Partners in Dialogue

By JohnR | Published September 9, 2011

What I say to a close friend is quite different from what I say to a distant acquaintance or to my boss, even if I’m describing the same situation.  When I speak to a friend, I will, of course, relate parts of the story that I keep private from the others.  More than that, though, my very words will communicate the trust we share and the emotional warmth I feel for her, without those themes having to be spoken about explicitly.  In an analogous way, a server at a restaurant can make me feel uncomfortable and communicate his displeasure with me while never straying at all from communication with me that is formally quite polite.  These situations remind us of two things.

First, the description of a situation is never automatic–never a matter of simply correlating the correct word with the relevant fact.  On the contrary, our descriptions are always interpretive.  In other words, the way we choose to talk about something will always reveal something about us–the speakers–by revealing what aspects of the situation we deem relevant.

Second, our words will also always say something about that one to whom we speak.  In the way we choose to speak, that is, we “say” who we take the other to be.  In my example above, I implicitly tell my friend that she is my friend, even as my words explicitly only describe some event at the office.

 Before we are adults, we are children.  When we are adults, we can endure the implicit snubs and put-downs, and, indeed, the implicit flattery, that our conversational companions direct at us in the power-plays that typically shape our interpersonal lives.  When we are children, however, we have not yet built up the secure sense of self-identity that allows the adult to know who she is despite the images of her that are projected upon her through the speech of others.  Indeed, it is precisely through such projections, such implicit portrayals of self-identity, that the child comes to form a sense of who she is in the eyes of others.

We should be very careful in our conversations with our peers to ensure that our implicit communications behind our explicit words are fair and respectful.  Even more so, as parents, care-givers, educators and friends, we should be extremely careful of the way that our interactions with children are telling them who they are, whether or not this is the message we intend to be sending.

Our contemporary society encourages us to accept the myth the we are independent, self-contained individuals from start to finish.  In fact this interpretation of human nature is not true.  Our very sense of “self” is accomplished in and through our language.  We are not independently formed minds who simply use an external language as a tool to pass information to other independent minds.  On the contrary, we become individuals only in the context of being partners in dialogue.

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The Conversational Path

By JohnR | Published September 1, 2011

I have a friend who wants to design a “cat ladder,” so her cat can freely travel between her second-floor apartment to the ground.  The problem, though, is that the same ladder that lets her cat out will also let other cats in.  Hussein Hoff on cat ladderThis, of course, is not something unique to the cat ladder: it is the nature of any road.  Establishing a road is establishing a universal means of transit, and the very thing that empowers me to go in my direction also allows others to go in other directions.  In this respect, a road is very much like language.

Language is the incredibly powerful medium by which ideas are allowed to flow: it is the means of transit by which my experience can be communicated to you.  This sharing of experience depends on the sharing of language though–the communication would never happen if you and I did not have the same sense of what our words and gestures mean.  A language that allows me to articulate my ideas must necessarily and simultaneously be a language that equally allows you to express yourself.

Our language allows us to articulate our personal experiences, but, because of its shared nature, that language is not itself a “personal possession.”  It is true that I am expressing “my meaning,” but it is not simply up to me to determine how that meaning can be expressed: the language itself, that shared medium of expression, sets the terms (literally!) for how we can express.  In other words, expressing my meaning requires I answer to its rules and norms.  Said the other way around, the strict and “impersonal” rules of grammar, spelling, and so on are not inhibitors of personal expression but are instead precisely what enable self-expression.  If you can’t operate within the rules of shared language, you can’t express yourself.

There is a second way, too, in which language is like a road.  Precisely because the road is necessarily a shared medium and thus necessarily not a “personal possession,” travelling along the road is necessarily always a social experience.  By saying social, I don’t mean we can never travel on our own; on the contrary, my point is rather that, even when we travel alone, we are also doing so “with others,” in the sense that we are drawing upon a power that is available to us only because others allow it: it is available to me only insofar as it is also available to you (and her and him) and so my action draws upon what can only be a shared possession.  In an analogous way, whenever we speak we draw on the resources of our language community–indeed, on the whole history of communal human practices of language use by which our language was formed–and speaking is thus always a social act, always an act of communal participation.

This notion that language itself–the very words in which we articulate our ideas–is a matter of sharing can teach us an important life-lesson.  When we talk with another person, we can often act as if our meaning were our own, existing autonomously in our own minds, and as if words were independently existing bits of the world that simply “clothe” those meanings.  If that were true, then communication would simply be the process of using a fixed tool to hand over to you something that I already possess.  In fact, the truth is quite the opposite of this.  First and foremost, communication is always a matter of two (or more) people undertaking something jointly.  Without that shared undertaking, the words don’t work as words, and, without the words, I don’t even possess my own ideas.  Talking is not a “one-way street” in which I mechanically impose the contents of my mind on you; it is, rather, the practice of coming to share an experience with another person, a “two-way street” (which all streets are, in principle) in which it is the other’s participation that allows me to have the experience being communicated as much as it is my experience that is communicated to the other.

The lesson, then, is that talking is not a matter of transferring information or ideas through sound, but is a matter of joining with another in shared experience of something.

This is an important lesson for teachers, for example.  A good class is not a lecture in which students are bombarded with sound, but is a situation of cooperative inquiry.  The talking initiated by the teacher should be an invitation to the students to share in an investigation, not a forceful gesture denying the need for their participation.

It is also an important lesson for personal life.  We should remember that in our conversations we are always implicitly shaping the terms of our shared experience.  Typically, that is not the topic we are explicitly talking about, but that is what our conversation is implicitly doing in the way that we talk.  This is what we should remember: we should remember that words, first and foremost, are our way of saying to the other how we recognize their participation.  Generally, we should be much more careful about this implicit side of our communication than about the explicit subject we are discussing.  We should remember that our conversation is a path, and we should practice what the Greeks call “sugchorein“: “making way” together.

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On the Road

By JohnR | Published August 26, 2011

Trimalchio, the ex-slave turned millionaire in Petronius’s Satyricon, invested all his money is some ships so that he could transport his wine to sell it in Rome, a short distance away.  Sea transport was a risky business, though, and his little fleet was wrecked and he lost it all.  Why didn’t he ship it by land?  Because the roads of ancient Rome were there for the army, not for business or personal travel, and transport by road would have been very slow, expensive and difficult.

This little scenario is interesting because it invites us to think about roads–about their importance and about their nature.  We rely upon roads daily, directly for our personal travel but also indirectly for making available to us all the goods and services that have to be transported to our nearby spots.  Historically, the “silk road,” the central route connecting traders and travellers from ancient China to ancient India, Persia, Palestine and Egypt, was a central force in facilitating development both between and within these cultures.  It is precisely the importance of these routes that makes them also prime sites for power: control of these access-routes allows one to control the flows of goods, people, and ideas, a control that can be directed towards cultural development or can be used for all sorts of military and economic exploitation.  And, of course, roads should not simply be thought of as land routes: the sea route Trimalchio’s ships sailed similarly functioned as a road as do all sorts of contemporary air and sea routes.  What is it that makes a road?  I notice two features in particular that seem to definitive of roads.

First, roads are not a destination, but a route.  Of course on can settle on a piece of highway and play a game, start a business,or make a home (the plight, often, of the poor and disenfranchised), but to do this is not to treat it as a road.  Roads are “made out of” asphalt or gravel, to be sure, but more importantly they are “made out of” an attitude we take to them, namely, the attitude that this piece of the world is for travelling.  Further, this is a collective decision: we must all recognize and respect that this is a road if it is to be able to function well.

This notion of collective recognition points to the second definitive feature of roads.  A road is not just my thing for going to my place, but is something any of us could use to go wherever each of us should desire.  The road itself, qua road, is indifferent to user, direction, and destination.  As Heraclitus writes, “the road out and the road back are the same.”

To use a road, then, is to enter into a shared perception of the character of (a piece of) the world, and it is essentially an agreement to enter into a space that others are entitled to enter with equal legitimacy and with conflicting goals.  It is the very nature of the road that using it for my own purpose simultaneously and automatically puts me into negotiation with the opposed purposes of others, and it is incumbent upon me (and them) to act cooperatively so as to coordinate our conflicting projects.

I have two points I want to make about these reflections on roads.

1. We generally take roads for granted.  We don’t typically notice a shift in our attitude when we change from “inhabiting” a place (while chatting in a coffee shop or working in the office) to “travelling through” space.  That change in activity does involve a fundamental change in our “interpretation” of the nature of our surroundings, however: our surrounding world is not longer a destination or “end,” but a route, a “means.”  We expect the world to accommodate this change and, typically, it does, with the result that we needn’t pay much heed to the issue.  In fact, though, the viability of the world as a place for travel must be accomplished and maintained.  Most immediately, we can travel so easily only because we have a history of governments who have established and maintained the “infrastructure” of roads and the traffic laws that govern their use.  Even more basically, though, we rely upon the cooperation of others to treat this as a space in which we can move freely.  We no longer face the danger of moving across land that was faced, for example, by Ibn Fadlan, Marco Polo, or St. Paul as they embarked on their travels.  They knew that crossing the land was a matter of engaging with people, and they behaved (and suffered) accordingly.  We however can easily fail to notice that inhabiting space is always also a matter of inhabiting society, that our own “personal” movements are a matter of interpersonal negotiation.  The very success of our society in providing us with reliable access to interpersonal space has concealed from us the essentially intersubjective nature of space.

2. We need to remember, too, that roads are not a destination: roads are themselves only important if we have somewhere to go to.  Our society has been very successful in establishing for us an environment in which we can travel; we have established, in other words, a social environment that treats space as an “indifferent” space.  We must remember, however, that, as well as travelling in generic space, we must also be able to inhabit specific places.  We need, that is, to be able to make homes for ourselves in places that are not indifferent, but that are our own, that are “for” us. Without such places, we have no destinations.  My last point was that our society’s success in establishing a world of “equal rights” has the paradoxical effect of concealing our dependence upon society; I want to suggest now that our political goal of establishing the indifferent equality of all–a goal of universal inclusion–similarly conceals the essentially exclusive use of places that we all ultimately depend upon, and that is the very reason why we need roads, the very reason we need an indifferent space.

We must not confuse a road with asphalt–for it is a social negotiation–and we must not confuse it with a destination–for it is only a route.  A world with an asphalt route, but no social cooperation and no destinations would be a wasteland, and a world in which that asphalt route would be, precisely, useless.  This, indeed, is the exact situation dramatized by Cormac McCarthy in The Road, which portrays a world in which there is a road, but no longer a society, no longer a goal.  McCarthy’s novel reveals, it seems to me, the disastrous implications of a politics that conceals the essential role of government, and substitutes the norm of instrumentality for the norm of healthy social life.  We should be concerned, I think, that this might be an image of precisely the implications of our own political world of technological instrumentalism, individualist democracy and global capitalism.

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Making Our Way

By JohnR | Published August 20, 2011

In one of my favourite passages in Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that he likes to talk with old people because “they are like men who have proceeded on a certain road that perhaps we too will have to take.”  (I.328e) There are many aspects of this remark that would be worth exploring, but I am specifically interested in the image of the road, and the idea that it is only perhaps the case that we, too, will take that road.  This passage, it seems to me, highlights the way that, for each of us, our own future always remains uncertain: we cannot say in advance where we are going, and we cannot know in advance what it will be like to be there.  Nonetheless, as Socrates suggests, it is wise to pay heed to the experience of others who have travelled their own roads, for the insight that their experiences can offer us about our own lives.  Socrates’ remark points to both the obscurity of our own future, and of the importance of trying nonetheless to acknowledge its weight.

It seems to me that there are two difficulties we face in comprehending our own future.  Let me describe each in turn.

The first difficulty is a psychological difficulty.  At every moment, I am aware of myself, and I have a sense that “this is what I am like.”  We seem, that is, to be confronted with our own nature, and that nature seems to be “just how it is,” “just how I am.”  The shocking truth of aging, however, is that we change.  Though this is how I am now, that will not always be so.  As we make our way through the day, the general situation we are in seems like our permanent setting and it is very hard not to act on the presumption that things will stay the same.  Surely something like this is involved in a person’s refusal to quit smoking, despite overwhelming evidence of the ill-health to which this will lead: we can know this to be true, but it doesn’t feel true.  A similar perspective no doubt lies behind the very troubling ways in which people can manage their longer-term interpersonal and economic lives poorly.  We can live in denial that our relationships need our care, taking them for granted as we act in ways that are ultimately destructive of them.  Similarly, we can live in denial of the need to care for our economic well-being, taking for granted that the experience of “getting by” satisfactorily that we can manage at 25 or 35 will always be possible–but, of course, it won’t be.  Our experience, then, plays a kind of trick on us, letting us believe that we “are” like this or that, when in fact this is only the current form our life is passing through, on the way to another form of living we have not yet anticipated.  The psychological difficulty, then, rooted in the inherent inability to experience our own future, is the natural resistance we have to acknowledging that it is not the nature of our future simply to “work out” automatically: we need to take care of our future, for our future will not automatically take care of us.  It is for this reason that looking to the experience of older others can be helpful: through them we can see what it is like to age, even though we cannot see that about ourselves; in seeing how they have made their way, we can see what it is like to care–well or poorly–for one’s future.

The second difficulty is a metaphysical difficulty, by which I mean a difficulty posed by reality.  The difficulty reality poses to us when it comes to “owning up” to our own future is that the terms according to which our world works also change.  This means that, even if we do glean insight from the lives of those who travelled these paths before us, their ways of coping with their situations might no longer apply to us.  The specific circumstances I am imagining here are situations of technological, cultural, or environmental change.   My mom found a way to make it through her life, as did her grandfather before her, but the world in which each of them made her or his ways presented a very different face than the world I live in.  They knew nothing, for example, of the ways the internet has had an impact on the carrying out of personal relationships, of how deregulated banking has intervened in the capacities that individuals and families have for having a private home or securing a pension, or of how massive environmental exploitation has reshaped our involvement with nature.  The second difficulty, then, is that we can never get a clear hold on the right frame of reference in which to assess our efforts, because the terms of the future world can radically undermine the terms we are accustomed to depend upon in our interpretations.  Whereas the first difficulty in coping with the future is rooted in the psyche of the individual, and thus can be meaningfully addressed by the individual’s own efforts, this second difficulty is rooted in reality, and thus is not affected by the actions of the individual.

The first difficulty–the psychological difficulty of acknowledging the need to take care of our old age–regularly inspires in me the desire to encourage others, especially others in their 20s and 30s, to be more attentive to the ways their current actions are building the home they will have for themselves when they are older.  More exactly, I should say, it is the real short-sightedness that I think I see in the actions of these people that inspires this desire in me.  It is imperative that young adults devote themselves to advanced education, develop good habits of moral and professional behaviour, and care for their own psychological and interpersonal health if they are to be able to greet middle-age and old age with a smile.

The second difficulty–the changing terms of the modern world–inspires in me a deeper concern.  Not just as individuals, but also as a culture, we look back on the way things have been, and act as if that way will continue.  In fact, this seems unrealistic.  Many people have made this point with respect to the destruction of the natural environment, and this is surely a compelling point.  I have an even deeper concern, however, for economic, technological, and political matters.  I won’t discuss the economic and political matters now, for the impact of technological changes is a big enough thought to grapple with on its own.  What is my concern?

More than anything else, I am concerned about the technological transformation of the social world and the work world.  As internet shopping becomes more and more dominant, the ability of families or individuals to maintain small businesses progressively declines.  As people turn more and more to downloadable music for use on portable, personal devices, the capacity for individuals to earn a living by playing music progressively declines.  These are two simple examples that are exemplary, I think, of a larger trend, and I want to point to two consequences of this trend.

The first consequence is that even people who have tried sincerely to care for their futures by cultivating a trade and working to build a business or a career can now find themselves in a world in which that business or career is no longer viable.  Many have already encountered this problem, and I fear that this is going to be the plight of many more people in the near future.

The second consequence is faced, not by the people who try to make a living in these ways, but by the rest of us, that is, those of us who depend on the contribution those entrepreneurs make to our world.  As those small businesses dry up, we discover there is no longer a “downtown,” no longer a public, market area in which to congregate, and to participate in a world in which producers and consumers cooperate.  Instead, we are left to a much more private life, where the market has been replaced by store fronts, run by wage-labourers,  for the chains that dominate internet shopping.  As the work for musicians dries up, we are left with only the mass-market products designed and distributed by the huge “music” corporations that are oriented to advertising and mass appeal, rather than to art.  In short, we rely on the environment that supports small businesses, trades, and artists to provide us all with a social world that offers us a good quality of life, and this environment disappears at the same time that the careers of individuals disappear.

Both personally and culturally, I believe we all need to show a greater concern for our future.  My worry is that, culturally, we rely too much on the belief that the future will resemble the past and that, as a culture, we are not sufficiently acknowledging the massive cultural changes that are in store for us.  Perhaps, despite the voice of optimism that typically accompanies talk of technological “advance,” the “old people” from whom we could learn a lesson now are those cultures that have undergone massive and unexpected cultural decline.

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Beginning.

By JohnR | Published August 16, 2011

Apocalypse Now! begins with Jim Morrison singing “This is the end.”  The 19th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel begins his Science of Logic with an essay called “What What Must the Science Begin?” and there, similarly, it seems to me that, in some ways, his answer is that it is only with the end that the beginning can be made.  I have myself been thinking a lot about aging lately, and here, too, I have been toying with the idea that it is only with the end–in this case, death–that our life properly begins.  Let me explain my idea.

When we are growing up, we take the world for granted.  Certainly as children, but also as adolescents and as young adults,we rely upon the surrounding world–and especially other people in that world–to ensure that there is a “place” for us, to ensure that routes and resources are available to us to move forward.  As we grow, we work at making our way in the world: we struggle to define ourselves, to learn how to cope with things, to get ourselves into a satisfactory living situations, (sometimes at a comfortable pace, if others do in fact make a secure setting for us, and sometimes at an overwhelming and crippling pace, if we find ourselves unsupported materially or psychologically and we have to “fend for ourselves” prematurely).  Even as we work in and with the world, however, we are not questioning the world, that is, we are accepting as “given”–“taking for granted”–the fact that the world is there and that we are there in it.  It is precisely this “taking for granted,” I think, that our aging can bring us to challenge.

In youth, the world is a world of possibility, and our own life similarly appears to us in terms of possibility: What will I become? Who will I be?  As we age, we develop ourselves, and, over time, we establish an identity.  While it always remains true that we can change, our developed adulthood marks nonetheless our having become someone specific: I have shown myself to be someone through my history, my actions, my accomplishments, and, though I can still go through important transformations, I cannot in good faith disavow this “who” that I have become.  It seems to me that this establishing of a developed, specific identity can bring with it a particular, important recognition: this life is mine to live only once, and, though as a free being I am fundamentally a being of possibilities, I am also, most basically, this one and only actuality that can never be effaced, never be repeated, never be revised.  This recognition of the irremovable uniqueness of my life is essentially the recognition of death: it is the recognition that this is my only chance to be me: it is happening now, never to be repeated.

This recognition of our mortal uniqueness, it seems to me, can be a life-transforming recognition, for it is the recognition that puts one, for the first time, into the position of seeing her or his situation in its true terms.  Up until this time, one has taken many aspects of one’s existence for granted, living as if it were simply a permanent truth that “there is a world” and “I am there in it.”  In recognizing my mortality, however, I recognize that the world will not always be “there” for there will be no me for whom there will “be” anything at all, and I thus come to appreciate the intrinsically finite terms of my own reality for the first time.  For that reason, it is only with this recognition that one really begins, we could say, to live one’s own life.

Such a recognition can be psychologically terrifying; indeed, it is probably some version of this recognition that lies behind the common experience of a “mid-life crisis.”  This recognition need not be something bad, though.  On the contrary, such a recognition can be our first real opportunity to appreciate our existence, and to appropriate courageously our own freedom.  In our culture, we are often led to think that it is in youth that life is rich and full, and that aging is simply deterioration.  This reflection on death and beginning perhaps suggests instead that we should think of life as only beginning in our later adulthood, only beginning, that is, when we have come to see ourselves as defined by the end.

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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.).