Hello Friends,
I have finished classes for the Spring semester and grades have been submitted. Graduation ceremonies are this coming weekend and so it is time to dust off my doctoral gown, which I still think looks more like something a wizard would wear than something to indicate academic training.
My son still has a few more weeks before his summer vacation begins, but I am already leaning hard into a new rhythm and flow defined by forgetting what day of the week it is while spending many hours doing yard work and making progress on my next book (you will hear more about that in the weeks to come).
I hope that whatever your circumstances and whatever your summer plans that you are making intentional effort to mark time in ways that facilitates joy today and hope for tomorrow.
In this May Newsletter I will give a few updates on my activities, then offer a suggestion for some music and a book to check out, then I will turn to a rather extended reflection about two types of leadership and why we should strive to be more like “canvases” than like “mirrors.”
I hope you enjoy the newsletter and continue to walk the trails of life with me as we think together about things that matter.
As always, please feel free to reach out to me at simmonsphilosopher@gmail.com and be sure to check out the links and new material updated regularly on my website.
In appreciation and respect,
Aaron
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Activities and Updates
Book Tour
I just returned from an amazing book tour through the midwest (with stops in Knoxville, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, South Bend, Bourbonais, and Bloomington). It was wonderful to meet so many folks on the tour! At one university, the provost came up to me after the talk and said that in all her time at that institution, the only time she had ever cried on campus was during my talk! In particular, she said that she was moved by my call for students to approach their education differently with an eye toward becoming persons, not just employees. Anyway, it was a wonderful time and a huge “thank you” to everyone who helped with the logistics and served as hosts along the way.
Philosophy Happy Hour
I will doing a Philosophy Happy Hour for paid subscribers this month on May 13th at 8pm EST. I will be sending out a link to all paid subscribers just before the event, so please mark it on your calendar and get signed up so you can join me for the live conversation!
On My Playlist
Having just spent a bunch of hours grading last week, I think that I have discovered the perfect music to make that otherwise pretty miserable activity much more enjoyable! It is the music of the band, Zeal and Ardor.
This is not a band for the faint of heart or the metal-opposed. It is pretty intense stuff, but wow it is good! Think black gospel meets black metal. An amazing mix of genres that definitely don’t seem to go together in any sensible way. And yet it works so very, very well.
By far my favorite track by them is “Götterdämmerung,” which is a banger straight out of the gate! I admit that I was headbanging pretty hard while listening it at my local coffee shop while doing my grading! ha.
Even if you don’t care for the intensity and distorted vocals, listen to some of the tracks that lean harder into the old-time-spirituals lane like “Devil is Fine.” In any case, definitely worth checking out (especially if you still have some exams to get through!)
Philosophers Worth Knowing About
My primary area of specialization is philosophy of religion. I try my best to avoid leaning too hard into that space here on Philosophy in the Wild, but this month, I do want to recommend a book (to which I contributed a chapter) that I think you will enjoy if you like philosophy mixed with some personal narratives. The book is Partnering with God and it is edited by Tim Reddish, Bonnie Rambob, Fran Stedman, and Tomas Jay Oord.
The book consists of 77 (!!!) chapters - but don’t worry each is VERY short. These are basically personal accounts of what it means to understand the divine in deeply relational ways. Even if you are not a theist or find religion to be a big mess, this book is likely to give you a different take on how things could be understood.
I definitely don’t agree with everything the various contributors claim, but I love the opportunity to think deeply about important stuff with folks who all approach it from a perspective of humility and charity, rather than undo emphasis on power and necessity.
I was honored to contribute to this volume and my chapter is all about my sister cancer diagnosis when she was just three years old. If you are looking for “God has a plan and everything happens for a reason” sort of stuff, this is not the book for you, but if you are more interested in thinking through what it means to live in the tension between the possible goodness of God and the reality of continued difficulty in the world, then you might find this book to be a resource worth checking out.
Let’s Think Together
Mirrors are weird because they are perfect Kantian moralists.
For Immanuel Kant, an 18th Century German philosopher, moral life is a matter of action according to a rational algorithm. Kant terms this algorithm the “Categorical Imperative.” The idea is that, as rational beings, we are under an imperative (obligation) to do what is categorically required. In other words, we don’t get to decide what to do relative to our circumstances, or our interests, or our preferences. Instead, we must do what is rationally necessary in all cases. For example, we are under an obligation to tell the truth at all times—with no consideration of the consequences. Kant’s moral vision is, as you can probably tell, unflinchingly rigid. There can be no compromise. Do what you ought to do, what you must do. Your personal interests are irrelevant. Full stop.
Mirrors work the same way, they do not show us what we want to see. They simply, and baldly, show us what is there. They do not present images through filters and with soft edges. They force us to confront what is the case with all the wrinkles and scars. We may desire things to be different, but this is what they are and the mirror forces us to own up to it.
It is interesting that humans work so hard to avoid mirrors (both literally and metaphorically). As a literal example, in some Jewish homes, sitting Shiva often involves covering the mirrors during the mourning period so that nobody is self-conscious about what they look like (with faces marred by tears and twisted by grief). Metaphorically, Michael Jackson (perhaps ironically given what has come out about his own behavior since his death) tells us to look at the “man in the mirror” in order to weigh and consider whether we like what we see. Mirrors, like bathroom scales, are uncompromising in their commitment to indiscriminate truth-telling.
Yet, this is also why mirrors and bathroom scales are assholes.
Sometimes, what we need is not simply to be confronted with the way things are, but to be invited to envision the way that they could be. Kantian morality is demanding and so refuses to make morality just look like whatever I desire, but it is also deadening at the level of encouraging moral living. It is important to know what we look like such that we attend to the way things are (maybe I have spinach in my teeth, or missed a button on my shirt), but it is equally important to be encouraged to see things as they could be, not simply as they are.
Think about it. If we lean into the metaphorical side of things, it is definitely worthwhile to own up to who and how we are currently—the sort of person that we are and the way that others see us. But, only ever knowing how we are seen does little to help us envision other ways of being such that we could be seen and known differently. Maybe we don’t like what we see when we look “in the mirror.” Perhaps that vision inspires us to transformation. We can only get somewhere else if we are aware of where we need to go from where we are.
But, even if looking in the mirror might inspire such awareness, it is not due to what we see, but how we take ourselves up in relation to what we see. By themselves, ultimately, the issue with mirrors is that they do not invite us to live into freedom, but instead simply to acquiesce to things as necessarily as they are. Nonetheless, precious little is necessary. Almost everything that the mirror shows us as “reality” could have been different. I could have eaten cake instead of spinach and thus avoided the green stuff between my teeth. I could have worn an Easter Bunny costume today instead of going business casual (whether or not I buttoned up correctly).
In this way, by taking a good look in the mirror, we seem to have run up against the philosophical principle known as the “naturalistic fallacy.” The naturalistic fallacy is basically the notion that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” I know that this might sound a bit abstract and detached from the “real world” of our lived experience, but in fact it is deeply practical and should hit us where we live!
All of us need to realize that what is currently the case does not dictate the way that things will definitely play out tomorrow. Possibility is much more pervasive than we often admit. To give an example, here, you probably have been in meetings where a new idea was being proposed, but then was shot down without discussion when someone said, “But that is not how we have always done it.”
To that I simply say, ugh. Well, maybe I can say a bit more than that . . .
Importantly, explanation (why we have done something a particular way) is not the same thing as justification (reasons why doing it that way is the best option). The Naturalistic Fallacy is a fallacy precisely because it forgets this fact. Far too often in life we act as if the way things are is simply how they have to be. Such confusion shows up in a narrative about the so-called “real-world.” We are sure you have heard, and have probably said, things like:
· “That’s just the way the world is.”
· “That’s the real world for ya.”
· “Welcome to the real world.”
· “When you get into the real world you will be in for a rude awakening!”
Firmly situated in the “real world,” we assume that mirrors are the only option. Mirrors tell us just to learn how the “real world” works and act accordingly. Mirrors make it seem like not only does everything happen for a reason, but whatever happens had to occur.
There is a contemporary philosopher named Simon Critchley who has a small book called Things Merely Are. Regardless of what he used that phrase to convey (he was actually offering a profound consideration of the poetry of Wallace Stevens), it is as if, here, in our mirror-defined-sense-of-the-world, we are confronted with this statement as the explanation (read: justification) for going with the flow, getting on board, not rocking the boat, or whatever other metaphor that serves as a stand-in for cultivated complacency.
Thankfully, the world is not a hall of mirrors. Reflection is not the only option.
Creation remains possible because necessity is an idol with clay feet.
Rather than living such that the world is one all-consuming mirror, we can (and I believe should) see it as more akin to a blank canvas. Canvases do not reflect, but instead stand as empty spaces upon which to draw and paint. They are textured so as to receive the color, but they ultimately reflect the textures applied to them depending on the materials used.
Whereas mirrors are descriptions, canvases are invitations.
If mirrors slide into the Naturalistic Fallacy and thereby confuse the “is” with the “ought,” canvases encourage continued consideration of the “could be.” Although mirrors are Kantian moralists, canvases are Levinasians.
Emmanuel Levinas, the 20th Century French phenomenologist, suggests that our existence is conditioned and constituted by a relation to others. Our very selfhood is a literal response to them. Although Levinasian philosophy is notoriously difficult, its important distinction from Kantian thought is that Kant locates decision solidly as grounded in our radical freedom, whereas Levinas looks to our essential relationality. Now, the basic ideas of freedom and relationships are not at odds with each other. But, when we push things too far, we can begin to see how it might be that we are tempted by excessive rigidity in both directions.
All freedom and no relationships leads to a deeply problematic egoism. My own interests are all that matter and my freedom is located in my ability to pursue my own desires without constraint. Alternatively, all relationship and no freedom leads to an equally problematic lack of agency. In such a situation, we would be presented by lots of alternatives and yet lack the ability to lean into the importance of my decision about how to move forward.
Kant overcomes the temptation to excessive egoism by turning to rationality as a moral constraint on our freedom. We are free to choose to do what is rationally required—and thereby be virtuous. Or, we can freely choose to reject what is rationally required—and thereby be vicious. But the freedom is not activated in deciding what is right, but simply in whether or not we will bring our desires in line with what is necessarily the case according to reason.
In contrast, Levinas avoids the temptation to relational excess by stressing that when we take ourselves up as constituted by relationships, we then come to see our freedom, our agency, our decisions, as mattering precisely because it is up to us how we will choose to respond to the “call” of all the others with whom we are in relation. Whereas Kant (mirrors) say that we “must” do this or that, Levinas (canvases) say that we have to decide what to do given that we don’t have the option to locate our freedom beyond the pale of social entanglements.
It is almost as if the existential canvas upon which we paint is more like a public wall and we have been invited to paint a mural for everyone to see as they pass by going about their daily lives. Sure, we could decide just to paint it all black and leave it at that. We could do a Rothko-esque series of squares in different colors. Maybe we decide to do a scene of families enjoying the city. Perhaps we forego painting it ourselves and instead invite local artists all to come and do part of it so that it ends up being an expression of the community itself. We could even choose not to paint it at all and just leave it the way it is.
But, no matter what we do, how it looks is up to us in an important way. To my mind, seeing the world as a canvas is a much richer approach than to see the world as a big mirror because we do not get stuck in the way things are in “the real world,” but instead find ourselves always already implicated in deciding what world should be made “real.”
Sure, things might seem a lot easier if our decisions are limited and if we convince ourselves that we are just doing what is required. Yes, it is easy to feel good about yourself if you didn’t really have the ability to be radically different. When faced with mirrors, labeling whatever you see as what ought to be seen takes care of the anxiety of moral decision. Leaders often lean into this mirror-logic because it allows them to avoid the weight of responsibility that attends the awareness that things could be otherwise.
Appeals to “the real world” are often deployed in the effort to explain where a leader stands as if there were no other option for places she could stand. Although we grant that such an approach does make things easier on the leader because it minimizes the actual responsibility that rests on their shoulders, it also undermines the point of leadership in the first place. My basic view is that the best leaders are those who facilitate ways in which others can then inhabit their own freedom.
Mirror-leaders are those who merely reflect what they take to be “reality” and so strip away the freedom of those in their community by refusing to live into their own responsibilities as leaders.
Canvas-leaders are those who do not seek to make sure everyone looks like the image in the mirror, but instead create spaces whereby others can decide who they hope to become. Mirror-leaders build communities by making all the houses look the same and then handing them over to folks wanting to move into the neighborhood (well except for their own, which is the big one on the hill of which everyone else is jealous and to which they all aspire). Canvas-leaders build communities by teaching folks how to lay sheetrock, cut molding, and apply paint and then find ways to continue expanding the borders of the neighborhood so that new homes can continue to be built.
Mirrors are about necessity. Canvases are about contingency.
Mirrors are about stability. Canvases are about fragility (each brush stroke changes what things).
Mirrors are about finality. Canvases are about the continued possibility of what can be done.
My hope is that we can find better ways to encourage each other to create spaces at our jobs, our homes, and in our society where everyone feels invested in encouraging others to continue to take up their own paintbrushes and add to the emerging picture.
As always, thank you for walking with me and talking along the way! Please drop a comment and let me know your thoughts about mirror-leaders and canvas-leaders. Which are you? How can we cultivate more of the latter?
Please share this post on your social media so that we can grow the community here!
https://youtu.be/xAHIb8QbH7c?si=78T7bNHh1YA2c-A5
This song is never far from me and has some helpful contributions to this conversation I think