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A LIVING, BREATHING PHILOSOPHERVice Talks with a Representative from an Endangered Species(Page 2 of 2)You can understand someone like Czeslaw Milosz denouncing irony a few decades after World War II, but the sense of nihilism, of isolation and alienation, is now so prevalent as a means of dealing with the absurd demands of living. Isn’t it hard to see how or why one would build an alternative? The idea is, I suppose, that irony is a response to a world that feels distant from us and that is not engaged with us, but it’s a world that remains one that we know all about and so we can step back from it and watch reality television, knowingly. It entertains you, sure, but you’re not engaged. One lives at a distance. There’s a floating distraction in the contemporary world, life at a distance enabled by technology. I want people to commit at the level of their subjectivity. The idea of subjective commitment is at the core of ethics, something that divides the self from itself. I become an ethical self. I cannot meet that ideal, I cannot fulfill it, it divides me from myself and it makes me strive harder. This ideal subjective ethical drive is at the heart of an absolutely earnest, radical politics that insists that people will be able to engage with each other, and they’re lifted from irony at that point. And we should posit this purely for ourselves? It’s an individual thing? Absolutely. We live in a world outside of our control, a media universe outside of our control. We have a weak sense of the self. I’m trying to counter that. The most corrosive thing about irony in relation to social experience is that it can corrode your relationships with other people. How? It can lead you to no longer see others as human beings but instead as worthy victims of a kind of reality television, of the pornographic violence at the heart of a lot contemporary culture. That offends me. Ethics is about a subjective ethical commitment to a particular other and how one meets that challenge. That’s the core of ethics. It seems hard to know how to enact this in one’s daily life. A key question is: How does one behave? One commits to a demand, some demand. It can be a demand for justice, equality, the good. That demand is something that structures what it means to be a self, but it can never be fulfilled in my view. The capacity for forgiveness has to be infinite. The core of ethical experience is the experience of an infinite demand that motivates my behavior. But we all sort of remain tied to the specter of religion in Western culture. Isn’t it difficult to imagine a complete shift? I remain optimistic. At the moment, the recession, crisis—there are opportunities. We are living through a very interesting moment. Especially in New York, maybe more so in Britain, where one in five people is connected with the financial industry. The bubble has popped, and everything is at stake, and it’s a real opportunity to be taken. Not to sound apocalyptic, but I think that there’s a genuine possibility of considerable social disorder, if it were properly channeled. It might not be—it might end up being expressed in terms of mass ethnic conflict, hatred against immigrants, foreigners, etc. I’m really watching carefully for what is happening in Eastern Europe. It’s going to be interesting how those countries react after the lie they were sold, especially in regard to the EU, and in countries like France, Germany, Italy, where there’s a tradition of resistance and opposition. I think governments are quietly terrified. There’s massive unemployment, a recession they don’t know how to deal with, and the measures they’ve taken are not working yet, and maybe they’re not going to work. There’s a prospect of significant social disorder. How would you like to see that come to life? Personally, I have an anarchist predilection in politics. I think human beings, if they’re allowed to break free of state law and the police, would be able to operate on the basis of cooperation and mutual aid. I think human beings have an essential capacity for goodness that is not allowed to express itself for social and historical reasons. There’s a conspiracy of stupidity and wickedness that corrodes people. The anarchist in me says if those structures were placed in question then something more powerful could emerge. What I’d like to see is a genuine end to the nation-state, an end to all those old structures. I’d like to see genuinely federalist politics—small units, towns, and cities. We’re stuck within Western Europe with a generally 16th- or 17th-century worldview—the nation-state. One might think one has gone beyond that with the EU, but that’s not the case. So the recession could have very interesting consequences. History shows in moments of genuine social crisis, usually something big happens. Also terrible things could happen. They could start to kill Jews, start to murder immigrants. That could also happen. Mortality is a consistent presence in your work. You state rather unreservedly that death should play a larger part in people’s lives. Philosophy is the art of dying. Part of that is the distracted floating attention, which is a part of contemporary life that Sartre would call a counterfeit eternity. We’re mortal, and that mortality has to structure our existence and the pleasures and pains that accompany our existence. I’m getting scared now. It’s finite, it’s going to end. The minute one grasps that, everything changes. Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one’s mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live. Doesn’t death feel further from our lives now than it did in the times of the ancient philosophers? That’s part of this dreadful social picture that we inhabit. We are isolated from death, we are insulated from it, and we don’t see it—even with the death of family members. We don’t see the corpse. It’s obscene, it’s shuffled away into hospices and nursing homes, and we don’t see it close up in an experience of war. We see it on television in a way that is distant as well. It would be a very good thing for people to see a corpse once or twice in their early life to see what that means. One of the great cultures that celebrates this most powerfully is Mexico. Mexico has this powerful understanding of mortality. It’s not simply Catholic; it’s much more complicated than that. The skeleton is the national symbol. But the United States is a society based on the denial of death, where everyone is going to live forever. And that just isn’t true. Literature and poetry blend with all your work, even the most technical philosophy. Do you conceive a central place for literature and poetry in people’s lives? Absolutely. It has the highest importance. Pasternak said that poetry is one of the enlargements of life. For me, philosophy is something I do because I’m not really a writer. If I had the ability I would have been a poet or a novelist, but I don’t, so I do this. So for me philosophy has always been an acknowledgement of failure. The people I genuinely admire are the people who can really write, who can really open up a world. Well, it’s an optimistic picture you paint—this place of literature, poetry, and art exalting us to an infinite ethics and an active political anarchism. But it’s hard to marry that with the reality of feelings of futility and aimlessness. It is. Very much so. Everything is stacked against it, and history is probably going to be written by the people with the guns. But it doesn’t take much to resist. It just takes two or three people meeting and deciding to do something. So I remain stubbornly optimistic. I basically think wickedness is a social and historical outcome. It’s something that human beings have done to themselves through mechanisms like the state, the police, and the law. Human beings are capable of so much more if they’d only let themselves imagine that possibility, and that’s what art and literature and philosophy can do. They can provide ways of imagination that can shake you and allow you to shift from sleep and boredom into something else. See all articles by this contributor
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