program, Yelton chose The New School for Social Research for graduate study because of the school’s specific values, namely “not treating ideas as timeless things, but as objects that have a history and various understandings through time, allowing people to be independent from any dogma in their scholarship.”
For his MA thesis, he examined Book X of The Republic, focusing on Plato’s argument that philosophy is incompatible with poetry and his claim that in the ideal city, poetry ought to be banned. “It’s all about understanding the distinction between form and content, and how an idea’s form can disqualify it from what philosophy is meant to do,” he explains. “Poetry can evade rational criticism, and the seductiveness of its form allows for potentially harmful ideas to get a hold of the soul.”
Now writing his doctoral dissertation, Yelton is diving deeper into this argument by examining a new wave of academic work that ties Greek philosophy more tightly into its broader cultural contours. “Even if Plato posited this quarrel, then there’s still the influences of the surrounding culture, which is largely poetic, as well as the understanding that poetry shouldn’t be understood as an amorphous concept, that there are specific genres [by author]: Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod. Understanding Plato requires that we understand these nuances.”
Suarez came to the U.S. from Uruguay 15 years ago to study modern languages, but unexpectedly fell in love with philosophy. “I feel that we have still not overcome many of the questions that the Greeks were asking,” she says.
PhD candidate Dora Suarez
In her doctoral dissertation, she is exploring the concept of visibility and its uses within the history of philosophy. “Just as we cannot take Truth and Knowledge for granted we also cannot — and should not — take for granted what counts as visible or invisible, or to be able to see and/or being seeing,” she says. “My goal is to develop a meticulous philosophical recasting of visibility and its implications, in a way that brings to the fore the ways in which we human beings constantly struggle to resist visibility and to resist through visibility.”
This topic is relevant to both ancient and contemporary concerns, and a recent book on the topic is helping Suarez make those connections. “[In] Andrea Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, she describes a transition between wander to wonder, from a vita activa to the vita contemplativa. I became intrigued in thinking about how this change to a kind of seeing that has nothing to do with the eyes and that starts with Plato can be traced to the way we think about visibility today,” Suarez says.
Similarly, other Onassis Fellows are also investigating the historical origins of familiar concepts, such as Justice or Nobility, that are now at the center of contemporary conversations. Teresa Casas, from Spain, is using her dissertation to examine the intersection of theatre and politics both in ancient times and today. Angelica Stathopoulos, from Sweden, is exploring philosophy’s historical relation to passivity within ethics and politics. In each of these cases, Greek philosophy offers insight into how such ideas first entered the stream of philosophy, restoring an important sense of perspective and offering a key to understanding their applications and limits.
More broadly, the Onassis Fellowship and its focused attention on all aspects of ancient thought has not only encouraged the department widen its temporal and geographic scope beyond the contemporary Continental, but helped faculty and students alike renew a commitment to looking past a typical disciplinary distinction between “doing the history of philosophy” and “doing philosophy” to really do it all — and well, too.
If you’re looking for Daniel Rodriguez-Navas, you’ll find him firmly at the intersection of ethics and the history of philosophy. You’ll also find him in an office at The New School of Social Research, where he is our new Assistant Professor of Philosophy. Research Matters spoke to him on his international background, Foucault, and whether a secular ethics can really exist.
Research Matters: Welcome to The New School for Social Research! We’re so excited you’re a part of our community. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your life? How did you arrive here?
Daniel Rodriguez-Navas: Well, I come from Venezuela, but I took a long detour to get here. When I was 17, I moved to Hong Kong to attend a United World College, a school that brings students from all over the world (primarily on scholarship) in an attempt to cultivate cross-cultural understanding. Then, I spent one year in Venezuela, then five years in France for undergraduate and masters degrees, then again back to Venezuela, but this time to teach while applying to grad school. Finally, I did my PhD at the University of Chicago and spent the last two years as a postdoc at Middlebury College.
RM: That’s a pretty global itinerary! At what point along the way did you become interested in philosophy, and how was that journey impacted by your travels?
DRN: My interest in philosophy was, in a way, always there. But one its main focal points, at least earlier on, was my relationship to religion. I was brought up Catholic, and attended a Jesuit school growing up in Venezuela. I took religion very seriously. But at some point early on, when I was maybe about eleven, I started questioning things a bit more thoroughly. I didn’t have many resources at the time. I found a copy of Descartes Meditations in my house. And later, through my older sister, I started reading Nietzsche and some of the existentialists — Sartre, Camus — and that really kindled my interest in philosophy, and helped me better understand my concerns about religion, and to form my own attitude towards it. But that was a long process…
At any rate, this, and the experience in the school in Hong Kong, where I had a group of friends who also enjoyed reading and talking about and all sorts of philosophical questions, sufficed to make me want to study philosophy. Since then, I have always lived wherever studying philosophy brought me. France seemed like an ideal place to study, and education in France was almost free. So after a quite intense language studying regime, off I went.
Then, during my third year in France, I took a course on Husserl’s Fifth Logical Investigation. I found it fascinating. It seem to me that Husserl offered a more radical and plausible version Kant’s epistemological project. But I also realized that that course wasn’t enough, that understanding Husserl’s project would take a lot more time and work. So I decided to do my MA thesis on post-Husserl and Kant’s views about the role of imagination in the constitution of experience. That was my first thesis. Since it focused on the second (post-1913) Husserl, I decided to work on the early Husserl for the second thesis, on Husserl and Frege’s theories of proper names. And after that, for a number of reasons, intellectual, professional, personal and I must admit, financial, I decided to come to the U.S. While I was in France I had been working with Jocelyn Benoist, whose work and overall approach to philosophy I found (and continue to find) deeply insightful. It turned out that he got a position as a regular visiting professor at Chicago, at the time. So at that point, Chicago seemed to offer the best of two worlds for me.
RM: Do you consider yourself an ethicist, a Foucauldian, a political philosopher, none of the above?
DRN: With respect to ethics: I grew up in a world that was created by a God. And of course, ethical questions were at the center of the worries about religion I mentioned before, to such an extent that my change of attitude towards religion was ethically motivated: it seemed to me that living ethically required giving up religion; that one can only live genuinely ethically—if one actually has a secular standpoint. Actually has, not merely lives or thinks ‘as if’ one did. All of this is of course terribly naïve, and even terribly Christian. But that’s the view I reasoned myself into back then. And yet, when it came to philosophy, for the longest time I had the view that ethical questions were the most complicated, and that I needed to get clearer about various fundamental metaphysical and epistemological questions ‘before I was ready’ for ethics.
All this to say: I always found ethics fascinating, and pressing, but always went out of my way to avoid writing on it. So when I was in grad school, I started worked on a project on self-consciousness: on the cognitive resources that a conscious creature must have in order to be capable of the kind of first person experience and thought that we’re capable of. But I also took seminars on Foucault with Arnold Davidson, and that’s when I was hooked. I had the inkling, the hunch, that I could find a deeply original, secular approach to ethics in his work….a rejection of the view [that]…unless the ‘authority’ of moral claims can be traced back to something external to us, or to something internal to us, but common to us all qua human beings… (something, you may say, external to each individual’s will), such claims lack ‘authority’ altogether.
I have the sense that while most approaches to ethics today take themselves to be secular, they remain thoroughly religious. Indeed, much of our ethical vocabulary, the sets of questions that we ask, the way we reason about ethics, are still largely shaped by the Abrahamic traditions that long dominated our tradition, both within and outside the discipline. And I was interested in exploring, by working on Foucault, a truly secular approach to the question “how to live?”, one that did dismiss various forms of relativism and voluntarism from the outset, but that did also avoid the pitfall of offering an error theory of ethical experience, or that inadvertently rendered the latter completely unintelligible (as radical versions of relativism and voluntarism, and various other metaphysically parsimonious approaches to ethics often do).
So yes, I consider myself an ethicist. And within ethics, I do have a Foucauldian approach. But more generally I think of myself as less of a Foucauldian than a Foucault scholar. I am less interested in ‘defending’ Foucault’s views than in getting them right and using the parts that I find interesting and useful to address various topics in ethics. More broadly, I think of myself as a historian of philosophy, who works primarily, but not exclusively, on 19th and 20th Century European philosophy.
RM: What do you make of the relationship between Foucault’s early work and his late work? What is the scholarship missing, and why should the general public care?
DRN: Foucault spent his career examining the interplay between knowledge and scientific discourse, mechanisms of power and political institutions, and later on, what kind of stance an individual can take in the face of the ways in which power structures and traditional ways of thinking, being and acting (with some of their good aspects, but also with many of their horrendous ones) tend to perpetuate themselves. Foucault not only offered insightful and original analyses of these issues, but offered conceptual resources for developing effective strategies for individual and collective self-determination. All good reasons for to care about his work, perhaps specially in the current political climate.
Now if you ask me what the scholarship is missing, my view—but I acknowledge that this is controversial—is that a careful, comprehensive, scholarly analysis of the last period of Foucault’s career, the ethical period, is missing, and more precisely, of Foucault’s idea of an aesthetics of existence, and why he took such an idea to be ethically interesting. This is what my main current project is on, so there’s a lot to say. But here’s one quick way to put the issue: the notion of the aesthetics of existence captures Foucault’s attempt to rethink ethical normativity, to move away from a deeply engrained conception of our relationship to ethical norms of conduct, not just the explicit norms that have the forms of commands, but to all sorts of standards of behavior that we either subscribe to or that we take others to hold us to.
However, it can be hard to see this (and how powerful the way of thinking that emerges can be), because Foucault passed away while he was working on this. What tends to happen in the scholarship is that Foucault emphasizes the importance of idea of “the aesthetics of existence” in his approach to ethics, but people recoil almost by reflex. The idea that ethics is about living life as a work of art, it really can sound like ivory tower babble at its worst… think of someone facing a real ethical challenge, or about the global trends in political discourse in the last few years, and then someone comes along and says, “Oh…if you want to find out what to do, just think of your life as a work of art!”
Partly because of this, and partly because Foucault famously resisted, for the most part, offering a positive ethical theory, with commands and prescriptions as to what we should do, even some of the most sophisticated readers present him as having a rather superficial engagement with ethics, and as depriving us of the means for engaging in serious political resistance. So the tendency has been to minimize the centrality of the notion within Foucault’s ethical views, and if not, to minimize the aesthetic dimension of the notion. And of course, this would be right, if all Foucault had to say about ethics is that we should treat ourselves as works of art. But I’m afraid that to do this is to proceed too quickly. Instead of really trying to understand what the aesthetics of existence is supposed to be and why Foucault took it to be so promising, scholars tend either to criticize Foucault for it, or to try to defend him from such criticisms by minimizing its importance. So we’re in this peculiar situation that while the concept has received a lot of attention, it’s content and role within Foucault’s overall ethical views, and thereby the views themselves, remains largely unaccounted for.
As for the other question, I believe the connection between the early work and the late ethical thought is internal and organic. There are no big breaks, merely shifts, sometimes methodological, sometimes perspectival. But Foucault worked on the same set of interconnected issues, with a more or less homogeneous approach, from about 1953 until his death in 1984 (this again is somewhat controversial). Simplifying matters a little: how can we minimize the permanent risk that, through our passive acceptance of traditional ways of thinking and being, we are more or less inadvertently participating in various exclusionary practices, and justifying them through scientific, medical, moral, and political discourse?
In the final period of his career, one of the focal points of Foucault’s work is ethical discourse and practices, what we may think of as ethical experience. He is trying to work out our relation to ethical norms insofar as they are rules for life, that is, rules for living self-conscious organisms. Even in the late work, with Foucault’s insistence that the subject-matter (the substance) of the aesthetics of existence is life (bios), he is trying to find an approach to ethics that emphasizes the fact that it, ethics, has always been about the governance of living organisms, of each individual organism by itself, of all by others, and of the interplay between these two forms of governance.
So that’s one way of thinking about the continuity of his project over the years, up until the final stage. But another connection is the development of an approach to ethics that makes it possible to understand the possibility of effective resistance. If power is so pervasive, so ubiquitous as Foucault argues in the mid-seventies, then how is resistance possible? The aesthetics of existence captures the rudiments of Foucault’s answer to that.
What interests Foucault about the notion, I think, is the parallel between the artists and the ethical subject’s relationships to aesthetic and ethical norms. Both live within a tradition, guided by the implicit and explicit norms that regulate conduct within the cultural setting that is an expression of that tradition. Both face the task of building on those norms in order to transform their practice. In the case of artistic practice this is clear enough: the aspiration is not to imitate the old style by simply accepting the old norms, but to transform the style by reconfiguring the norms. In the case of ethics and politics, the idea of transformation is important if one thinks—as Foucault rightly does—that ethical discourse is ethically dangerous, in that it can be (and how many times hasn’t it been and isn’t still to day!) used to marginalize and exclude people, to deprive them of their entitlement to be treated ethically. And in both cases, arts and ethics, it matters that one cannot simply shed the tradition and start anew from scratch. Traditional norms are constitutive of us, they thoroughly inform how we are, how we think, how we feel and what we think is possible. So how can we resist the pressure of tradition? That is one of the main questions that he is trying to answer through his work on ethics. The aesthetics of existence is key insofar as it offers a model for resistance, and for rethinking ethical normativity in a way that opens up new pathways for resistance.
RM: Shifting from your research to the present: What was your image of The New School when you were on the market, and why did you want to come here given the choice? What did you think The New School was, and why did it seem like a good place to continue developing this line of research?
DRN: The New School is a very prestigious institution, and the philosophy department is very well known. So of course it was a great position. One might have written on philosophy of language at a very analytic philosophy oriented program and still want to work at The New School! But, more important, it was an ideal job for me, because The New School is a stronghold of continental philosophy, of historically informed philosophy (the phrase used to be and still should be redundant, but it isn’t here and now!) and also for politically engaged philosophy. And there is an emphasis on the concreteness of philosophy, of a way of doing philosophy that isn’t just about the perpetual proliferation of philosophical discourse, from and to philosophers alone. People here try to keep the world in view and want philosophy to be an agent of change. The faculty, and the history of the department, are really remarkable in this regard. So for me this wasn’t just a great job among others, but it was, to be quite frank, a dream job!
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
While countless writers, artists, and academics explore a certain duality in human nature, they tend to focus on the manifestation and effects of that divided self. Assistant Professor of Psychology Katrina Fincher asks a different question. She wants to know exactly what makes that duality possible within a single individual.
Within clinical psychology, this question is largely uncharted territory. “With a few exceptions, researchers have not examined the mechanisms which enable the same person to shift, quite rapidly, between kindness and cruelty,” she said.
While Fincher’s particular research interests developed during graduate school, they actually took root much earlier. Fincher’s mother grew up in Argentina during the country’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983), during which she saw her best friend kidnapped, her aunt imprisoned, and her cousin murdered. Her mother eventually started a new life in the U.S., where Katrina grew up. But summers were spent back in Argentina.
“From May to August, I lived in the shadow of [the regime’s] atrocities. However, most of the year I escaped to an idyllic American suburb, where I lived under the cushy regime of absent-minded academic parents and progressive schools, where safety was taken for granted and I had the luxury to learn empathy and compassion,” Fincher remembered.
That intimate experience of “emotional whiplash” – viewing firsthand the extent to which people could express capacities both for kindness and cruelty – fascinated her. But she never considered psychology research as career until she met her first mentor as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania – the legendary Paul Rozin.
“Paul is one of the most incredible people you will ever meet, and he has such a profound intellectual curiosity that he will make you excited about nearly any idea,” Fincher explained. Inspired by her work with Rozin, which centered on disgust, she decided to pursue graduate work in psychology at Penn with Professor Philip Tetlock. Once again, the working approach Tetlock had to his craft proved more important than his particular interests. “For me research typically starts with people and the degree of intellectual chemistry we have,” she said. “I love the way [Tetlock] thinks and approaches problems,” Fincher said.
Her doctoral dissertation explored perceptual dehumanization, and her research since has broadly centered around “a wide range of issues related to moral psychology” and “the psychological mechanisms which enable humans to live in cooperative social groups.”
Fincher’s overarching interest in the psychology of sociality branches off in two distinct but connected directions. The first concerns the psychological mechanisms that enable empathy or cruelty; the second, the ways in which individuals relate to social values and norms. These two are connected because, according to Fincher, “we deny personhood to fellow human beings in response to social cues in order to facilitate behavior that upholds social systems.” In this sense, understanding the capacity for extremes of compassion and cruelty means understanding both individual psychological processes as well as broader social ones.
Fincher explores what scientists call “perceptual humanization and dehumanization”; in particular, “the psychological mechanisms which enable people to treat one individual callously and another kindly.”
From Fincher, K.M., Tetlock, P.E. & Morris, M.W. (2017) Interfacing with Faces: Perceptual Humanization and Dehumanization, Current Directions in Psy. Sci.
As illustrated in the above graphic, much of her research looks at the way people perceive one another’s expressions. “Not surprisingly, what matters a great deal is how you engage with the individual’s face. People visually process faces in two qualitatively different ways.”
In a humanizing mode, an individual will take in the other’s face as a whole, generally focusing on the eyes. By contrast, in a dehumanizing mode the observer’s eyes will drift from feature to feature, showing an inability to think of the other in holistic, humanized terms. Demonstrating this difference experimentally has been one of Fincher’s main accomplishments to date.
Yet she is also interested in the larger question: What accounts for this difference? What makes it so that an individual gazes upon someone in such a dehumanizing light? According to Fincher, there are three larger reasons: to enforce norms and facilitate. punishment; to tolerate the suffering of others in situations of high moral conflict; and to enable strategic decision-making.
“We deny personhood to fellow human beings in response to social cues in order to facilitate behavior that upholds social systems,” Fincher stated. “Humanizing perceptions are elicited in a cooperative context and lead to empathy, compassion, and the desire to fulfill another’s needs even at a personal cost,” Fincher said. “In contrast, dehumanizing perceptions are elicited in competitive situations and function to disengage moral restraint and lead to callousness, indifference, and the desire to ignore another’s pain even for no personal gain.”
In other words, our perception of others is largely determined by the larger institutional or social context, wherein the main determinants are norms and values. Here Fincher makes another distinction between “social norms,” which mean the ordinary socially accepted standards for acceptable behavior, and “sacred values,” which refer to the deeper underlying principles that govern which behaviors become normative or not. Theorists have taken norms to change more speedily than the more fundamental sacred values for any given society. Fincher questions that consensus, however. “[My] work shows that although people claim sacred values are absolute they actually function very similarly to social norms,” she said — work that the Army Research Institute recently awarded $1.2 million.
Since earning her doctorate, Fincher has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Management at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. There, she continued her research into and published several journal articles on a number of psychological phenomena connection to social and moral psychology, including perceptual dehumanization as well as the sacralization of social norms.
During her first year at NSSR, Fincher will be teaching classes on exactly those topics. In Interpersonal Interactions in the fall, she’ll work with graduate students to take a closer look at conflict, the social attributions we make about others, and how a social environment influences how we think and communicate. In the spring, she’ll teach a broader survey on moral psychology, and how morality and moral issues connect to recent sociopolitical issues – topics at the heart of NSSR’s century-long work engaging in the most pressing issues of the day.
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Jeremy Varon: The 1960s, and 1968 in particular, are endlessly memorialized, especially in those societies that, during that time, underwent profound transformations. Part of that memorialization is often a reliving of that past by those who shaped it, and that memorial culture can be either superficial or substantive depending on the media. This can be a wonderful point of entry for younger people who aren’t familiar with this period, and a wonderful incitement to memory for the people who lived through it. But for a discerning professional scholar, it’s a mixed bag: there’s exposure of an important era that I’ve dedicated my life to studying professionally, but yet a kind of reduction of history to a set of ruling cliches.
