Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer holds the Beamer-Schneider Professorship in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio – a land that was, before the Treaty of Greenville (1795, subsequently violated by the United States of America), once of many nations. He recently wrote on public philosophy for this blog.
What is your work about?
Thank you for asking me to talk about a weird series of books I’ve written. My main interest in writing about them here is to give an example of three kinds of diversity in philosophy publishing that I think deserve more attention. The first is diversity in the manner of philosophical work. The second is diversity in the genres found within academic philosophy, and the third is diversity in the kind of publishers useful for philosophy. Overall, I want to include my voice in the many discussions inside and outside academia that problematize where philosophy has been heading and suggest that we can reorient it against the histories of silencing still haunting the discipline and the university. There is a better way of doing philosophy than simply churning out arguments. It’s slow and plain, and like a weathered land.
Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time (2017) and The Wind ~ An Unruly Living (2018) are seven studies – a group of six in Solar Calendar and then a long seventh stretch that comprises The Wind – where the sense of “study” is that found within drawing or music, as in an étude. Following on discussions I had with Lauren Tillinghast in 2008-9 when I returned from time developing a civics program at American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., I realized that the object of reasoning – whether theoretical or practical – determined a different sense of what and how a study is. Practical studies develop “practical capacity,” whereas theoretical studies develop “knowledge about” things. Given that philosophy’s proper object is wisdom, and given that wisdom is not exclusively – or even mainly – theoretical, I wanted to understand how one could come to study philosophy. I worked my way to a sense of study such as found within the practical arts and then wrote in that manner.
Along the way, I realized that there is a third form of knowing that cannot be reduced to the practical or the theoretical – I call it “relational reason.” It is the form of reasoning involved in knowing a person – in acquaintance, familiarity, acknowledgement, moral accountability and in love, among other things. After seeing relational reason’s discrete logic, I realized that it has been dawning on the so-called “philosophical” tradition since roughly the eighteenth century, although one might think that the problem propelling people toward it began with Descartes. Rousseau, Smith, Kant, and Hegel, in particular, opened up various dimensions of its normative space and form. But it took 20th and 21st century phenomenology from Husserl and Sartre through Levinas and Derrida to Irigaray, Nancy and Marion; 20th century social theory from Dilthey through Honneth; eclectic early 20th century responses to neo-Kantianism such as Bakhtin and Buber; and the rise of psychoanalytic theory of object relations, field theory, relational psychoanalysis and family systems theory to mark out its core in Eurocentric thought. Today, Darwall and to some extent Michael Thompson have done the most to mark its location in analytic philosophy. Meanwhile, anti-imperial thought was and is rife with dimensions of it, from DuBois to Fanon to Spivak, Faith Spotted Eagle, and Kyle Powys Whyte. It makes good sense within social epistemology too.
I realized that my dissertation work on conscience was actually drawing on it, fractured and misdirected by trying to make conscience as the voice of common humanity show up in practical reason where it does not actually make complete sense. When common humanity appears in practical reason, the problems of imperialism are not far behind. But when common humanity is approached through relational reason, the pre-eminence of self-determination and openness to others decenters positions of imperial presumption.
To reason relationally is to seek to connect with a person. The knowing in it is knowing a person (or persona), neither exclusively knowledge-that or know-how, although in life all three forms of reasoning cooperate. To know someone is not simply to know a lot about them or to know how to handle them. In fact, it that is all it were, we would have a world of objects and not people, and there would be no intimacy, friendship, moral accountability or interpersonal relationship.
I realized that wisdom-seeking that is not organized by relational reason as the lead is impersonal and inhuman – also consistent with empire. To essay a study in relational reason would involve something different. It would be a kind of personal philosophy that, rather than being self-absorbed (which I believe is a result of trying to practically own oneself), opens out on the inside to others through seeking to relate as a person, not simply as a (theoretical) subject or as a (practical) agent. A relational study would be like coming to know a person, finding the struggle to find wisdom from the inside of personal life. I thought of the horses of Plato’s Phaedrus, modifying the myth’s content, with one horse in the lead – Relationship – and two horses behind it in tandem – Theory and Practice.
Now’s it’s understandable that being personal might suggest something uncomfortable, indulgent, or exhibitionist. I believe that these impressions are the result of living in a world that is structured practically in the economy and, in the academy, theoretically. We are supposed to relate to knowledge as an object and put it to work on objectives. We are supposed to leave ourselves out of it beyond owning what we believe or intend and standing for it. The problem is, though, that wisdom is flawed if all we have is a practical or theoretical orientation. That might be wisdom for a robot (from the Czech robota, forced laborer), but it won’t be for a person. If we want to be consistent with the object of philosophy – wisdom – then we have to be oriented by relational reason in a dynamic interaction with both theory and practice, with all three cooperating. And relational reason should lead, because it is morally first (I think both of Darwall and Levinas here), and because at the end of the day we are people heading into the great mystery – the void – not simply cogitators or agents.
So the question is how to relate, not whether to relate at all. Relating will be uncomfortable, but because someone is trying to get down to personal responsibility in a life that matters personally. It should not be uncomfortable because someone is crossing intimacy boundaries. After all, that would be flawed relating. And relating will “give free reign” (the Latin root of “indulgent”) to details that seem idiosyncratic, eccentric or weird (from an Old English word meaning destiny), but not because the one relating is trying to lose their autonomy. Rather, relating gives free reign, because autonomy – making sense to each other – involves the particular as we get to know each other. However, relational reason will not be exhibitionist, because trying to attract attention from others is manipulative. It actually involves viewing others as objects, and oneself as a “me,” a direct object, too. Relating isn’t exhibitionist; it is true, in the original sense of being steadfast and reassuring between people – you will not be an object to me.
It’s in this way that I wrote the two connected books. Thus, The Wind and Solar Calendar aren’t about something. They are something. Take that as humorously as you like. With Solar Calendar, I wanted to write a book that felt like the 19th century novels I read when I lived in France as a high schooler – novels of growing up. I wanted text to convey the texture of a person. The back cover says:
Imagine the kind of philosophy book you might have wished for when you were growing up. Seeking a reader who would live with her own questions and walk around town with her thoughts, this book would not have a single thesis but would work through multiple problems and be an experience, born out of life-experience. Solar Calendar contains a family portrait, a parody-essay, a time-capsule poem, an exploded essay, a poetic record of an act, and an aphorism journal for a year. They protest that philosophy is a daily practice of thoughtful relationships and turn the book into the texture of a person.
About a year after Solar Calendar was in revision and proofing, The Wind came out of nowhere:
A process begun in Pisa, Italy in April of 2016 during a workshop on political theory in the Anthropocene, The Wind ~ An Unruly Living is a philosophical exercise (askēsis, translated, following Ignatius of Loyola, as “spiritual exercise”). In [t]his exercise, [I] throw[…] to the void: the ideology of self-ownership from a society of possession. By using the Stoic kanōn, the rule of living by phūsis, [I] follow[…] an element. Unhappily for the Stoic and happily for us, the wind is unruly. A swerve of currents through a social fabric, it’s full of holes, all holely. […]
The Wind was inspired by something that had haunted me for a long time – a recurring stretch of film in Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo (Mirror). In that stretch of film, I found that Tarkovski managed to create a mirroring movement for his viewers, to make art directly personal and relatable as Tolstoy had wanted. What Tarkovski created was a movement of autonomy – turning from out of senselessness toward sense. I saw this as a focused response to the 19th century, European discovery of despair, anxiety, or “groundlessness” as an ontological and psychological expression of our subjectivity. In the context of discussions of the metaphysics of nature that had risen up in the Pisa European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) workshop, I came to ask how we can relate to the more than human universe if not by beginning from a moment of “non-identity” that, like a telegraph, works its way back into us as a space in which we might reflect on sense. The Wind thereby took up work I had done on relating to the more than human world in The Ecological Life through what I termed “analogical implication,” drew through the stretches opened up by Solar Calendar, and anticipated the next two books on which I am working.
As it turned out, in The Wind, I used fiction for the first time alongside essay. I pushed how I had been exploring in Solar Calendar to a point where fiction – specifically theatrical – became philosophically meaningful to me through the text. In so doing, and given the inspiration for Solar Calendar, these two books cohere with a new movement found among scholars trained in English and Philosophy especially – I’m thinking here of Yi-Ping Ong’s The Art of Being and Michael Clune’s Gamelife – where literature is not simply a vehicle for philosophical illustration but is itself a form of philosophical discovery.
The Wind and Solar Calendar are thematically linked. But even more, they evoke a way of life, something that has recently been picking up in the discipline, and which Ong discusses by way of 19th century philosophy in The Art of Being. In this way of life, moral life is more basic and more important than moral theory, but not because moral theory isn’t important. Rather, the question is about how to live morally, and that begins only with the living, after which clear vision helps.
I’ve picked two excerpts from the books, chosen just for the APA Blog (see below). In the first from Solar Calendar, two sections of a five section “time-capsule poem for the far future” explore the timeline of what in environmental philosophy is now called “the Great Acceleration,” linking it back to the rise of killing at a distance in the early Holocene. The task is to understand, personally, the perspective of planetary time next to the perspective of personal time. Section two, “Historia,” delineates the time-line through relational reasoning and section three “I was in the [ … ] then” (a moth has eaten parts of the time-capsule’s contents) finds that the problem of joining planetary and personal perspective is painful, although the pain motivates. You can hear me voice these sections here, too. In these two extrusions of poetry into philosophy, I was working out how to live with the problem of planetary scale.
The second excerpt from The Wind comes after the first of three stretches (in The Wind, I used “stretches” for what was in Solar Calendar, “studies”). The first stretch, “Airing things,” moves to vulnerability and introduces the book’s work through relational reason. The second and third stretches move to theoretical and practical reason respectively, always with relational reason leading. The second stretch, “The void” explores delimitation – the word for theoretical wisdom in this book. The last stretch explores practical reasoning and in particular political activism through relational reasoning, ending in a fictitious letter to militants from an elderly, queer man named Fritz Books whose story develops throughout the book. There, he urges “friends” to abandon militancy as a misshapen form of relating. After all, militancy and its strategy begin with others as objects to be moved around, practical things, not people. At the opening of the second stretch, however, I step back and re-contextualize the work of the book, first in my own words and then in words of Fritz – at that point still in middle age. He left his job in banking after a breakdown and is regrouping, reading philosophy at home after working at the local ACE Hardware store.
Check it out. What I like about the excerpt from The Wind is the way the fictitious character is not beholden to the discipline of philosophy, but sees it as a way to develop his ability to be a part of a community. If only professional academics regularly thought as much!
How have readers responded?
The responses have been meaningful. When you have a work in theory, the question is primarily whether the account given is justifiably true or, if not, whether it is productive in opening up important new theoretical questions. When you have a work in practice, the question is primarily whether the arrangement of practical ordering is useful, and in many cases whether it can promote moral concerns. Or one may ask whether the work reveals practical obstacles that, when grappled with, will produce more useful action later. But with a work primarily in relating, the question is whether the work can be relatable on the inside of people. What is most important is that the reader come alive as a person. Focusing on our lives as people, the question is whether the work centers or decenters us in order to put our relationships into perspective and to help us relate more autonomously and authentically (following Jean-Luc Nancy for autonomy and Charles Larmore for authenticity, I use these two concepts in ways that are consistent with, indeed needed for, relating, pace the way autonomy and authenticity are often criticized today).
When you give of yourself, whatever the embarrassment at first, you may find that people meet you in kind. Solar Calendar found people who read expansively, involving philosophy and reaching beyond to the humanities more generally. It found people, not research robots, odd and as simple as that sounds. Philosophy as a discipline has been colonized by research and become prey to neoliberal logic. It needs more capaciousness and interpersonal maturity. When Shannon Lee Dawdy realized that the book “does what it says,” I felt grateful for her discernment. Or when Lynne Huffer found the book to be “honest and brave,” I felt my risk had been worth it. I received responses from a novelist, an artist, and an English professor, as well as from colleagues in Philosophy. Usually people outside Philosophy appreciated it sooner. That didn’t surprise me. It’s abnormal, and it’s a protest.
The response that meant the most to me came from out of the public in the slow, small sense of the public I love. A hard copy of Solar Calendar was left in a little free lending library on the far North Side of Chicago near Evanston (I think I may even know who left it there, but that is another, comical story). Someone out for a walk picked it up and was drawn in. She read it, let the entire book sift down for half a year (!), and then sent a handwritten letter to my work mailbox. In the letter, she responded directly to what interested her in the book and shared her thinking with me. I did not feel that she was trying to gain attention for her theories, as so many crackpot responders do, or that she wanted to argue for the sake of arguing, as so many philo-robots do, but that she had been thinking and wanted to have a conversation. That meant so much. What she wrote was beautiful; it was thoughtful. I believe that philosophy can be written to non-academics in a way that is challenging, that does not dumb readers down. This reader proved that Solar Calendar could work like that.
By contrast, the response to The Wind was nearly immediate. The book’s more accessible and quickens relating. Solar Calendar slows things down deliberately. It doesn’t make people easy. The Wind, however, is thematically and rhetorically fluid. Like thūmos – spirit – the wind rushes to meet people, rushing past them onward through an “alley of light and disappearance.” Creative writers, in particular, have responded enthusiastically to the book’s stretch. I was also glad that Kyle Powys Whyte appreciated it. I have learned a lot from how he thinks about moral relations and brings them to life through extra-academic organizing. His word meant much to me.
Did you encounter any problems getting yourself published and, if so, how did you overcome them?
Of course, I did. “Po-biz” (poetry business) as a poet colleague of mine says, has ingrown practices. I wasn’t coming from a MFA in creative writing, and I didn’t have a string of literary journal publications behind me. Moreover, Solar Calendar was heavily philosophical. It wasn’t light or dodging as so many literary essays are. It slows everything way down.
At the same time, Solar Calendar did not look like philosophy as it is part of the “industrial theory” research academy (as I like to think of it). I’m not a “Continental philosopher” who might draw on deconstructive textual practices to justify a strange format. And every single study in the book shows more than says. The book also refuses to have a single thesis. What list could it get on, then, what editorial series? When a scholar considers the novel as philosophy, they write about it. But why can’t a novel be a form of philosophy?
The anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy and the philosopher-theologian Sarah Heidt gave me good advice: “Self-publish the book, get it out there.” Then aim for a publisher. That’s what I did. There are maybe a dozen copies of the first version of Solar Calendar out there. Notice the role of friends in this story.
Then, the philosopher Ryan Johnson told me about punctum books. punctum (the “p” is consistently lower-case) is the labor of love of medievalist Eileen Joy and the Nubian scholar and philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and a dedicated, small team of editors. Founded in 2011 by Joy and Nicola Masciandaro, and later registered as a not-for-profit agency, the publisher is a leader in the globally emerging open access humanities movement. They take risks on “spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion,” sending e-copies direct to free download after six months. The money they gain from print copies or from the first six months of e-copies is used to cover publishing costs. punctum is a publisher with a strongly moral agenda, something you can read in their publishing primer.
I was lucky to work with them. They gave care to both manuscripts. I felt that I was dealing with people who were there for the meaning of the books, not for the profit they might make. The book designers – the poet and medievalist Chris Piuma and van Gerven Oei – did remarkable work with the layouts. The books are visually beautiful or intriguing on the page, and they feel right in the hand should one find a printed version. They are books to walk around with, mark up, get wet, read in a café, and talk about with friends in such a way that the meeting becomes more important than the book, which becomes an occasion. You can even defenestrate these books in frustration, and the meaning of them somehow fits. Their lines are flight.
The discipline of Philosophy and academia more generally are not supportive enough of publishers like punctum, although punctum is peer reviewed and boasts an impressive advisory board. punctum has published important critics like Lauren Berlant and Lester Spence, and will publish important contemporary artists like Caroline Woolard. But promotion and tenure committees at R1 institutions may not recognize it. That should change. The quality of the book is what should matter, reflected by referee or reader reports. A publisher with intellectual integrity should matter, including that publisher’s sense of knowing done for the sake of truth, goodness or beauty, open to everyone. And hasn’t the discipline of Philosophy, in particular, suffered by its failure not to be open to everyone?
What else would you like to do with your research, if you could do anything?
Currently, I’m finishing a book on planetary environmental responsibility given the persistence of empire that creates a concept called “anthroponomy” – a specific ordering of autonomy-in-relationship mereologically and teleologically keyed to planetary dimensions. That sounds pretty theoretical! But I have been changed by the two punctum books I wrote. So I describe the anthroponomy book:
Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: An Anti-Imperial Exercise (Routledge, 2020) introduces the idea of anthroponomy given the persistence of empire. Anthroponomy is helpful, because the concept of the Anthropocene erases geopolitical history. Involving Anthroponomy makes anthroponomy personal, life-sized, so that a reader can relate to it. Along the way, a number of other foundational and related ideas are discussed. The book ends with a question about what others can make of anthroponomy, a necessary question given both the nature of the idea and the culture of empire.
Consistent with my previous three monographs, Involving Anthroponomy‘s style is novel, synthesizing spiritual exercise (askēsis) in the Senecan tradition and the essai as Montaigne conceived it. Involving Anthroponomy learns up from Plutarch, Seneca, Montaigne, Thoreau, Woolf, Cavell, Barthes, Savater, Coates, and Faith Spotted Eagle.
Along the way, the book advances the concept of disagreement-in-relationship, too. That, in turn, will be the subject of the second book on which I’m working, tentatively titled, Disagreement in Relationship: The Social Construction of Wonder as a Ground of Democracy (Bloomsbury, est. 2022). There, I aim to stage a set of meetings. The first will bring my analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s capability work on biocentric wonder alongside her lifelong use of wonder across several areas of philosophy. The second will bring wonder in relation to the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, taking up Kant and Arendt in the process. The third will relay the first two discussions to the ground-breaking work of social epistemologists such as Kristie Dotson. Finally, the fourth will explore wonder alongside protest, drawing on the work I’ve done over the past years in and around protest and socially engaged art. I want to consider some paradoxical ideas about democratic disagreement and engagement that both problematize and expend deliberative approaches to democracy. Obviously, the “against democracy” movement involving epistocracy will be part of the discussion, too, a fifth meeting.
Beyond that, I’ve barely begun a short book project – a notebook exercise – called Underland that I hope to propose to punctum in the future. Its goal is to respond to the “learning to die in the Anthropocene” discourse by focusing on how a life can be built up through moments of moral accountability as found in intrinsically respectful relations. I want to think about how to go out like that, and also how we always ought to go out like that, including in what we hope to pass on. All our relations are in the void.
Secondly, I want to develop my work in and around relational reason both more systematically and more plainly. There’s a book called Esther, a Philosophy that I hope to propose to Feminist Press in honor of my late mother and her tacit philosophy. In some ways, my work on relational reason is entirely indebted to what I learned up from my feminist mother, the first person in her entire family to go to college, and a first wave feminist after whom I took her maiden name when she took it back. Esther Bendik, including her fifty-four year – real – marriage with David Keymer, taught me the core of what I tolerate in relational accountability, expect of emotional maturity, and intuit as authentic in interpersonal relationships, things we can all access with time, honestly, accountability, and attention.
Finally, I’ve a social practice art project I’ve begun with Misty Morrison that will, on my side of it, produce individual books fitting the person for whom they are destined. This collaborative project will involve a series of such books, letter press printed as a “single” (not a “multiple,” copied, edition), and then documented virtually as well.
Overall, I want to spend the foreseeable future stretching philosophy relationally, working in relational modalities and on the issues of moral accountability that matter most to grappling with the banality of evil we face on this planet now. The banality of evil today is scaled to the planet, but it is also scaled to the interior of people inside societies, including academic institutions, that have yet to become relationally mature and which are haunted by histories of domination.
Finally, what writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
I write daily during the workweek and when I am between semesters or on break. During semesters, I write for at least half a day two days of the week and usually squeeze in a couple of hours on one or two of other three days. I may write some on Sunday evening to get my mind back into the project, but I am not usually a night time writer. I write best first thing in the morning. Often, I refuse to check email or anything else until it actually helps me in the midst of writing (I sometimes need to break out of the writing, be alienated, and then go back to see it more clearly).
I am slow with beginnings. I take forever to come up with the spine of a book. I may spend the first fourth of the entire writing time of a project – up to half a year – working on the structure of the book. Similarly, I spend a long time on the openings of each chapter, study, or stretch. I may rewrite the opening thousand or two thousand words dozens of times before I break free into the space of the chapter, study, or stretch. I refuse to go on until I find that the writing is compelling to me.
Solar Calendar was extremely slow in the making. The oldest text in the book is a revision of text from 1989. There’s substantial material from 1991-2005, thoroughly revised dozens of times. The book took approximately three years to form, bringing together material, rewriting it, reorganizing it, finding the right frame for the process. I gave attention to every detail of the book. The book was personal. It was a protest against the training and misdirection of the discipline I’d experienced and for a better way of doing philosophy, one more consistent with the object of philosophy.
Still, Involving Anthroponomy has been developing since 2011 through articles and essays. Disagreement in Relationship has roots in a conference paper at the Human Development and Capabilities Association annual meeting in 2007. All of these books relate in specific ways to work I began with Susan Neiman in the early 1990s in college.
Books are like people. They have personae. It is important to let a book become “who” it is. Each book has a life of its own. For this reason, the structure of books emerges slowly, is not simply a theoretical or practical matter, and occurs within a space of judgment that is primarily moral. Alth0ugh I read so many books that are basically exercises in theory, they all are – whatever their greatness theoretically – less than a book can be when they remain impersonal arguments and ignore being processes in lives. To reason relationally within them would involve a subtle reorientation for their authors, but it would not hurt truth. On the contrary, it would bring truth to life.
Excerpt 1 from Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2017)
Excerpt 2 from The Wind ~ An Unruly Living (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2018)
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Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
