The Logic of Long Distance

It's fashionable to say we are post-truth, but falsity and unreason have always lived alongside fact and inquiry -- and not just as their opposites.  As folks like Nietzsche and Freud have shown, the capacity for truth and reason is often built out of processes of violence, rejection, and resentment. Anyone who has been to school understands this tension. So must anyone who has reckoned with the history of America, beacon both of slavery and of freedom, of both equality and of racism, that most arbitrary and ugly form of inequality. We are, after all, not minds, but animals. Human animals operate largely outside of processes reason or even self-interest. These are late-arriving achievements, hard won and fragile.  Yes, we can maintain ourselves in a space of reason; we are capable of operating purely economically, but anyone who has interacted with another human animal intimately knows that all of us also need spaces of irreason and even violence, where we can e...

In Foucault's History of Sexuality , he looks to Greek sexual practices to make a distinction between two forms of ethical discipline. The first thinks of morality and ethics as a matter of interdictions, judgments, and transgressions. This conception of ethics is essentially juridical : a set of laws or rules that organize behavior according to principles that one ought not transgress or that one ought to live in accordance with. To do the good, to live well, is conceived in terms of more or less rigid moral laws that are policed by the appropriate moral authorities: usually a clergy of some sort who has access to the true meaning of a sacred text and uses that text to diagnose pathological or degenerate behaviors. The goal of this sort of ethics is to identify deviations from the good life and to reform those deviations. The second form of ethical discipline is less interested in transgression and reform and more interested in managing the body to produce health. Foucault calls...

The French philosopher Michel Foucault writes that "experience is trying to reach a certain point in life that is as close as possible to the 'unlivable,' to that which can't be lived through. What is required is a maximum of intensity and a maximum of impossibility at the same time." When he made this statement, it was as a response to phenomenology, which is the philosophy of experience: the sort of philosophy that looks to describe the ordinary experience of everyday life. Phenomenology is perhaps best captured by Husserl's demand to "return to the things themselves." Phenomenology as a practice of wisdom and truth thought its mission was to describe the reality of the events of ordinary life. Running blogs can be read as rough phenomenological treatises. Their authors attempt through a variety of styles and genres such as the race report or the training plan or the setting of goals to articulate their experience of running. What makes much of thi...

Run a fast marathon. Write a dissertation. The two goals for the next year. I thought I'd track my own progress here for myself and for family and friends that want to follow along. We'll see how it goes. I'm working now on the first chapter of the dissertation. The challenge is setting up the context for my ideas about the nature of experience, experimentalism, and a social view of education. The key figures in the dissertation will be William James and John Dewey, and their ideas will be supplemented by more contemporary folks like Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Cornell West, and Paulo Friere. The basic idea behind the dissertation is that if we properly understand the nature of experience, then we understand ourselves as educational beings. The task of building democracy means building institutions and ways of thinking that allow folks to take education into their own hands. This is the meaning of autonomy--to be able to play a part in the making of one...