Fragility of the Human Personality, Christopher Hamilton

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTMHzoV3T7c

this is an illustrative talk, first because Levi has much to report to us about how things can go horribly wrong between people, but also because the speaker has an inkling that there is a vital ethical correction in Levi’s descriptions to the more speculative/abstracted line of philosophical tradition that Hamilton is deeply schooled in, and yet in his talk the speaker cannot quite escape reducing Levi’s poignant observations to his more familiar/habitual line of thought.                            We are bound to/by the very habits that enable us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi

5 responses to “Fragility of the Human Personality, Christopher Hamilton”

  1. “in his talk the speaker cannot quite escape reducing Levi’s poignant observations to his more familiar/habitual line of thought.”

    You mean his dualisms: animal/human, nature/culture, body/soul, surface/depth? In the end he nearly equates one’s personality with one’s possessions, the implication being that whoever has the most stuff has the most soul, the most depth, the most humanity. I didn’t listen the Q&A so maybe he nuanced the argument he lays out in his talk.

    “We are bound to/by the very habits that enable us.”

    I’ve just finished reading, per your recommendation, Stephen Turner’s Social Theory of Practices. As you know, Turner endorses the importance of habit, and it’s in part because habits aren’t locked up in the interconnected prisons of inaccessible tacit knowledge and inescapable cultural norms or presuppositions or paradigms. At the very end he writes:

    “The practice relativist must interpret at least some disagreements, over ‘fundamental’ premisses, as immune to resolution through new experiences. The argument of this book is that there is no reason to think there are such fundamental premisses… The picture that I have developed here is one in which practices is a word not for some sort of mysterious hidden collective object, but for the individual formations of habit that are the condition for the performances and emulations that make up life. No one is immured by these habits. They are, rather, the stepping-stones we use to get from one bit of mastery to another.”

    Certainly the habits of thought to be discerned in the talk do serve as stepping-stones to mastery, as evidenced in Hamilton’s example of the “Master Race” dehumanizing its victims. Do philosophers who cultivate have their own stepping stones to mastery? I.e., if you’re particularly adept at navigating the mental and cultural realms, and if you can convey the sense that body is disgusting whereas mind is attractive, then maybe you can gain greater access to the kinds of possessions that enhance my depth of character. I’d say it’s a lot easier to inherit one’s wealth and to justify it by claiming to be more cultured, with greater depth of character. Send your kids to Dartmouth, cultivate your taste in wines, hang original artwork in the corridors of your totally refurbished 19th-century “cottage” in the Hamptons…

    • Hamilton is sloppy in the ways that you note but what struck me was that Levi, pace Heidegger et al, doesn’t find all of our vulnerabilities to be symptoms of some ground/limit fear of death, that there are many kinds of sufferings/horrors to human-being (including some that are terribly dehumanizing) including that that our base-drive to live (echoes of Levinas’ il y a) under certain conditions can be an ethical horror (reminiscent for me of Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham’s calling from G-d), and I think that this paradigm shift is what Hamilton is drawn to but in his analysis slipped from grappling with disgusts and all in/to an all too familiar diagnosis of decay/death.
      I’m pleased that you got a chance to read Turner who I think is right on that there are NO means for linking/programming us into hive-minded-collectives/machines and such (no spooky Spirit like Concepts/Ideologies/Codes/Systems/Structures/etc).
      And that as Donald Davidson and others have noted there are no Necessary gaps in world-views (I of course don’t believe that literally speaking there are such things that one might have) that keep folks from negotiating,
      but I would think our everyday experiences, especially in blog-comment-threads, show us that Wittgenstein/Rorty where right that there are indeed conversation-stopping, spade turning, habits/biases that people are bound by that make some particular negotiations impossible, one can of course if things don’t get too hostile negotiate other matters with that person.
      And I don’t remember Turner (who can be a bit Dewey-eyed) wrestling with how much of our bodily-being/functions are non-conscious (Bert Dreyfus and others have shown us how skill-mastery/habit-cultivation is a process of practices becoming un-conscious/habituated and bearing a familial resemblance to Heideggerian working tools ‘invisible’ in their use) , including our cognitive-biases, and that they may well (often do) elude our grasps and our attempts to hack them.

    • I hear you about blogs and habits of thought. No, Hamilton doesn’t really go into how habits are learned and consolidated into a person’s repertoire. I appreciate the way you liken compiled automated procedural expertise to Heidegger’s ready-to-hand. It’s not just the tool but the skilled use of the tool that gets taken for granted when things are functioning properly. Just as the bicycle had to be assembled from its components before it found its way into the garage, so too did the kid’s ability to ride the bike have to be assembled from its component behaviors.

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