What exactly is your position on the position of having positions about positions?

At work today, we had a meeting about meetings, or, more specifically, we had a meeting to talk about the 'norms' of our meetings, which means we meet to talk about how we are going to talk about what we talk about in our meetings. With all this talk of the normative and meta-reflection about reflection I felt for a minute like I was in some sort of Platonic dialogue like the Alcibiades I, talking to Socrates about talking to Socrates.

I find the idea of talking about 'norms' interesting, it evidences a strong disconnect with both the phenomena and the noumenona that surround us. It also gets at the one way I ever intend to make any money, using my limited but sufficient sensitivity to things to do what my mother tells me is called group-dynamic consultation, essentially figuring out how and why groups of people do not function as they should, and fixing them. Talking about 'norms' implies one either has none or one does not like the ones one has, but it begs the question of how talking about something that operates on the noumenonalogical can be fixed by talking about it, or, even worse, agreeing on a new set of norms. It would be akin to talking about standing distance (how far or close you stand to a person) and deciding as a hive of individuals to change the standing distance. Would, or better yet could, anyone actually follow it? There is something profoundly ephemeral and mercurially about group dynamics, working on all sorts of unconscious levels, and the solution to things that are beneith the phenomenaligical can't be to rationalize, systematize, and explain them. As the Tao says, or doesn't say, the act of naming strips a thing of its name. We do not live in a world of objects that can be named and have properties, at least I hope not.

The meeting about meets was bookended by an announcement that the staff had to take 'climate' survey to figure out the. . . climate of the school (I thought it seemed partly-sunny, but the supercomputer I use to calculate the probability of the weather was down, so I had no confidence in my answer). The idea of categorizing and systemizing one's feelings about the 'climate' of a place, the same background state that permeates all of our interactions, our 'norms' evidences the same technocratic desire to control being, that our sense of existence is to control existence. The survey's replace what was previously seen as intuition, or, mono no aware as the Heian Japanese put it, the sensitivity to things and ability to be moved.  We do not live in an era of poets and  intuitives, where a highly attuned individual could be sensitive to the ontological feelings of his culture, but a technocratic era where smashing and hollowing out idols is done not with a tuning fork, but a blunt hammer. Where impositions come from the top, or are trolled from the masses by people who could not understand the answers because they do not understand the questions. There is some idea, deeply ingrained in Western thought from Plato to Freud, that even if you asked a person a question and they answer honestly, they are not being honest because they do not know themself, do not have access to the real answer. Can we know what influence our parents have on us, or our friends, or our teachers? Or why certain groups work well together and others do not? Would we even want to? Will a quorum on any of these things get at the answers, or will the answers be somehow meaningless because it is treating things of the immaterial as if they are something to be picked up, moved, and altered. Tolstoy said the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless, or as the Tao puts it, know not-knowing: supreme, or can you control our breathe, gently like a baby?

Werewolves Have to Stand in the Back of the Bus

In terms of modern, Promethean punishments, nothing seems worse than being forced to read the fantasies of a sad, dumpy looking Mormon housewife who really just wants to have a threesome with a werewolf and vampire. I do not know if the werewolves are supposed to be soccer players and the vampires football players, or vice versa, or maybe one of them stands in for the lacrosse players (do they have lacrosse in Mormonville?) but it is pretty obvious that each group represents some sort of sports team.

The other aspect of the Promethean punishment (in this case having crows peck your brain out every night instead of your liver) is being forced inside the mind of a teenage girl, or being forced inside the mind of a dumpy looking Mormon housewife fantasizing about herself as a teenage girl having a threesome with a shorn werewolf/captain of the soccer team and vampire/point guard of the basketball team. I teach teenagers all day, every day, and though their dasein is surprisingly difficult to comprehend, any rational adults would not for all the bodily punishments in the world have their mind forced back into teenage ontology.

One of the things I do find most interesting as a teacher is the desire for the demos to possess Nietzschean qualities like personality, charisma, and creativity the desire my students have to be a Kierkegaardean individual as opposed to a particular. The ideas (not theirs, of course) are deeply flawed, we all do not have personality in the Nietzschean sense, or charisma, and most of us certainly are not individuals as Kierkegaard saw it, but also profoundly amusing to see in action (Note: I am well aware how horridly obnoxious adding the suffix 'ean' to the last names of different philosophers and apologize for the pretention; that I have found a way to avoid saying 'Kafka-esque' is a miracle of sorts). Our regime functions as a sort of Hegelean wet-dream where everyone not only has the respect he thought was essential to our being, but thinks themselves an autonomous individual, wholly liberated from material, ethical, and metaphysical burdens, able to manifest and create their being on a daily basis. Personally, I think that is simply a lot of work, and gladly leave it to the ubermench and glow worms like Churchill, but having taught both spectacular and frightening pedestrian students, this idea about individuality is the glue that binds them together. With the spectacular, it really does create something, particular humans capable of becoming an individual, and all the freedom from the material, tradition, and custom have certainly created more of these individuals, even if they have less individuality than the individuals of earlier regimes, but in the pedestrian types, the woefully pedestrian types, it leads to extended conversations like this:
Me (in a conference with a student about how she can improve her writing): "Jessica, the biggest deficiency (she didn't know what this word meant) in your essay is you did not have enough textual evidence of analysis, if you had more of both, you would have done better."
Slug (slug is a much more fitting name for Jessica because she seems to be closer to a slug than a person. It seems to take effort for her to blink her eyes, and breathe (through her mouth, of course) and she walks as if she is Atlas with the weight of the world on her shoulders, or just the weight of her head, which must be filled with rocks  for reasons you will see): "What's that?" (in a nasally, absent-minded tone where the words come without thinking, not that thinking would have brought forth any other words)
Me: "What's what Slug, I don't understand your question."
Slug: "What you just said."
Me: "Well, I just said that you did not do as well on the essay because you are missing both textual evidence, and, more importantly, analysis."
Slug: "What's analysis?"
Me: "What do you mean what's analysis? I mean like (I use the word like a good deal with my students. They seem to understand similes much better than anything else) analytical statements where you made deductions (take a guess asto whether she knows what a deduction is) about the text based on textual evidence."
Slug: "I don't understand."
Me: "You don't understand what Slug, what a deduction is or what textual evidence is?"
Slug: "Yea."
Me: "Yes to the first, or yes to the second."
Slug: I don't know, both."
Me: "Ok, well, here (handing her the book we were reading). Find me a piece of evidence from the text."
Slug: "Like where (again, the deep comprehension of simile manifests itself)?"
Me: "Anywhere, flip to any page and find some textual evidence."
Slug: "Ok, here." (flipping to a random as I told her to, but holding the book open and towards me, like a gift of some kind)
Me: "Ok, good, now read it and find something concrete in it that is textual evidence." (I don't know if she knew what I meant when I said concrete, like she could have thought I meant concrete as in the construction material, but she seemed to be able to grasp my meaning from either context clues in the sentence, or from the fact that she was holding a book, and not something hard and can scrape your knees on should you fall on it, which she must have done quite a bit learning to walk)
Slug: "Ok, here, it says the weather was bad."
Me: "Ok, good slug, now that is textual evidence. Analysis would be talking about why the weather is bad, or, even better, what the significance of the bad weather is."
Slug: "Ok."
Me (at this point, I feel I have won my Pyrrhic victory, which is an apt description because this little dialogue does not really capture the extended, dramatic pauses in between everything Slug says (one would think she is contemplating the celestial bodies they are so long), and decide to end the conference): "So you need more of that in your next essay, then you will do better."

This conversation is in no way misrepresentative of Slug, and really represents her grappling with something of relative difficult for her; it was certainly more difficult than the conversation I had with her were she asked me how to 'do' vocabulary, like how to complete a sentence with a missing word, or find a synonym for a word, or how to write a sentence with a vocabulary word in it. Heidegger thinks all humans having (or are) being, so she must too, but I could not in any way tell you what this girl's being is. Our orthodoxy about individuality and personality seems to have done this girl no help, and I get the feeling that a little noblesse oblige and condescension would help her more than telling her she's an individual, capable of selecting her own values and 'lifestyle', though until we outsource the re-stocking jobs at CVS, I feel comfortable there is a place for her in this modern world of creative beings.

Where is you vomitorium, next to the bathroom?

    I have wanted to write a post about our culture's Epicureanism for quite a while, and unfortunately this article in The Atlantic is not only more thoroughly researched than I have the capacity or discipline to carry out, but also references Livy which immediately trumps any sort of allusion I intended to make. Fortunately, I still have half an original idea left to contribute that the writer, B.R. Myers, does not cover, so I shall proceed ahead, mooching off his thorough and no doubt slightly soul crushing work (the man has read multiple books with titles like Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, multiple). Before I begin, I should say that I had no idea people took food so seriously, or, I should say, I knew plenty of people made far too much money off of food, and plenty of people took the consumption of food to be some kind of religion, but I suppose I never realized the depth of their shallowness and utter lack of irony, but a lack of irony seems to be one of the real hallmarks of whitepeople, so I should have known better. To be so sanctimonious about say, a steak, seems more than a bit misguided, but as Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in organic offal.

    Because the West has been fraught with ontological tension as soon as Athens found out about Jerusalem, or vice versa, a tension exists in the food world, and at its heart it is this: eating luxuriously until you want to vomit (and maybe do vomit) is good, but being fat is bad. Nothing in the modern world  is worse than being fat. It is, far and away, our Cardinal Sin, worse than the only sexual taboo we have left, pederasty, simply because when you are fat, you are fat all the time, and pederasts cannot constantly molest children. Being overweight to most people goes far beyond any sort of venial, corporeal sin to a moral sin; the fact that a sin against the body can be raised to the level of a sin against the soul shows how superficial and bodily we moderns are (that it is a contradiction not believing in a soul, but still believing you can sin against it also should not fall on deaf ears). Our Gods are eating well, living well, and being healthy; no culture before ours placed as much emphasis on health as a end, not a means. The Romans no doubt valued health in its soldiers, but it was not so they would look good and live long, it was so they could more effectively kill barbarians (and often their fellow citizens). Medieval Christians valued health, but it was because man is made in God's image, and because they had an understanding that sins against the body, if left unattended, could become sins against the soul; the corrupt body had to be kept as clean as possible lest you corrupt the Holy Spirit residing within you. Gluttony was ranked a Catholic sin, but was by most enumerators the least severe of them, and was linked to a sin against the spirit, not just the body.

    Moderns have no such problem making this distinction, and multi-million viewer television shows exist simply to exorcize people of their fatness. Millions of people every week tune into The Biggest Loser to watch people become morally better as they lose weight (it should duly be noted that a previous iteration of this show existed, Extreme Makeover, but people obviously found it distasteful that the participants should become more moral without having to work for them. Gastric bypass surgery was not sufficient penance). That they think these people are better after losing weight is a testament to modern superficiality.

    If being fat is immoral, then what is viewed as the highest morality is not healthfulness, but some vague respect for food and Epicurean pleasures. Fat people are, to borrow from Woolf, out of proportion. That, and they do not eat at morally correct eating establishments. Fat people, or most Americans, eat at places like Applebees and The Olive Garden, while moral foodies eat their own chicken's eggs, or the eggs of chickens that were laid very close to them. To a certain foodie set, lying, stealing, and betraying those closest to one are hardly as bad as eating at the wrong restaurant. I am acquainted with a large enough set of people who would be wholly comfortable breaking bread with an adulterer, but would not sit down to eat with a person that consumes 'fast' food. These people do not see their moral bankruptcy, and  in fact find themselves to be morally superior to others because they shop at a farmers market and eat organic. Myers links the foodies in with gluttony, but I do not think he has gotten the sin correct. To me, it is pride that the foodie is guilty of. Pride in their morals, self-satisfaction, and the inability to see beyond themselves. The foodie sees the whole world through the compass of food. Other places have no culture outside of food, and one can understand everything about a place through its food; it is an odd sort of revision of Marxism, where even economics takes a back seat to consumption. To the foodie, prayer before a meal is just time to sniff and salivate, and the idea of food having a spiritual aspect to it is transformed to vague, Pantheistic, Transcendental ideas about Nature and God, whatever the hell those mean. It is this, the moral superiority of the foodie that is most irksome and sinful.

    In The Gay Science, Nietzsche distinguishes Epicurean and Stoic times, and links the Epicurean with extreme sensitivity and intellectual curiosity; basically himself with his delicate stomach and penchance for migraines. Watching Anthony Bourdain eat the eyeballs of cats, and whoever it is on Man vs. Food eat god knows what he eats, I do not see a good deal of sensitivity or intellectual curiosity.