Monday, November 23, 2009
Crime A Little Philosophy for Police Beat
Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:51 PM
In last week's Police Beat, I briefly discussed the main ideas of a contemporary and famous American philosopher I greatly admire, Graham Harman. A week later, the philosopher posted this on his This may be the least expected reference to my philosophy so far (even weirder is that it was forwarded to me by a colleague here in Egypt). In the POLICE BLOTTER OF A SEATTLE ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER.
What I wrote was this:
My other point has to do with the burning paper bag. It recalls an image that an American philosopher, Graham Harman, loves to present and consider in his lectures and essays—the image of fire burning cotton. This beautiful image, which has its roots in ancient Arabic philosophy, shows how the fire essentially focuses on one thing about cotton: how it burns. The fire is indifferent to or ignores other aspects of cotton: its whiteness, softness, roundness. The fire uses up only a single aspect of the cotton, its flammability. Similarly, the fire on the paper bag only focused on a single aspect of it: that it burns. Nevertheless—and this is Harman's point, the heart of his philosophy, which is called speculative realism—the fire, even if it consumed the whole bag, did not exhaust all of the things that the bag could be: a shopping bag, a garbage bag, an obstacle to an ant. The paper bag is inexhaustible.
Anyway, I just wanted my haters to know—Bell Biv DeVoe.
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Harman is one of the most important academic philosophers writing today. For starters, he writes *well*. For another, he's not afraid to entertain big ideas, and sometimes weird ones. For these reasons, he is sometimes wrong. But he's wrong about the right things. This is a philosopher's job. Thank you for pointing out, again, that speculation on the biggest questions is always relevant to the immediate concerns of everyday life.
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