New APPS

Even the noblest vocation carries with it spiritual dangers unique to that calling.

Medical doctors are in grave danger of seeing all humans all the time as automobiles to be fixed. Police officers see too much depravity in every context. Dentists start to feel generally unloved. And for the humble professor, other people become lecture room audiences. Worse, in critical fields such as the humanities, the whole world starts to look like nothing more than grist for one’s favorite hermeneutic framework.  

Part of the problem is the necessity of adopting a persona, which has far more to do initially with how you move your body in certain circumstances. With respect to teaching, it’s initially pretty terrifying to be up there in front of a bunch of people. So most of us find comfort in subconsciously aping mannerisms of the professors that strike us as confident and successful.

It’s fun to consider particularly viral personality types in this regard. Consider the sort of limping way that Jim Morrison would stumble around. If I had a nickle for how many people I’ve known both in and out of the music industry who perfected the Jim Morrison stumble,* then my kid’s piggy bank would be appreciably heavier. Or consider Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles patois, leavened by drink. Mickey Rourke got this perfect in Barfly and as a result a million drunk adolescents have at least at one point in their lives non-ironically intoned “To all my friends!” with exactly the same distinct vocal inflections. In philosophy, we all know of stories of students of Kripke who, when particularly moved by the Spirit/Mind, compulsively move their torsos back and forth, make an irritatingly high pitched keening sound, and (in the same rhythm as the prayerful rocking back and forth) do that little hand motion where it’s like they are screwing the idea into their head with their fingers.

We all have ritualistic ways of moving our bodies related to vocation. And when these bodily movements, directed at other sentient creatures, colonize our own affective states we begin to adopt a persona.

Commonsensically, the danger happens when the persona adopts you** and your dealing with others become characteristically facile in various ways. But what is this facility? Kant gave us a set of prima facie compelling answers involving treating others as mere ends, not respecting their autonomy. More generally, we seek a kind of human authenticity that transcends whatever persona we adopt in our various roles, including our vocational ones.

But what if Kant is importantly mistaken about autonomy? What if there is no there there behind the changes in spiritual costume we all undergo,*** depending on who we are dealing with, several times a day? Or, more profoundly, could any there do the kind of normative work we seek?

I don’t know. I think Foucault’s reported later “ethical period”**** has to have faced this problem square on. I also have this intuition that philosophical work on the ethics of gratitude and reverence has to be relevant. It can’t be an accident that the normative cash value of so much religious discourse involving selves that transcend social roles ends up getting played out in public manifestations of gratitude and reverence.***** But besides Paul Woodruff’s book on reverence (I haven’t read it yet, but it looks fantastic) I haven’t seen much philosophical discussion of these virtues.

I think with respect to gratitude, it gets you out of your own skin a little bit in two ways. First, you no longer reflexively think of other people merely in terms of how people are discussed and treated in characteristic ways by your vocation. By practicing gratefulness you learn to cherish things in other people that have nothing to do with your own vocation. Second, practicing gratefulness allows you to be better at finding things that gratify your own soul independently of your vocational persona. These are the two major ways that gratitude helps to set up a roadblock with respect to the colonizing powers of your own personae. I think that as a normative stance it is probably importantly autonomous from the various ways it can be realized metaphysically (there should be some way to justify it independently of Kantian or Christian views of human nature). Third, this.

[Notes:

*Please don’t google “Jim Morrison limping” as you’ll probably find three or four other Newapps posts where I make exactly the same point. Of course in a blog post about how being a professor turns you into the loudest drunk at the bar, I have to be the damned loudest drunk in the bar.

Remember that guy who wouldn’t shut the eff up about Frank Zappa’s use of the mixolydian mode, or the first U.K. tour of the band Wings, or how Hank Williams Senior almost certainly had Marfan’s Syndrome? How he just kept going on and on and on when you just wanted to have your goddamned drink in peace? That’s me. I was that guy. Sorry everyone!

**Somewhere John Calvin says that when you read scripture, scripture is also reading you. If anyone has a citation for this, I’d appreciate it.

***I’ve never understood Neitzsche’s animus towards actors, some of whom are lovely people.

****Disputable, clearly- but I think the description of Foucault’s three periods in Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World is canonical for a reason.

*****Well “can’t” is putting it strongly. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche surely all had points after all.]