Well, with this line, Westley does a nice job of channeling the philosopher, Nietzsche. Although we have no reason to think that Nietzsche wore a mask when he wrote the following, we have good reason to think that his mustache left Westley’s in the dust:

Today I want to reflect just a bit on this shared sentiment expressed by Westley and Nietzsche. A lot depends on how we choose to interpret it. Go too far in one direction and it leads to a terrible theodicy, but go too far in the other direction and you can land in a very narrow conception of the human condition. The problem with the first extreme is a flat-footed determinism. The problem with the second extreme is an inhuman reductionism.

Let’s consider those extremes and then maybe find some ways to navigate them productively.

A Troubling Theodicy

If Nietzsche is right that finding “meaning in suffering,” is the only way that life can make sense, then it is not a big jump to the claim that all suffering is, somehow, meaningful. If life is senseless, or meaningless due to the amount and degree of suffering, then suggesting that suffering is meaningful immediately evades the pressing despair.

Notice also that Nietzsche is implicitly assuming that if we can’t find meaning in the suffering that survival becomes impossible. Almost responding to Albert Camus’s question whether or not to commit suicide, Nietzsche suggests that there just is no point in continuing to live if the suffering that defines that existence is not meaningful. So it is deeply understandable that one would try to make meaning of one’s suffering in order that one’s life have some point.

In contrast to Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of “useless suffering,” according to which suffering is absolutely gratuitous and unable to be integrated into some sort of broader calculus of existential significance, Nietzsche’s proposal is that is suffering is useless, then so is life. With that framework in mind, we can quickly see that Nietzsche is seemingly trying to find some sort of explanatory criterion by which to make sense of his experiences and the difficulties, frustrations, and pain that have been so definitive of his life.

His attempt is not something that should sound strange to us. Indeed, in one way or another, I think we all try to figure out some way to make the most of what has been made of us. And a whole bunch of life is definitely perplexing, confusing, and deeply problematic. So, we grasp for some explanation that would allow it to make sense, and for us not to feel so alone.

As such, it is almost ubiquitous to hear that “everything happens for a reason” or that “God has a plan” when stuff goes sideways in life. I have argued elsewhere that both of these claims can be true without leading to the problematic places that most folks take them. For example, it makes a lot of sense that if one is a theist, then God would have some sort of intentional vision for how God would hope the world would work out. That God has a plan is less a statement about necessity than it is about the idea of God is understood as some sort of mind. The point is that “God has a plan” does not require that God is determining outcomes, but simply that God holds views about what outcomes would be better if they obtained.

Additionally, everything does happen for a reason - that is just the nature of causation. Reasons are largely just a matter of physics and not in need of metaphysical support. But, when you hear someone claim that “everything happens for a reason,” they are almost always tacitly falling into a determinate metaphysics. The explanation for “everything” is a grand ordered system of “reasons” that ensurie positive outcomes. Suggesting that everything happens for those reasons should give us pause. Though such an ordered structure doesn’t have to be grounded in a personal intention, often appeals to some sort of divinity aid in maximizing confidence in that structure. It is simply easier to trust that someone is working behind the scenes to make sure it all is working out for the best, than it is to trust some sort of impersonal gravity toward the good (which seems so impossibly far away in the midst of a life of pain and suffering). This is how “everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan get merged into “everything happens because of God’s plan.”

It is at this point that we should start protesting that if everything is happening according to some divine plan, then what we take to be our freedom is largely an illusion. Moreover, such a perspective would eliminate the possibility of seeing some stuff in life as a break from such a plan. In other words, what we consider “bad” (or pain or suffering) would actually either be good, or be an instrumental necessity on the way to the good. In any case, the theodicy that results, according to which God’s goodness is maintained despite what seems like truly awful stuff would explain pain and suffering in ways that make it something not to bemoan, but to embrace.

“This sucks,” we might say. “Not so fast, it is all part of God’s plan.”

This move serves to belittle the reality of the experience of suffering. It does not allow suffering to be a break from the way things should be, but instead makes it simply part of the things that are as they should be.

Such broad determinism makes a hash of the weight of moral and existential decision. It minimizes responsibility while maximizing epistemic overconfidence.

But how could Nietzsche possibly support or endorse a theodicy, given his own famous atheism and proclamation of the “death of God”? Well, I do not think that we should attribute any sort of theism to Nietzsche, but we should take seriously the ways in which his claim about suffering seeks to explain the stuff in life that most resists any such explanation. He is, like those proposing theodicies, trying to mute the bite of suffering while still finding meaning in those moments that would challenge our certainty.

A Nietzschean theodicy may not appeal to a classical theist God, but it still refuses to allow for suffering to be “useless” given that it is so deeply definitive of human experience. And that leads an all too narrow conception of our humanity itself.

A Narrow Humanity

Life is pain.
To live is to suffer.

Such claims would not be problematic if they were nuanced a bit and made more modest. For example, of course life involves pain. Absolutely to live means that there will be some suffering. Difficulties arise when we move from particular claims to comprehensive ones. In the move to broad all X is Y statements, we often miss out on the complexity and multiplicity that defines what we set out to understand and describe. Such reductionism amounts to a narrowing of perspective.

When it comes to descriptions of human existence, such narrowing is dangerous in ways that might actually lead to more suffering! You have probably heard the old adage that everything looks like a nail if all you have is a hammer. Well, I think that the same is true in relation to human experience. If life is pain, then all moments can get reduced to such pain. If to live is to suffer, then all living can be narrated through the lens of misery. What results is the Debbie Downer effect whereby there are all sorts of other ways to see things, but any attempt at finding joy, seeing beauty, experiencing gratitude, etc., become just misguided in the face of how bad things are.

When we narrow the human condition to pain and suffering, then we have a deeply skewed and incomplete account of what it means to be who we are.

Things Suck, but Not Always

If the determinism of theodicies (whether theistic or not) and the reductionism of narrow approaches to human existence are both bad options, then we might think that the best move is to view Westley and Nietzsche as just having made false claims. That is certainly an option and maybe a good one, but I worry that doing so might miss what is so importantly correct about their claims (when made more modest).

Life does often suck. It sucks in big ways (disease, corruption, systemic injustice, poverty, etc.) and it sucks in smaller ways (disappointment, frustration, annoyance, and obstacles that we wish weren’t the case, etc.). So, Westley and Nietzsche are not wrong to stress the role of pain and suffering in our lives.

But, not all of life is pain. And just in case you are wondering, my Substack is free to everyone - though pain support is greatly appreciated - and so I am not selling something, ha! Being a Debbie Downer is bad, but so is being a Jolly Jay, who sees everything as wonderful and never admits that stuff goes sideways a lot more than we wish it did.

Moreover, Nietzsche is not wrong to suggest that we might be able to try to find some meaning in some suffering. Here I stress the qualifiers. Explanations, and justifications, are not a problem (they are very good things and we should probably demand them more of each other). but that doesn’t mean that we can get some sort or final justification of everything. We should inquire into the reasons why things have happened they way they did, but we might not need to bring God into it so often. Human cruelty, greed, and malice are often plenty to explain why stuff that sucks could have been very different.

Yes, there is some growth and wisdom that can arise from experiencing difficulty, but that doesn’t mean that the suffering was “necessary.” Indeed, I tend to think that the most productive growth that happens from such experiences is fostered when we admit that those experiences genuinely are awful.

Life can be painful. Life will likely involve suffering. But, we can and should do our best to minimize such things. Finding joy when it is possible to do so is a skill to cultivate. Figuring out what wisdom can be gained from stuff we will had been otherwise is a good practice, but so is admitting that suffering also might just be “useless.”

I know that this post is not exactly breezy and inspiring. But, I maybe it is true - and perhaps that is of some benefit to you today.

And if you want something that is inspiring, here is a picture of the bikes that my friends and I have on the backporch of the cabin where we are currently staying to do downhill mountain biking in West Virginia. Well, that is the hope at least. Currently, we are all inside frustrated because it rained so badly today that we couldn’t ride at all. That sucks, but maybe tomorrow will be better. Life is not always painful. To live is not simply to suffer. Sometimes the sun comes out and the trails are dry enough to ride.

In shared hope.

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Brett holds a Ph.D. in religious studies and is one of the best thinkers I know. He has a standing invitation to write for “Philosophy in the Wild” anytime and you may have seen his earlier posts on Bon Iver and Justin Townes Earl. Well, today Brett offers another in his series of reflective and moving essays on artists that deserve not only our attention, but our affective investment. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Written by Brett Land:

Dolly Parton’s done ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Anything’s possible.
- Robert Plant

All cities are heroin cities now.
- Evan Dando

A typical Jason Isbell album has one, maybe two, hard rocking songs. Rare is the Isbell all-out rocker, a song heavy from start to finish. “Be Afraid,” from 2020’s Reunions, is one of these rarities. A clenched fist of a song, it’s easy to read “Be Afraid” as semi-autobiographical, since the singer is warning himself about the pitfalls of fame. “The stage belongs to you,” Isbell sings, “and you feel like a star. You can bark and snap like a dog at the man who just tuned your guitar.” It’s such a good song. In the chorus, he wails, “Be afraid, be very afraid, but do it anyway.”

An image in the final verse captures something about authenticity relative to the cover song. “I don’t think you even recognize,” Isbell sings:

“the sound of your voice
when it’s blasting
through the speakers
in the sky
and if your words
add up to nothing
then you’re making
a choice
to sing a cover
when we need
a battle cry.”

“To sing a cover when we need a battle cry.”

That’s so right.

Isbell has said in interviews that he’s talking here to music-industry insiders and other performers, but on some level, we all know what he means: to cover is to copy.[1] Covering is the opposite of invention. To cover is merely to execute, to draw between already existing lines. When we cover a song, we choose mimicry over authentic expression, and we choose the easy, familiar sing-along versus the blinking cursor of the empty page or the dread of not-knowing if something is good.

And even if, say, in your hypothetical cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” you deviate some, or change the tempo a bit, or embellish the chorus with a different intonation, it is still, at most, an interpretation of something that already existed. You didn’t make anything new. There was no furnace of creation, no creatio ex nihilo. When we write our own stuff, we take on the harder work of thinking for ourselves, and we are drawn into the confrontation-with-self that all creative endeavors presuppose: What if this actually is the worst song ever written? And a complete failure? What if everyone hates it? What if I’m not actually any good?

One lesson here is that no matter how many people in the crowd are asking for it: Don’t. Play. Freebird.

*

The primary way I fell in love with the cover song was through punk rock—or, at least, Green Day and the like—this type of cover went from slow to fast: a normally loud, fast band would take a slower song and punk it up. They’d transform the original from a sappy chart-topper into a wall of sound and adrenaline, into something that made you sing along and want to move with it. Think of the way The Atari’s drained all the dreadful heaviness from Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” and transformed it into something that had power and consequence. They coarsened Henley’s radio-play cheese into something palatable, singable, even authentic.

The direction here was from light to heavy, slow to fast.

Evan Dando’s true genius, I submit, was his uncanny ability to do the opposite: he could take something complicated and weird and not at all interesting and find an acoustic substrate, a pop essence, a golden thread that ran through the song that didn’t seem to exist before, or had been covered over with instrumentation.

He would distill a song to voice and string, simple melody, simple verse, yet somehow spine-tingling. One of the earliest examples of this is his cover of Metallica’s “Fade to Black.”[2]

This cover doesn’t actually showcase Dando’s voice, since the guitar and lyrics are emotive enough that he can stay in the same register most of the song. Gone are the pyrotechnics of the original—no building wall of sound; no snarling James Hetfield. The same lead-guitar riff but dulled to Dando’s acoustic strings, something more Lead Belly than metal, more Gibson than Fender.

Another example that showcases his voice more is his cover of The Misfits’ “Skulls.” You’d have to search to find a more disturbing song, but Dando’s voice shifts the tone completely, somehow disarming the song, dulcifying it. “Corpses all hanging headless and limp,” the song opens, and later, “Gotta have you on my wall.”

Both songs are materially more powerful in the originals—electric guitars, amplifiers, intimidating lead-singers—but Dando’s acoustic renderings unleash a different kind of power in them; a subtle, swooning power. Dando somehow makes the horror-core imagery of “Skulls” sweet, and he transmutes the death-note tone of “Fade to Black” to one of intimacy and warmth.

What is this thing that he’s doing? Do we need a word for it? Is he “acoustifying” these songs?[3]

*

If we think of a “cover” as simply a recording of a song that has already been recorded by someone else, then we might need to refine our definition. As P.D. Magnus demonstrates in his convincing A Philosophy of Cover Songs, just a few examples show the cracks in the common-sense understanding of cover-as-previously-recorded-song. “Let it Be,” written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, was first recorded and released by Aretha Franklin (this after McCarthy sent Franklin a demo with the hopes that she might record it). According to our definition, one would have to say that Lennon and McCartney covered their own song, since Franklin’s version predates theirs by a few months. The existence of “demo” recordings complicate things further because demos often exist prior to the recorded versions that become famous.

This was the case with Willie Nelson’s “Crazy.” Nelson had recorded a demo but wanted someone with a powerful voice to record it, so the song might get some exposure, yet we don’t consider Patsy Cline’s version a cover, even though it technically might be. Co-authorship muddies the picture even more, as in Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon’s “Layla,” or Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s “China Girl.” Jazz recordings and so-called “instrumental covers” should likely be an altogether different category, and finally, there is the Weird Al Yankovich problem, or rather the problem of musical parodies. This happens when an artist follows the precise melodic structure of an existing song but changes the lyrics. These parodies don’t get categorized as covers, but they are closer to standard-covers than we give them credit for.[4]

The complexities of this landscape have led scholars like Deena Weinstein and Gabriel Solis to suggest that the contemporary cover is a singular feature of rock music, “both for technological and ideological reasons,” writes Weinstein. This is why the first true cover artist was Elvis Presley, who didn’t write his own songs, and whose fame was meticulously constructed on the performance of material written by black artists.

*

Evan Dando broke into popular music in the early 1990’s as the lead singer of the Boston rock band the Lemonheads, who evolved from punkish roots into a jangly, guitar-driven sound when they discovered that Dando’s voice ought to take front and center (in the earliest iterations of the band he was the drummer). See early tracks like “Half the Time” and “Stove” from Lovey, two songs where the band seems to be discovering what would later become mainstays of their sound: jangly guitars, Dando’s voice, lyrics about stuff around the house, dumb puns. The band became staples of the so-called “alternative” music scene of the mid-90’s, finding modest success with albums like It’s a Shame About Ray and Come On Feel the Lemonheads. Dando’s magazine-cover good looks (his mother was a model) contributed to their popularity and also limited them in other ways; Sassy magazine once dubbed him “His Beautiful Blonde Sadness.” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill put out a hate-fanzine My Life with Evan Dando, Popstar, and another fanzine Die Evan Dando, Die came out the same year.

It makes a lot of sense to consider Dando’s music through the lens of the cover song, since his career has been abetted by so many of them, intentionally or not. The Lemonheads received an early jolt of attention when they covered The New Kids on the Block’s “Step by Step” for a B-side, and the same thing happened with their cover of Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” and later Paul Simon’s “Mrs. Robinson,” a cover that Dando has discussed his disdain for (“Paul Simon can suck it,” he wrote in his 2025 memoir Rumors of My Demise).

Most of Dando’s covers were esoteric, as in “Frank Mills,” a random song from the musical Hair, and “Into Your Arms” from the Australian musician Robyn St. Clare, or “Streets of Baltimore,” from Harlan Howard via Graham Parsons. I’m not even mentioning the two cover albums, Varshons (2009) and Varshons 2 (2019), which has standout covers of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Willaims, and Florida Georgia Line (an outfit that, I am happy to say, I was unfamiliar with—Dando’s cover of “Round Here” is the best example of my argument that he could transform dross to gold, that he could make the hokey, and kitsch, authentic. “That fireball whiskey whispers,” Dando sings, “temptation in my ears”).[5]

*

Historically, the relationship between cover songs and recorded music is quite complicated. One could argue that the first cover song must have appeared shortly after the technology became available that allowed artists to record published music. The cylinder-recordings of the 1890’s, then, were likely the first true published covers, which saw record companies publishing the same piece of music performed by different artists, as in the old “standards.”

But if you have had the pleasure of watching Ken Burns’ sixteen hour magnum-opus Country Music, you will know that recording a song written by someone else is a pillar of the country music tradition (Johnny Cash didn’t write “Ring of Fire,” the woman he was cheating on his wife with did; nor was he the first to record it). Early on, record companies just wanted to have versions of popular songs available to sell; covers were “coverage” in an almost literal sense. Covers were the original content. “Just as a band might try to learn the popular songs that an audience member might request,” Magnus writes, “a record company wanted to be able to have a version for sale” (9).

Rankings in trade magazines also profoundly shaped the behavior of record companies, which in turn shaped the behavior of consumers. The use of rankings as a way to measure commercial success saw the rise of the so-called “crossover” hit, which was normally a cover of a black artist’s R&B song by a white artist. We know Elvis Presley made a career covering the music of black musicians, but a more apt historical example is probably Pat Boone’s theft of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” The singer songwriter Don McLean described the dynamic this way:

“If a black act had a hot record the white kids would find out and want to hear it on ‘their’ radio station. This would prompt the record company to bring a white act into the recording studio and cut an exact, but white, version of the song to give to the white radio stations to play and thus keep the black act where it belonged, on black radio. A ‘cover’ version of a song is a racist tool (10-11).”

Magnus argues that covering, ultimately, does not inherently involve a politics of race. Instead, he sees covering as a way of establishing and projecting identity, always through a revision of—and relationship with—the original. He cites David Bowies Pin Ups from 1973, an album of covers from mid-sixties London mod-culture, and Social Distortion’s dalliance with cowpunk, as examples of covering that don’t involve race. “Although race can arise as an issue in covers,” he claims, “that is because racial issues run deep in American culture and in American music. The phenomenon of the cover song is not essentially connected to it” (11).

*

People like to remember that Kurt Cobain—through his style, lyrics, and personal choices—challenged traditional masculine norms of the time, but Dando was a part of this vanguard too. It was Dando that wore a dress to numerous events and performed in one repeatedly throughout 1993 and 1994, leading to him being photographed in a dress with Bjork by a British photographer for a magazine cover.[6] His song “Big Gay Heart” was an attempt to normalize male attraction to other men, and his cover songs were subversive too. When he’d cover a song written by a female that pined for a “he,” Dando would keep the pronouns the way they’d been written. This small act of fidelity to the original was transgressive. He sang, “How will I know if he really loves me?” in his cover of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?”

Dando’s subtle resistance to normative masculine tropes is nowhere more evident than his cover of Smudge’s “The Outdoor Type.” The title is ironic, since we learn that he’d “lied about being the outdoor type” in order to appear cool. The singer has “never set foot inside a tent” and “couldn’t build a fire” to save his life. The catchy chorus, “I lied about being the outdoor type,” stands in for the entire song as a confessional of masculine shortcomings:

“I’ve never slept out underneath the stars
The closest that I came to that
was one time my car
broke down for an hour
in the suburbs at night
I lied about being the outdoor type.”

So much about this song appealed to me as a teenager. There was the refreshing sense that it was okay to say these things out loud. I couldn’t “grow a beard” or “even fight” when I first fell in love with the song (still can’t), but this contrasted with the camouflaged-legions singing along to Hank Williams Jr’s “A Country Boy Can Survive,” the masculine-anthem of the 90’s in the South. The sincerity of lines like, “couldn’t build a fire to save my life,” even if they weren’t true in my case, felt like they opened up new ways of being a man. These were the kind of things, after all, that would get you mocked in front of country-boys-that-knew-how-to-survive. Nobody wants to admit to having “never owned a sleeping bag,” but Dando somehow softens the alienation I feel every time I walk into REI and realize I need to spend thousands of dollars to go camping.[7] There’s also the way that the song makes confessing an act of authenticity. It was okay that, as a ten-year old camping in the backyard, I’d woken up shivering and went inside and slept in the comfort of my bed—for so long, there had been shame about that.

*

As I was revising this essay, I came across this article.

This wasn’t a surprise. Dando has been acting high and erratic for as long as he’s been famous, which is coming on four decades now. He has a long history of discussing his drug use in interviews with alarming candor. There’s the time in 1994 when he lost his voice on a crack binge and had to do interviews for Come on Feel the Lemonheads and instead of cancelling the interviews (like any sane person would do) he showed up and wrote his communication to the journalists on little scraps of paper. He told them, or wrote to them, that he’d lost his voice smoking crack, and he described details about preparing and using the drug, and what it feels like—a stunt that didn’t have the effect Dando thought (he later wrote “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” about the experience).

There’s the time he and Johnny Depp took acid and climbed the scaffolding of the Atlantic Records building up to the 20^th floor only because they thought it would be funny to surprise the people they knew working inside. There’s the time in 1995 that two women convinced Dando to leave the Glastonbury festival hours before his band was due on stage, making the Lemonheads officially no-shows at Glastonbury that year. And there’s the time that Dando and Rick James (yes, that Rick James) and some other people took guns to the roof of a music studio during the Rodney King riots and fired their guns in the air when looters approached the building, all of it while high on too many drugs to list here. All of these stories are detailed in Dando’s 2025 memoir Rumors of My Demise, an absurd book that takes a blithe tone about his drug use. I say “absurd” because any reading of Dando’s take on his drug use seems like denial parading as a lack of shame. Here are just a few of the things he says about drugs in Rumors:

“Heroin was different than other drugs I’d tried. It gave me a real comfortable feeling. I was a moody guy, and I never knew how I was gonna feel or what situations would weird me out. Heroin was something I could do that would guarantee me feeling good for about six to twelve hours. I was sad and angry, putting out fires in the only way I knew possible.” (81)

“I don’t advise self-medicating. I’d use speed and cocaine to try to stay awake for as long as possible, and then I’d use alcohol and weed to come down. If there was something stronger available to help me achieve either of those ends, even better. I’m talking to you, Xanax and Valium. The best sleep came after taking a shot of heroin. To know I was going to get a guaranteed good time was worth a lot to me. If there was something that stopped you from waking up in the middle of the night and screaming your head-off, would you take it?” (89)

“[Graham] Parsons’s tragic death by overdose in the California desert at the age of twenty-six struck a chord with me. I was still experimenting with heroin, chipping, but relatively clean and hadn’t had any major scares. On more than ten occasions I’ve made the pilgrimage out to the Joshua Tree Inn, where Gram Parsons overdosed, and have stayed int the room where he died—room 8.” (105)

“I went to Silver Hill [rehab] to recover from my misadventures in Australia, but I didn’t want to stop getting high. Not then. Not ever. Rehab was an opportunity to come back to myself, but it wasn’t this big, life-changing experience for me. Rehab never is. For some people rehab clearly defines their lives in terms of before and after. It wasn’t that big of a deal for me.”

“People used to be so heavy about drugs they declared war on them. I was just a young, sensitive kid who liked to get high. I didn’t see the harm in it. I was into altered states, the whole acid thing, the potential to expand human consciousness. I was interested in all that stuff, but to say that I was just ‘intellectually curious’ is a cop-out because I ended up a heroin addict. Obviously, there is some danger there. You have to be smart about it, or at least smarter than I was.” (253)

“After my parents’ divorce, I didn’t see the point in staying positive. I wanted to get fucked up and break things.” (254)

“When I see a photograph of myself high on heroin, I look…wrong. Others might not see it, but I’ll recognize it right away. I’ve got a glaze over me. I look damaged, diminished.”

We see it, too, Mr. Dando, the heroin glaze-over; we have always seen it. Does it help that Dando started taking drugs to curb debilitating night-terrors and sleepwalking episodes, which he suffered from since he was a teenager? The drugs assured him he would wake up in the same place he’d fallen asleep. “I think some people were supposed to take drugs,” Dando told the Guardian in an interview for Rumors, “and one of them was me.”

Ugh. Fine. Can we forgive him this? Can we remember that we are talking about a person who achieved indie-darling notoriety for a song he wrote called “My Drug Buddy”—so it understandable that he might be confused about what drugs have done for him.[8]

My close friends had an encounter with Dando after a concert where he asked them to score drugs—hand to God I am not making this up—and then someone got him drugs and he stayed at the bar and did the drugs with whoever wanted to stay. And, as the article I mentioned earlier reports, his wife claims that he was so erratic and strange during a Tiny Desk Concert taping—part of the promotional blitz for the 2025 Lemonheads album Love Chant (an absolute joke of an album)—that both NPR and the Lemonheads have agreed it will never be released.

*

At least since high school, I’ve been attempting to play and sing just about every song that makes me sing along with it. If I’m bobbing my head to a song during my workout—say “How Lucky” by John Prine, or “That’s the Way the World Goes Round”—then the odds are near one hundred percent that at my house later when I have five minutes to spare I’m going to take the guitar off the wall and start messing around with chords, maybe a capo, until I can find the basic melody. If I don’t get it after a few minutes, I’ll look on the computer and see if someone else has figured it out.

After a few run-throughs with the song, if no one is around, I’ll try and sing it. “Sing” is perhaps the wrong word—squeak and squeal, maybe, strain and struggle, likely. My first attempts at singing any song will sound like I’m trying to mimic the voice in the original. It will sound like I’m doing a bad John Prine impression, or a Springsteen, or whoever, and this will be the case for the first ten or twenty times I sing it, maybe always. I don’t think professional singers have this problem, but it happens to me every time I learn a new song. I somehow can’t get past a fidelity to the original.

On the few occasions I have written songs, the weird opposite happens. The singing comes naturally. I’m not saying that songwriting is easy; it is so incredibly hard. The writing of lyrics and the matching of those lyrics to a melody, and the endless combinations one can try, can be maddening. But the actual voice comes out smooth, and whatever highs or lows I need to hit, I can, and the feeling of strain, or of bland indistinction, is entirely absent. My voice feels vital. Singular.

I think this is because the original is mine and has only ever been mine. However I make it, however I sing it, is how it is supposed to be. With a song I didn’t write, there is the unshakeable feeling of measuring to some other, of the violence of comparison. While this tells us something about why a great cover song is no easy achievement, it also tells us about the freedom of original creation and its quixotic relationship to authenticity. We find our voice—our true, unstrained voice—only when we are courageous enough to leave the save confines of precedent and into the intimidating, wide-open spaces of true creation. There’s a battle-cry in there, waiting to come out.

*

Here’s a conversation starter: What’s your favorite cover song?
I’ve been asking this to friends for weeks now. People love talking about it. They often smile as they recall a song. They usually take their phones out and insist on playing it.

A great cover can spark a unique sort of obsession in us. When one gets its hooks in me, I’ll listen to it thirty times in a row because I get convinced it is the most perfect piece of music. It’s happening right now with Dwight Yoakam’s cover of “Purple Rain.”

I’ve been thinking about why I love this version so much. I suspect it distantly reminds me of South Carolina (there is always, for a southerner now living in California, the feeling of exile, and underneath everything one pines for the South). It must remind me of childhood on some level, which is when the original was popular. Maybe it’s a combination of Yoakam’s voice and the familiarity of the song, a feeling of both new and old colliding, a kind of sonic uncanny. Whatever is happening, I can’t get it out of my head.

I think the true draw of the cover song—the thing that Evan Dando was so good at unleashing—holds a unique power over us. The appeal reminds me of why we are pulled to memoir, and movies about historical events, as opposed to pure fiction—they make a different kind of claim on us, and they speak to us directly, with urgency. The cover song does something similar with music: it delivers a potent combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and it speaks to us in ways that other songs don’t—we recognize it, but it is new.

*

In almost every way, the story of Evan Dando as a musician is the story of a talent that was never fully realized. It is a formidable talent—a voice like that, a face like that—that got lost in the trappings of fame. Dando’s songwriting career will be seen as a few faint flares across an otherwise dark sky; but his cover songs, to those of us in the know, are exceptional. If asked, we will tell you: this guy did not write much himself, but for a brief time in the latter days of the previous century, he could make just about any song beautiful.

***

An Incomplete List of Songs Evan Dando Has Covered Throughout His Career, Either with the Lemonheads or as a Solo Artist. Some Are Recorded in Studio and Some Are Performed Live.

• John Prine “Sam Stone”

• John Prine “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”

• Lucinda Williams “Abandoned”

• Lucinda Williams “The Nights Too Long”

• Metallica “Fade to Black”

• Whitney Houston “How Will I Know?”

• Graham Parson “1000 Dollar Wedding”

• Graham Parson “A Song For You”

• Hank Williams, “Won’t You Sometimes Think of Me”

• Smudge “The Outdoor Type”

• Smudge “Tenderfoot”

• Smudge “Divan”

• Smudge “Not Here For a Haircut”

• Victoria Williams “Frying Pan”

• Echo and the Bunnymen “The Killing Moon”

• Big Star “Thirteen”

• Big Star “The Ballad of El Goodo”

• The Eagles “Take It Easy”

• Townes Van Zandt “Waiting Around to Die”

• Townes Van Zandt “Pancho and Lefty”

• Michael Nesmith/Linda Ronstadt “Different Drum”

• Misfits “Skulls”

• REO Speedwagon “Keep On Loving You”

• Oasis “Live Forever”

• New Kids On the Block “Step by Step”

• Abba “Knowing Me, Knowing You”

• Suzanne Vega “Luka”

• Neil Young “Thrasher”

• Glen Campbell “Galveston”

• John Waite, “Missing You”

• The Nightcrawlers “The Little Black Egg”

• Harlan Howard “The Streets of Baltimore”

• “Frank Mills” from the musical Hair

• “My Hero, Zero” from the School House Rock! Rocks compilation, 1996

• Paul Simon “Mrs. Robinson”

• The Bevis Frond “Lights Are Changing”

• Rainer Ptacek “Rudy With a Flashlight”

• Cole Porter “Miss Otis Regrets”

• The Jayhawks “Settled Down Like Rain”

• Carol King “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”

• Flamin Groovies “You Tore Me Down”

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NOTES

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/879263762/jason-isbell-on-honesty-in-songwriting-and-doing-the-right-thing

[2] In what follows I refer to “Evan Dando” and “The Lemonheads” interchangeably and use them as synonyms. I refer to Dando in the past tense not because he is deceased but because he is unable to perform these songs at the level I am writing about.

[3] I find this also to be the case with Dando’s cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” also famously covered by Elliot Smith. Dando’s voice is far more traditionally beautiful than Smith’s, and the warmth of his version contrasts with Smith’s strained, razor-blade falsetto.

[4] Think the parody isn’t really a problem relative to cover songs? “The percentage of words,” Magnus argues, “shared between the original and the parody does not seem to matter.” Magnus takes the case of Kid Cudi’s “50 Ways to Make a Record,” which is a sort of revision of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” “There is a parallel structure in the title and lyrics between Cudi and Simon but also between [the cases of] Yankovic and Queen. Perhaps the only thing which stops “Another One Rides the Bus” from being a cover is that it is a parody, which in turn is because it is funny. And “50 Ways to Make a Record” counts as a cover because it is not a parody, which in turn is because it is not funny. John P. Thomerson, who denies that parodies have to be humorous, seems to count all co vers as parodies; he refers to typical cover band performances as ‘reverential parodies of classic rock and country hits.’ A definition of ‘cover’ should be able to make sense of this. Call this the problem of parodies” (5).

[5] See the incomplete list of Dando’s covers below.

[6] https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-singer-evan-dando-of-the-lemonheads-cross-dressing-news-photo/110403039

[7] I am aware that this is Philosophy in the Wild, and the front-image is a tent. For the record, I love the outdoors.

[8] See Dando’s recent duet of the song with Jimmy Fallon:

I wasn’t sure what to think about that claim then, and I am still a bit perplexed by it today. I get the idea that resistance can come in all forms and is, at its most basic, a refusal to allow some broader narrative of significance determine one’s own conception of meaning. That is fine with me, but surely there is a big difference between just trying to drink away your problems, which doesn’t actually solve any problems, and opposing the social structures by which your problems are framed in particular ways. The former strategy is escapism while the latter is potentially transformative. Or so it seems to me.

So, I have tended to hold this general line in my approach to a variety of artists that I just think are lowering the standards of what it means to be human. My annoyance at sloppy lyrics, repetitive rhythms, and general disregard for any sense of social responsibility remains in place, but something happened recently that at least has given me pause about my initial reading of my friend’s take on things.

Rarely do Spotify algorithms lead me to bands that just rock my face, (as explained by Paget Berzins so well last week in her guest post about Spotify), but recently something showed up as I was listening to some random punk playlist while writing. an academic paper about phenomenology and the ineffability of poetic expression (yeah, I know I am a nerd!) that just caused me to stop and do a deep dive into the band.

The band is Pkew, Pkew, Pkew, a punk group from Toronto.

They are genuinely fantastic and yet part of what grabbed me so profoundly is that their lyrics were basically punk versions of the kind of themes found in some of the Soundcloud stuff. Rather than getting high, they talk about getting drunk with friends. Rather than overly focused on sex, they are focused on making the most of the present. Rather than being anchored in trap rhythms, they throw back to an era of punk that was more about fun than revolution. But, what really struck me while listening to them was just how good I felt about not allowing the pressures of the world to override my need for enjoyment, beauty, and an embrace of the moments we have together.

I am not sure it is exactly the same view as expressed by my friend about Soundcloud rappers, but nonetheless their music is definitely a performative resistance to a world that says we need to put away fun in the name of maturity.

Yes, I am very well aware that they struck me as profound while Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Peep make me want to kick a hole in my speakers so that I can stop the “music,” is probably directly connected to my own social position, my musical preferences, and even my age. And yet, even though I have absolutely no desire to return to those rappers to give them another chance (NOPE!), I admit that I like Pkew, Pkew, Pkew so much that they have caused me to see the radical importance of understanding fun as a kind of refusal to give into the meaning making machine of those who need us to be like them in order to reinforce the status quo.

I have often said that I go mountain biking or trout fishing in order to find the energy and charity to continue navigating a world gone mad. Out in the wild I am able to escape in order to return with purpose. I think that music likely works the same way. Escapism in theology is disastrous, but it might be very needed in relation to one’s own embrace of where you find yourself. Work can’t mean everything. Politics can’t be all consuming. Stress is deadly. Fun, just for its own sake, is a performance of one’s shared humanity as we escape the insanity to be remind ourselves why it is worth diving back in and trying to make things better.

Alright, that’s enough philosophy. Let’s have some fun. Here are some tracks that really just make me want to jump around my living room and refuse to be a grown-up at least just for a while.

The song that caused me to stop working and pay attention was “Mid 20s Skateboarder,” which has the great refrain “Mid 20s skateboarder, I hope I don’t get hurt.” This line immediately reminded me of biking with my friends. Though we are all late 40s and definitely don’t bounce back like we once did.

I love that this video version of the track goes straight into another song, “Blood Clot,” which definitely continues their general point about finding ways not so much to relive one’s glory days, but to realize that getting older doesn’t mean that those days are over.

Indeed, one of their other songs that explicitly makes that point is “Glory Days.”

I love the line: “If those were your glory days, I’m glad I wasn’t around. If those were your glory days, you must be real shitty now.” hahahahaha. The idea, here, is that if we spend our time looking back on the “glory days,” then we are likely living a life that is pretty uninspired currently. Moreover, folks who constantly look backwards in these ways are also probably misrepresenting that past as something it simply wasn’t.

And if you are looking for something exceptionally deep, then try on this track simply about ordering a pizza.

Occasionally there are glimmers of an awareness of the radical potential of their perspective. This is especially the case on “Let the Bridges We Burn Light the Way.”

Rather than giving in to the power structures that determine what matters in the world, they encourage the opposite approach. Having been told over and over “don’t burn bridges,” their response is simply - yeah, go ahead and burn bridges that are not worth crossing back over. This is actually really smart, if you think about it. I see it resonating with Socrates’ claim that we should not worry about what the powerful or cool people think, but only what the virtuous people think. So, yeah, burn bridges that make it harder to get back into the good graces of the people whose opinion you shouldn’t care about in the first place.

A final song I will highlight is “The Night John Buck Hit Three Home Runs.” This track is also almost a punk-meets-folk offering. It deals with some pretty heavy stuff and yet situates it in the most mundane aspects of human existence. One line that really hits me hard is “We can’t stop you from dying, so we’ll just stop you from dying alone.” Wow. As Anne Lamott says, quoting Ram Das, “in the end, we are all just walking each other home.” But, then right after that profound moment, we hear “Go Blue Jays.” The sublime in the pedestrian is where the task of life confronts us.

I hope that you will check out Pkew, Pkew, Pkew and I hope that you will also find ways to let having fun be a performed resistance to a world that tells us all to confuse professionalism with being boring.

Here is my favorite album by them if you want to listen to it all the way through (it will make you want to order pizza, drink beer, and ride skateboards, but maybe that is a pretty good idea while the rich ignore the humanity of the poor, the powerful run rough-trod over the marginal, and the privileged forget the plight of the marginal. Remember, the escape of fun as resistance is not that we ignore our social and moral obligations, but that we find ways to regain the strength to continue in the struggle. And, if anything joins us all in the human condition it is our shared vulnerability and our mutual capacity for joy. By fostering the latter we might better see the former.

In light of these realizations, I probably won’t be turning on Playboy Carti or Trippie Redd after Pkew, Pkew, Pkew, but at least maybe I have found a bit more sympathy for those who do. . . . . meh, probably not. That stuff is really, really bad.

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Moreover, I think that purely from philosophical and political perspectives that postmodernism and critical theory are exceptionally helpful resources in the attempt not to confuse our own limited viewpoint on things to somehow capture God’s perspective. Of course, we don’t “need” postmodernism and critical theory for that reminder - Paul Woodruff rightly notes that the ancient virtue of “reverence” already amounts to the notion that you should never claim divine sanction for your human initiatives (for doing so is deeply irreverent since it confuses human conceptions with divine wisdom) - they are, nonetheless, philosophical approaches that not only anchor us in our shared humanity, but also help those who claim to be Christians to do so with more self-aware integrity about the historical complexity that attends such an assertion.

Unfortunately, far too many with in Conservative American Christianity (especially within White Evangelical traditions) see postmodernism as a denial of Christian Truth (always with a capital-T), and critical theory (especially when understood in line with contemporary critical race theory) as antithetical to Christian ethics. I think that those readings are not only mistaken, but deeply misguided when it comes to appreciating the weight of responsibility that attends both thinking and living well.

Ok, well I will, no doubt, share that podcast with you all once it is released, but for today’s post I want to offer you the opening remarks that I presented in the hope that they at least open some productive questions for all of us - wherever we stand politically, philosophically, or religiously.

Postmodernism

First, let’s talk very briefly about postmodernism since I see it as the broader philosophical framework internal to which critical theory is simply one alternative. The best definition for postmodernism comes from the Christian philosopher, Merold Westphal, who simply defines it as the recognition that: “You can’t peek over God’s shoulder.”

As such, postmodernism is an epistemic claim, not a metaphysical one. It is not primarily about “what” is the case, but about “how” we should relate to whatever “whats” that we affirm. You might claim that X and someone else might claim that not-X. Fine. Postmodernism simply notes that whether you claim X or not-X, you must do so as an historical, contextual, culturally-located, embodied, experiential being who is limited in all sorts of ways. So, I guess if your “what” (or your X) is the claim that “We can know things from a God’s eye view - and we can know that we know them that way,” then sure, that would be off the table, but not because it is false, but just because making that claim would require us to occupy a position that singular existing individuals (as Kierkegaard would term them) don’t seem to be able to occupy. If one wants to object that the claim that we can’t occupy such a perspective is itself occupying such a perspective, then I would again cite Westphal who notes that within a postmodern framework, we are not deciding among capital-T Truths, but instead choosing what such Truths are worth affirming (or are warranted) as lower-case-t truths. To summarize his account on this front:

Modernism claims that “There is Truth” (that can be known objectively via Reason - also with a capital-R).

Postmodernism claims that “the truth is that there is/is not Truth” (and reason is, itself, a tool used by humans to make the best case for what they take to be True).

On this telling, and I entirely agree with him here, one could affirm objective Truth, or deny such objective Truth, but within postmodernism one would only ever do so from where one stands - as embodied, historical, cultural, etc.

Postmodernism is, then, an incredibly helpful method for insisting on the importance of epistemic humility. When Jean-François Lyotard says that postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives,” he is basically saying this same thing. He does not say “metanarratives are impossible” or that “metanarratrives are false” or even that “metanarratives should be rejected.” Instead, he just makes clear that any big-story that acts like we can get our of our lived perspective (which is so deeply shaped by social identity categories) misunderstands how to relate to knowledge claims.

As such, rejecting this postmodern view requires a denial of the virtue of reverence and acknowledging that we are not God. Postmodernism is fundamentally about the awareness required of one’s own embodied/historical/hermeneutical position in claiming to have knowledge and understand truth (with or without the capital-T).

I readily acknowledge that there are some postmodern philosophers who do sometimes seem to give in to the fallacy of thinking that just because we can’t see how we would be able to get out of our interpretive lived perspectives to know reality, that there just is no reality that is knowable. That is a non-sequitur and should be rejected. But, as I have argued at length in many other academic essays, such a “metaphysical” version of postmodernism ends up being self-refuting. The epistemic version is not only more coherent, it also has a great benefit insofar as it does not allow postmodernism to slide into being its own “worldview.” Were it to do so, it would then, itself, be a metanarrative! Accusations that it is, as are often heard from within Conservative Christianity, are thus understandable only if one appeals to the bad examples of how postmodernsim has been described.

Postmodernism is not a worldview, it is an epistemic method that positions all knowledge claims within hermeneutic/interpretive frameworks. We very well might know things as they are, but we cannot know that we do. We are always doing the best that we can to hold true beliefs as supported by good arguments, but we can’t get outside of our existence to check to see if our claims actually obtain. This should not worry us, however. The only danger here is to objectivist claims that are made by people who forget their own limited, vulnerable, and finite humanity. For Christians to “reject” postmodernism comes dangerously close to enacting the idolatry of thinking that their own view is really just God’s.

As Kierkegaard notes, “existence is a system for God, but it is not a system for an existing individual.” I would just tweak his claim and say “existence might be a system for God” - because the only way that we could know that it “is” is to somehow stop being an existing individual and find some way to “peek over God’s shoulder.” Doing so would not make you a better Christian, but might actually make you a bad human being.

Critical Theory

First, like postmodernism it is neither a worldview nor a metaphysical theory. It is a methodology that allows for a variety of worldviews and a range of metaphysical views. For example, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Judith Butler are all rightly viewed as critical theorists, but they disagree about ethics, social practice, and conceptions of reality.

Critical theory only becomes a worldview/metaphysics for people who can’t make sense of their own cultural location without thinking that worldview conflict (culture wars) are the main mode of disagreement. This is why so many Conservative Christians tend to see critical theory as a threat to Christianity. Their own binaries shape what they take to be possible from their interlocutors. When one affirms not that “The truth is that there is Truth,” but simply “ This is the Truth!” then any challenge to that epistemology is likely to be misunderstood as a rejection of the “Truth” upon which one stands.

So if critical theory is not a worldview or a metaphysics, then what is it? Well, here I will borrow from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on critical theory in order to highlight the four main characteristics. For each of these four, I will also offer reasons why I see them as resources for Christian thinking. I should make clear that I don’t see these resources as things that should make Christianity more compelling to non-Christians (my interests here are absolutely not conversionist). My aim is just to show that these characteristics resonate deeply with at least some interpretations of Biblical values.

Ok, so critical theory is . . .

(1) Self-Reflexive: It appreciates its own location in social and historical contexts. A critical theorist does not stand outside of the social spaces on which it comments. It is always offered as an acknowledgement that it, too, is a human, all too human, discourse. It is an attempt to make sense of the world, but not by standing outside that world, but taking as seriously as possible what it means to be located within it.

a. Relevance to Christianity: The virtues of humility, hospitality, and honesty should be central to Christian ethics and critical theory can help Christians to understand how those virtues are often easy to expect of others and yet not to display in relation to one’s own views. See Matthew 7: 3-5:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

(2) Interdisciplinary: It appreciates that philosophical engagement should be supplemented with social science. Here the idea is that critical theory is not narrowly philosophical, but philosophy that appeals to relevant evidence from other disciplines. In this way, it is impressively attentive to the concrete particulars of the history, culture, and societies in which we find ourselves.

a. Relevance to Christianity: Whether you are Christian or not, evidence matters for robust argumentation and any serious commitment to truth seeking. Too often Christianity (and especially Conservative White American Evangelicalism) has been not only anti-intellectual, but especially opposed to scientific evidence (drawn from a very particular and self-forgetting conception of the Bible). Critical theory helps Christians to take seriously scholarship that broadly embraces liberal arts and sciences such that Christian claims about truth (with or without the capital-T) can be taken seriously as offered in good faith, and not just in narrowly question-begging communities. Christianity is more compelling as a discourse when it does not shy away from the nuance that such work yields.

(3) Materialist: Critical theory contends that thinking should always appreciate the relationship of theory and practice. As such the concrete, material facts about social reality are not something to set aside, but to draw upon.

a. Relevance to Christianity: That there are mind independent states of affairs can be granted while still acknowledging that what counts as “objective” is often nested in discourses of power that play out invisibly in the world. Taking seriously the lived historical context in which narratives are taken up as true or false is consistent with the Biblical notion of seeing through a glass darkly (see I Corinthians 13). Whatever else that passage means, it sure does seem to convey that hermeneutics is essential for any theoretical exercise (including what it means to be Christian and what “counts” as Christian within specific historical spaces).

(4) Emancipatory: Critical theory holds that the goal of human flourishing as fostered by maximal freedom is a fundamental value. Far from being enemies of freedom, as is so often claimed by Conservative Christian critics, critical theory (especially in its inheritance of Marx) is fundamentally a methodology guided by the belief that oppression is something to overcome. In that, very limited sense, there is an “ethic” at the heart of critical theory. But notice that this is exceptionally underdetermined. It does not give normative prescriptions about what, specifically, freedom will look like in policy (again the critical theorists disagree about that), and it does not offer any determinate unified account of what oppression involves (there will be some similar threads across many critical theorists, but again nuance is key here).

a. Relevance to Christianity: Micah 6:8 claims that a follower of God should “Love mercy, do justice, walk humbly before God.” Christianity is largely unintelligible outside of the idea of human flourishing and an emancipatory message. Indeed, consider that John claims “Who God sets free is free indeed” (John 8). And repeatedly God presents Godself as having come to bring freedom to the captives. Accordingly, liberation theology is not a narrow view that falls outside the mainstream of the tradition. It is what Christian theology is all about. Or as James Cone puts it, “Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology.”

Of course, like with the critical theorists, identifying this overarching theme doesn’t mean that all Christians will agree about the best strategies for facilitating freedom. Moreover, they might even disagree about what oppression looks like and where it is best resisted. Indeed, that different Christian communities have historically been split on whether true freedom is this or other worldly is merely further reflective of the importance of critical theory to Christian awareness and social identity.

In the end, Christians should be postmodernists and critical theorists - at least in these broad ways I have outlined here. Of course there will be lots of disagreement about the specifics, but even some general convergence on the importance of humility, hospitality, self-reflective awareness, being socially attentive to the material conditions of human bodies, and then working for the emancipation of those who are/have been oppressed by powers that do not align with these values seems like a very good place to start in the task of rejecting Christian nationalism and the arrogance and self-protective theology that undergirds it (while also undermining our democracy and shared concern for each other’s humanity).

• Is there more that needs said about critical theory? Absolutely.

• Are there very good critiques of some of the figures within it? Definitely.

• Do we have to accept everything about all of the sub-movements in critical theory in order to appropriate these key ideas that lie at its core? Not at all.

• Should Christians be critical theorists (whether or not they align with any particular thinker within that movment)? I think so.

Insofar as Christians, like all humans, should care about thinking well in order to do their best to make life better for their neighbors, then the humility and critical awareness facilitated by postmodernism and critical theory are not just philosophical methods of some benefit, but are also helpful for anchoring us all in what Woodruff would term the “needs of our shared human weakness.”

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Just as the existence of search engines inundate us with seemingly endless rabbit­-holes of information, current music streaming platforms seem to provide unlimited choice through unprecedented access and the ability to explore artists, genres, and even decades. Why, then, does it feel so difficult to discover and entrench oneself in new musical landscapes, escape the perpetual rut, feel that ebullient satisfaction at stumbling accidentally upon a song of sublimity?

The current digital music environment is governed by an annoyingly hidden aporia: while we possess the potential to experience an endless stream of music, platforms rely on algorithms tethered to systematic productions of ignorance, or, academically speaking, agnotology. Breaking this algorithmic pressure is necessary to both broaden our tastes and fight against deliberate attempts to keep us as placid consumers.

There are many articles about how streaming services suck (as there should be), all with different strategies to oppose them. I would like to focus on the anxiety­-laden undertones of Spotify specifically, which has been hit in recent years with criticism and pushback from lawsuits surrounding the platform’s discovery mode to artists removing their work in protest of different company practices, but the issues I will address apply much more broadly. Streaming platforms are laden with agnotological quicksand and algorithmic potholes that give us an illusion of discovery while systematically reducing our autonomy.

What is Agnotology?

It is reasonable to think that ignorance can be combatted with knowledge, but what if knowledge is deliberately used as a tool to perpetuate and increase ignorance?

In his book Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Robert Proctor coined the term ‘agnotology’ (derived from the Greek agnosis/not knowing) while studying the tobacco industry’s campaign to manufacture doubt about lung cancer. The case is an example of a larger trend where ignorance is not an absence of evidence but an active perpetuation of confusion. Proctor categorizes ignorance into three forms: “ignorance as native state (or resource), ignorance as lost realm (or selective choice), and ignorance as deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (or active construct).” It is important to acknowledge, therefore, that we experience ignorance throughout our lives in many different ways, each of which requires a different strategical opposition, and that while not all forms of ignorance are bad, agnotology is particular, sinister, and deliberate.

I add here that knowledge is one of the defining factors of ignorance, and it is easy to conflate knowledge with information. The internet, including Spotify, often offers abundant information, but information is not knowledge, and knowledge is, simply in itself, not the end goal! In an attempt for brevity (which I can’t say I’ve ever achieved), let us quickly discuss why this is the case. We can talk about Plato of course, but I would prefer to talk about Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” an essay I highly recommend along with Tolkien’s “On Fairy­ Stories.”

In that essay, Benjamin discusses how,

“the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new… A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

Information—including random songs you listen to once or admire fleetingly—is disposable, while the music that makes us transcend, indisputably a story itself ( the experience of listening, the lyrics and music each in isolation and together, the history of its creation), has imperishable physical and metaphysical qualities that use the knowledge of the song to come to something further. Perhaps consider understanding here instead. As Heidegger says, “Understanding is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge, but a primordially existential kind of being, which, more than anything else, makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible” (taken shamelessly from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on understanding, the hack I am). So maybe one could argue that, before knowing a song exists or hearing it for the first time, we have an understanding of what we are already attuned (haha) to and what will truly affect us. We confront a certain possibility of resonance. And other philosophers who write of understanding also allow for luck to be an element, since a true belief does not necessarily have to come from brute information or knowledge. Hence, tumbling upon a song in a natural setting, instead of an algorithmic one, is a form of luck that generates understanding without manipulative generation. Interestingly, Giambattista Vico, in arguing that understanding humans is different from understanding nature, coined the term fantasia, where one can imagine the thoughts, perceptions and beliefs of another. Fantasia also means an improvisational musical composition that doesn’t follow the “rules” of traditional forms… it is here that music becomes so magical, where understanding moves past information and knowledge both, and instantiation becomes abstraction again.

Skips, Discoveries, and Algorithmically­-Generated Playlists

Spotify is known to inundate spaces with cheap production music—Liz Pelly’s report in Harper’s, drawn from her book Mood Machine, details the emergence of Perfect Fit Content (PFC), a program in which a small pool of writers, often working under fake names, supply generic, mood-­centered tracks for Spotify’s largest playlists at a deep royalty discount. AI slop joins them in those slots, with Spotify continuing to refuse to label AI­-generated content. Such mood­-coded filler has none of Benjamin’s story and no potential for understanding, for the whole point is its disposability. Spotify hopes we won’t be able to tell the difference.

The production of ignorance also goes deeper than promoting cheap music. Pelly further delves into how Spotify’s “Discovery Mode” offers artists the choice to “accept lower royalty rates in exchange for algorithmic promotion” (Read her Guardian article here.) This renders Discovery Mode an agnotological tool disguising advertisements as personalized recommendations and obscuring any non-­monetary musical discovery.

Spotify’s algorithms have also been shown to reduce taste diversity, promoting homogeneity and constructing listeners’ personas through playlists based on aesthetics and moods, neat labels for a listener to attach to their musical identity.

Another, more self­-authorized agnotology occurs with “liked” songs, where thousands of tracks are lost in the proverbial long­ forgotten manila folder in the drawer you never touch. While a random shuffle of these songs is great for stumbling upon a track you listened to once two years ago and loved, it also promotes a habit of listening that is non-­intentional and restricted. Grounding discovery in physical life (hearing it in the diner, finding it when listening to an album) solidifies our memory of a song while easy clicks require no retention.

Philosophizing

Jean-Paul Sartre feels like the wiffle­ball philosopher to use here, but it’s worth exercising some caution since he is so often bastardized (I’ll probably do so too). For Sartre, human existence is split between facticity (our material past) and transcendence (what we are not yet). Algorithms further Sartre’s bad faith, passing your facticity (read: data) off as transcendence, and we often accept such algorithmic determinism to avoid the anguish of choice. This allows us to push away the inevitable feeling of stagnancy when faced with so much information, and thus deny ourselves the beauty of such musicological freedom. We allow these algorithms to define us, to tell us what we will like, the genres we prefer, the eras we fit into, separating us from songs that could provoke us regardless of their algorithmic likelihood. It is not just the denial of freedom, but the elimination of more enjoyable, affective musical futures.

Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, argues that knowledge rests on ignorance, which is something purposeful and bodied. For Nietzsche, we have “contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom….” Spotify’s job is therefore easy, preying on an innate impulse to remain ignorant in order to live and manipulating such impulses to control our decisions. Ignorance is not always bad… we don’t always have to strive for absolute truth, nor do we have to try and reduce illusions in our life simply because they are illusions. This is a tiring pursuit which will inevitably fail, for we can only take in so much information, and can only hold a finite amount of understanding of the nature of our reality.

As a daydreamer myself, I appreciate the ability to disconnect from reality, yet I often use music to aid this desire, for music has a unique power which affects a person without operating in the sticky and often subjective true­/false paradigm. The difference between Nietzsche’s ignorance and agnotology is this: the former is transparent to the chooser and serves a fulfilled life, while the latter is imposed, opaque, and treats the listener as a means to the ends of profit.

As an exercise, think about a song that scratches all those itches in your body. One that does so for me is “Watermelon in Easter Hay” by Frank Zappa.

While I love all of Zappa’s work, none of his other songs inhabit the same essence, and thus do not speak to me in the same way. An algorithm cannot find another song like it by using metrics such as genre or artist or speed. The algorithm will continue to offer suggestions that never hit the mark. While it feels daunting to sort through such a vast library to find a song that is equally satisfying, this difficulty is part of what makes stumbling upon such a song so intensely special.

I remember how good it felt when I realized “Problem Number 6” by Bruno Pernadas evokes the same feeling that Watermelon does, how it felt to identify the nameless feeling through the identification of it in another.

By the way, I am still looking for a song that matches “Because I’m Me” by The Avalanches, if anyone has an idea.

Not only must we fight this agnotological plight for the sake of data protection and ethical purity, we must fight it because it will never provide us with the ability to experience the true power of music. Perhaps this too is intentionally done by music platforms, for such emotional turbulence counteracts the ideal of the placid consumer.

How Do We Change How We Listen?

Ah, but as Albert Camus says (in my favorite book of all time), “Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate,” and so while I make this argument I cannot help but acknowledge my own hypocrisies. Tu Quoque be damned! I have not halted my use of Spotify. In fact, I often find myself appreciating its existence, for it has provided me with the resources to build a potentially colossal musical lexicon… every song a door into history, mathematical structure, samples, endless forums discussing opinions of tracks and covers.

Eliminating Spotify is a protracted undertaking, but there are some ways I try to keep the behemoth of knowledge exciting instead of stagnating.

Firstly, reading artists’ bios prevents the detachment we often experience when mindlessly consuming songs without acknowledging the presence of the creator. A bio can also reveal geographic patterns, influences, contemporaries, and (trivially, but so often overlooked), the names of the band members. This information builds a web where connected songs and artists become discoverable even when they don’t share a genre or “sound” (one for me was Elliott Smith → Heatmiser → Quasi → Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks).

A second easy step is skipping insipid discovery feeds, daily mixes, and Spotify radio stations. If you need recommendations, go to Reddit (a true digital polymath).

Playlists, of course, are the beacon of streaming, modernized mixtapes entrenched with love and labor. I’ve spent countless hours pouring over a playlist for a friend and have experienced no greater pleasure than receiving loving and positive reviews from my unconsenting receivers. If you were annoyed or titillated by this article, please drop me a link to a playlist in the comments!

My active resistance to musical agnotology, however, is to reconnect listening to natural disorder and interaction with the physical world, both in the unbastardized, unmediated encounter with a song, and to the reminder that music is so inherently connected to our essence as humans that we have to spurn sterility wherever we find it. Go to a record store and listen to what they’re playing, sit at a bar, find a really good radio station, sit in an isolated forest and think about what music you desire to have around you, then unearth it through shuffling your songs until one resonates. Listen to the whole album that song you like came from. Anything that a human has touched is, dare I say, the most sound way to do it.

Agnotology is terrifyingly present all around us. This form of ignorance cannot be written off as natural, for it is an active tool keeping us in the dark while our data is gathered and exploited and our narratives manipulated, and it cannot be combatted solely with the passage of time. I leave you with some words of Clarice Lispector (in her book Agua Viva) and her description of a relationship with music, which illuminated for me a personal need to return to the naturalistic impulse to feel as you listen, to hear trembles, to read melody, to taste sublimity:

“I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music ­ I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.”

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Well, for today’s Music Mondays (which by the way I have stopped putting in the titles of the posts because for some reason when I do they get read FAR less than when I make them appear like “normal” posts), I am offering a portion of the introduction that I wote for that journal issue. If you would like to read the whole thing, it is available here.

I recognize that this is a bit more technical and academic than most of the stuff that I do here on Philosophy in the Wild, but sometimes I think it is also worthwhile to get a glimpse of what is going on in the debates that we might observe but not participate in, so that is at least my hope for today. Nonetheless, if you really don’t care about any of it, that is fine - hopefully the links to some cool mashup music will still be of some benefit to your Monday’s routine!

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Mashup Philosophy of Religion and Dialogical Hope

I first proposed the idea of “mashup” philosophy of religion in an essay that I wrote in response to Nick Trakakis’s critique of my attempt to bring new phenomenology together with some aspects of analytic philosophy of religion.[1] I now want to explore possibilities for this framework within contemporary philosophy of religion. My specific hope is that by mashing-up continental and analytic approaches to the philosophy of religion, constructive work is possible despite some divisions that have traditionally been obstacles to discourse. I will begin by offering a quick sketch of what I mean by the phrase/metaphor and explain why it is meant as more than just a matter of rhetoric. I do not intend it to serve as a rigid designator for a particular philosophical method, but instead as an expression of hope for dialogical charity and discursive hospitality to cut across philosophical traditions and disciplinary borders. Mashup Philosophy of Religion, then, is offered as a name for a promising way of encouraging philosophers of religion to hold such hope as a guiding principle for scholarship.

Mash-Up or Just Mish-Mash

I draw the notion of “mashup” philosophy of religion from the popular art form known as “mashup music.”[2] Mashup artists such as Girl Talk, The Kleptones, Max Tannone, and Danger Mouse have been instrumental in developing this mode of cultural expression that uses technology to bring different musicians, genres, and periods together to make something new (while remaining old). Here is a pretty good playlist that I found that features examples of what this approach offers (if you are short on time, definitely check out track 3: “The Ace is Back”!!):

The skill of the mashup artist combines technological knowledge regarding how to pair otherwise divergent songs and styles in ways that are seamless and compelling, and musical knowledge regarding what songs and styles can most compellingly be brought together. In this way, we might say that the mashup artist combines the logical with the poetic in order to facilitate creation. As an example of such mashup music, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004) is a mashup of Jay Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album. Finding enormous, even if unexpected, success, The Grey Album demonstrates the constructive possibilities that are available when music from different genres is brought together in ways unanticipated by the original artists. Impressively, The Grey Album invites fans of the Beatles who might not otherwise care for hip hop, or Jay Z fans who might not otherwise care much about early rock and roll, to open themselves to something that was previously apathetically ignored, or explicitly dismissed. In this sense, mashup music might be seen as a sort of gateway to alterity.

When done well, mashup music is not derivative, but original. This originality is deeply informed by a critical awareness of a complex, and plural, inheritance. Perhaps the most famous mashup song is “Numb/Encore,” which is a Grammy-winning mashup of Jay Z’s hip hop and Linkin Park’s nu metal.[3]

Like The Grey Album, “Numb/Encore” allows for rock/rap engagement reminiscent of Run DMC’s 1986 appropriation/remake of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” (1975),[4] or the Judgment Night Soundtrack, which offers a variety of such rock/rap combinations.[5] The difference between such collaborations and genuine mashup music, however, is that collaborations tend to be original tracks that are co-written by artists coming from different backgrounds/styles, whereas mashup music is a constructive appropriation of two preexisting songs such that a new “third” thing is created by bringing them together. So, Linkin Park’s “Numb” and Jay Z’s “Encore” were both songs that previously existed on their own such that “Numb/Encore” functions to explore possibilities that occur when these two songs are reimagined in light of each other.

In this way, mashups are often transformative in a way that collaborations may not be. While I think that collaboration and mashups are both important ways to explore new vistas, it is important to find ways of not just doing what one does alongside what others do differently (collaborations), but ways of doing differently what one does, in light of what others do with you (mashups). Ideally, mashups and collaborations will function together, though, such that mashups will invite constructive collaborations and those collaborations will be transformative for the artists and musical genres involved.

I believe that contemporary philosophy of religion can be productively renewed if scholars appropriate this “mashup” approach for academic inquiry. One might ask why such “renewal” is needed? There are a number of ways to make such a case depending on what aims (or hopes) one has for the discourse itself. For my own part, I am eager to think about constructive ways of drawing on a variety of philosophical traditions in order to address pressing problems in the contemporary debates.[6] Often, the very way that a question or concern is framed reflects assumptions that might be contested in an alternative tradition. As such, being willing to think about, and also draw upon, the diverse resources that are available across traditions allows for a hermeneutic awareness that is resistant to insularity and narrowness.

I mention insularity and narrowness, here, quite intentionally. In a “manifesto” envisioning a renewal of philosophy of religion in relation to work occurring in the academic study of religion, more broadly, Kevin Schilbrack argues that traditional philosophy of religion is characterized by narrowness, insularity, and intellectualism.[7]

For Schilbrack, the specifics of this critique are such that philosophy of religion has traditionally been primarily theistic (narrow), concerned mainly with the cognitive dimensions of religion (intellectualist), and not engaged with work on religion occurring in other disciplines (insular). Even though counterexamples to Schilbrack’s account can be offered, it is important not to too quickly dismiss his critique as an important challenge to the hegemonic tendencies that can be identified in the field. Mashup philosophy of religion can make significant strides toward addressing such tendencies and, thus, facilitate productive responses to the narrowness, insularity, and intellectualism that too often characterize traditional work in this area.[8]

Although Schilbrack sees both analytic philosophy of religion and also continental philosophy of religion to be guilty, perhaps in slightly different ways, of these three tendencies, I think that exploring how these two traditions (which are already representative of a plurality of approaches, methodologies, histories, trajectories, etc.) might be mashed-up is a good first step for then engaging in other (more expansive) mashups and collaborations in the future.[9] There are a variety of ways mashup philosophy of religion might look, a mash-up of religious studies and philosophy, of feminist philosophy and traditional apologetics, of cognitive science and theories of religion, etc. In the effort of encouraging such work in the future, this Issue intentionally focuses on ways in which the often cited stylistic differences on offer in analytic and continental philosophy, which may or may not reflect real alternatives in content, might not have to be seen as an obstacle for inquiry, but as an opportunity for constructive reflection.

In so doing, my hope is that we can avoid problematic, though perhaps well-intentioned, calls to “overcome the analytic/continental divide.” Such calls often end up suggesting that one tradition should simply be revised so that it now looks just like the other tradition. Attempting to overcome the divide in such ways would be akin to overcoming the divide on college campuses between athletics and academics by simply eliminating athletics from college life. When it is suggested that philosophy is best served by eliminating the diversity of approach, style, method, and history on display in philosophy, it is difficult not to conclude that the goal is no longer truth, but a reinforcement of the power of those whose preferred approach, style, method, and history is presented as the only “legitimate,” “rigorous,” “meaningful,” “existentially relevant,” option.

Importantly, though, philosophical diversity is not necessarily intrinsically valuable on its own. For example, although it is possible that some philosophers might say that by using crayons instead of computers to write books some new phenomenological experience is available that enables an embodied relation to one’s thought in constructive ways, I would hope that such an approach would not be given much credence in the contemporary debates. My hope is motivated by a reasoned belief that such crayonists, as we might term them, would not offer anything of value to philosophical inquiry. Novelty, on its own, should not be the point—quite a bit of mashup music is not much more than a mish-mash of stuff that is better left alone (again, a high degree of technical and musical knowledge is crucial for the novelty to be worthwhile). Alternatively, being dismissive of the new, out of hand (i.e., simply because it is new), is dangerous. Finding ways of working within the standards of a discursive community (professional philosophy of religion, say) while opening that community to new discursive possibilities is the aim. Specifically, the thought is that although continental approaches are potentially made better by engaging analytic alternatives, and vice-versa, both should still be understood as philosophical discourses.

Drawing again on music, we might similarly say that although hip hop and metal are far from each other in many ways, they both operate according to generally agreed upon conceptions of musical form, structure, and purpose such that the rock/rap mashups are frequently quite successful. Such initial work mashing up various traditions within philosophy can then better position philosophy of religion to open onto the sort of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural engagement that Schilbrack rightly suggests to be needed if the future of philosophy of religion is to remain as bright as possible.[10]

Mashup philosophy is not promising simply because it embraces diversity. It is promising because it puts the already existing diversity occurring in the various traditions of philosophy of religion into productive dialogue such that the wider shared community is recognized as already diverse in important ways. Accordingly, overstating the divide between continental and analytic is unhelpful. Yet, the very call to “overcome” the divide can make it seem that there is a mutual ground where all differences can be, and will be, resolved. Such a Habermasian rapprochement, we might say, is, in this case, not only unlikely but potentially dangerously triumphalist.[11] In light of the mashup framework, the best option for philosophers of religion, I believe, is to abandon the notion that such “overcoming” is the goal. Rather, finding ways to appreciate and appropriate the values of the other tradition(s), while allowing differences to remain such that one appropriates the other tradition(s) while still working within one’s own, is a better model.

Jay Z does not need to form a metal band; Linkin Park does not need to become hip hop group. Rather, it is only by remaining true to their respective “traditions,” we might say, that the mashup of their songs so productive. The third space is opened because the other two spaces remain in place, but no longer understood primarily as in opposition to each other. Indeed, it might be that the formerly conceived opposition can be reconceived as productive tension. There may or may not be ultimate agreement and harmony in such mashup philosophy of religion, but just as in music, the resolution of dissonance is not always the best, and certainly not the only, way to conclude a song. The task of mashup philosophy of religion, as specifically considered in this issue, is not to overcome the divide between continental and analytic traditions, but to stop thinking that the divide is something that requires oppositional antagonism or unreflective disregard.

We must be diligent not to allow such mashup philosophy to become nothing more than a mish-mash of traditions that make most sense when left to their own devices. And yet, in light of Schilbrack’s challenge, it seems important at least to see if the logical and poetic skill on display in the best mashup music translates beneficially to the logical and poetic emphases of the analytic and continental traditions. I believe that it can. Notice, though, that this requires that we not assume that our tradition gets it all right. The humility of realizing that the skill set required for reaching beauty, goodness, and truth might best be achieved through engagement means that we must not ignore the distinctions but appreciate them as opportunities for self-critical reflection and potential transformation.

In this way, the logical and poetic are not positioned as a stark dichotomy, but instead as important aspects of each other. Without the poetic dimension, mashup music can degenerate into not much more than a computer program; without the logical dimension, mashup music can remain an unactualized idea. It is at this point that the commonly heard critiques of analytic philosophy as existentially removed, and critiques of continental philosophy as lacking rigor, are important to keep in mind. Nothing is gained by trafficking in such stereotypes, but appreciating why such stereotypes are often deployed is helpful for thinking creatively in light of the realities that might have given rise to them.

***Here is maybe the best mashup of all time. You are welcome:

Well, this one makes me laugh too:

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NOTES:

[1] See J. Aaron Simmons, “On Shared Hopes for (Mashup) Philosophy of Religion: A Reply to Trakakis,” Heythrop Journal 55, no.4 (July, 2014): 691-710. For Trakakis’s critical essay, see “The New Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy of Religion,” Heythrop Journal 55, no.4 (July, 2014): 670-90. I have also explored “mashup” philosophy of religion elsewhere, see J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially chapter 7; see also, J. Aaron Simmons and Martin Shuster, “Mashup Philosophy as a Task for a Lifetime: An Interview with J. Aaron Simmons.”

[2] The “mashup” metaphor has also been used by John S. McClure in relation to theology and popular culture—see McClure, Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). For more philosophical analysis of mash-up music, see Christopher Bartel, “The Metaphysics of Mash-ups,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2015).

[3] On the Jay Z/Linkin Park album, Collison Course (Roc-A-Fella Records and Warner Bros, 2004).

[4] See Run DMC, Raising Hell (Arista, 1986).

[5] For example, Helmet and House of Pain, Biohazard and Onyx, Slayer and Ice-T, Cypress Hill and Pearl Jam, etc. See Various Artists, Judgment Night Original Soundtrack (Immortal and Epic, 1993).

[6] There are many scholars who have been exemplars of this sort of work, so I do not mean for my proposal of mashup philosophy of religion to be understood as itself inviting something radically original. Instead, my hope is that this frame encourages the engagement with diverse philosophical and religious traditions as an explicit orientation for philosophy of religion itself. As just a few examples of scholars who I consider to be models for possible analytic/continental mashup work, consider Nicholas Wolterstorff’s engagement with Derrida and Ricoeur in Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Merold Westphal’s embrace of both hermeneutic phenomenology and some aspects on offer in reformed epistemology in “Taking Plantinga Seriously,” Faith and Philosophy 16, no.2 (1999): 173-81; and especially William Wainwright’s attempt to think about the different cultures of philosophy of religion that operate in the American Philosophical Association and the American Academy of Religion (Wainwright, ed. God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996).

[7] Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell), especially chapter 1.

[8] I have argued this basic point in more detail elsewhere. See, J. Aaron Simmons, “Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion,” Philosophy of Religion After “Religion,” eds., Richard Amesbury and Michael Rogers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

[9] See Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 9-10.

[10] As an example of what such a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach might look like, see Purushottama Bilimoria and Andrew B. Irvine, eds. Post-Colonial Philosophy of Religion (Springer, 2009).

[11] See Alvin Plantinga’s worry about the triumphalism that might threaten contemporary Christian philosophy (“Response to Nick Wolterstorff,” Faith and Philosophy 28, no.3 (Jully, 2011): 267-8). In light of recent trends in analytic theology, on the one hand, and proclamations of the “end of philosophy of religion,” on the other hand, it seems to me that a real danger of thinking that one could “overcome the divide” is that instead of a view that incorporates dimensions of both traditions, it is plausible that one or the other would simply be swallowed up in the other. See, Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, eds., Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nick Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2008); Timothy D. Knepper, The Ends of Philosophy of Religion: Terminus and Telos (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

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On Trump’s recent trip to China, he took a bunch of CEOs with him, but he didn’t take any philosophers, or humanists for that matter. Why? Because the value proposition by which he conceived of his trip is purely instrumental. It is transactional. The point of all human relationships is an objective calculation. Whatever serves my purposes is good, whatever does not, is bad. Instrumental thinking almost always operates according to such stark binaries because the questions that “matter” are only those that lead to concrete outcomes and quantifiable achievements.

Now, of course in a bunch of areas of life such instrumental thinking is not only inevitable, but deeply necessary. If you are trying to get to Chattanooga from Charleston then there are better and worse ways to go. What counts as “better” or “worse” will always be framed within the ultimate goal of arriving in Chattanooga, but then other factors will enter in to make the decision not as obvious as it might otherwise seem. Maybe you want a scenic route through mountains, maybe you want to avoid interstates, maybe you want to get there as quickly as possible, maybe you want to stop by every Buc-ee’s along the way!

So, although instrumentalism is not always problematic, when it comes to thinking about who we are as people, it is exceptionally dangerous. The danger lies not so much in the instrumentalism, as such, but in the way that instrumental logic almost always will crowd out all other possible value theories. If the outcome is all that matters, then any argument for other things making a difference can quickly get ignored as not only irrelevant, but as unhelpful distractions.

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Notice that part of the problem with instrumentalism is that it can’t wrestle effectively with what matters. It just asks what outcomes we desire, but not whether particular outcomes are worthy of our effort, allegiance, or existential investment.

One of the areas that this broad set of debates finds the most traction is when it comes to the goal/point/purpose/aim of college. A while back I did a post where I tried to offer the best arguments that I could find to support the claim that college is just about getting a job. In all honesty, I do think that college should take seriously the role that economic identity plays in so many ways given our broad capitalistic social frameworks. But, when college is understood as about making our students wealthy employees, it almost always comes at the cost of inviting our students to think carefully about becoming persons.

Again, I feel like I have been saying this to the point where my voice sounds like Vince Neil’s pathetic attempt to try to hit the high notes of “Kickstart my Heart” in 2026 (or, for you more metallic fans - like anything Chris Barnes has done over the past decade with Six Feet Deep, hahaha, sigh!). I used to say that if you go to a basketball game and don’t lose your voice while there, you didn’t cheer hard enough. Well, I often feel like I have lost my voice trying to cheer for the importance of the humanities to human flourishing, social wellbeing, and a general sense of existential purpose. And yet, like the pretty small audiences at contemporary Mötley Crüe shows, it is hard to get folks to come listen when your voice has given out.

Ironically, when things feel the most hopeless, things also tend to matter the most. The stakes are higher. This is why I ask my students all the time whether what they are doing, what they hope to do, who they are, and who they hope to become is something that “matters”? I often hear them answer almost any question with a summary of their resume. To which I often respond, “Very cool, so you did an internship, ok, but did it matter?” “Sure, you are graduating with honors, but why does that matter?” “Awesome, you got that dream job, but is it inviting you to do something that matters?” “You just made your first million, well done, but are you ok with who you are becoming?”

I can hear many critics screaming that it “matters” if it leads to a successful career. But, then I would note that we are back into an instrumentalism that can’t own up to the costs of its own assumptions.

Instrumentalism will always require some degree of cost-benefit analysis. And, again, that is not necessarily bad. But, being unable to step back to ask whether such analysis can, itself, cost more than we are willing to pay is often just one of the “sunk costs” that don’t make it onto the P and L spreadsheet.

Businesses often wrestle with questions such as “How many deaths are okay before recalling a product?” Imagine, though, if this question were put off the table as inhuman and the CEO simply said, “human dignity is not something for which algorithms can be designed to quantify.”

Parents often wrestle with questions such as “Is college worth it?” But, I fear that more and more parents are unconcerned with anything other than a Return On Investment (ROI) - which is then understood in purely economic terms. While higher education is far too expensive, indeed it is unjustly expensive, that shouldn’t prevent asking complicated questions about how we might rethink society so that college is not so expensive, instead of just quickly concluding that the expense makes college a bad investment. It might be that college is “worth” substantial public investment. It might be that college is “worth” it as a space where we can carefully rethink the goals of our shared social lives. It might be that college is “worth” it not in terms of money, but in terms of the very project of human flourishing. Indeed, if we automatically think that such flourishing is exclusively an economic issue, we have already shut down the critical thinking that colleges are pretty good at fostering.

And yet, what happens when colleges and universities have embraced the very instrumentalist logic that undermines their “value” in the first place? When higher education markets itself as primarily about pre-professional job training, it stops doing the cultural work at stake in figuring out what “matters” in the first place. It has already drunk the corporate kool-aid and re-narrated itself as “valuable” precisely because it is an instrumental means to economic ends.

Even at my own institution I often hear about “re-envisioning the liberal arts” or “re-imagining the liberal arts.” If that means how can we make the case for the intrinsic value of thinking long and hard about who and not just instrumentally about what, then I am all in. And I think that such work can be fun, energetic, and innovative. But, if it means re-conceiving the humanities in terms of what they offer in terms of job-prospects in an age of AI, say, then we have missed the point entirely. AI is quickly changing all sorts of things, but who are the people who are entrusted with wrestling with what is at stake in such changes?

If we hand the keys of the kingdom over to the very people who have claimed that college is not worth it because of an instrumentalism that pervades all of their thought, then we are nearly guaranteed that those people are ill-equipped to understand the question in the first place. And, hence, we see Trump taking CEOs to do the work of diplomacy because the only relationships that matter are business transactions. Unless colleges and universities fight such tendencies, they are actively participating in their own erasure.

Well, in light of such reflections, today I read an interview by a friend of mine, a fellow philosopher who ran a liberal arts program until it was shut down according to very sorts of instrumental values that the program did such a good job of interrogating. Dr. Jennifer Frey is a tremendous thinker and even when we disagree on things (which we most certainly do), I am always productively challenged by the rigor of her thinking and the virtue she takes so seriously as a model for human existence.

Frey was interviewed by The New York Times about the very things that I have been saying in so many ways for a very long time now. Check out that interview here. It is well worth your time to read all of it, but let me just highlight a few key passages that I take to resonate with my own commitments.

For Frey, the crucial move is to abandon instrumentalism out of the gate:

I think the deeper question is about what I would call liberal learning, a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.

Her focus on the existential depth of our social lives, rather than just the contingent economic ways in which our lives get navigated is refreshing and deeply constructive:

This idea that a higher sort of learning and self-cultivation is truly liberating, that it helps people have a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in their life and also helps them to cultivate a space of genuine leisure.

In a way that reminds me of the philosopher, Aaron James’s notion of “leisure capitalism,” Frey rightly notes that leisure is not about transactional engagement whereby our “worth” as a person is determined by our bank account and ability to vacation on a beach.

Interestingly, Aristotle — this always really strikes students, they just think it’s so wild, like so unbelievably wild — says the goal of education is leisure. And we forget that the Greek word, the root for “school,” is leisure. But leisure is not idleness or amusement. And it’s definitely not just resting up so you can get back to work. It is that space that we need to set aside to cultivate the highest parts of us.

Yeah, the “higher parts of us” - the stuff that really “matters.” Sure, we can disagree about the specifics involved here (and Frey and I are likely to slide in slightly different directions on some of how this might play out), but returning to the question of something being “worth it,” ask yourself whether a big salary is “worth it” if it requires treating your employees like disposable objects? Is it “worth it” to dominate in a business field if it comes at the cost of minimizing the capacity of others to afford healthcare and basic housing? The point is that cultivating the highest parts of us requires that we break out of the narrow transactionalism of a world run by what James terms “corporate assholes,” where running a business somehow qualifies you to narrate the values of a society.

Accordingly, Frey is right when she claims that:

I believe that we’ve really dropped the ball when it comes to general education in this country. Students have no sense that their education is anything other than this externalized instrumental means to an end. We have to look at how to recover that first.

Ultimately, the very instrumentalism that not only corporate assholes, but also college administrators, seem to be so thoroughly embracing as the only option for continued traction in the marketplace will lead to the radical dissolution of our very humanity. The rise of AI basically guarantees this. As Frey explains:

We will not really, in any meaningful sense, be free. I don’t care what the political system is. If you haven’t done that work of deep, humane reflection and self-cultivation, you are not really engaged in that project of becoming a person.

I genuinely enjoyed reading her interview and I found myself repeatedly shouting “Amen!” at the coffee shop where I was sitting. I do hope that you will read all of it and wrestle with the weight of her claims. Yeah, a university might get more students by reimagining the liberal arts as no longer about the liberal arts, but does that university even matter at that point?

I can imagine other critics reading this and simply saying that it sounds like a bunch of liberal clap-trap reflecting the privilege of the highly educated who are already disconnected from the material realities of the working class that does require such an instrumentalism at the heart of how most folks navigate the world. Sure, it would be great to sit around at read Plato, but doing so is the kind of stuff that people who have to work for a living don’t have time to do - they are too busy dealing with the messed up world produced by so many generations of the disconnected educated class.

This objection is important and must not be quickly dismissed. And yet, I actually think that the more universities have become pre-professional training schools, the more they have cultivated the sort of competitive individualism that undermines the possibility of bringing about a world where we are implicated in each other’s flourishing. Instrumentalism easily facilitates a zero-sum game of self-interest in ways that make it exceptionally difficult to invite our neighbors to think with us about how we could do things differently. When colleges start reflecting the logic of corporate assholes, they fail to do the work of creating cultures that shape what corporations emerge tomorrow.

So, while I fundamentally oppose an economy that requires higher education and advanced degrees for economic survival, I think that the best tools we have for moving society away from such a world actual are found in spaces where we encourage each other to think deeply about what really matters. Colleges are not the only place where that can happen, but increasingly as liberal arts education gets undermined from inside and out, it is becoming much harder to find people willing to do the work of thinking about how to make such spaces more common in our broader society.

Being invested in each other’s humanity is much harder work than getting the training to outpace our competitors in the job hunt. In this way, perhaps the greatest irony of instrumentalism is that it keeps telling us that we have to be the most skilled in order to be competitive while actively making us worse at everything that matters most about who we are. The belief in an economic model of competition that overrides what is most deeply human about us serves to make us ever less human. Maybe that is why so many instrumentalists are excited about AI replacing human labor?

When you suck at being human, you will likely need to turn to machines in order to think that you matter at all.

But since we are still human, at least for today, here is a picture of a sunset I took a few days ago. Such a view is of no obvious instrumental value, it is still beautiful, and yeah, that does matter.

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So what could that claim possibly mean: “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”? I don’t take it that as a statement about a very narrow epistemology or reductive metaphysics. Instead, I think that it is best conceived as a musical testimony to the importance of what philosophers call embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is the idea that the mind is not some disconnected “ghost in the machine” of the body. Instead, rejecting the computational theory of mind, embodied cognition is the view that our lived experiences as embodied beings conditions what we understand, know, and take as significant.

Although I am crossing a bit between philosophy of mind and phenomenology, I tend to think about embodied cognition as the basic notion that we are beings who feel before we think and, accordingly, what it means to think must be framed in terms of our felt experience as bodies. We are affected before we engage in effects.

On this model of understanding, “swing” might be viewed as that sort of experience whereby we are changed from stationary to engaged, from passive to active, and from impassible to deeply moved. So, in life, as in music, if something “ain’t got that swing,” then it fails to impact us at our deepest level. It is almost an accidental, and incidental, aspect of our experience, not something at the core of who we are.

So, whatever has “that swing” causes us not only to tap our feet, and begin to dance, but to become invested and interested in where we are and how we could inhabit it otherwise. Swing invites us to care because it motivates us to get out of our seat and be transformed from observers to participants.

When I hear Duke and Ella I can’t help but think that they are right. Life is just so boring if it doesn’t have “that swing.” Indeed, swing is what refuses easily accommodating what the herd mentality tells us matters. Swing is not about being “like them,” but about finding our place in the groove. I sometimes ask my students as we are talking about a particular text (whether philosophical, poetic, or literary) whether they were “moved” by it. I then ask them toward what they were so moved. Sure, I care about them understanding Descartes’ “Evil Genius” argument, and Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative, and Beauvoir’s distinction between “being born” and “being made.” But, unless those ideas take root in the individual lives of the student, then that “understanding” is more like a memorized fact than it is a meaningful awareness. The difference is “swing.”

Kierkegaard gets at something like “swing” when, at just 22 years old he asks:

“What use would it be if truth were to stand there before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not, and inducing an anxious shudder rather than trusting devotion? Certainly I won’t deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge, and that one can also be influenced by it, but then it must be taken up alive in me, and this is what I now see as the main point.”

That “main point” is that something matters to us. That is has “swing” and impacts where we find ourselves. We are unable to hear it and just stay still. We can’t just be indifferent. We may not all relate to it in the same way. “Anxious shudders” are quite different from “trusting devotion,” but in either case, we abandon an objectivist conception of truth and, along with it, the idea that our minds are just computers. Life is not an algorithm. Kierkegaard, Ellington, and Fitzgerald all get that, and so should we.

What caused me to reflect on this notion of “swing” was that last week I fulfilled a life-long dream and saw Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in concert! They were my favorite of the “Neo-Swing” bands of the 1990s. My son actually got to meet Scotty Morris (the founder of the band).

This movement was inaugurated in the late 1980s with groups like Royal Crown Revue (which formed out of a punk sensibility and whose style always reflected those punk roots), and Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers (whose version of “Blue Skies” is just hauntingly beautiful).

Following from these early pioneers of Neo-Swing came the hey-day of the unexpected movement when 1993’s film “Swing Kids” and 1996’s “Swingers” both featured a prominent focus on “swing” as not just a musical style, but more of a way of life.

Here is one of my favorite scenes from “Swing Kids”:

Despite being set in 1930s Germany, this feels somehow prescient on where we now find ourselves. The excitement, the affect, the impact, the embodied participation, it is all profound. And, moreover, at the end we see the tone switch as Nazi officers come in the club and everything changes to reflect the ideological assumptions of the power-structure. What is so cool about this is that swing is presented (as it was historically) as a refusal to “go quietly into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas might put it. Swing is rebellious and obstinate. But, and this is important, it is this way not just out of immature protest, but out of an abiding commitment to the untamed realities of human existence.

The womanist theologian, Kelly Brown Douglas, makes a similar point about the role that the blues played in the history of the black church and, especially, the role of women within it. I highly recommend her work, but as just an example of how she sees music to be a kind of performative protest of free bodies against the constraints that would threaten to reduce them to mere objects, see her essay “The Black Church, the Blues, and Black Bodies.”

Moving from “Swing Kids” to the, admittedly, more irreverent “Swingers,” here we see the transition from the first generation of “swing” to its revival in neo-swing. In this clip, set to the music of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, the affective dimension of human existence is on full display. Sure, there are hormones and just sexual attraction obviously also in play between the two characters, but far more important than that (as is made clear within the context of the film) is their willingness to be vulnerable with each other in the shared dance. The pretense and self-loathing that had been so common for them now drops away as the dotted eighth note pattern pushes them both forward. In this way, the “Go daddy-o” lyric is not just an encouragement to dance with the attractive person at the end of the bar, but more of an existential invitation to become who you are ok having been.

Along with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy came other bands such as Squirrel Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and The Brian Setzer Orchestra. Almost all of these groups were also punk adjacent in their origins and I think that is just incredibly cool. Here is an awesome playlist with all the main tracks from this period (I didn’t make the playlist, but it is really, really good, so I didn’t see any reason for me to replicate it):

Part of what is so cool about understanding “swing” as a of reminder about the importance of embodied cognition is that it doesn’t really matter if you like this sort of jazz music or not. It is not about a particular genre, but about living with style.

I get asked all the time why I like both extreme metal and also boom-bap hip-hop, but then somehow also listen to jazz, to folk, to singer/songwriter, etc. Well, every time I respond that I don’t care so much about genre as I do about intensity. I care that the music be impactful. I want it to move me.

When I was at the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy show this week, it was remarkable how even the security folks and people checking tickets (which were all older folks clearly volunteering at the fine arts center’s outdoor concert venue) were dancing all over the place during the show. I mean, it was downright amazing to watch these folks, who were just as serious as can be while checking bags and making you walk through metal detectors, all forget about their arthritis and inhibitions and just start moving to the music. The swing overrode their normal sensibilities . . . as all things that really matter deeply to who we are probably should.

Ok, well, hopefully if you grew up thinking that learning to swing dance was a necessary part of becoming an adult (my friends and I used to clear the furniture out of the living room and all try to recreate the scenes from “Swing Kids” and “Swingers”), then this post will be a reminder of just how cool this music really was, and how cool it remains. But, if this is not your jam, again no worries. But whatever it sounds like to you, make sure that you are finding a way to “swing” today.

When so much of our lives are just inane tedium serving the interests of those who do not care about us, it is important to remember that “it don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing”).

So grab your fedora, put on those suspenders or mary janes, and meet me on the dance floor of a life well lived.

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Well, sort of . . .

Although I admit that in response to his challenge I was tempted to make this post entirely about the nuances of analytic mereology or epistemological debates regarding “modest foundationalism,” say, I then started thinking about the assumption operative in my former student’s comment. Whether he realized it or not, he was tacitly claiming that there is lots of stuff that is too light, too ordinary, or too personal to count as genuine fodder for philosophical inquiry. The stuff of philosophy, he basically suggested, is technical, difficult, hard-edged, and objective.

I willingly admit that lots of what professional philosophers (like myself) do, does rightly fit into such a description. And this is actually a very good, and important, thing. In a time when expertise is being rejected in favor of crude preferences for wealth, and when the hard work of becoming a specialist is thrown out in the name of political loyalties, it is crucial that we not ignore the social value of technical work done by serious people about difficult things.

Indeed, I don’t want my dad’s neurologist only relating to issues in ways that are accessible to the general public. I don’t want my truck mechanic to consult manuals that someone without training could easily understand. I don’t want someone re-roofing my house or fixing my plumbing after watching a few YouTube videos.

Expertise matters and should, in some significant way, be “exclusive” to those who have put in the years of training, learned the technical vocabulary, and engaged in the embodied liturgy of repetition that fosters the honed development of their singular skill. Why would we expect such expertise of our physicians, our mechanics, and our craftspersons, but not expect it of our philosophers?

Surely our minds, our thoughts, our beliefs, and our reasons are as important as our bodies, our vehicles, and our houses.

So, again, I think that my former student was definitely on to something in his desire for me not to “water-down” the philosophy to make it accessible to non-specialists.

And yet . . .

Even though we need to celebrate philosophical expertise, there is something really cool about philosophy that is, to my mind at least, less prominent in other fields: almost everything (and I mean everything) can be philosophically interesting!

We don’t go to neurologists to change our oil. We don’t call plumbers when we are having headaches. We don’t reach out to mechanics when a hail storm has caused a leak in our ceiling. But, we can think philosophically about the relation of our brains to our moral sensibilities, about the transformation of our embodiment with the advent of new technologies, about the significance of “place” in relation to what we call “home.” And so on.

My point is that philosophy is about much, much more than a professional discipline reserved for experts. Without wanting to take anything away from the rigorous work done by my colleagues within that discipline, I just don’t see philosophy as narrow in the way that so many other fields are. Indeed, at its most general (and existentially viable level) it is about living on purpose and learning to breathe deep while living. In this way, philosophers take seriously what everyone else takes for granted. Or, as I often say, philosophers put question marks where most other folks put periods. In this way, I think that philosophy should always be personal, whether or not it is done by professionals.

Let’s just do a little bit of this expansive work together.
Consider the following two pictures:

Both of these pictures are deeply “personal” to me. When I look at them I admit that I almost tear up thinking about my son no longer being the cute little kid who insisted on wearing his magic cape and the wolf ears while we were on vacation in Vermont so many years ago. He is now a stinky-butt teenager and much more concerned with his “fit” (read: clothes) and his weekend plans with friends than he is about spending time listening to bedtime stories about imaginary places where animals talk and he has the ability to fly.

It is surely possible just to see these pictures as a distraction from the “seriousness” of philosophical inquiry. Or minimally we could see them as just irrelevant to such “objective” professional work. But, I think we would be wrong to do so. Indeed, I think doing so would likely make us bad philosophers.

These pictures are my attempt, as a professional philosopher, to illustrate several complicated philosophical ideas in ways that ground them in my lived experience. The point is not to tell you about my life, I am sure you have more interesting things to think about, but to invite you to think more reflectively about your own life.

Let me give you just a few examples of philosophical principles that these two images might help us to understand--were we to spend the time pursuing the thoughts:

• There is no sense of selfhood without a temporal location (Heidegger, Nietzsche, James).

  • The idea here is that there is no “you” or “me” except in a context that is, itself, historically positioned. I am, to some significant degree, the performance of a story that I continue to tell about who I am. But just like you cant pick up a novel and begin to read on whatever page you want and then flip to whatever other page and keep reading, our selfhood emerges as an extended coherent narrative that needs a history and also a future. In fact, ask yourself whether you would be doing what you are doing if you did not think that the world would exist two weeks from now? Moreover, ask yourself who you would be if things had been radically different for you over the past 10 years, etc. Who you are/I am is not some sort of transcendent objective state of affairs. You are/I am in process. We are always becoming. And we only become right where we are. When is often the framework for Who.

• Existence is not only fundamentally relational (Hegel, Whitehead), but a matter of responsibility (Levinas, Derrida, Beauvoir).

  • Perhaps the best way to explain this is that we are not at first free beings without moral constraints, but moral beings who navigate their freedom in social contexts. I am not “me” and then have some responsibility for my wife, my son, my students, my neighbors, etc. It is my responsibility (and the specific ways that it plays out in historical contexts) that constitutes who I am.

• To care about others requires that I be invested in my obligations to future generations (Petit, Sartre, Rolston)

  • My actions are not somehow isolated in their impact. I am responsible for whatever “world” I have handed over to those who come behind me. The way I often think about this is that “norms norm us.” What I will have allowed to be viewed as “normal” will, in large and small ways, shape what others take for granted as obvious and necessary. Taking up our historical existence amounts also to anticipate how our lives will shape the lives of those who we will never meet. Being narrowly focused on “right now” amounts to a moral failure since what we do “now” will often be received by those who follow us as the “right” thing to do. Think about how often we hear that “this is just the way things are done” really amounts to “that is how we have always done them.” Existing in moral community requires being invested in opening spaces for the moral flourishing of those who inherit our influence. I think about this a lot when it comes to taking seriously that my son watches me as a model of how to live and who to become. I hope that I can bear that weight well.

• My identity is essentially located in a social community in which not only meaning but also justice are formed and enacted (Nussbaum, Arendt, West, Aristotle).

  • Our moral lives are not isolated from broader social frameworks. Cornel West has claimed that “justice is what love looks like in public.” I think he is right. We are unable to set aside the political in order to “get along” with our friends and family. As Aristotle rightly understood, the “polis” (community) is what shapes who we become and it is where we either cultivate virtue or vice as acceptable for our social world. Justice is not an afterthought for existence. It is the bassline and drumtrack over which our lives are the improvisational performances that make us who we will have turned out to be.

• Knowledge is to some significant degree a matter of experience (Locke, Hume)

  • Novelty is often cool. Innovation is usually fine. But it all depends on that toward which one is moving and the ideals in relation to which one narrates progress. It is only by the long persistence of effort that we learn how better to spend our time. I am not sure I am a good father (though I am trying to become one) but I know I am a better one than I was when my son was 2. I have now had 14 more years to figure things out. The “hard fought hallelujahs” of which Jelly Roll speaks are not usually to be found in graduate school or medical school classrooms. But the lessons learned in those classrooms are often what allow us to be better interpreters of what hallelujahs are worth fighting hard for in the first place.

• Some things are just felt more deeply than words can express (Chrétien, Marion, Henry)

  • As much as I love words, and I probably use far too many of them far too often, I think almost everything that matters most in life happens at the level of affect more than it does at the level of cognition. Maya Angelou is right to say that they will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. I want my son to feel loved - whatever lecture I might give him about the importance of the four conceptions of love for reflective existence.

The list could go on, and on, and on. As Outkast says, “forever? forever ever? forever ever?” Yeah, forever.

Philosophy does not admit of easy limits when it comes to its domain. If it is about life, if it is about truth, if it is about value, if it is about existence, if it is about subjectivity, if it is about meaning, if it is about language, if it is about belief, etc., then it is where philosophy can happen.

What matters, though, is how we relate to what we so often ignore. Are we reflectively aware? Are we willing to inhabit questions, rather than move to easy answers? Are we interested in slowing down in what we are doing, rather than trying ever more quickly to be done with it?

I deeply respect my former student and consider him a heck of a philosopher, but I think he, like almost all of us, is tempted by what I want to term the allure of the exceptional.

Exceptions are interesting, and perplexing, and worthy of our attention, but as I see it, philosophy should more often invite curiosity about the ordinary.

Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder--he is right. But, we don’t need to wonder only about extreme case studies, we can wonder about what is right in front of us at this very moment. As the band, Oasis says “all my people right here, right now, d’you know what I mean?” Maybe they were just trying to get us to focus on the majestic possibility that confronts us in the sublimity of the mundane.

As I look, philosophically, yet always personally, at those two pictures of my family, I don’t just think about things differently, but strive to live differently.

That’s the hope expressed by Karl Marx when he says that philosophers are not just those who understand the world, but those who should seek to change in (in light of hopefully an ever better understanding). That’s the realization of Aristotle when he says that it is hard work to be excellent.

I often think about the famous painting by Raphael, “The School of Athens.” In it, we see Plato and Aristotle walking together. Plato is pointing upwards—indicating his focus on the world of the forms—and Aristotle has his hand opened toward the ground—indicating his focus on our lived practice and social world. I think that we don’t have to decide between them. The point is not, ultimately, which one of them was right about metaphysics, but that they were friends who walked together and talked a bit along the way. It is that conversation, that friendship, that walk that I think is really what philosophy is all about.

Look, in no uncertain terms, I can tell you that it is much easier to get a Ph.D. in philosophy than to become, daily, a good father, a good friend, and a good person. Seeking to do the latter things cultivates important humility as I live into my professional identity.

So, to my student I simply say, give me a call anytime and we can talk modal logic. Then, as we finish our conversation, I will remind him that even if he figures out all the deep philosophical questions but fails to live a life defined by truth, goodness, and beauty, then he may have missed the most important point.

Don’t believe the lie that you can’t do philosophy because you didn’t get a college degree. Don’t give in to the temptation to think that what you do daily, in your home, at your office, or wherever you find yourself, is somehow less important because it is too pedestrian. Instead, as Kierkegaard says, we should attempt to “find the sublime in the pedestrian.” That’s simply what philosophers do (whatever their profession).

Here, at the beginning of summer we must be aware of the fall semester yet to come, but we must not, thereby, miss out on all the days in the sun.

Similarly, as I look at my son I must be aware that if I am too filled with regret for not making more of the time with him at 7, I will quickly find myself having missed out on making the most of my time with him at 16.

Go do philosophy. Right now. Live on purpose. No special degree needed.

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Unfortunately, far too many seniors think that graduation is from being a student to being an employee. This way of approaching things makes education merely an instrumental good, education a temporary endeavor, and success a matter of returns on (monetary) investments.

Although my advisees know that I tend to be very wary of giving actual advice, choosing instead to help students think about the probable risks and rewards of various existential options and then encouraging them to make the choices that they are willing to live with, today I want to break that general habit and give some advice to graduating seniors. Now, I offer this advice specifically to those finishing college, but the advice applies, I believe, to those graduating from high school, or those who have never set foot in a college classroom but continue to try to live toward virtue in the midst of the difficulties of a broken world.

1. Do not prepare for the “real world,” but instead prepare to choose, over and over and over again, what world you are willing to make real.

2. Who you walk though life with will matter every bit as much as where you are trying to go. Relationships are not secondary or incidental to what matters in life. They are what matters and almost everything else will be a matter of logistics.

3. Your degree, accomplishments, and achievements, and similarly your weaknesses, your failures, and your regrets, do not determine your dignity.

4. Ben Folds is right that it sucks to grow up. But he is also right that everyone does. The tricky part is that not everyone does so with grace. Stop trying to be 40 at 22. There will be plenty of time to be 40. As Anne Lamott says, “be where your feet are.”

5. Whatever else you have on your “to do” list, make sure that every day you do something just because it is awesome, something just for the sake of joy, and something for others.

6. When it comes to money, don’t let it control you. Money is merely a tool. The two best ways I have found to keep it in its appropriate place is to give the first 10% of whatever you make to those who are in need, then take the next 10% and invest it so that it continues to grow regardless of your circumstances. That way you are caring for others, first and foremost, and then caring about your future. That priority is the right one. Egoism will eat you.

7. Here’s another thing about money - it doesn’t matter that you are rich, but it does matter that you are kind. Remember Maya Angelou’s wisdom that people will forget what you do and what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.

8. The world is unjust and unfair, and we should do all we can to fix that, but don’t let your anger override your appreciation for beauty. In the midst of despair there are always reasons for hope.

9. Who you are becoming is always more important than what you do for a living. If you focus on the former, you are likely to be happier with the latter.

10. Life is longer than you think. So, slow down. Important things take time. You got this.

I often ask my graduating seniors what they would tell themselves if they could go back and talk to their first-year selves. Every single one (in different ways) always says the same thing: “I would tell myself that you are going to be okay.” I love that. I often tell my students that philosophy is all about knowing that you are good even when things are not. And on those days when you just aren’t good, you have surrounded yourself with people who can hold you up until you are.

One of my favorite pictures of my son is when he was about 6 or 7 and he put on my Ph.D. gown. In that picture I see the deep point of everything I have done - all the hours, all the effort, all the stress. The goal was not the degree but to be someone that he can look to as a model of a life well lived. I am not sure that I have pull that off, but thankfully I get to keep trying. Yes, I look forward to watching Atticus walk across the stage at his own graduating in the near future, but I am far less concerned about his degrees than I am about his character.

Despair is far too easy these days. And yet we must refuse to allow it to be inevitable. Whatever happens become someone you are okay having been.

No matter who you are, things are going to be difficult. As Nietzsche notes, “life is not an argument.”

Life is messy.
It is often unmanageable.
But it is also glorious.

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Well, my wife is telling me to stop saying that since I will only turn 49 this July. But in any case at this age I spend a lot more time than I used to thinking about what philosophers call the “counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.” These are the things that would have been true had people done different things. Now, I am on the side that thinks such counterfactuals do not actually exist. In other words, there is no fact of the matter about what would have happened.

Maybe it is helpful to think about it as a matter of possible worlds. We live in the “actual world” but there is a possible world that is just like the actual world but where all of us have red hair. Or just like the actual world but where being right handed is in the minority. Or just like the actual world but where you grew up 10 miles north of wherever you actually did. And so on. I do not think that there is a possible world that would have become the actual world if just I had done this or that at some point in the past. Instead, I am a big fan of agency and think that when we choose to do something we are actively bringing about a world that could have been otherwise.

At nearly 50 I wonder what might have been the case (what possible world would have been made actual) had I not gone to Vanderbilt for my Ph.D., but accepted that offer from the University of Tennessee? Or what might have happened if I had stayed at Vanderbilt for that post-doc in ethics, rather than moving to Arkansas to take a faculty position at Hendrix College? Or even what if my best friend had not broken up with his girlfriend (who I ended up marrying a few years later!)?

I don’t actually think that there are any answers to such questions. But they are still productive as invitations to realize that so very much of our lives is a crap-shoot. We can do it all “right” and still things go sideways. And others can do everything “wrong” and yet end up empowered and somehow not paying the consequences for it.

The task has got to be to live so that whatever happens, we are ok with how we lived. As I have argued at length in my book, Camping with Kierkegaard, we can’t guarantee outcomes, but we can commit to appropriate investment. If you haven’t read it, grab a copy.

Said more beautifully than I can, Maya Angelou is so very right when she claims:

“[Doing] right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul. It brings you the protection that bodyguards cannot give you. . . . Try to live your life so that you will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity.”

It’s the worry about those “years of useless virtue” that I think bear more heavily upon me as I age. But since none of us can control what happens, let me suggest that we follow the advice of Aristotle (and many, many other philosophers) who encourage us to strive for excellence rather than popularity. The latter might happen for those who cultivate excellence, but it will not be as likely to threaten their virtue. Alternatively, those who seek out popularity often do so at the direct cost to excellence.

Selling our soul, your character, or your integrity, is always too high a price to pay for anything.

For this “Music Mondays” I was reflecting on one of the bands that I think was genuinely excellent and yet just never broke through and never found even 15 minutes of fame. The band is Magnetic Flowers. They are from Columbia, SC. Their first album, Presents, Pasts, and Futures, came out in 2007. It was followed up in 2009 by What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About (which is really fantastic!), and after a single in 2010, their last album, Old, Cold, and Losing It, was released in 2013.

You can listen to all of their music for free here on Bandcamp.

*** In the aim of transparency, I should mention that their drummer is my brother, Evan.

Well, especially on their last album, every single track is near perfection. The lyrics are all something that would intimidate an English major. The production is exceptional in that it avoids all pretense and all worries about being “too slick.” And yet it is also balanced, appropriately bass-heavy without losing the high end that cuts through. The arrangements are mature, and dare I say, even wise. They have a musical sensibility that goes far beyond any easy categorization. They are, in a word, excellent.

Aristotle rightly notes that it is very hard work to be excellent and Magnetic Flowers exemplify what results when you put in that work.

If you listen to Old, Cold, and Losing it, I especially recommend the upbeat “Eat, Drink, and be Weary,” the playful “Trout Fishing in America,” and the somber and yet hauntingly profound “Let me Down Easy.” But seriously, every single track is just perfect. Top to bottom, the album is the kind of thing that would easily make the top ten lists for music critics for about 49 different reasons.

And yet . . .

Despite playing some big festivals, receiving very good press from around the Southeast, and drawing big crowds in their hometown of Columbia, SC, they never broke through. They never got the contract from a major label that would have made them a household name. They never made enough money playing music that they could avoid going back to their other varied careers. They never made it big. As a result, they no longer exist as a band and are remembered only by a very few folks who bought vinyls of their albums and still spin them at parties and smile when they are asked by guests “who is that you are playing?”

So, had they found more popularity and broken through in the mainstream what might have happened? I have no idea. But again, I don’t believe that there actually are counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that actually are the case as possible worlds. As such, we might rightly ask whether excellence even matters if it is not accompanied by the popularity that makes all that hard work worth the effort?

To be honest, I don’t know.

But, here is what I hope is true: Excellence is not a matter of outcomes, but only of investment. Excellence is not something that rests on its laurels. Excellence always sees “doing right,” as Maya Angelou says, as the task - no matter the circumstances.

As I sit here listening to their last album, I can’t help but be struck by the subtitle of their track “Fire of ‘09,” which simply states: “You’re going to be okay,” In fact, when this album came out, those who were early supporters received a copy of the vinyl album and also a t-shirt that was simply a white t-shirt with a crudely drawn image on the front of a building with lots of windows. In some of the windows it spelled out that all important statement: “You’re going to be okay.”

This is not that t-shirt, but it is one that I made with AI that closely resembles it:

I love this shirt and this message, but here is what is really, really cool: the band didn’t put their name anywhere on it. Almost as if they were acknowledging that the message is the only thing that matters, they cultivate excellence even if that means coming at the cost of popularity.

They made the right choice - even though it is, as Angelou admits, rarely profitable.

There are better things worth living for. And Magnetic Flowers list those things in the track, “Let Me Down Easy”:

“Let the laughter of my friends make me clean again.
Let the liquor in my throat fill me like a ghost.
Let the shouts of passersby freeze inside the night.
And please, let me down easy.”

Yeah, almost in the same tone displayed by Socrates when he tells Crito that they should not care about what the popular people or powerful people think, but only what the virtuous people think.

The same is true in music as in life . . . excellence matters even if nobody else notices.

You’re only going to be okay if you are not hinging your health on the actions of others.

But if you can do the hard work of excellence while ignoring the near constant temptations to think that popularity is really what matters, then you might just find that when all is said and done, you are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses who also celebrate the excellence, the virtue, the wisdom, and the life that you have cultivated. Magnetic Flowers illustrate this at the end of “Let Me Down Easy” by having the instruments all drop out and the haunting voice of the singer go through the chorus once in naked vulnerability. But then when it seems like the song is over, everyone rejoins and for the first time in the track the lyrics are all sung by all the members of the band. The solitary vocal is now a community.

You’re going to be okay not because your excellence makes you popular, but because it will surround you with people who will stand with you when the crowd turns away. This is, indeed, a kind of protection that bodyguards can’t provide.

I have to remind myself of this a lot these days. But here is the thing - I don’t wish I were still 25. I don’t want to be younger, I just want to do my best at whatever age that I am to strive toward excellence. Not in the attempt to be better than others, but to be someone I am okay with having been. I think that this has got to be what they mean with that message in the windows. Things might all collapse, but you are going to be okay if you did justice, loved mercy, and walked humbly. Excellence, even if ignored by everyone else, really does make a difference. Popularity, though intoxicating, does not.

I deeply wish that Magnetic Flowers had broken through and gotten really, really popular, but I can only wish that because I don’t know what would have happened had they done so. But what I know is that this band, and especially this album is excellent. And even if nobody else ever hears it, their excellence matters.

Oh, and by the way, so do you.

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So, I know that this will take a bit more time than my normal posts (our conversation is about an hour and a half), but turn it on during your morning commute, or while on the treadmill, or even while cooking some dinner. You won’t regret it. And be sure to let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments.

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Their classic album, Jane Doe (2001), remains one of the genuinely great albums in the genre. But their new album retains all of the chaotic glory of their earlier releases while also reflecting a maturity that only comes from the long experience of lived existence. The title of the album illustrates this deepened awareness. Gone are the blindly optimistic assumptions of youth, and instead we find a recognition that desire is rarely enough to bring about the world in which one hopes to live. Simply put: Love is not enough. Much more is required in the hard work of existence.

This broadened existential approach really hits home on the second track of the album, “Bad Faith.” Check out that track and then I will offer just a few thoughts on what we might take from it - whether or not you find yourself rocking out to the groove, or immediately getting a headache from it (which my wife says happens whenever I pick the music for us to listen to!)

I don’t know if any of the members of Converge have ever read the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, but after listening to this track, I think that they might have.

Swinging out of the gate with only a two line verse, they illustrate the way that life is so deeply marked by temptations to despair. It sucks to go through hard times, but it is often just as bad (maybe worse) to see someone we care about struggle. As they note:

Today, I saw the face of love in pain
With a sadness that couldn't wash away

We often do anything that we can to distract ourselves from the difficulties we face, and we would do anything to prevent our loved ones from having to face hard times. And yet, true sadness is not something that is easily “washed away.”

When faced with such distorted faces navigating the agony of the human condition, what are we to say? Well Converge offers a very simple and yet profound encouragement:

You can't give up
I can't give up
They can't give up
We can't give up on us

Easier said than done, though, right? Surely the notion of not giving up is just a bit too simplistic when considering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that no amount of will is able to overcome.

Converge concludes the track with a refrain that is admittedly a bit perplexing:

Bad faith, bad faith
It can't wash away
Bad faith, bad faith
It won't wash away
It can't wash away
Love in pain

Why would anyone think that “bad faith” could wash away such pain? Why would one even try to do so using such a blunt and awkward tool?

Well, it is here that I find Sartre’s existentialism to offer an important resource not only for making sense of these confusing lyrics, but also to us all as we face challenging times in our own lives and in the lives of those we care about.

Sartre distinguishes between “good faith” and “bad faith.” Neither has anything to do with religious commitment or theistic belief. Rather, Sartre anticipates my own definition of faith as “risk with direction.” Or, maybe, a better way to put it is that I was drawing, to no small extent, on Sartre (and other existentialists) when I formulated that definition. The idea for Sartre is that all life is lived either by owning up to the weight of responsibility for ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves (good faith), or by denying such responsibility by attempting to escape it in some way (bad faith).

On this account, bad faith is still faith in that it remains risky and directed, but it is bad in that it is also unconscious and evasive. It is a risk that gets denied. It is a direction that is unchosen.

Bad faith happens whenever we seek to pass off our responsibility onto the shoulders of someone else. Bad faith is a name for escapism, whereas good faith is a name for conscious investment in the stakes of one’s own decisions and the existence that results from them.

Avoiding bad faith is a matter of taking up oneself as a task and one’s world as shapable. Good faith refuses to allow for any suggestion that we are stuck. Instead, it encourages owning one’s circumstances as constituting the site of decision and self-making.

Good faith is not about moving in this or that direction, but in moving on purpose in whatever direction you take to be most worthy of your time and effort.

In light of this account, we can, I believe, make better sense of why bad faith will never wash away love in pain. And I mean that in both of the senses that this phrase might convey. Bad faith can never eliminate the love despite the pain because love is purposive in a way that bad faith is not. Similarly, bad faith can never wash away the pain of the beloved because it refuses to own up to the pain in the first place.

In this way, bad faith is a kind of performative denial. It refuses to admit the actual circumstances in which one finds oneself. So long as we are in bad faith, we are never capable of moving forward. Instead, all movement is just a spiraling deeper into evasion, into denial, into despair.

Escapism offers no genuine escape.

Good faith, alternatively, may not wash away the pain, but it does not allow the pain to overwhelm the love.

Here we are.
And that matters.

Even if I can’t wash away the pain, I can stand with you in the midst of it. Good faith is such solidarity in the human condition. It is the embrace not of the pain (Nietzsche was wrong about that), but the rejection of any attempt to deny it. We do not need to find meaning in all suffering, but we do need to affirm meaning in spite of it.

James Cone, the great liberationist theologian, speaks about “hope beyond tragedy.” That is what I think good faith admits might be possible. There are no guarantees, but hope remains when we stop denying the circumstances in which we stand. Hope is not a refusal. Bad faith does not converge (see what I did there?) with hope. Instead, hope is never an escapist gesture, but an expression of continued investment in the significance of our experience.

Converge’s music is not exactly easy on the ears, but similarly life is not exactly easy to navigate. Whatever our musical preference and whatever our current circumstances, may we find the fortitude to embrace the responsibility we bear for ourselves and others.

Bad faith neither washes away the pain nor allows the pain to be unmanageably excessive. Only living with purpose and standing in good faith despite the risks can both facilitate the strength not to be destroyed by the pain and also the courage to make the world less painful.

Metalcore may not hold the keys to the meaning of life, but I do think that it might go a pretty good way toward inviting us to take such meaning more seriously.

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Well, during junior and senior high school, I developed some ability and ended up playing professionally for many years (as well as teaching numerous students along the way). Nowadays I only play for fun, and I spend more time watching my 16 year old son play than I do practicing myself. Atticus is very good and is now attending a fancypants “Fine Arts Center” for high school where he is studying percussion and jazz.

Frequently Atticus has his friends over to spend the night and they spent most of their time making up songs on the piano, laying down a drum beat to the new melody, and then overlaying guitar, Irish flute, and auxiliary percussion parts. Though some of the music is often let’s just say . . . an acquired taste, it is always amazing to hear them create new tracks.

I have often said that my approach to philosophy - both as a writer and speaker - is influenced heavily by my being a drummer. Indeed, I think of philosophy in terms of music most days. I start most of my classes with music in order to set the tone for the day. I almost unconsciously think of songs that illustrate big philosophical ideas while I am reading. And, perhaps most importantly, I try to make my classes, my books, and my presentations all have the emotional impact, structural flow, and rigorous nuance of really good music. That said, I am sure that some of my students wished I listed to more Bon Iver than Annal Nathrakh since I think sometimes they prefer the energy of a coffee shop to a mosh pit. Oh well . . .

Reflecting a bit about these things, I want to highlight three ways in which I think that philosophy is very much like music in that they are both about improvisation. Hopefully you can appreciate and integrate these ideas into your own life and thinking, whether or not you have clean double strokes.

Oh and before we begin, if you are interested in thinking more about the philosophy of music or the philosophy of improvisation, check out this book by my friend, Bruce Ellis Benson. It is fantastic:

Ok first, in order to be good at improvisation. you have to spend many, many, many hours in the practice studio. Creativity rewards diligence. My son still tends to prefer to make up songs instead of putting in time on his rudiments. But, as I tell him over and over, there is only one way to get better: PRACTICE.

Importantly, though, practice never makes perfect! Instead, as Aristotle explains, it just makes familiar. When we don’t have to think about every single stroke, every single note, every single chord, then we are able to move through them all more comfortably. When we stop thinking so much about playing, we begin to play more compellingly. It is worth realizing that you can’t experiment on what you absolutely don’t understand. Experimentation is a matter of pushing from what you know into what you don’t.

The phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, said that when it came to philosophy, he was a perpetual beginner. I think that the same is true in music. When we realize that all the time we have put in is not in order to walk around acting like we have mastered things, but so that we can sit down behind the kit, pick up the guitar, or grab the tin whistle, and create with others.

Thinking well is crucial for living well, but the goal is to do philosophy so that it becomes simply the manuscript paper upon which we then begin to write notes. So, practice, practice, practice, but then don’t forget to play!

The second point is actually a pretty easy one to understand: Don’t be limited by your gear, but make your gear push beyond limits! I imagine that you have all seen a street drummer playing a 5-gallon bucket and making it sound amazing! This is true innovation: making something out of what others consider nothing. Philosophy works the same way. You don’t need a Ph.D., you don’t need a huge library, you don’t need a book contract. Philosophy is a matter of making the most of what has been made of us. It is about doing what we can with what we have where we are. Although I highly recommend students take some philosophy courses in college, I would never suggest that college is necessary to be a philosopher. Don’t be intimidated by what you “lack.” Be inspirational by what you make happen with what you already have.

Finally, improvisation is almost always more fun with others. Though there are some pretty fantastic one-person bands (I am really digging Blackbraid right now - a one-man Native American black metal project that I highlighted on a Music Mondays a while back), I love playing drums with a bass player who pushes me to hear things I might otherwise miss.

Philosophy is not primarily an activity to be done alone. It is about living intentionally with others and inviting them to rethink their beliefs as they help you to consider your own. Socrates modeled that criticism is how we care for the soul of another. As far as I am concerned, criticism is, thus, an expression of hospitality. It is an invitation to think together such that loving truth is more important than elevating our own egos. Playing with others has the same effect. When we trade licks, riff over a general comp laid down by someone, or learn to listen really well, we are cultivating the virtue of hospitality. Humility and hospitality go together. Allowing room for the other instruments to find their own voice alongside your own is crucial for the track to unfold.

So . . .
(1) Let’s spend time practicing, but then remember to play.
(2) Let’s refuse to be determined by our circumstances and cultivate the courage to seek excellence in all occasions.
(3) Let’s find our voice by learning to pass the mic to others.

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Levinas is especially interested in this question because he has long interrogated the idea that there could be some point at which our responsibility for others finds its terminus. Surely, it might seem, in the face of such elemental evil - which is his term for “natural” or “surd” evil - as contrasted with moral evil (evil directly resulting from human actions) we would find such a limit. One can’t be held responsible for the “damages due to fire,” right? Fire is not controlled by human will and is not constrained by our intention. The elemental force outstrips human responsibility because it overwhelms human reason . . . or so it would seem.

For Levinas, the text cuts against such an interpretation. Contrary to our reasonable attempt to defend ourselves against that which we cannot control, this passage

“affirms responsibility for damages caused by a disaster, due, to be sure, to human freedom, but which, as fire, immediately escapes the powers of the guilty party. Fire, an elementary force to which other elementary forces will add themselves, multiplying damages beyond any rational conjecture! The wind adds its whims and violences to it. And yet responsibility is not diminished.”

Going on to suggest that responsibility continues “beyond all reason,” Levinas suggests that any attempt to give a rational defense of suffering, of evil, of the incalculable loss due to the “fire” would be “indecent, as all theodicy probably is.”

Importantly, and tragically, for Levinas, who lost so many family and friends in the Holocaust, the damages due to fire are far greater than property destruction. He is interrogating the way that we find ourselves in a world where we have become callous to the suffering of others - especially if that suffering is not directly/rationally tied to specific concrete intended action that allows for explanatory rationale. His specific reflections are anchored in the trauma through which he lived (and as a result of which so many more did not) and yet how can we make sense of such evil? His answer is that we cannot. And yet that doesn’t excuse responsibility.

Rational thresholds are not the right criteria for moral life.

Often, things spin out of control such that an easy chain of causation becomes hard, if not impossible, to articulate. I think that Levinas’s essay is especially relevant today in a time of war, rising cultural indifference to the suffering of others, dehumanizing rhetoric and actions that lead to a raging inferno of hatred, fear, and tragedy that threatens to overtake moral awareness and concern. Though it can be tempting to lay the blame of our situation at the feet of this or that person, Levinas’s point is that sometimes evil just doesn’t work that way. Like fire, it is fanned by the irrational winds of whim and outstrips any attempt to suck it back into a judicial framework where the guilty are punished according to public reason and social outcry. Even attempting to do so threatens to excuse much of the impact of the evil as lying beyond any such structure. Accordingly, theodicies (attempts to justify the evil or explain it) are, themselves, indecent in the face of the suffering, loss, and brokenness that has occurred.

Instead, Levinas’s claim is that responsibility must be something that goes all the way down. Only as such could we even begin to do the hard work (maybe the impossible work) of owning the weight of unintended consequences and our obligations to every single other person as part of the same moral community.

Importantly, the damages due to fire are not local, but they represent the idea that the whole world has burned down. Our rational securities, our social expectations, our moral assumptions, all of it faces flames that cannot be controlled.

This realization is hitting me hard today as I weep in light of the callous indifference of those supposedly charged with bearing the weight of social responsibility. Rather than putting out fires wherever they threaten, we instead recently saw Trump claim that “a civilization will die tonight.” In the seeming attempt to focus on national economic policy, we have watched as (according to Impact Counter) approximately 750,000 (including 500,000 children) have died as a result of funding cuts from USAID. It is exceptionally easy to be angry about such facts, and perhaps even easier to say that if Trump were gone then things would be better (which I think that they largely would), but it is very hard to make easy rational claims about how the guilt functions in such cases. Responsibility overflows our legal orders. And once we start pulling at this thread of moral blame, the sweater of social explanation becomes largely unwearable.

I agree with Levinas that only if we see responsibility as having no rational borders, admitting of no easy limits, and resisting any reduction to juridical decision can we perhaps begin to fight the fires that rage in our world. But this means that we risk facing the fragility of those very social structures upon which we so often cling for security. When our world burns down, what is left?

Far too often, we would rather watch the houses of everyone else burn down so long as we think that ours is safe from the flames, rather than work together and do all we can to model that so long as any house is unsafe, all are at risk. As Martin Luther King Jr. rightly noted, a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

At the risk of myself sounding indecent in the face of such a serious topic, which I hope I will not, I actually think that the new Kacey Musgraves song, “If the World Burns Down,” although part of the soundtrack to a silly TV show (which I admit that I genuinely enjoy), hits on a really important aspect of this Levinasian framework. Here is the song with the lyrics:

Though this track is obviously meant as a love song, what if we expand the “you” in a Levinasian fashion? What if this “you” is not about this, specific, other person, but about the radical infinity of each and every single other? What if we hear it as almost an expansion of Derrida’s claim “tout autre est tout autre” (every other is every bit other)? I think that if we do so, then we can gain a fairly practical sense of what it might mean to live into the challenge that Levinas offers to us all.

“There’s fear in the air, uncertainty
Got the windows down, it’s just you and me
Conversation and one more drink
Your mouth and heart are all I need

So let’s go down to the water
I’ll go all in

If the world burns down, opens at the seams
Well, I hope you know, you were it for me
If the way it goes, goes against our dreams
If I never told you, you were it for me.”

Notice that she admits of the weight of the unpredictable, the irrational that threatens to overwhelm us. Ignoring the romantic overtones, what we see is a statement about being fully invested in the other person such that “I’ll go all in.” Accordingly, in the face of fear, we do not turn away from the other, but help them “down to the water” both to escape the flames and also, in the words of the old spiritual . . . down to the river to pray - that is to join together in shared hope when faced with the overwhelming odds stacked against us. Calling out to God is not a means of avoiding responsibility, but of embracing it. It is to align oneself with the Good that also is irreducible to rational calculation. And, crucially, this is not a point about determinate religion, but about desire - what Levinas will term the desire for the absolutely other, for the good of the absolutely other.

Egoism, jealousy, greed, power, they all conspire against kindness and concern for the face of each and every other person. But, even if the world (our structures of power, of intelligibility, of social order, of rational explanation) burns down, the question that matters, the question of responsibility, remains: Will you be there for the other?

When read in this light, the last lines of the song really hit hard:

“You were it for me
It was always you
You're the only thing
I don't wanna lose.”

Levinas understands selfhood to be ultimately a matter of responding to the moral call of the other person. The “you” really was always “it” for “me.” Even if the world burns down, I am not lost so long as I remain true to that call of the other. Hence, the “you” really is the “only thing I don’t wanna lose.” For if I hold on to “you” then the world can be rebuilt - maybe ever more justly, ever more protected from some of the fires of moral indifference, ever more committed to the awareness that there is no “me” if I am not invested in “you.”

It is only in this sense of being entirely invested in “you,” says Levinas, that there is justice also for me. As I hold on to you as the world burns down, I need you to hang on to me. Here maybe the track by Natalie Taylor and Donovan Woods can also be rethought as a Levinasian call:

“Hang on to me
For as long as you can
Pull me in, pull me in
Hang on to me
For as long as you can
Pull me in, pull me in.”

Yeah, I know it probably sounds like hippie nonsense in the face of global calamity, authoritarianism, and rampant asshole capitalism, but the realization that “you” are it for me and that I need you to hang on to “me,” is perhaps the only hope that we have. This doesn’t excuse the need for social consequences and judicial punishment for those acting wrongly. This doesn’t ignore the importance of local causation in many cases of inhumanity. But, it does reject any attempt to secure our own place as somehow blameless as the world burns down.

The damages due to fire are horrific, but there is a chance to rebuild so long as we can stand together and refuse to limit our responsibility for making the world otherwise.

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“Tennessee’s outdoors, in and of itself, is a marvelous think tank. It doesn’t matter if it’s the dead of winter and I am hiking the Appalachian Trail toward Icewater Spring shelter or the middle of May and I’m wading into the Hiwassee River at low flow, this wonderland of mountains and valleys is a perfect place to get delightfully lost in my thoughts.”

I love this passage for two reasons. First, I have waded into those very low flow waters of the Hiwassee River more times than I can remember. But, second, his words here speak to the way that the familiar is always most profound when it retains mystery. It is as if Venable is performing the truth of Heraclitus’s claim that you can’t step into the same river twice. No matter where we are, or how many time we have been there before, today is new. It is different. And that matters.

We can so often get lulled into what we might term an “apathy of the everyday” that stifles our ability to remain open to what comes.

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Aaron James says that one of the most important habits in life is to develop the skill of “adaptive attunement.” By that he means that we must be able to flex at some moments and stand firm at others. Only if we pay attention to where we are, are we able to navigate things well.

This idea of cultivating an awareness of the strange in the familiar is actually a helpful way of thinking about ethical life, I believe. In her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, the existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, does an excellent job of highlighting the ways in which moral life is not something that is static and necessary, but always contingent and fragile.

Consider her claim that:

“Man exists. For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.”

Beauvoir’s point here is that we must make the most mundane things resound in their actual significance. What world do you want to make real? What do you hope will be true for yourself and others? How will you live such that flourishing is possible? These questions are not abstract dynamics attending to value theoretic speculation. They are extremely practical. They put the flesh on the bones of moral life, as it were. They position us as not just intellectuals, but as lived bodies. What, then, is worth your time? How, then, will you live?

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She says later that we must become our own “interrogation.” In other words, we need to live such that we are always aware that things could be otherwise. What we take for granted (like the waters of the Hiwassee River) is never as stable as we think. Being where we have been before doesn’t mean that what worked previously will work now. We must grow comfortable with questions about where we find ourselves if we are not to forget that there are other places we could be.

“Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning,” Beauvoir contends. She is right that we have trained ourselves to find indefinite questioning a painful experience. We are not fans of ambiguity. We like to be in control. And yet, as the Stoics remind us, we simply can’t control everything. We must find ways to embrace the challenges of what depends on our will and the courage not to be overwhelmed by what lies beyond it.

The “good” is not something stable like a wall or a statue. The “good” is more like a river. It flows and gets deeper at spots and shallower at others. This ambiguity is troubling for those who need us to fear those with whom we disagree. This ambiguity is dangerous for those who make a living fostering the insularity that attends self-righteousness.

What is really cool, though, is that when we acknowledge the ambiguity that attends our moral lives, we are better able to appreciate what is possible. Things can be different. We are not stuck. The river continues to flow and we can learn to ride the rapids. But, such a ride requires deep humility. As Anne Lamott says in her book Grace Eventually: “’I think I might need help.”

We all need to say that - probably more often than we allow ourselves to admit. Lamott goes on to note that we must attend to the difficulty of some of our steps: “I suppose that if you were snatched out of the mess, you’d miss the lesson; the lesson is the slog.”

The lesson is the slog. Yesssss. I love that.

How often do we ignore the slog because we are just so darn irritated that we are in the midst of it?

By paying attention to the mundane, the familiar, the ordinary, the mess, the process, the ambiguity, and the slog, we are ever more slightly better prepared not to be wrecked by it. Sometimes when the slog is especially taxing, it can seem like we are just doing the best we can to make any progress at all. But, at other times, we can appreciate the strange in the familiar that opens onto possibilities that are too often hidden in plain sight.

When we find the strange in the familiar, the familiar becomes alive with new options. It resonates with the harmonies we might otherwise miss. When we listen, and I mean really listen, then we might begin to hear the symphony of such possibility.

I don’t know about you, but for me there is very little more beautiful than the sound of the flowing river. The water continues to move, to dance, to bounce, and to float. But as I stand there allowing my fly-line similarly to move, dance, bounce, and float above that moving water before the fly finds its landing just behind the rock where the water spirals back on itself, my own existential impermanence becomes the condition of so much meaning. This moment will never come again. But, wow, what a moment we can make it.

Yes, the water level on the Hiwassee might be higher than I was expecting, but it also might yield a slight shift of the water flow as it breaks over the rock. That small, almost imperceptible shift, might be just enough to invite a curious trout to rise to my fly. I will never know unless I get to the river.

Maybe Heraclitus was a fisherman? Perhaps he was misquoted and really his claim was that you can’t ever cast your line into the same river twice?

That sounds pretty good to me.

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In what follows, I will be quoting heavily from Kaho’s essay (block quotes in italics). I hope that you will hear my own thoughts as, in some sense, dancing with hers.

I love this track by Francis and the Lights because it is more about coming to grips with one’s inherited identity than it is about jumping around to the music. In this way, it is a matter of actively choosing to allow oneself to be moved. We are shaped by that which we did not decide. We are the result of the influence of others. The opening lines make this clear:

“In the ground, we bury
The seeds of a pear tree
All the things we carried
Now we're down to our bare feet.”

Our existence is an embodied performance of what others made possible. And yet that does not determine us in some sort of teleological way. Instead, it is an invitation. Will we respond?

When I am really dancing, I am not trying to dominate the music. I am not standing over it like a planner over raw material. The best moments happen when I stop trying to impose myself and instead let my body enter the rhythm. The music leads, but not in a way that erases me. Rather, it draws something out of me that feels more fully mine precisely because it is not forced.

That is exactly right. Dancing is the response to being welcomed. The chorus expresses this mode of embodied hospitality:

“May I have this dance?
To make it up to you
Can I say something crazy?
I love you
Give me both your hands
To make it up to you
Let me spin and excite you.”

It is crucial that we realize that there are no riskier words than “I love you.” These words are absolute exposure.
They are, as Francis says, crazy!
They are madness.
They are also home.
They are also absolute safety.

The statement, “Give me both your hands,” is not offered as a demand, but a quiet call. Notice though that if we take both hands, then both of our hands are also taken/held/grasped. We are not only the spinner, but the spun. We are not just the exciter, but the excited. Dance is mutual. It is co-implicating. In this way, it also about dispossession at the very moment that it is constitutive.

In dance, I am efficacious without being in total control. I do something, but I do not produce the whole condition of possibility for what I do. The music is already there. The rhythm is already there. My body has been shaped by practice, memory, and feeling long before that moment. So when a dance goes well, I cannot simply congratulate myself as if I authored it alone. I entered something. I answered something. I moved with something. That makes me ask whether freedom might actually begin where mastery loosens.

Yes. Yes. Again, yes. “Freedom might actually begin where mastery loosens.” I so wish I had written that line. It is just so good. It speaks to what philosophers from stoicism to existentialism term “letting be.” We are most in control when we no longer try to control everything. We are most free when we are most relationally constrained.

None of us are absolutely self-created. We are the product of the lives of others. That is both an amazing realization of dependency that fosters moral investment, and also a frustrating awareness that arrogance is always what Whitehead would term “misplaced concreteness.”

“We are bound to inherit
The sins of our parents
And all of the people we passed through
Now we're down to the last two.”

Chance builds on this idea in his contribution to the track:

“You’ve got your mother’s eyes. You’ve got your grandmother’s ring. You’ve got your daddy’s discernment. Girl you did your thing.”

I love that doing “her thing” is a matter of living into this inheritance without being overridden by it. As Kaho puts it, we receive that which does not erase us, but invites us to find our own movement.

I take it that Chance’s claim, “I love you more than your mother. More than you love yourself,” is an expression of the irreducibility of who we are to the traces that have shaped us. Dancing can be the expression of those various threads all being woven together.

I do not dance because it can always be converted into a defensible outcome. Sometimes I dance because it is the most alive I feel in my body. Sometimes I dance because movement gathers my scattered self together. Sometimes I dance because the music feels too full to remain still inside it. None of these reasons are irrational, but neither are they the sort of reasons I usually trust in public.

Trust is just so hard. It is so easy to talk ourselves out of our own voice. Silence is just easier than risking the scorn of those who do not dance to the music we play.

And yet, I think that the real question is whether we will dance to the music we hear. Will we embrace the fact that we might get off beat and yet then have the fortitude to find it again?

I think that the video does a great job of showing what that looks like. We initially see both Francis and Chance in the mirror, but Francis disappears as Chance comes into view. He keeps trying to practice the movements but can’t seem to get them right. He is the visibility of self-doubt, of self-criticism. But the song continues. The beat goes on (I could help it!).

Then, during his verse he seems to find his footing just a bit more, he strings together the movements a bit more seamlessly. And then Francis jumps in next to him and the beat kicks in as they both find their footing and dance together to the end of the song.

Pay attention though because there is one spot where they spin as the line says “let me spin and excite you.” It is clear that Chance about falls over. And yet they keep going. I can’t imagine that this was intentional. It seems more likely that he just stumbled and about lost his footing. Rather than give up, call a wrap, start over, etc., he just keeps moving his arms and finds the beat again.

In the end, it is not about getting the dance right, but continuing to move to the music of life. In that sense, the continued motion is the point. The adaptive attunement (thanks, Aaron James for the phrase) that makes dancing with others possible expands to an existential openness to self-trust.

“You must have been born with two right feet.”

That’s right. None of us are incapable of dancing through life. We get worn down and made weary in a world that needs us to feel bad about ourselves in order that someone else feel better about themselves. But that is a failure of true dance. The point is not that one person dances so that everyone else sits down. It is the invitation “Can I have this dance?” Get up. Get moving. Join in the movement.

Maybe freedom is not the power to stand outside all influence and create myself from nothing. Maybe freedom is closer to what happens when I become attuned enough to respond well to what is already calling me. Maybe the most truthful moments of my life have not been the ones in which I controlled everything, but the ones in which control gave way and I moved in step with something larger than my will. If that is true, then I have to rethink not only dance, but my whole story about myself. I have to ask whether the life I call mine has been less an act of possession than a practice of listening.

Kaho’s essay invited me to dance today and I am so glad that it did. I hope that it does the same for you. If so, I think that Francis and the Lights offers us all a pretty good backing track.

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While reflecting on this basic idea I re-read the following passage from Jacques Derrida. It is from the book that he coauthored (sort of) with Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality:

“Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights. Just hospitality breaks with hospitality by right; not that it condemns or is opposed to it, and it can on the contrary set and maintain it in a perpetual progressive movement; but it is as strangly heterogeneous to it as justice is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable.” (26-27)

Derrida is characteristically difficult to understand here and so if you gave up reading that about half way through, you would easily be forgiven for doing so (and if any other Derrida scholars are reading this, yes, I get the irony in offering forgiveness here!). Well, today I want to do my best (still might not be good enough) to try to unpack this passage in order to think about the stakes of being welcoming to even that which challenges where we stand and how we make sense of ourselves in the first place.

There are two moves that he is making and both present different existential tensions that are crucial to making sense of how receiving criticism and showing hospitality are two sides of the same coin. The first is the distinction between the “foreigner” and the “absolutely other.” The second is the distinction between “law” and “justice.” Once we get clear on those two differences, we can make sense of the difference between “conditional” and “unconditional” or “absolute” or “just” hospitality.

Hang with me. I really do think that the effort is worth it.

Foreigner/Absolutely Other

Derrida rightly recognizes that some others are only relatively different (which means that they are also relatively similar) in that we can still make sense of who they are, place them in a context of intelligibility, and give them the status appropriate to their “name.” There are a bunch of possible ways we could make sense of this (and all would only be approximate analogies) but let me offer two examples.

I often have students ask me if they can bring a friend to one of my classes. I always say that they can and yet when that friend comes to class, they always come up and introduce themselves and tell me their name and thank me for allowing them to attend, etc. In this case, they are still not someone who ordinarily lays claim to belonging in this space. They have to be invited in, as it were. And yet, I am able to make sense of them and what it means to welcome them to class. In Derrida’s terminology, they would be a “foreigner” such that they are not exactly one of us, but they are close enough to who we are that it is easy to see them as able to fit in. Simply put, their presence doesn’t actually challenge who “we” are. They might ask questions about how we do things, sure, but they don’t put “us” in question.

As another example, imagine you get a knock on your door and it is someone that you don’t know, but they still look familiar. They then tell you that they live down the street and need some help with this or that. You invite them in and help them get the cup of sugar, or make the call, or whatever it is that they need. In this case, again, they are strangers, but still intelligible to us. Using Derrida’s language, they are “foreigners” who can’t just walk into our front door anytime that they please (as would be the case for someone who lives in the house with us), but they are still recognizable according to the broader context of meaning and community in which our “welcome” is offered to them.

Contrast these examples with a case where the person asking for hospitality is absolutely unrecognizable to us. This can play out in a variety of ways - and for Derrida it is more of a structural question than it is a practical one (though these are never disconnected). Maybe they don’t speak our language. Maybe they don’t fit our assumptions about acceptable bodied presentation. Maybe they do not see the world the way that we do. Maybe they even see our way of seeing things as deeply problematic and dangerous. By the way, would you be just as invitational to someone with liberty spikes as you would be to someone in a suit?

Derrida’s notion of the absolutely other, the radically unknown other, is his attempt to countenance encountering that which would be unintelligible to us on our terms. The absolute other contests the terms of presentation. They are not just others like us who we don’t yet know, but they are others who challenge who/what “we” are. They put “us” in question.

Law/Justice

The categories that Derrida develops to make sense of such encounters are complicated but basically serve to distinguish between the domain of reciprocal calculated risk and the domain of asymmetrical absolute moral command. He names the former “law” and the latter “justice.”

Law is the name we give to the ordinary structures for navigating encounters with others like us. It is how we find ways to live together in society and to exclude the “wrong” people and include the “right” ones. Laws are contingent rules that govern our interactions with others who are also subject to the same social context and frames of meaning as we are. In that sense, they are still part of “us” even if still requiring invitation to come in the house. Law is what allows us to make sense of how “foreigners” need to act and what allows them to know what is expected of them once they enter. Again, “foreigner,” here, is the relative other - it is not primarily about nationality or citizenship (though it is also about that).

Alternatively, justice is not a concrete fact about a social order. Justice is the name that Derrida gives to the ideality that calls forth the establishment of laws in the first place. Justice is always, “to come,” because any concrete instantiation of “justice” in this or that way will fail to be just in some respect. Justice, Derrida claims, is never an historical reality, but the call that continues to motivate us to do ever better in history. It is always arriving, but never here. It is present when we realize that there is always more that is required.

Conditional/Unconditional Hospitality

With these basic ideas in place, we can now see how they motivate two different notions of hospitality. Conditional hospitality begins with a mutual agreement about how things are going to work out and sets the terms by which the hospitality will continue to be shown. It is definitionally stipulative. As conditional, it starts by placing conditions that must be met if hospitality is to be justified.

Alternatively, unconditional or absolute hospitality is a welcome without reserve. It is not a matter of saying “you can come in, if . . .” but instead flips the order of the operative expectation. The “come” is prior to, and indifferent of, any facts about “who” it is that is coming.

It might seem that absolute hospitality is just a pipe-dream. But, I actually take it to be the sort of thing that we find in The New Testament when Jesus offers the invitation “come all who are heavy burdened.” The seeming condition of being “heavy burdened” is not meant to divide people into groups, but instead is offered as a statement about what it means to be a human. To exist as vulnerable beings is to be heavy burdened by the weight of decision in light of finitude. So the expression “come all” is best read as a statement of absolute hospitality. Come all those who are like us. Come all who are not. Come all who reinforce our sense of things. Come all those who challenge them. Come all who agree. Come all who refuse. Come all.

Let that sink in. ALL are welcome - without condition. Regardless of name. Indifferent to status.

Only absolute hospitality to the absolute other could qualify as “just” hospitality. And yet, such hospitality seems impossible. Derrida admits as much and yet doubles down on the idea that it is in that very impossibility that justice is possible. But, and I get that this is annoying - it is possible by being impossible. If we can see how to enact it - by understanding the other on our terms (as “like us” in some important way), then there is no real decision required. There is no challenge to how we do things. Indeed, the conditional hospitality is simply a manifestation of how we do what we do.

But, opening the door to the absolute other, to the nameless, to the one without status, to the one who doesn’t show up on our terms, we expose ourselves to the radical contestation of those very terms. When we say “come all,” the invitation is a dispossession of our claim to the place into which we invite the other. It cedes status, rather than recognizing it.

In practice, it is hard to see how such absolute hospitality could even work. In every case, there is going to be some mode by which the other gets reinscribed into our frame of meaning and value. And yet, it is at that point where we are tempted to turn deconstruction into mere pragmatism, the “impossibility” continues to press. Only that which is impossible demands real risk. Only that which puts us in question makes possible new answers. Only that which is absolutely other can evade all egoism. And yet, any attempt to show absolute hospitality will turn out to be an instance of conditional invitation. Any attempt to enact justice, will inevitably manifest as new law. At that moment, though, justice will stand as the name to which we appeal to critique our own failures.

Derrida sees that tension as what motivates any social existence that is not to be wrecked by complacency.

Critique and Hospitality

So, even if we find absolute hospitality as a compelling conception, in practice can we truly be absolutely hospitable to critics? Does that even make any sense? Wouldn’t that just amount to eliminating the perspective you take to be worth defending?

Well, again, it is the tension between the necessity of law and the excess of justice, between the requirements of conditional hospitality and the demand of absolute welcome, and between the recognition of the other as “foreigner” and yet allowing them to overflow our categories, that serves as the crucial aspect. Being absolutely hospitable to critics doesn’t mean that we forego critiquing those who we think are wrong. However, it does mean that never do so with certainty. Absolute hospitality is the call that requires us to abandon all smugness.

Although I find it quite impossible to welcome even those who threaten the existence of the house into which I invite them, it is only when we are willing to risk such a threat that we overcome the self-insulating protectionism that serves to eliminate those voices who do not just echo my own.

I know that none of this is likely to lead to some easy set of 5 steps toward a better society, or the 3 ways that you can have better conversations, or some other self-help take-aways. But, from what I can tell, it does cause us to hesitate when we think we have everything figured out. It should bring us to the point where we take more seriously that the impossibility is what keeps us vigilant.

In a time when so many are so quick to entrench their own perspective as the only rational or moral option, the impossibility of absolute hospitality, and the never-ending demand of the justice yet to come stand as crucial checks on our own bloated idea of self-sufficiency.

We need each other, but that means that we also have to be open to that which we cannot predict, expect, or tame.

Emmanuel Levinas says that only the absolute other can truly surprise us. Well, in an age overrun with egotism and reckless indifference, I would love to be surprised by that which I can’t expect. In a time where all expectations get overrun by cynicism, a little bit of impossibility might go a long way toward revisioning what is possible.

When it comes to moral life, that which is most impossible may turn out to be the most necessary. Rather than being defeated by that thought, perhaps it can motivate us to stay awake and attentive for the knock at the door, rather than comfortably going to sleep after turning on the alarm system.

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Written by Brett Land

Sometime around 2016, I rounded up every guitar pick in my house, of every type, gauge, material—even a vintage wood pick I found at a thrift store near Tahoe—and threw them in the trash. I had recently pledged allegiance to the unheralded discipline of finger picking, having had something like a religious conversion, musically speaking, and picks were unnecessary now. Picks were kind of stupid, actually. I spent countless hours thereafter training my thumb to strike and re-strike the top three strings, over and over; on a G chord, I would play the E string, then D, then A, then D again, then I’d repeat that until my wife asked me to stop. So, it would be: E D A D E D A D etc… Seriously, I played that, with my thumb for most of 2016, and only then, with that incessant thumping down, could I start using the index and middle fingers to play the higher strings, underneath and sort of between the bass notes. I’m describing here—excuse me if this is obvious—the Travis method, created by Merle Travis, which can take months to get halfway decent at, as was true for me, and even longer to master. And besides the fact that my wife had to endure an inordinate amount of error-laden, non-melodic thump-thump-thumping, the repetitive action also laid waste to the thumb and index finger on my right hand. I should also say: this is entirely Justin Townes Earle’s fault.

He started it, for me. It was how he could generate so much sound and texture and driving-rhythm with just an acoustic guitar and his fingers. When I listen to a JTE clip—like the one below—I often suspect that two guitars are playing and that he is hiding one, off camera (there were never two guitars). Notice how he does exactly this with Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” a cover that transforms the original from a boppy dance about to a pathos-filled cri de Coeur (try and put aside, for a moment, the zoned-out looks and eye-rolling, and the general heaviness of that in light of Justin’s overdose in 2020, because we’ll get to that below).

The man is hammering the bass notes. They drive performance (they give it an intensity that even his album version lacks). His thumb is relentless: thump-whack-thump. And the whole time, the high notes are giving texture, flitting around underneath the thumping. Like I mentioned, it seems at moments that there are two guitars playing (Justin was frequently accused of having a hidden guitarist behind his stage because people couldn’t believe that one guitar could generate so much sound).

As impressive as this is, he developed another style that was even more unique. He was inspired by Malcomb Holcomb’s utterly original style of slapping and strumming and banging. The technique uses a “slap” or “hit” on the down strum and then picks individual notes on the up strum. So instead of a thumb-strike on the bass note, as with the Travis method, he’s hitting all or most of the strings—sometimes it sounds more like a slap, sometimes a hit. The hit happens on time, with the beat. “I am my father’s son,” he sings below, “I never know when to shut up.”

So much about Justin Townes Earle can be gleaned from this song. For one, as I’ve been going on about, his unique picking style is on full display here: the blend of striking, strumming, and picking individual notes is lovely. We see his songwriting bonafides here too, especially as he wrestles with his father’s shadow (he is the son of Steve Earle). “I am my father’s son,” he begins, and proceeds to lines like, “We don’t see eye to eye” and “I went down the same road as my old man,” talking about drugs. Yet the song’s resolution, the emotional payback, comes in the bridge where he lights a cigarette in the dark and glimpses his reflection in the mirror, realizing that he’s got his mother’s eyes; and then, devastatingly, “I still see wrong from right, I know,” he concludes, “because I’ve got my mama’s eyes.” The song takes a swing at his absent father by aligning him with the lamentable traits he inherited—loudmouth, addict, stubborn—and then aligns his mother with the morally worthwhile ones. In the world of the song, he has a shot in life, and still sees wrong from right, because of his mother.

What a swing.

Good thing it lands clean.

I’ve been thinking about JTE’s music recently because of Jonathan Bernstein’s biography What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, which traces Earle’s childhood in Nashville alongside other music namesakes, his early experiments with old-timey country and his band The Swindlers, his rapid rise to fame, his chaotic personal life, his lifelong battles with addiction and his many, many attempts at recovery, and ultimately his overdose in a Nashville apartment in 2020. Bernstein’s book is so good it made me return to Earle’s music after a few years of putting it in the attic of my thinking, as something about his death made me want to not think about him. I’d loved his music so much, and imitated his style for so long, that his death was something I had to ignore. When I heard about it, I didn’t even want to know the details. I didn’t need to. I knew what would happen long before it did.

What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome has shifted my feelings.

Bernstein seems to have talked to everyone that knew Justin, and everyone that played with him. The biography isn’t hagiography, nor does it speed past Justin’s shortcomings: his short temper, his addictions, his tirades and outbursts, his stubbornness. If you’re interested in the tradition of singer-songwriter in America—say, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Townes Van Zandt—then you would dig this book.

And while What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome far exceeds what I’m writing here—and many of the things I’m discussing in brief here are there given many pages—Bernstein overlooks an aspect of Justin’s artistry that others have also missed. Much of what has been written about Justin, that is, has focused on his songwriting, his unique guitar playing style, his struggles with drugs, and/or his tumultuous relationship with his famous father. And while all of these are important, the very first thing people notice about Justin when he performs is not his guitar playing or his lyrics or his dad, but his voice.

The man had pipes.

In the earliest recordings Justin ever made, his voice is already distinct, far more road-wise than the teenager that sings it. Interestingly, this first song Justin ever recorded 1) is a song he wrote about his father’s absence in his childhood, “I remember sitting on the doorstep,” he opens the song, “oh with tears in my eyes;” and 2) his father is actually credited with the song, not Justin. Let me say that again. The first song that Justin Townes Earle wrote and recorded as a teenager is on a Steve Earle album and credited as a Steve Earle song. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is so obviously Justin and not his father; Justin’s voice, if you can’t tell by now, was a far cry from his father’s twangy-snarl. Justin’s voice was more straightforward. It was an indelibly Nashville voice, but not traditionally country, and certainly not that Tim McGraw nasal-sounding whine that so many country music stars of the 90’s used (sometimes Sturgill verges on this). Justin sang from his diaphragm more than his sinuses, and he layered his songs with more pathos, more emotional edge. He frequently sang at the far-end of his register, as if whatever phrase he happened to be singing was the single most important of the song, the single most painful of the concert. And then he’d sing the next one that way. Sometimes it seemed like he thought he was singing in a gigantic room and needed to sing to the far seats.

But there are two qualities—beyond power and raw emotion—to his voice that I want to highlight: vibrato and lingering.

Vibrato is a quick change in pitch (like, five to seven times per second) that happens when a singer is relaxed and breathing correctly. It sometimes sounds like a shimmer or a flutter. Justin had this amazing gravelly, raw vibrato that he utilized to give emotional depth and texture to his performances. You can see that on full display here in his rendition of “Ain’t Waiting,” which he sings from a porch or patio somewhere in South Nashville with enough power and feeling that folks probably heard this performance in Memphis. Goodness gracious he sings the absolute mess out of this song. Watch until the end.

See what I mean? I absolutely love it when he leans into “white buck shoes” in the final verse, or the final chorus, “nobody’s waiting on me,” I start to think about my life differently, to ask questions about how free I really am. Will I ever be able to share something I made in that full-throated of a way?

I don’t even like this song that much, in terms of Justin’s body of work—it verges on cheese in parts; “Sunday morning, frying chicken,” is a little on the nose for some of us that grew up in the south; right? Maybe not so straight-on with the southern symbols and idioms—but that matters not one iota relative to the freight-train of feeling and momentum the song builds with his guitar-slapping and the absolute howling of his voice. How amazing, really, to sing with such power and gusto and emotion.

When I say “lingering,” I don’t mean anything technical—this is just what it sounds like to me; maybe it is “slurring” or “drawing out.” But to really understand what I mean by “lingering,” you have to rewind the clock back to 2011. It is hard to remember now, but in 2011 Jason Isbell was an unknown guitar player backing Justin on the David Letterman show. In the clip below you’ll see a heavier, more bloated Isbell, donning a hat, playing backing guitar to Justin’s “Harlem River Blues.”

Remember this was Justin’s trajectory—he was the top of everyone’s list. He was the Americana guy. And had he continued to write and record the kinds of albums he’d made with The Good Life or Harlem River Blues or even Midnight at the Movies, he probably would’ve found the kind of fame that his Americana contemporaries, like Isbell and Sturgill Simspon, found. And where Isbell would get truly sober and find new heights of success, Justin would battle his addictions for the remainder of his life.

So, right when he should’ve gotten truly famous, Justin’s sound changed. There was more blues, and his rhythms grew more soaked through with the absurd amount of opiates he was taking. His voice changed some too—not a lot, but some. Somewhere around Nothings Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now he starts to hang onto words longer than he should, rolling over sounds and lingering there, as if he didn’t really want to move on to the next bit (go back to the Graceland cover and listen closely for this, you’ll hear it all over the track; “the way she combs her hair off her forehead,” he adds a few “mmmms,” sort of mumbling, at the end of “forehead”). And while Justin has always used this technique of slurring or lingering—think of how a blues singer might add a mmmmm sound after a word—hereafter it becomes a staple of his singing. Coincident to this, a new register of pain emerges in his voice. The voice transmits this pain as much as if not more than the lyrics. The guy is hurting. “I’m feeling low and downright mean,” he sings at the emotional apex of “Unfortunately, Anna,” a song about an encounter with a prostitute in Nashville.

The opioid habit also coincided with a subtle turn inward in his songwriting, and his songs are more directly personal, less cloaked in southern-idiom and symbol and archetype. No more songs about the MTA or the ghosts of Virginia, like on the early albums. Listen to “It’s Cold in This House” or especially “Unfortunately, Anna,” and you here a man singing his pain.

*

I learned in Bernstein’s book that Justin was hospitalized in July of 2020 with aspirated pneumonia. He’d been drinking so heavily that he had started vomiting in his sleep. The vomit was getting in his lungs and infected them. He had to have lung surgery.

When I heard this, for some reason, it devastated me. It seemed that something sacred had been defiled. Those lungs. The power they had. What a shame.

*

Throughout Bernstein’s book he revisits the notion that Justin lived in near-constant tension with a notion he called “the myth” and which his father termed, in one of his most famous songs, the “Hardcore Troubadour.” The myth is the idea that the singer songwriter must suffer in order to produce anything of artistic merit: think Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, Kurt Cobain, and about a thousand others. Bernstein shows how Justin became enamored with this mythical construction of the artist in his early years and romanticized it—writing some of his best early work while drunk, high, or some ungodly combination of both—and equally how Justin’s later years were categorized by repeated attempts at sobriety (some more successful than others) and by a self-conscious attempt by Justin to speak publicly about the untruth of the hardcore troubadour myth; that, in fact, the artist didn’t have to suffer. Think of the way Jason Isbell started writing his best work once he got sober (there are countless other examples of this).

If you look at Steve Earle’s song “Hardcore Troubadour,” you see this myth strained through the renegade songwriter archetype, one that is incapable of domestic-life and commitment. “Hey girl,” Earle sings in the opening bars, “don’t bother locking your door.” The song returns to the image of a songwriter waiting outside to be let in; he’ll be there all night, but he’ll also be gone in the morning. “He’s just singing the same old song / that he always sang before,” Earle sing, “he’s the last of the hardcore troubadours.” The hardcore troubadour can be counted on for sex and a rollicking good time, but as soon as the sun comes up, he hits the road. He likes to drink and kick up trouble and not much else. He’s hardcore, right? He couldn’t be bothered with any of the boring domestic stuff that constitutes an actual life—dishes and laundry and band-aids on skinned knees and meetings at school with teachers. The Hardcore Troubadour is drunk and looking for women (Steve Earle, by the way, has been married eight times; Justin was on his third).

The point I’m making is that the myth of the artist does not merely extend to the act of creation, nor to substances and inebriation; it is also anathema to the rituals of daily life. What Hardcore Troubadour could be bothered showing up at school on time, and sober, to pick up a four-year old when he’s at the bar all afternoon and later is going out with the lads and after that ….

Perhaps we need a myth of the softcore troubadour. He or she can write songs and have fun, but they can also show up to their kid’s parent-teacher conference on time. They can tap into the creative act without the destructive habits—the Gods of decadence—that so many fall prey to. They can transition from the heights of creation, and the dizzying highs of performance, to the slower rituals of ordinary time: laundry, making dinner, registering your child for first grade, which requires a birth certificate and a bill with your name on it….and what rockstar could bother? Can you imagine one of the Oasis brothers changing a diaper?

It’s a problem that we can’t.

Can we teach our artists to discover the glorious in the everyday? Can we bring them down from the seductive heights of fame—everyone is cheering for you; you are awesome; you are a genius—to the deeper, more meaningful and substantial realities of domestic life: your kids need you to take them to the playground, and then there is a whole bunch of other stuff after that, and no one is cheering for you, and no one cares about what you write or sing; they just want you to be present. They want you to sit down, on the ground, next to them, and do a puzzle, for the next hour, and then, after that, they want to play the twelfth game of Old Maid.

In the Hardcore Troubadour mythology, there’s no room for this.

All or nothing.

We need a new way of thinking about the artist, then, one that doesn’t present us with the false choice of creation versus commitment. We need a mythology that reminds us of the sacredness of the everyday, which has nothing to do with adoration or genius or fame and everything to do with puzzles, Old Maid, and parent-teacher conferences.

*

In 2024 New West Records released All In: Unreleased and Rarities from the New West Years. The double album is a miscellany of B-sides, covers, and live recordings that most fans of Justin’s have heard before—his cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” for one—but the first six songs are unreleased demos he recorded in The Saint of Lost Causes sessions (his final album). As such, they represent the last songs he recorded or wrote.

When I first listened to them, it was like he’d come back from the dead. Damn. I was immediately drawn back into the artistry of his voice and guitar, his indelible style, his lyricism. The production on the songs is limited; it is just Justin and a guitar; but the songs are excellent.

As someone that has poured over everything he wrote for a long time now, it is my opinion that he was writing—despite the drugs, despite everything—some of his very best stuff at the end. I would like to nominate “All or Nothing,” a letter to his daughter, as his most perfect song, and a good place to end this. “Oh little girl,” he sings, “I won’t lie it’s a big mean world.”

It is a hauntingly beautiful song. As a father with a daughter about the same age as his daughter Etta, I can hardly listen to it without reaching for some tissue.

*

There are so many places to end it.

Here’s one: the trauma that Justin never really got past was that of his mother and father. Single Mothers. Absent Fathers. It’s right there in the name of the double album he made, and it’s right there as the thematic material of so many songs he wrote—call your momma; oh momma; “Momma I’m hurting,” he sang on “Nothings Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now.”

Single Mothers. Absent Fathers.

Strange how we end up doing the very things that hurt us.

*

I sometimes think about my single friends when I’m with my kids, especially the ones that are creative-types and can work whenever they want. The ones that don’t have to squeeze creative work into the smallest inconvenient corners of the day. Earlier my daughter Clementine came in and asked me to help her get a water bottle while I was in the middle of a very important sentence and I thought about how nice it would be to work without interruption.

But I also think about them when something beautiful happens, something poignant, sweet, life-affirming; I’ll think, they’re missing this. They’re out there on the road, kicking up troubadour mischief, and they don’t even know. Clementine just came in—again—and asked if we can fill up the kiddie pool in the backyard later and every moment that passes is one less moment that something like this can happen.

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First, listening to critics doesn’t mean being converted to their position or convinced of their view. Often being receptive to criticism means becoming more convinced that one’s own view remains the best option on offer. The key is that we are not just paying lip-service to the objection, but actually doing our best to take it seriously and present it in the strongest form possible. Avoiding straw-man and weak-man presentations of the views we reject is crucial if we are genuinely trying to weigh and consider the relevant alternatives to where we currently stand. But, despite taking a view very seriously and presenting it maximally charitably, it is still reasonable occasionally to conclude that the support for it does not outweigh the support for where you stand. Listening doesn’t mean that you cede the day to the critic, but simply that you are open to doing so if their reasons are good enough. The real danger is that we become obstinate in our commitments and calcified in our claims. Such habits then lead to a kind of cognitive complacency that causes us to overestimate the evidence for our views and minimize the evidence for alternatives. That might make us feel good, but it is vicious and leads to egoism rather than truth.

Second, not all criticisms are offered in good faith and, accordingly, not all alternative views are worthy of serious consideration. It is important to be judicious in our efforts to interrogate our own commitments. It is an epistemic failure to think oneself infallible, but it is also an epistemic failure to spend time being charitable to views and people who do not deserve it. That said, it is extremely important to be self-critical about how those lines get drawn and those judgments get made. It is far too easy to conclude that anything and anyone that rejects where you stand is, thus, unreasonable. I have tried to offer some conditions for determining something/someone to be unreasonable (namely that they refuse to give public reasons, or they fail to recognize the humanity of all interlocutors). But, these conditions are themselves nested in particular histories and conceptions of how reason works best as a social practice. It is possible to understand things differently even at this more basic level and so, yet again, humility is required and hospitality should be maximally on display. And yet, such virtues should lead to the conclusion that just anything goes when it comes to discursive practice.

Third, standing with confidence doesn’t mean that you stand with certainty. Years ago I wrote an essay called “confidence without certainty” and the goal of that essay was to say that standing on purpose and with reasons doesn’t mean that you think any/all rational people will necessarily agree with you. In almost every case, there are other reasonable places that people of good will could come down. It is crucial to realize that being fallible doesn’t mean that you are wishy-washy. Humility just means that you are where you are for good reasons, but acknowledge that you might change your views as the conversation continues.

Finally, our embodied experience doesn’t determine whether an argument is valid, but it definitely will impact whether we are likely to be able to enact the conclusions as an existential option for our lived practice. William James terms this live/dead options. Only live options are possible and what counts as live options is largely anchored in your historical circumstances and your lived history. Thinking that we are all just rational algorithms misunderstands the role of embodied cognition. Life is not very much like an argument, even if we should care deeply about the various arguments offered for how to live. At the end of the day, though, people are rarely motivated exclusively by reasons. We feel before we think. And so learning to be kind is every bit as important as learning to engage logically. Indeed, I think that there are good moral reasons to take reason-giving seriously. It is because I see you as a person of dignity that I owe you justification for how I live in a shared social world. But, an argument is no replacement for empathy. So, unless we see each other as mutual participants in vulnerable humanity, we risk reducing each other to discursive obstacles, rather than deliberative neighbors.

Ok, well, I hope you have enjoyed this series. I have definitely enjoyed thinking with you during it. As always, drop a comment and let’s continue the conversation.

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