Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Fell in love with your "john"?!

Is this some kind of bulimic binge vomiting confessional?

Michael, I noticed that too. It doesn’t sound like the sort of confession I’d have expected from David.

Now I’m trying to remember the rest room in their house; it didn’t make that big an impression on me (if in fact I visted it). Maybe David has a truly elegant, luxurious john that he keeps in reserve.

Interesting stuff. I know a bit about phenomenologists; I've read phenomenologists; and you, sir^W^W^Wand I was interested to see what kind of phenomenologist you were, back in the day.

So I went straight for the References. (There aren't any.) Then I skimmed through the first few pages, looking for the bracketed invocations of Garfinkel or Schutz or Husserl or Heidegger or Sartre or Merleau-Ponty or... (I couldn't find any.) Then, I'm sorry to say, I gave up.

I wanted to know *who you were arguing with* - what conversation you were contributing to.

This attitude would have infuriated you at the time you wrote it, & there's a time when it would have infuriated me - "never mind the conversation, listen to the ideas!" But I think now that it's inescapable - knowledge lives in knowledge clouds, in academia as much as anywhere else.

Still, phenomenology is cool, and far too little appreciated. Who *were* you arguing with?

I was arguing with just about everyone writing about ethics, a field generally divided into principle-based philosophies and consequence-based philosophies. I was also arguing against phenomenologists, since it's a field that has generally stayed away from moral philosophy. (Sartre engaged morally, but I wouldn't count him as a phenomenologist.)

(BTW, AKMA and Michael, I can't tell if you're teasing me, but I meant "john" as in "prostitute's customer" sense, the implication being, you see, that I had prostituted myself. I can spell this joke in further non-salacious detail if you'd like...)

The thing is (he intoned with all the gravitas of a fixed-term research associate), setting out your stall as an argument with everybody will either
(a) blow everybody's mind
or, far more probably,
(b) leave everybody cold
There's a reason why so many academic papers take the form "author A is wrong in this specific way"; it engages everyone who's got author A as part of their mental furniture, and gets the ideas in the paper into a continuing conversation. (This is all part of my argument that refereed papers are just like del.icio.us, only slower.)

Dunno about Sartre. I discovered existentialism long before phenomenology, so my immediate inclination is to keep them separate. Viewed dispassionately, though, I think there's a good case for saying that existentialism is in the phenomenological tradition. (Although that might entail defining existentialism...)

Don't listen to them David. "Fell in love with your john" was a wonderful metaphor.

Phil, I did a whole bunch of the picking-an-argument -with-so-and-so type papers when I was an academic. This was an attempt to do something broader. And, yes, it's under-sourced. But at the time I thought that among academic philosophers, it'd be clear what conversation it was taking part in since it explicitly references the two major traditions of ethical thought and suggests instead a third way.

Phenomenological ethics is a new contribution in Philosophy. In Buddhism, phenomenologyical ethics is a basic principle.

Phenomenological ethics is a new contribution in Philosophy. In Buddhism, phenomenologyical ethics is a basic principle.