I feel that human is an “architectural genius” because of the ability possessed by all humans to make meaning out of “nothing”. We derive the most complex stories and associations from mundane objects and actions. When we tell stories our words as Eliza Hamilton from the musical Hamilton puts it “You built me palaces out of paragraphs/You built cathedrals” (Song: Burn). We make entire worlds with some resembling ours and others being illusions we breathe life into. Words are just scratches on paper or squiggles on a screen that require the reader to imagine the concepts the words intend to represent. According to Nietzsche, the human is an “architectural genius” because it “succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations…so delicate that it can be carried off on the waves…” (pg. 757). I think what he means by this is that what we conceive of as truth and it resting on solid ground is that the ground is moving constantly with the truth being built to be strong enough to hold on. The moving ground could be an illusion to the questioning that society often subjects the truth to. Even when the questions appear settled, unanswered questions bubble under the surface threatening to move the foundation further. When he describes how the concepts rest on the foundation of the relationship he draws between being firm and being delicate is probably about how for a truth it needs to be able to move in a way where it reaches everyone yet be sturdy enough to withstand questioning or even opposing truths.

This implies that language has more of a capacity to build new things and less of a capacity to describe. This is not to say that language is incapable of describing. Many of the poems and stories written in the romance genre can pair tangible words with a concept as messy and tangled as love. However when asked to describe love by itself most humans struggle. That highlights the limits of descriptive language exists because “It is not known to us in itself but only in its effects” (pg. 759). As with love we only know the concept from how it affects others and how we are affected as recipients of love however we do not know what the essence of love is. Nietzsche further expands on this when he mentions how “…they are utterly incomprehensible to us in their essential nature” (pg. 759). It is because of this that humanity relies heavily on figurative language to explore or explain the truth within ideas and objects encountered in daily life. On some level we are aware that we will never know the full truth within the world around us yet these language tools help us to get as close to the essential truth as possible.

A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site.  In what follows, I will outline three things:

• a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
• a quick primer on how to create your first post
• a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.  
2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences.  In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible.  And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class.  For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you are free to create your own Commons name/avatar as you please, so you can use a pseudonym if you like; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class.  If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.
3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future 306ers to see.
4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

What makes for an excellent post?  For this class, posts should:

• contain at least 400 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
• explain a given text’s argument (or part of an argument), using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
• engage that argument critically, noting its limitations, its links to other texts we’ve read, its unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that gives some sense of what I’m looking for. Since we’re using contract grading, anything in the A-B range below is “satisfactory” for contract purposes.

What do I write about? You are free to choose any focus you wish and to write about any of the texts we’re reading in any combination. A couple of suggestions:

• You may write about what we’re about to discuss our what we’ve just discussed. I prefer that you not write about something we’ve discussed long ago. So, for Friday, you may write about Nietzsche or about de Saussure. By the time Blog Post #2 rolls around, I don’t want to hear about Nietzsche, since we’ll have moved on.
• Be careful how much you bite off. It’s better to “do more with less” than the opposite here. So a close examination of de Saussure is probably a better idea than a breezy, loose comparison of Nietzsche, de Saussure, and Culler, in which each gets a sentence or two.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good. Getting zeroes in the gradebook for the posts is deadly. Better to dash of something that’s not your best work than to leave it blank. And it’s good discipline: no one feels like they “got it” after reading Lacan for the first time, so writing your way towards clarity, no matter how messily, is valuable.
• Use the study questions: it’s perfectly permissible–even suggested–to simply answer one of the study questions in your blog post, or to use it as a springboard for a more complex argument. They’re there, so use them!

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post.  I’ve annotated it using the hypothes.is tool, so you can see what makes it exemplary.  And remember: it’s not an exercise in cookie-cutting: your results may vary, and there are lots of ways to write an excellent post.

While you work on your final self-eval, etc., a little food for thought (vegan, of course):

How Far Should We Carry the Logic of the Animal-Rights Movement?

Kelefa Sanneh reviews “Animal Liberation Now,” by Peter Singer; “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility,” by Martha Nussbaum; “Fear Factories,” by Matthew Scully; and “Our Kindred Creatures,” by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

It’s an interesting survey of recent work in “animal rights” that follows more of the liberal/pragmatic strain of philosophy rather than the French theory strain we read (Deleuze-Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Wolfe). But very interesting to see the problems that arise when jumping off from the egalitarian notion of common “rights” rather than the “limitrophy” of Derrida.

Hasta luego, and have a great summer!

A bit early, I’m posting the final questions for the supplementary essay (for A Contract Students Only). A few notes:

Answer ONE of the four questions

Follow directions carefully: download the file and write the response on the template. Other file formats are fine (Pages, .pdf, whatever).

Due Wednesday at 5pm via email. One day late gets you a “minus” and more constitutes a breach of contract and bumps you to a B contract.

Here’s the template and GOOD LUCK: 306 exam template

Prior to discussing Derrida’s essay tomorrow, I wanted to share the wonderful obituary that Professor of Religion Mark Taylor (one of my early mentors at Williams College) wrote upon Derrida’s death in 2004:

Opinion | What Derrida Really Meant (Published 2004)

Op-Ed article by Prof Mark C Taylor says Jacques Derrida, who died last week, will be remembered as one of three most important philosophers of 20th century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger; says no thinker in last 100 years has had greater impact on people in more fields and different disciplines than Derrida, and no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood; explains what he meant by deconstruction; drawing (M)

Taylor nicely lays out the stakes of Derrida’s philosophy, often accused of undermining all foundations for ethics and moral judgment, as an enterprise deeply invested in moral and even religious questions. We see this in the very late essay (2002) that we’re reading together, where he goes “back to the beginning,” in a sense, troubling foundational moments in the mythic heritage of Western thought, asking us to rethink our ideas about what it means to be “human” and “animal” at once, what it means to use language (or be used by it), and what it means to “thicken,” as he says, the boundaries between concepts, rather than make defending them a life-or-death proposition.

All this is especially relevant this week, as we see colleges and universities turned upside-down, with college administrators ushering in police and expelling/suspending/encouraging arrest of students, staff, and faculty engaged in peaceful protest.

I can’t help but think of the high profile rats have gotten in Mayor Adams’s tenure. Meet the Rat Czar, who addresses herself to the manifestation of rattus rattus (Public Enemy #1)** as “becoming-rat”:

Mayor Adams Anoints Kathleen Corradi as NYC’s First-Ever ‘Rat Czar’

Mayor Adams Anoints Kathleen Corradi as NYC’s First-Ever ‘Rat Czar’

** Actually it might be billionaires who pay an average of 8.2% federal taxes, due to making a vast amount of their income from investments.