Dear potential reader: I don’t think this page is very interesting. I don’t think it’s worth your time. I put it here only for people who insist on narrative.

When I left consulting, I was trying to find something to interest me. One of the things I tried was to read scholarly work. Many of the books I tried were not fulfilling, but I found three that I found fascinating.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the self

Jonathan Lear, Love and its place in nature

Richard Moran, Authority and estrangement.

Thus, Moran was one of my initial philosophical heroes. [I say philosophical heroes because I also have my household gods in other fields. In economics, Deirdre McCloskey and Michael Piore. In psychoanalysis: Lacan via Bruce Fink and Julia Kristeva.

Frankly, I’m a card-carrying dilettante. Lots of heroes, lots of field-of-interest. No real depth in any of them.

Consistent with this, if you cared to look, you would see that many of my podcasts are introductory volumes. I’ve done several on books in OUPs Very Short Introduction series and similar series from other publishers. I’ve covered “Introduction to” for Thoreau (with Larry Buell), Walter Benjamin (Peter Gordon), Proust (Joshua Landy), Phenomenology (Dan Zahavi), and Philosophical Method (Timothy Williamson). I’ve also covered intellectual biographies, including those of Freud (Joel Whitebook) and Julia Kristeva (Alice Jardine). You can see my dilettantism converging with an interest in intellectual history. Through books focused on particular authors, I’ve also been able to dilettante dance with Sartre (Terry Pinkard), Barthes (John Lurz), Aristotle (David Charles), Kant (Karin de Boer), Angela Davis (Tommie Shelby), Hegel (Claudia Melica), Keynes (Stephen Marglin), Socrates (Agnes Collard), Melanie Klein (Merav Roth), and Melville (Joseph Boone).

[Incidentally, why do some of the famous people need only one name, and others need two?  The people who needed two are: Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Angela Davis, and Melanie Klein. So it looks like a factor analysis would point to sex (females more likely getting two names), and how common the last name is.  You need the first name to distinguish Walter, Angela, and Melanie from others with last name Benjamin, Davis, and Klein. But since Kristeva is not a common name, the use of Julia Kristeva points to the importance of sex here.  Indeed, I wouldn’t say Shklar or Nussbaum; I’d say Judith Shklar and Martha Nussbaum.  Arendt is perhaps the exception.  But still I think I’d be more likely to say “Hannah Arendt” than, say, “Edmund Husserl.” Then why does sex matter?  It’s a dig at women: they’re not big enough to be a one-name institution? It’s a way of giving men more space, more deference. A suggestion that one can approach women on a personal basis.)

About Me

I’m 62 years old. No. Scratch that. I’m 63. I turned 63 last week. When I tried taking classes, I was older than all the other students—and all the professors too except the emeritus ones. I’m retired from public policy and litigation consulting (economics). (Really, I’m more “laid off” from consulting than “retired from it.” Like Charles Barkley when someone said Danny Ainge retired. “He didn’t retire. He was waived.”) Really my career arc—well first of all, it’s not so much an arc; if it’s a function it’s discrete, and where it’s defined it’s a polynomial. My career arc can be summarized by the Peter Principle. Or the “Up or Out” rule.

I once had a colleague (Rebecca Taylor was her name, I think) who brutally characterized me as a “failed academic.” I didn’t object at the time, but it has hurt me in memory over the years. In retrospect, I think it is unfair. I can say that there is in fact much more to me. I am for example also a failed consultant. And a failed mental-health clinician (another story for another website). A failed real estate agent, etc.

“What’s the diagnosis?”

This is the crucial question which my wife and I always use when talking about people. In my case, I have self-diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder. With some mania. Now I’m not talking about DSM here. I’m taking the route of “Everything is a spectrum.” If you look up BPD in the DSM, it’s really extreme. I’d say I’m along that path. That means emotionality. It means getting canceled a lot for being too emotional. For being inappropriate or for not following protocol or standards of comportment.

You can see above I often attempt to use the old charming self-deprecation tack. What does that tell you? Does it tell you I’m real comfortable in my own skin? It should, I think, tell you the opposite. I have to remind myself that when I see someone else who uses self-deprecation, that’s probably a sign that they are susceptible to narcissistic injury. It is okay for them to deprecate themselves. But if you join in, you might, depending on their mood, be met with unexpected rage.

On diagnoses, what can we say? First of all, there is Proust. If my emotionality is seen as an illness, I will win all sorts of benefits. <Proust quote here> But the downside is, there are many people who will not respond with sympathy. Then you are canceled: not listened to; not given standing to speak.

Back to the Moran narrative.

Those three books inspired me that scholarly work could be world changing. I wanted to try to get my hand in it. I tried taking courses (at BU and at BC) and also tried podcasting. Eventually the podcasting won out.

I eventually contacted all three (Taylor, Lear, and Moran) to see if I could talk to them for the podcast.

Charles Taylor I never made direct contact with, but his publisher told me she asked him, and he declined. Jonathan Lear, I had already known him very little (through an article I wrote which he responded to. <I’ll put that article <here> and his response <here>. Over the past few years, we corresponded intermittently by email. He was amenable to a podcast but nothing specific materialized. My correspondence with Lear is <here>.

For Moran, I knew through his website that he was working on a book about Proust. I had myself already become interested in Proust for other reasons. Rather than wait for Moran’s book, I approached him about talking about a working paper or two. We decided on SMP as well as his Amherst Lecture on self-love.

I think both articles—like all his work that I have read—were great. I prepared for our talk, and I was ready to go by the Thursday prior to our scheduled Tuesday talk.

My podcast: motivations and dilemmas

1) Scholarship can rock the world. Some scholars, to me, are thus heroic.

2) When actually doing the interview, the interviewee is my guest. My first human duty—before anything else—is for the guest feel comfortable and valued.

3) What holds back scholarship is its professionalization. If you read scholarship—John Lurz’s book on Barthes, Joseph Boone’s book on Melville to name two—there is very little disagreement in them. The ethos seems to be to agree with every other scholar. You need to cite everyone else, and you need to affirm their work. I became emboldened in this view by reading Timothy Williamson. In VSI Philosophical Method, he says that, yes, philosophy seminars have traditionally been gladiatorial combat. He agrees that’s a problem to the extent that some people will not be able or willing to interact in that way, and thus their voices won’t be heard. But overall he makes the case that the gladiator model is good, healthy for the field. The bigger problem is scholars being in silos and only hearing from people who agree with them.

4) I am better as a cheerleader than a quarterback. When I feel I am helping someone else do their thing, I can research with great energy. When I try to research something where I am going to be the spokesman, I get cold feet. I want to disavow and block.

5) I can tilt at windmills via podcasts. But to do so I need to try to combine cheerleading / xenia with tough questioning from outside the academy. And I can be the little cheerleader, but I run the risk of rage and indignation if I don’t at least feel appreciated by the Big Life authors. In addition, if I really do not like the book—if I don’t respect the author and the book they have written—I won’t be able to do a podcast. I will have to (rudely) cancel after first agreeing to do so. I will need to figure out how to minimize this sort of rudeness.

To the narrative itself, once again.

One specific strategy I have used to the xenia / gladiator dilemma is to ask destructive questions—but inform the author of them ahead of time. It offends my sense of xenia to be recording a conversation and blindside the guest with destructive questions.

With Moran, I had sent him some nonstandard questions I thought about asking. He didn’t seem interested. His articles are very tightly written. They are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But, it seemed to me, his style is not one to take his conclusions and, for example, start applying them to adjacent fields. For example, I proposed using current examples of the Medical Philosophy, to show how prevalent it was. He declined. I was okay with this.

(I thought that Authority and estrangement was the most difficult book I had ever read. So difficult that I read it twice. The first time, I thought I had found a major problem in it, but I also wasn’t sure I was understanding it. When I was taking a class at BU (epistemology with Daniel Star), I proposed to Prof. Star that I write my term paper on A&E. I will look for that paper and put it <here>. After the second reading—and after writing the paper—I could not fathom what my first reading had been. I felt my first reading was, as I suspected, on the point of bizarre.

As of about Thursday, then, I had decided to try to do—and provided an outline for—a podcast in which we would focus on Proust. I mentioned in an email that I thought we would not talk about Freud. In my email, I claimed that was because I didn’t think the listeners would care about Freud versus Proust. But in retrospect, I think that was just an excuse. The truth is that, although I’m generally interested in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, I was not particularly piqued by Moran’s thinking on these topics.

Indeed, if memory serves, the paper I wrote on A&E, for Prof. Star, criticized Moran precisely for the therapeutic component. I mean the therapeutic component, again, was fascinating and compelling, and I felt pushed the “philosophy of therapy” further than anyone had done before, but I was just saying there is still much further to go.

But then Moran wrote me and said …

But then Moran wrote me and said something to the effect that, to his mind, the Freud piece was the crucial part of the paper. And if readers didn’t want to hear about Freud, then maybe we should just cancel the podcast. This was alarming. Partly it signaled to me that Moran may not actually be comfortable with podcasts. His reasoning is so razor sharp. He may not feel he is being himself in a podcast setting. On the other hand, he had just recently written an article for The Boston Review where he was stepping outside, and he had agreed to talk, so …

It reminds me of the time—I still squirm when the memory arises—of the time that I was having dinner with Judith Shklar in the mid 1980s, and I asked her who she thought would win the next election. It was as if I was saying that her authority meant she would have greater insight into the coming election than anyone else. In my memory, at least one person at the dinner table tee-heed, signaling the cringe in the question. But JNS just gave her answer, without pointing out that that wasn’t exactly her field.

Sorry for the name dropping of JNS. Yes I knew Judith Nisse Shklar personally—but on a very, very limited basis—through a member of her immediate family.

Always the eager research assistant, never the ..

Always the eager research assistant, never the researcher, I readied myself to dive into Moran’s discussion of Freud over the weekend. It’s not like that was a chore. I was excited to do it. If Moran thought it was crucial, I wanted to understand it.

What followed was a weekend where, by Sunday, Moran canceled me. Why? Well, you can read his email on another page here, but essentially there was a sense that I was too emotionally involved and I didn’t understand his argument well enough. I was disputing things that were beyond dispute, mischaracterizing his arguments, and it was all because of some emotional thing I had with Freud.

Do I have an emotional thing with Freud?

I’ll give Moran that. Sure: I do have an emotional thing with Freud. But I’d respond in two ways: first, I myself led with that. I went into the weekend saying that I tend to get defensive about criticisms of Freud. I get angry.

More importantly, my response is that I strongly disagree with the professional standpoint that says, when someone gets emotional, one has the right to cancel them. I am tired of being canceled for emotionality. Moran said he hit a sore spot with Freud. Well, that may have been a slight sore spot, but he hit and real and powerful sore spot when he both canceled and did so by pointing to my being emotional

We can step back. We can be philosophical. Hume, Bion, and no doubt many others have said that reason is emotion’s little bitch. Again, SMH is getting at this too. One of the more interesting parts of SMH (i.e., not the Freud part) is how philosophical theories are tools one plays with. Theories do things for us as we try to position ourselves.

On a metaphysical level, without emotions (without their “magical transformation” of the inert world), why would we do … anything? IOW canceling someone for showing emotions is canceling them for their particular combination of (a) how strongly they feel emotions, (b) how capable they are at hiding their emotions, and (c) how willing they are to hide their emotions (i.e., how they weigh the tradeoff between (i) authentically showing who they are, but (ii) thereby losing the considerable benefits of a stoic presentation.

But let’s not forget that the issue is only the surface one of whether you show emotions. There are always underlying emotions. Theories are never unemotional. One of the things that Charles Taylor is so excellent for is that he looks behind the polite professional scholarly persona, and he asks, “OK but something must be motivating you. What is the motivation, the “moral resource” to use Taylor’s term, that is getting you to make this argument? By making this argument, you’ve taken a certain posture, assumed a certain bearing, what is that posture or bearing doing for you?

I have an interest in the philosophy of emotions. For example, I talked with Owen Flanagan about his How to do things with emotions. And I’ve talked with several people about animal rights, a subject where the philosophy of emotions always comes up.

For example, when I spoke with Martha Nussbaum, she said that the emotion of disgust was not reliable as a motivating emotion. It is certainly disgusting how animals for food are treated. And it is certainly true that, if you are disgusted, you will avoid the disgusting thing. (I guarantee you that if you read Peter Singer’s Consider the Turkey, you won’t be able to eat Turkey on Thanksgiving.) But the problem, from the point of view of an animal rights activist, is that not only do people avoid disgusting things, they also avoid things which promise to make them disgusted. (Like, how likely are you, now, to read Peter Singer’s Consider the turkey?) The always reliably motivating emotion is … anger

And what do we get angry about? Well, just as Swann and Proust’s narrator are always toying with different theories, you and I are too. In my case, I once heard (I can’t remember where) that anger is always about perceived disrespect. We humans carry around with us an individualized moral hierarchy, a ranking of the social sphere which says that, as a matter of moral imperative, certain people and certain groups must be gived proper respect. It is imperative that these rules be observed by other people and defended by those who can do so. One gets angry when these rules are not followed. Anger motivates action.

Hence this website! I always admired Richard Moran’s work. But it wasn’t until he angered me, that I had the energy to make this website. I recently read a LRB review by Peter E. Gordon of a new Marx book or translation. The upshot about Marx was that he was driven by anger. I had never thought about that in Marx’s case, and it would be interesting to see how that played out in Marx’s case. But generally, we are social creatures and therefore writing criticism is painful. Anyone who writes criticism must have some underlying, motivating anger; otherwise, they would never stomach the associated pain.

Two features of my own social-moral hierarchy.

1) Me and mine need to be given their due respect.

2) Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

This second one corresponds nicely with the BPD. It is an orientation to other people’s internal states of comfort or anxiety. Life is not about accomplishing this then that. It’s about living in a complex emotional field. Different people represent different sets of emotions. Coming to close to someone and you will absorb their anxiety or depression. One also is scanning the horizon for any possible example of complacency. Complacency is the ultimate outrage, and one is morally required to pillage and sack.

Freud scores highly on both 1 and 2. For 1, I am among those who are part of his tribe, that is, those who believe in transference. For 2, he was Jewish and living at the time of National Socialism. And today he is routinely dismissed by the complacent class.

Charles Taylor describes Freud’s appeal as a role model. <Find the cite and put it here>. Actually, prior to the Thursday swerve into Moran’s discussion of Freud, I proposed to Moran that he was saying something similar. <find and cite here>

If we really believe Freud then we don’t know why Moran canceled me, and Moran himself doesn’t know either. From his perspective, my best guess is he was frustrated with my mania and my destructive comments. He also had a prior about me, namely that I didn’t have a big name, and there was little cost to him to disrespect me. We might say he likes being in control, doesn’t like having his theories misunderstood (even becomes incensed by it) and wouldn’t be where he is if he weren’t a prima donna.

Maybe we could say about Moran: He was feeling too much anxiety that he would not be safe with me. He wanted to get back into control by making a strong decision, acting aggressively.

If we asked ourselves: was he trying to achieve a goal here? A goal in the real world? Yes. He wanted to stop getting emails. He wanted to get out of this podcast this crazy manic guy. Was this directed toward satisfaction of a desire in the real world? I don’t think that was primary. It would have only been secondary in the sense of, “There are a lot of demands on my time, and I need to cut off things that aren’t productive. I also need to cut off things with crazy people.

At any rate, he canceled me. I was so terribly hurt. I felt sorry for myself. I felt like such a loser because what I did all weekend was figure out that his entire discussion of Freud was … WRONG. Somehow, so energized at feeling I was being helpful to him, that he would be so happy that I had kept him from these big mistakes in his future book, I was fantasizing about how he would thank me for my help with Freud. I was fantasizing he would say, about his next book, you know I should really make Baker a co-author because that work he did that weekend was simply brilliant. This is embarrassing to admit. But wtf.

Why the anger? Sure there were the obvious things: former hero cancels you; he violated the moral rule (in my mind) that one should only disrespect up (not disrespect down). Challenge the coach, but never the Zamboni driver. He also violated the moral rule of looking a gift horse in the mouth. I believe there are too many writers in the world and not enough readers.

(You would think Moran would agree with this. He has said elsewhere that reading itself is, for him, a form of philosophical activity).

I was not getting paid to read his work. I don’t get paid from the podcasts. I put myself in the position of offering authors both (1) marketing, new potential readers and (2) comments from a sensitive/careful reader. What I get does not cost them anything. I get two things that are very valuable to me, viz., (1) good conversation and (2) the deadline of needing to read their book by X date, and needing to collect my thoughts on it. Neither of those two things cost them anything. Basically, every single author I’ve talked to has, I think, enjoyed the conversation. Many of them have said so. One was so kind as to say it was the best interview of their career.

In other words I am both a Zamboni drive and the gift horse.

But what I am most aware of—in terms of why this hurt so much—is that Moran never seemed to pay attention to what I said. I mean I am sure he is wrong. It is possible someone could show me I’m not correct. But until someone corrects me, I think it is absolutely clear he was wrong about Freud. I basically think the paragraphs he wrote were written quickly and somehow survived the peer review process. But they really don’t make sense.

Can I trust myself? Can I trust that that is in fact a big part of my anger? Not being listened to sounds pretty noble. It sounds like I am saying something because I think people will side with me. Or something that will help me side with me. That could be true. Anyway, emotions are overdetermined. But I will say that after he canceled me, I tried to get him to reconsider, and at that time, I offered both that we would talk about Proust only (not Freud). I also offered just to talk to him. Just to talk to him—forget about the podcast—no recording. I just wanted him to see what I was saying. I’m pretty good at this point at realizing that many people will hear me, and it won’t affect them. They will go on as before. But for someone to blow me off, after I had spent all this time—on their project no less—and not even be given a hearing. As far as I am aware, that is the thing that really irked me. That is why I created this website.

Emotional reasoning.

Part of the bias against showing emotions is that we discount reasoning done when we are under the spell of emotions. Why is that? Why do we have the preference for the reasoning done when we are at homeostatis? I am not convinced there are good reasons for that.

Even about this issue, as I think more and more—and as time goes by—I look back at things I wrote on this website and they seem wrong because they are “too emotional.” I see a lot of splitting. For example: Moran is the worst person in the world, and Lear and Taylor are the best. Everything seems hyperbolic. I seem to trying obviously to appeal to somemember of the gallery who is choosing between me and Moran.

Basically it seems “childish.” But I am resistant to erase those earlier thoughts. I think they have a wisdom to them. I’m tired of people preferring the depressive stance to the paranoid stance. So I am going to keep everything I write here.

Below, accordingly are some things I wrote earlier on this topic, that I would distance myself from when I am more “constant.”

My supposed emotionality was his stated reason. But another reason could be that I pointed out problems in his paper. His response to this was equivocal and catty. Rather than countenancing my criticisms, he tried to use that reductive “professional” humor so common these days He said something like, “Little did I know that I would make you so mad about something so minor as Freud’s theory of something.”

It was hurtful, dismissive, arrogant.

I asked him to reconsider, but I have not heard back from him and, based on prior experience with people who have canceled me, I expect he probably won’t even read my email much less respond to me.

Of course this does get an emotional response out of me. I feel hurt, ashamed, and treated unfairly. Like most cancelers, he will simply give me the silent treatment, and expect me to just stifle myself somehow.

This is the technique of “You are too emotional, so I won’t talk to you, or listen to what you say.” It is diabolical since naturally the recipient is infuriated hence fulfills the cancelers diagnosis. The canceler causes the very emotionality they diagnosed in the first place.

I don’t really feel like just taking this without any response.

Thus this website.

My first three pages will be: (1) the story of what happened (a sort of play by play for the emails) (2) all the emails between us. And (3) a brief-as-possible summary of the problems with Moran’s article “Swann’s medical philosophy.” That third page will be essentially a distillation of the emails.

Is it emotionality that caused him to cancel? I think when people claim that you are being canceled because of emotions, they are really objecting not to the emotionality per se but the valence of it. That is, if my comments had been positive, if my emotionality had been an admiring emotionality, he wouldn’t have canceled.

To the extent that it really is emotionality that causes people to cancel someone, it is the negative emotionality. My comments were critical of his work. We might suspect he was also afraid that I was manic, that I was showing too much interest in his work. This seemed in some way unsafe to him.

I have been canceled for emotionality many times. Probably a dozen times over the past 10 years. But this is the first time, it was a philosopher, a podcast guest who did so. Yes I am passionate about philosophy and all the articles I read. Until Moran, everyone says they value and appreciate the energy I bring to their work. Ask Owen Flanagan to take one example. Or Alex Byrne. I was more critical and more manic with both of them than with Moran.

How disappointing it can be to meet one’s heroes.