The DJ and the Stock Market.

Though there are smaller examples from earlier times in history, it is the British East India Company that is usually thought of as the first great “joint-stock company,” and it is shortly after its founding around 1600 that the “stock market” began in Amsterdam.

The basic idea of the joint-stock company is simple: a number of different people put up the money to launch an enterprise–they “buy stock” in it–and that company then does business, either paying back the investors out of its profits, or paying them dividends on their stocks.  Of course, if the company fails, the stockholders get nothing back.

The basic idea of the stock market is also simple: you can sell your stock in a company to someone else, so that they can take the risk and receive the dividends.  Your stock in a company that seems successful may well sell for a higher price than you initially paid, or for a lower price if the company appears to be failing.

The British East India Company, that first great joint-stock venture, set up shop in India with the sanction of the British government and with the compliance of various local rulers in what is now northeast India.  The wealth that was returned to the stockholders (and to those carrying out the enterprise in India) came from the goods produced by Indian labour that the Company was able to sell in Britain for a much higher price than they paid in India.

Those buying and selling stock in the Company back in Europe did not really need to know much about India, (though, to be sure, their insight into whether or not the Company was likely to succeed would surely vary with their level of insight into the workings of the Company).  To make (or lose) money, all they had to do was exchange some money for a slip of paper identifying them as shareholders.

And, of course, the wealth they used to buy the shares was itself the product of people labouring.  If someone traded grain for shares, that grain was the result of many man-hours of labouring to plant, cultivate, harvest, and transport the grain, and similarly for any other kind of wealth.  A wealthy English landowner who owned large farms and received rent payments in grain from many tenant-farmers of course needed to know nothing of the ways of farming in order to be able to spend that wealth.

The wealthy buyers and sellers of stock thus have a very particular experience: they are exchanging the wealth produced by Indian labourers for the wealth produced by English labourers without ever necessarily coming into contact with either domain of wealth-production; their experience is limited to an exchange of one piece of paper identifying ownership of grain for one piece of paper identifying ownership of stock.

In fact, the decisions of such wealthy men of commerce to fund or not to fund an enterprise have substantial economic consequences.  Indeed, had various such men not subscribed to the British East India Company, the sea trade with India would not have developed.  (And, of course, neither would the various Indian repressions, famines, and wars caused by the policies and practices of the Company have happened, and various existing practices of trade for Asian goods would have continued and those practicing them would have continued to make a living.)  In this sense it is surely true that the wise deployment of wealth is essential to the development of productive enterprise.

The experience of the businessman who buys stock that he can subsequently sell for a higher price is that, by his wise trading, he “made money,” to use the English idiom.  This idiom, though, is clearly misleading.  The trader now has legal control of greater wealth than he had before; in fact, though, he made nothing.  The Indian and English workers made the wealth he now controls.

The role of the financiers or merchants “making money” while facilitating or hindering productive enterprise by exchanging goods or buying and selling stock is rather like the role of the DJ at a dance club or on the radio.  The DJ selects the tunes and their tempo, volume, and sequence, and, if this is well done, the people dance.  When this role is carried out well, music and audience meet each other in a way that lets each reach its appropriate fulfillment through connecting with the other.

The DJ, however, is not a musician.  The DJ’s action depends entirely upon the thousands of people who have spent years labouring to learn to play their instruments and who bring to the world their creativity and effort in their making of music.  The DJ’s success also depends entirely upon the participation of the crowds who attend and dance.  Imagine a huge dance club with no pre-recorded music for the DJ to choose from, or with only 5 people in attendance!  A group of dancers and a group of musicians can make a party without any DJ present.  The other way doesn’t work.

There is a good reason for the existence of stock trading and good reason for the existence of DJs.  In each case, strong results are produced by the organizing and directing of different but complementary resources to produce mutually beneficial exchanges that would not happen otherwise.  Such organizing and directing is a task and a skill that is not simply reducible to the production of the resources exchanged, and it makes sense that those who have excellent abilities at carrying out this organizing for the betterment of all involved should be respected for their talents and rewarded for their efforts.

It would be a disaster for economic life and for musical life, however, to mistake merchants for producers or DJs for musicians.  It is only through the labours of the workers and the musicians who are respectively the generative sources of our economic and musical life that there is any wealth for merchants and DJs to manipulate. If we confuse DJs with musicians or financiers with producers, and turn to them to provide for our economic and musical needs, we undermine the very sources of economic and musical life and win for ourselves an ever more sterile and non-productive world.

Unfortunately for all of us, this disaster has already occurred.

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Calculating Your Earnings

We often have a sense of pride in a product that we have made, and the effort we put into forming the thing gives us a sense of ownership.

After years of practice with the soccer ball and the playing field, I feel on the “inside” of soccer, I feel that soccer is “my thing.”  And, indeed, looking on at the performance of a great player, we sometimes say “he owned it.”

When we study a foreign language, it is initially an alien system, and we cannot express ourselves in it; with our native “tongue,” however, the language we deploy—whether we are great poetic artists or just everyday speakers—expresses our meanings, and our words are no longer an alien medium, but a site where we encounter ourselves: through our long and intimate history of learning the language, we have “earned” the right to call our words our own.

And, of course, when we labour on the natural world to build or to harvest growth, or when we use our highly cultivated skills to make, lead, sell, manage, or teach, we proudly think of ourselves as having earned our daily bread, our wages, our popularity, our bonuses.

What is it, though, to earn?

Typically, we would distinguish what we earn from what we inherit or what we receive as a gift: we do not say that we have earned that which comes to us through the power of another.  The son of Joe Kennedy did not earn the financial and political empire that he inherited from his father any more than Adam earned the right to be the first man.  Similarly, I did not earn my blue eyes nor you your beautifully proportioned body.  I did not earn the political freedom I was born into nor you the common knowledge that the world is round (actually, an oblate spheroid) and that women are equal to men—indeed, had you been born in a different era, you would have inherited different views, which you would consider equally compelling.

I did not earn my naturally healthy body any more than the person born lame earned a crippled position.  And, just as I did not earn the body, I did not earn its attendant ability to move gracefully.  When I become a smooth, swift runner, I am thus enjoying capacities I received and not “making myself a runner.”

Is there earning in this running?  To be sure.  Given the powers I have, I show who I am by how I take those powers up. What I earn is the right to be recognized as a good or bad pilot of powers that occur on their own, a good or bad caretaker of capacities that rely on my taking them up in order to be realized.

When I win at soccer, then, I should be a bit cautious in what I take pride in.  No doubt I should be pleased that (because of my good upbringing) I had the emotional resources to stick to my plans and train daily.  No doubt I should be pleased that I deployed my native intelligence to make good decisions about how to practice.  But rather than becoming too thrilled with the greatness of my talent, I should give thanks that I was, at birth, the lucky recipient of a well-formed body with a strong heart and a large brain.  –And, indeed, if I forget this and wrongly imagine my soccer skills to be “my” ability, I will get a nasty surprise one day when I wake up and find that the body that gives me those powers has become sick or aged, and no longer affords me those powers upon which I have been relying.

And similarly, too, with our language.  My eloquence, my charming style, my clarity, or, indeed, my capacity to compose provocative, oracular utterances—these are all “mine” by the grace of language.  That this is a gift of my body is made clear in the aphasia brought about by a stroke; but even without such a bodily collapse, I may find that “my” language fails me, that I have lost my “gift” of speaking well.  Language works in its own way, and I, like a surfer, can sometimes ride its crest, but it is the powers of language, with their own system and history, that I am thus privileged to deploy, powers that inspire me, but that I neither crafted nor understand.

And finally, then, our labour and its economic reward.  All social life depends upon a division of labour, wherein individuals working on particular tasks pool their distinct efforts in a social collaboration of mutual support.  In any life other than the most solitary life of struggling with nature, we depend upon the efforts of others to get by.  We contribute our efforts and receive our rewards according to the character of the particular system of the division of labour in which we live and work.  Those who offer their services as sign painters, for example, command a notably smaller economic reward for their labours now that those who contributed those same labours 70 years ago, though the labours performed are identical.  What we earn is not a simple effect of what we do, but is the effect of the placement of what we do in an economic system.  And the economic system in which we work is something we inherit.

Whatever economic power we deploy, then, is the power afforded us by a system, which is itself a system founded on the cooperative labour of all.  What we “earn” is not our doing, but (a) the doing of the labour of all, and (b) the doing of a system of organization and distribution of that labour and its results.

The economic system might be compared to a jazz band.  The saxophonist performs a “solo,” and “her” Db note sounds great, but it sounds great because of what the bass player, the pianist, and the drummer are playing behind and around her.  The good saxophonist doesn’t “make” a great solo: she rides and directs well a wave on which she is surfing, an ocean of music she inherits from the rest of the band, from the tradition of jazz, and from the whole history and nature of music as such.

It is with an attitude of humility and respect that the saxophone soloist will properly appreciate her “earnings”: she will recognize her cooperative role in a system—an organized group of musicians to whose activity she contributes powerfully and formatively, but upon whose activity she depends and whose contributions make it possible for her to have the role that she has.  It is this same attitude that we should have as we try to calculate our economic earnings.  None of us “earns” her economic rewards for him- or herself: each of us receives what we do through the power of an economic system that controls the distribution of the collective resources of all.  Calculating our earnings properly means recognizing accurately what we owe to those others who are responsible for making our situation what it is.

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Jazz and Tradition

Recently, I found myself in a dull part of Pittsburgh, looking for a place just to get off the street, relax, and have a drink with a friend.  The only place we could find promised live music–a bonus, from my point of view, since witnessing live music is one of the most rewarding experiences I know of.  Unfortunately, what the sign really meant was that a very loud P.A. was blasting the sound of a guy strumming (loudly) a few chords on guitar and singing some party tune.  No doubt in some logical sense that can be described as “live music,” but there’s no real connection there with music as I understand that term.  I had to leave.

On the other hand, though, I was recently walking down a street in Philadelphia when suddenly I heard a swing rhythm on a ride cymbal, cycle of fifths harmony with a walking bass line and a piano playing thirds and sevenths, and eighth-note lines on a trumpet.  I can’t hear that without feeling an immediate magnetic pull on my soul–I had to go in.

Why is it that jazz music has always captivated me?  I think there are probably two reasons.

The first reason I find jazz so appealing is that the ability to play it only comes with quite a deep involvement in music, and this, it seems to me, is audible in the music: though jazz music can often be immediately gripping melodically, rhythmically or atmospherically, it is also immediately clear that its complex–a feature that people often respond to by saying “I don’t get it,” or “that sounds difficult.”  Jazz is not the kind of music that anyone can just pick up and play and, for better or for worse, that feature of the music is part of its sound.  What I like about this is not the sound of “elitism,” not the “cerebral” character, but the sound of music as such being appreciated: I think that jazz music “says,” so to speak, “appreciate music,” and for that reason jazz music cannot truly be listened to if one does not in listening feel compelled to reflect, through its richness, on the nature of music itself.

The second reason I find jazz so appealing is that it is inherently improvisational, which means that music as a process, not just music as a result, is what is being enacted.  A jazz performance is truly “live” in that the music itself is being brought to life uniquely in that performance.  Jazz music is performative, uniquely brought into being in its being performed.

These two definitive features of jazz music that I have identified here, however, exist in tension with my initial description of the music that drew me into the bar in Philadelphia.  Jazz, I am saying, is improvisational, exploring in its music the very nature of music.  For that reason, jazz can never take a single definitive form, but will necessarily exist as a “permanent revolution,” always transforming its nature through its practice.  But if jazz, therefore, is not the perpetual reenactment of an established form, it cannot be simply identified with a walking bass line or a “Charleston” rhythm: jazz certainly took that form, but that form is not identical to jazz.

I love jazz music, and that means for me that I love Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives, I love Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Red Norvo, I love Sonny Rollins, Mal Waldron, and Jackie Byard, I love Elvin Jones, Wayne Shorter, Billy Higgins, etc. etc.  But what is it I love about them?  I love the fact that through their performances, (of which I have only that aspect which is the recorded sound, not their bodily creation, in the lived time of a performance, of a musical interaction with the other musicians), through what they play, I can hear “jazz”: jazz is not the specific form (which can be repeated endlessly by students who can learn the techniques without necessarily experiencing the music) but what is heard through the form.  I love these performers not because I think their specific way was the right way, but because each in his own specific way was bringing into being the tradition of jazz, that is, they were the changing way through which jazz performed itself.

I therefore think that, in a distinctive way, jazz is a “traditional” art form–traditional, not in the sense of being part of the tradition our culture carries on, but in the sense that it can only exist as a tradition, for there is no definitive form in which it can be realized: jazz only exists as a tradition of changing forms.

Are those old, “traditional” forms still jazz?  If those old forms are simply reenacted religiously, then I don’t think they are jazz–they may be objects of sentimental affection for some, but as music they will be dull and past.  If those old forms are reenacted musically, however, then they remain open avenues for musical exploration: the reasons they could be vehicles for jazz once remain alive, and they can be vehicles for jazz again.

Jazz will not only be found in the vibrant reenactment of these established forms, however, but will more especially be found in the new musical forms that are being developed by musicians pushing themselves over the horizons of the tradition.  Those who inherit the tradition of jazz will carry on its spirit not through a reverential repetition of that tradition but through a creative, performative engagement with the spirit of improvisation, “respecting their elders” by demonstrating the same bold innovative spirit that made Duke, Bird, Mingus and Monk great in the first place.

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The Laws of Inheritance

“Did you earn it or inherit it?”  This is the question that Socrates asks the shield-manufacturer Cephalus at the beginning of Plato’s Republic.  Socrates asks this question about Cephalus’s wealth, noting that people who inherit wealth from another tend be less careful about its use than do people who have earned it themselves.

Already this is an important insight–it is when we have earned something for ourselves that we really appreciate its value, whereas when we receive something without effort we tend to be careless of it, taking it for granted and not respecting the effort and accomplishment (someone else’s) that it represents.  There are other sides to the experience of inheriting, though, beyond this attitude of careless expenditure.

When something is explicitly bequeathed to us, we can receive this gift as an obligation to the donor: we can feel responsibility to “carry on” his or her intentions, even if that would not otherwise have been our desire.  Perhaps, upon the handing down of my mother’s old camera, I decide to cultivate a practice of photography, or perhaps I tend carefully to what had been my father’s favourite roses.  We can experience the gift, in other words, as the handing over of the need to care–quite the opposite of the frivolous expenditure we considered above.

A third attitude is also possible.  The death of our parents might leave us with various objects of sentimental value.  Such objects we may hold onto reverentially, for the capacity they have to hold the dead in memory, to bear witness, in their absence, to their reality and their importance.  A painting my father loved may become an object of intense attachment for me even though I never cared for its qualities as a painting: I hold it dear because it is a memory of him, the sign for me of his importance, which would otherwise go unrecognized in a world that has forgotten him.

In The Muqaddimah, the great 14th Century Muslim philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldûn remarks that “Man is a child of the customs and the things he has become used to,” (Chapter 2, section 5), and our thoughts on inheritance can help us to reflect upon these “customs and things” that we live from.  Like family goods, the accomplishments of culture are handed down to us.  We ourselves do not “earn” the cultural goods we inherit; rather, we grow up taking for granted the terms, the structures, and the resources of a world made by others.  The same three attitudes with which we might respond to a personal inheritance define our response to our cultural inheritance.

When we have not earned our wealth, we spend it easily: the lifestyle we thus develop relies upon the work of others–the work of those who created the wealth we inherit–but we need not be aware of that work and, hence, can be oblivious to the true character of our reliance.  Taking our wealth–personal or cultural–for granted means that the true source–and “price”–of that wealth is unknown to us.  Culturally, this means that we use, for example, roads, electricity, clean water, and accessible public space without learning the labour costs, the political practices, or the environmental resources that are required to make these goods available.  It is this ignorance that allows us then to deal with matters of labour, politics and the environment in ways that undermine the very possibility of maintaining these goods.  Since we did not participate in their making–since we did not “earn” them–we can fail to recognize what it takes to maintain them, and we can “spend” them foolishly.

The reverential attitude towards sentimental mementos leads us to value goods sentimentally at a level that exceeds their basic worth as functioning components of everyday life.  This is not particularly a problem when I, privately, hold on to a dull pair of scissors that my mother used to use, but the cultural analog of this practice can be more troubling.  We may reverentially insist upon maintaining certain practices–eating practices, dressing styles, or practices of marriage, sexuality, or parenting–because that is the way our culture’s founders are reputed to have acted, and at this point we risk crippling our cultural life with outmoded and unhealthy behaviours because our desire to recognize the importance of those cultural figures impedes our willingness to understand those practices for what they are.

In contrast to both of these two attitudes, however, we can receive our cultural inheritance as a gift, and, in accepting the gift, accept the obligation to carry on on behalf of our ancestors, to do what they could not do in their lifetimes.  In this attitude, we receive our inheritance like the torch that the relay-riders hand on to each other in the image with which Plato begins his Republic.

What it is like to thus receive an inheritance as an obligation?  It is precisely to adopt the attitude that one must earn one’s inheritance for oneself.  Our culture will always be something we receive–something granted–and we must always, thus, begin by taking it for granted: our culture, in short, will always be opaque to us, and we will always live on the basis of capacities and resources we did not earn for ourselves.  Engaging with this responsibly, though, is precisely not to accept this condition as the last word, but to “own” one’s inheritance by learning the nature of one’s cultural institutions and practices, struggling to understand where they came from, and striving to take up responsibly the fundamental values that lie behind the accomplishing of that culture in the first place.

Such an earning of one’s tradition for oneself, however, will typically not be a static repetition of the form in which that tradition is already established, but will be a creative transformation of the received forms in a way that makes them responsive to the new and changed circumstances that characterize one’s own world, in contrast to the world of one’s predecessors.  Fidelity to the past will come in the willingness to challenge the form in which it was handed down.

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Music and Mathematics

Music is essentially about time, about the way a note or a beat picks up on those that went before and sets up those that will come after.

A metronome responds to this essential temporality.  It produces a rigid beat to which a musician can refer in order to hold firmly to the temporal “skeleton” of the piece being played: the metronome defines the core temporal flow that organizes the timing of the notes and the beats in the tune.

The metronome marks out the “time” of the piece, but it does it very abstractly and rigidly, very “mathematically.”  There is also another time of the piece, a concrete time.

When one is truly playing (or listening) to a piece of music, one does not count “1, 2, 3, 4” in one’s head to know where the beats fall.  Instead, one feels the beats: the rhythm is in the music, not imposed upon it, and one feels the time by getting into the music, not by going outside it to an independently defined number line.

And what happens when one plays “by feel” rather than by listening to the metronome?  Sometimes the music speeds up; sometimes it slows down.  The time, that is, is wrong from the point of view of the metronome, but the time is right from the point of view of the living experience of the music itself.  The music “breathes” with its own internal pulse, more like a living being than like a machine.

There is counting in music, and so there is math in music–indeed, it is hard to imagine music without number.  Music, however, offers something more than mathematics: in many respects, it is the ways in which it is not math that are what most make music valuable.

First, music is responding to the living pulse of the piece.  To respond to something living is much more demanding than counting.  It requires flexibility and openness, and the resourcefulness to pull together a unique and unanticipated “answer” to the question posed by the musical situation.

Mathematics and music, in additional to their intrinsic worth, are also both important educationally.  Education in mathematics, in addition to offering valuable practical skills, also opens us to the world of the “intelligible”–the structures that lie behind what is immediately perceptible: mathematical education shows us the permanent structures, the “rules,” to which all things answer.  Musical education, on the other hand, offers almost the opposite.  It educates us into creativity and imagination: into responding precisely in the absence of fixed rule.

Music also introduces us to beauty, the experience of an irreducible worth of a non-replaceable, non-universalizable, particular, concrete thing.  It alerts us to the singular worth of the irreducible specificities of our living reality.

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Friendship and The Limits of Math

In his dialogue Lysis, Plato gives a nice description of a very familiar human experience.  Lysis, a young teenage boy, would like to come over to join a conversation that Socrates is having with some others, but he is too timid to do so.  When his friend Menexenus arrives, however, he feels able, in the company of his friend, to go over and join the social group.

I have certainly often experienced such situations in which I only feel confident to move into some public activity if I feel “paired up” with a friend.  In such situations, my friend lets me feel like I don’t have to expose myself fully to the alien social situation, and that I have a place of refuge with my ally–not somewhere to which I’ll retreat physically, but a psychological point of respite.

In such situations, it is really the “pair” that is acting.  I do my thing only with her: my action is our action.

Now, let’s do a little counting: how many are here?

We might normally think that I am one person and my friend is another one, so we take one, add one, and get two.  Experientially, though, this is not true.

It is only in my friend’s company that I feel myself: experientially, it is the addition of the second that lets me be one for the first time.  The experience of the “pair,” in other words, doesn’t fit easily into the system of discrete units presumed by counting.

Many economic and political approaches treat people as if they (we) were just discrete countable units, denying the complexities of these (and other) relationships of interpersonal and social dependency that define our existence.

Politics does that at least when it turns each of us into a single vote, stripping each of us of the complexity and richness of our engagement with the political arena and translating our reality into a simple “yes” or “no” to a policy designed by someone else without our input, and presented to us only as a “take it or leave it” “choice.”

Economics does this when it treats us as a resource for offering 40 hours per week of labour, hours that are themselves each worth a certain number of dollars: all the stuff of a human life becomes a price tag–all of our reality is interpreted as a dollar value, a number.

The political recognition of our individual rights is essential, as is our recognized capacity to participate autonomously in economic life.  These recognitions are essential to a free life, but they become the opposite of freedom when there are mistaken for adequate interpretations of human life.

In our living experiences of intimacy and friendly companionship (and much more besides) we do not live as discrete individuals.  Our experience, rather, is of a set of powers, expectations, interests and feelings that arise from a shared situation.  We can count–persons, votes, dollars–but that dividing up into units always comes after a living situation is established–a living situation that is continuous and connected where the mathematical units are divided.

Mathematics is great, but it depends upon a concreteness of incalculable importance that will always exceed its comprehension.

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By Your Leave

“I can finally relax,” she said.  “I couldn’t really enjoy the music when we were with them.  I really like those guys, but I’m not at ease with them.  I’m happy now to be able to go out with you, so that I can just focus on what I’m doing.”  That’s something I heard recently, and I found it very illuminating about the nature of action.

We often imagine that we, as individuals, are free to do what we want, choosing how we will exercise our powers on the things of the surrounding world.  That was not the experience of the woman who was speaking, however.  Her experience was that other people were a crucial link between her and her world: in the company of unfamiliar companions, she could not comfortably connect with the world, whereas the company of an old friend allowed her the freedom to engage with the world as she wanted.  Indeed, it is this second part of her comment that I find particularly revealing and particularly important: being with her friend allowed her to focus on something else.  This focus was what she could not do around unfamiliar companions—she could not settle into her situation.

When we spend time with a close companion, it is very often the case that our experience is not about that companion.  Our companion, rather, accompanies us in our worldly affairs.  We look at the sights with her, shop for clothes with her, read the paper with her: in each case, the company of the other “completes” our inhabiting of the situation and allows us to let ourselves be absorbed in the activity, secure in the sense that we are acting together, even if the activity is something singular and private like reading.  What these experiences of companionship reveal is that our actions are characteristically joint actions—actions undertaken with the support of another.

We often misconstrue the nature of action, and, in a related way, we often misconstrue the nature of other persons.  We typically think of another person as the object of our experience, as something (someone) to whom we are paying attention.  On the contrary, in many ways the character of another person is most powerfully revealed precisely in those experiences in which she is not the object of our experience: our experiences of companionship reveal the other not as an alien object, but as the very medium for engaging with the world and, indeed, for our accessing of our own powers.

We should pay more attention to this notion of other persons as the ones who give us the world and, indeed, give us ourselves.

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Can You Do the Math?

Apparently, some urban elementary schools now encourage their 12-year-old students to “go out for lunch,” that is, to get together in small groups and go out to purchase their lunchtime meal at a nearby downtown restaurant.

When I first heard this, I was surprised, and my first thoughts were critical.  “Should schools be encouraging consumerism?” I wondered.  Should they be recommending salty, fatty restaurant food?  Should they be pushing such young students downtown?  Should they be stigmatizing students who have little access to money?  My further reflections moved me in a different direction, however.

When I was such a young person, I traveled around town freely.  Both on my own or with friends, I grew quite familiar with my neighbourhood and with the downtown, and I had plenty of experience conducting business in stores.  Young people today, however, appear to me to be much more restricted in their movements and activities, hardly having the opportunity to develop the skills of self-reliant engagement with the urban environment, and it is probably good that they are being encouraged to develop these skills.

One particular area of the non-self-reliance of these young people seems especially noteworthy.  Many, it seems to me, have little experience with money, and do not have the quick skills necessary for purchasing: they are not experienced in the interactions (and don’t really know what to expect or how to act) and they don’t know how to calculate change.  (This inability is pointedly reflected back and reinforced by many behind the counter who rely on electronic cash registers to tell them what change to give.)

For myself, I can’t imagine a life without facility with number.  Our lives are intensely quantified at every level from personal issues of making change at a store, paying a service charge at the ATM and reading the number of calories or grams of sugar in a packaged food produce, to the larger social and cultural issues of mortgage rates, national budgets, unemployment figures, votes for the governing parties, and immigration limits.  So much important information is communicated through numbers, and we are crippled at every one if these levels if we cannot easily understand the significance of these numbers with which we are confronted.  –And, further, our ignorance can be easily manipulated by others who deploy their numbers misleadingly.

In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates talks of the importance of education in mathematics. Mathematics is important for the sorts of reasons I’ve just given, to be sure, but, he argues, it is also important for even more serious reasons.  Mathematics is an engagement with formative structures of reality that are abstract, universal and necessary.  Mathematical structures are abstract in the sense that they don’t care about anything empirical: three plus five is eight, regardless of what the three or the five things are.  Such structures are universal because they apply to any and every situation, any and every three or five.  They are necessary because they are the structures that must characterize anything if it is going to count as “real”–anything that is must act in accordance with these principles, regardless of its specific circumstances.  Here we see the deeper significance of mathematics, beyond its practical value for dealing with everyday calculations of quantity: education in mathematics is primarily important because it introduces us to the domain of the necessary grounds that underlie empirical life.

When we study math, we learn to look beyond the immediate and to recognize that the immediate itself already answers to grounds and causes that are not immediately evident.  Studying mathematics is thus the beginning of the study of the “invisible” causes of things, the beginning of the attitude that doesn’t just stop at the “that” but asks, as Aristotle says, for the “why.”

I mentioned earlier the 12-year-olds and the cashiers who cannot on their own “do the math” required for their simple financial transactions.  But truly “doing the math” goes much deeper.  To understand our finances, to understand the economics of the downtown, is a deep matter of studying causes, of studying the powers that are deployed behind and through the simple everyday transactions in which we are engaged.

Socrates enjoins us to study these deeper causes.  Our studies should be mathematical until we have it as virtually “second nature” to look past the immediate and understand what deeper reality is insinuating itself into our lives through this immediate.

I am always a bit surprised and dismayed with the cashier who cannot make simple change.  I am even more shocked, though, by the educated adult who buys bottled water, gives money to the established “charities” whose attractive young agents solicit donations on the street, shops at malls, or votes for “budget-cutting” candidates.

Can you do the math?

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On the Subject of Study

When we undertake the study of something, we typically approach the subject-matter in a very circumscribed way.

There already exists a very well-defined discipline of engineering or archaeology or management or kinesiology, and each such subject studied thus presents itself as an already complete, independently defined object.  The existence of the discipline, in other words, suggests to us that the subject-matter is “real,” and we then turn to the already well-developed disciplinary norms, methods and already-established results to comprehend that object.  What is concealed in this process, and what we often forget, is that all these established domains of inquiry have their root in the human practices of investigation that initially gave rise to them.  Those “sciences” exist, in other words, because their subject-matters mattered to people.

We take up our studies in a circumscribed way, in that we cut them away from their existential context: we do not understood how our subject-matter arose in response to the specific concerns that specific people had.  To study well will not simply be to learn the “objective features” of our subject-matters, but to learn–and to grapple with–the human purpose behind (and in) their study.

Here, as in so many places, the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates remains one of our most insightful guides–and one of our most unrelenting critics.  In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, (509d-513e), Socrates proposes to Plato’s brother Glaucon that we imagine knowledge to be like a divided line.  As we move upwards along the line in our developing knowledge, the object of our study becomes clearer and we understand better what we are doing in that study.  It is a significant advance to move from noticing a dark spot on the ground to recognizing that it is a shadow, that is, recognizing that the dark appearance is caused by the body whose shadow it is.  It is a significant further advance to move from noticing that body to recognizing that it is itself a phenomenon–a reality dependent for its existence on the deeper, causal forces that shape reality as such, and that reveal themselves through such bodies.  2000 years later (in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy of 1641) René Descartes made the same point: “what is in front of us” is recognized more clearly when we recognize things appearing, rather than just sensations, and more clearly again when we recognize universal principles of nature appearing, rather than just things.  Both Socrates and Descartes thus defend the importance of science–the importance of understanding reality in terms of its causes.  Both Socrates and Descartes, however, push us one step further.

According to Socrates, there is a fourth, highest step as we make our way up the line.  This final step comes when we realize that our sciences argue from assumptions. Point, line and plane, for example, are presumed in geometry, not proved; similarly, time, earth, and humanity are presumed in history, not proved.  The final step on the line is the study of these “hypothesis,” that is, it is the recognition of these presuppositions as presuppositions, and thus the practice of putting these presuppositions in question.

Here in North America, the university school year has recently started, and many thousands of students are settling into the process of storing up new information while remaining unchanged personally; this process is facilitated by teachers who present their own teaching as a simple matter of transferring information, with no sense of existential engagement.  In fact, though, there is no “neutral” object and no “neutral” process of study.  Through every mode of study we are in fact taking a stance on shaping our human world, whether we notice this or not.

Thousands of students of psychology learn the “facts” of “mental illness,” content to believe that these terms properly map onto the definitive features of reality, rather than asking what it means to interpret human existence in terms of the opposition of mind and body or asking what it means to understand forms of psychological coping on the model of physiological disease.  Thousands of students of economics learn the “facts” of efficient “fiscal management,” rather than asking why it the case or whether it is right that we have a “free market” economy or especially asking what money is.  Again, students learn the “facts” of “gravity,” “bosons” and “experimental method” without first asking what it is to interpret the world as the result of the impersonal laws of matter and motion.  There were reasons why Copernicus, Galileo and Newton took up the study of reality in these terms: are their reasons still our own?  Should they be?

When we study these subjects and accept their orientation to the world, we are actually taking up a stance on reality–we are interpreting the world.  But other stances–other interpretations–are possible.  The interpretations we adopt may well be fine–they may be–but when we have not understood how the stance we are taking up is one possibility within a field of other (often conflicting) possibilities, we don’t know what we’re doing.

According to Descartes, the fourth step (beyond the recognition of sensations, things and forces) is the recognition that I am always there in whatever I experience.  To truly know “what is there,” we must ask “who I am,” “who is the subject who knows?”  I believe it is similarly incumbent upon us, personally and culturally, to ask ourselves, what are we doing in embracing the terms of this or that science, who are we when we think in these terms.  Our true education comes, in other words, when we ask–and ask critically–who is the “subject” of this study.

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Loyalty and Critique

The Buddha “went forth from home to homelessness,” leaving his family behind as he followed his sense that he needed to learn something more, something that could only be found by launching out on his own.  Their love for young Siddhattha Gotama led his family to desire that he stay: they loved who he already was and they could rightly recognize the fulfillment that would come to him and to them by his staying in the family home.  Yet if their love for him had been true, it would not have been a matter simply of loving what he already was, but would equally be a love for who he aspired to be, and such a love would welcome his embarking on his quest.  This ambivalence—simultaneously desiring the maintenance of the happy situation that already is and desiring the transformation of that situation on behalf of what could be—this ambivalence is surely what is commonly felt by parents as they teenage children depart for university.

True loyalty to another requires loving the possibilities of that other, and not just what is currently actual, and loving that possibility may indeed mean—as it does in the case of the parents whose daughter or son is leaving home—accepting a future in which one is not involved.  When a daughter announces her desire to become an artist or a son announces his desire to marry, parents must accept that the children will follow a path not of the parents’ design.  Love requires that, for the sake of the other’s future, one embrace being denied.

True loyalty requires a willingness to accept denial.  Equally, loyalty to another can require that one deny that other.  It is loyalty to the future possibilities of a student that leads a teacher to criticize that student’s work or behaviour.  While it would be comfortable—to both student and teacher—simply to accept the student’s limited skills of communication or distorted grasp of the subject matter, the good teacher will nonetheless embrace the uncomfortable situation—uncomfortable to both student and teacher—and criticize the student’s work, denying that the current situation is satisfactory.  To do otherwise would be to sacrifice the student’s future, to fail to prepare the student to live up to the norms to which she will ultimately be accountable.

In both of the situations described here—the departure of children and the criticism of students—the responsibilities of loyalty are reciprocal.  Parents need to allow their children to leave, and children need to leave their parents.  And, just as the good teacher must express loyalty through criticism and denial, so must the good student be prepared to receive such criticism and denial as an expression of support.

We often think of love and loyalty as simply matters of affirmation—“unconditional acceptance.”  Such an undiscriminating approval, however, is fundamentally a denial of our “temporality,” a denial, that is, of the fact that our present is always opening onto a future to which it is answerable.

Inasmuch as love and loyalty involve denial, criticism, and, hence, opposition, however, they are inherently marked by discomfort and strife.  To be in a loving situation will necessarily be to make oneself vulnerable to being critically appraised—one of the most intimately challenging and uncomfortable experiences known to mankind!  To be in a loving situation is also to make oneself responsible to be critical—a responsibility to be undertaken lovingly and carefully, one of the most difficult requirements known to mankind!  How often, I wonder, do lovers abandon the real vibrancy and dynamism of their love because of the challenges of this true loyalty.

Socrates, the philosopher who liked to spend his days wandering in downtown Athens chatting with people, unrelentingly practiced such a loving discourse.  He approached others always with the sense that the way to respect a person as such is to treat her or him as “accountable,” and so he imagined that healthy interactions would always involve mutual appraisal—criticizing and being criticized (which can involve endorsement, as well as denial).  No doubt he sometimes let himself be overtaken by the “enthusiasm” of critique, and failed to be sufficiently careful or loving in his challenges; no doubt he sometimes fell for the flattery of approval and was overly sensitive to being appraised negatively.  Nonetheless, his life evinces a sincere and consistent commitment to treating human lives as things of value, as things worthy of being held answerable to the highest standards.  His trial and execution in 399 BC is perhaps evidence for how hard we find it to embrace truly the demands of loyalty.

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The Toronto Seminar

I am deeply committed to the idea that philosophy is a cooperative activity and an inherently fulfilling one. For this reason, I encourage activities of philosophical study in which, through conversation, a community develops in which each participant experiences her or his thinking to be elevated beyond the level she or he could achieve alone, and in which study and social life are closely interwoven.

Since 2003, I have run an annual summer seminar in philosophy. Each year, roughly 25 invited participants-primarily faculty members and Ph.D. students from universities across North America-gather for roughly one week of intense, group study of a major text from the history of philosophy. Participants meet twice daily for sessions of highly focused discussion of the text and the issues it raises. When not studying in preparation for the meetings, seminar participants also socialize together, generally taking advantage of Toronto's outstanding, multicultural dining opportunities, and taking part in Toronto's vibrant and varied live music scene. Participants in these seminars consistently have the experience of growth in their conversation and conceptual abilities, and typically leave with a transformed sense of the nature and possibilities of philosophy.

Throughout the year, I also often lead smaller private seminars, specially oriented to graduate students, on various texts and topics in the history of philosophy.
Music

Music, along with the other creative arts, is one of the most profound ways in which people express and define the distinctive character of human life. Composing, performing, and listening to music are some of the most fulfilling of our experiences. Listening offers us the opportunity for the sensuous pleasure of listening and moving (in dance), for emotional self-expression, and for bonding with others in shared enthusiasm. Performing brings with it the demands and rewards of communication and cooperation-with band-members and with audience-and supports the development and deployment of highly-refined bodily and expressive skills. Composing can be a powerful intellectual and cultural practice, offering one a route into participating in the rich historical and multicultural traditions of musical expression. Engaging with music, like engaging with philosophy, touches us in every dimension-bodily, emotional, intellectual, interpersonal, cultural, spiritual-of our experience.

My own personal path into music has involved me in the study of jazz music in particular, and since 2005 I have performed regularly in Toronto as a guitarist with my own band, the John Russon Quartet. The band (with the outstanding musicians Nick Fraser, Mike Milligan, and Chris Gale on drums, bass, and saxophone respectively, and, on special occasions, with Tom Richards joining us on trombone) performs my original compositions, as well as interpreting the standard tunes of the jazz repertoire and experimenting with free improvisation. We have just (August 2011) gone into the studio to record our first CD, and it should be available in a few months. It has also been, and continues to be, a major project of mine to develop a community of jazz enthusiasts who will carry on the tradition of appreciating live musical performance in general and jazz music in particular in this age in which recording, downloading, and dj-ing have come to define "music" for most people.
Community

I think of both philosophy and music as communal practices first and foremost, and I regularly try to design community activities involving either or both. Currently, I am organizing one series in downtown Toronto.

"Story and Song Night" is a once-a-month event in which a speaker narrates one of the great stories from the world's religious traditions. Stories are among the oldest and most basic of our ways of telling ourselves and each other who we are as people, and the ancient stories that have been handed down for generations remain powerful and provocative resources for thinking about ourselves and our lives. On the fourth Tuesday of each month, a speaker narrates a story she or he has found personally meaningful, and this is followed first by group discussion and then by a set of live music performed by some of the best of Toronto's musicians. The event is hosted by Naco Gallery Cafe (1665 Dundas St. W.).