Keeping Things Handy

Note to my readers: I am putting up this post today in honor and memory of my father, who was born three days from now in 1910, on the Fourteenth of March — or “the Mourteenth of Farch,” as he always liked jokingly to put it.

“A place for everything and everything in its place.”

That is an old saying. My father sometimes used it to encourage my brother and me to put his tools away where they belonged when we were done with them. Once we finished using any of those tools, we were to put them back in his toolbox, our garage, our closets, or other storage spaces he and my mother had built or designated for them. That way, they would be handy for the next person who might have occasion to lay hands on them, whomever that person might be, including especially my father himself.

Indeed, as I will discuss in one of the subsequent sections of this post, it is the proper usage of things that first lets them be in the space which is theirs, and then maintains them there.

My father, Charles James Seeburger, Sr.,  as a young man

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To use something is not to ab-use it. To say the same thing somewhat more expansively,  to handle something is not to mis-handle it.

Usage, handling, does not require that we adapt what we use to us. Rather, to use or handle something requires that we adapt ourselves to it.

            [. . .] If we handle a thing, for example, our hand must adapt to the thing. Proper accord lies in usage. Authentic using does not diminish what it uses; rather, using defines itself by being what first lets the used as such be. But such letting be is by no means unconcerned laxity, let alone neglect. On the contrary: authentic using lets the used loose into its own presence and protects it therein. [. . .] Using is letting loose into presence, is guarding in presence.

Those lines come from the published text of Martin Heidegger’s 1951-52 two-semester lecture course Was heißt Denken?[1] The book of that title was eventually published in an English translation as What is Called Thinking?[2] The passage I cite above is my own very freely interpretive translation of most of one paragraph of the lecture Heidegger delivered to his class during the seventh hour of the second semester of the course, the summer-semester of 1952.

What Heidegger says in the passage cited is of course true of all physical crafts — for example, the crafting by hand of pottery out of clay. However, Heidegger’s remarks are no less true of all mental crafts. 

Most especially, his remarks are true of that singular mental craft which constitutes the very basis of all genuine crafts, whether they involve any physical component in the ordinary sense at all or are entirely mental. That is, Heidegger’s remarks are true of thinking itself as such.    

Handcrafting potterz

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We are trying here to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking is just the same as building a shrine. In any case, it is hand-work. The hand has its own meaning. According to the ordinary notion, the hand belongs to the organism of our body. However, the essence of the hand will never let itself be fixed or clarified as a bodily grasping-organ. Apes, for example, have grasping-organs, but they have no hands. The hand is infinitely, that is, by an essential abyss, distinct from all such grasping-organs as paws, claws, or fangs. Only a being that speaks, which means thinks, can have hands and in handling achieve the works of the hand.

That paragraph, once again in my own freely interpretive translation, also comes from Heidegger’s Was heißt Denken? Only this time it comes from early in that course, the second hour of the winter-semester of 1951-52, the first semester of the two-semester course. I will repeat the line that is most crucial for my purposes in this post: “In any case it [i.e., thinking as such] is hand-work.

Just a bit later, in the summarizing transition from the second hour of the entire course with which he opens its third hour, Heidegger writes a very brief paragraph consisting of no more than the following two lines, yet again in my own freely interpretive translation: “Thinking guides and bears every gesture of the hand. To bear means literally: to gesture.”

 That leaves nothing more to say or do. It puts everything back in its proper place, keeping it handy.

[1] The text of the course was first published in 1954 by Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen and eventually became Band 8 of  Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main; Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), from p, 190 of which I have taken the lines cited above.  

[2] Translation by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

Praiseworthy and Blameworthy Blaming

According to The Online Etymology Dictionary, beginning around the start of thirteenth century of the Common Era the verb blame meant “to find fault with” someone or something, as opposed to praising or commending that person or thing. Around a century later, however, the verb blame came to mean "lay responsibility on for something deemed wrong." The same entry for the verb blame also goes on to tell us that the roots of that word eventually trace back to the Late Latin word blasphemare, meaning literally "to blaspheme,” that is, “ ‘to speak lightly or amiss of God or sacred things’,” which also had a sense of “ ‘revile, reproach’.“

All that is pertinent to what I wish to address in today’s post, so please keep it all in mind as you read what follows. If you do not, you will have no one to blame but yourself.  

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Whenever we encounter a problem of some sort, we are called upon to find out what is to blame for that problem in the sense of causing it. We are called upon to find what is to blame precisely so that we can then try to fix whatever has gone wrong. All other considerations aside, blaming of that sort, which pertains to the endeavor to fix problems, is itself praiseworthy, which is to say it is worthy of commendation.

On the other hand, whenever someone or something is blamed simply for being who or what that person or thing is, we should do what we can to defend whomever or whatever is being blamed, pointing out that no one and no thing is to be blamed for the sheer fact of existing.  Blaming of that sort, which finds fault with persons and things simply because they are who and what they are, is itself blameworthy, which is to say it is worthy of condemnation.

Mere fault-finding may serve psychological purposes. It may, for example, be a way of building up one’s own ego by tearing down someone else’s. Or, to give another example, it may simply provide momentary relief from some disturbing emotion one is feeling, diverting one’s attention from that emotion by focusing on finding faults in others. Of itself, however, such blaming does not entail any deliberate, conscious attempt to fix any acknowledged problem. It may be servile, but it is of no service.

In contrast, locating the source of some disorder in hopes of fixing it has nothing servile about it. Instead, it is animated by a worthy animus, in the sense of that term also, like blame, derived from Latin and which means “basic intention or underlying spirit.” The spirit of the endeavor to fix the blame for a problem in the sense of identifying what caused that problem is a spirit of service altogether free of servility, whether that servility be to those who exercise coercive power over one, or just to one’s own emotions.  

That spirit of blame deserves applause.

*     *     *

            [. . .] Lyon-Martin Health Services, a San Francisco health clinic focusing on transgender people and cisgender women, was forced to shut its doors amid COVID-19, thanks to budget cuts passed down from parent company HealthRIGHT360. Many of Lyon-Martin’s clientele were uninsured or underinsured, and most felt invisible, unsafe, or unheard by the practitioners at general clinics. Clinicians at Lyon-Martin were offering COVID-19 tests to transgender people living in shelters, a necessary service that is now gone. Some blame HealthRIGHT360 for not prioritizing Lyon-Martin, others blame the city of San Francisco for not offering financial assistance.

            Blame, however, won’t keep the doors of needed services open. [. . .]                                                                                                        

—Kitty Stryker[1]

If we’re attempting to do praiseworthy blaming — that is, if we’re trying to locate the source of some problem in order to fix that same problem —  then we need to be careful about not misplacing the blame. Precisely because we are looking to fix whatever has gone wrong, it is of crucial importance that we not only correctly identify what is really to blame, but also identify and actively address what we can and should do to rectify the underlying problem for which it is to blame. If we cannot see our way toward any solution to our problem, then our inquiry into what is to blame for that problem has not yet inquired deeply enough. We need to ask more questions until we finally see our way clear to begin doing something about the underlying problem.

Blaming alone is never enough, even if the sort of blaming in which we are engaging is itself of the praiseworthy rather than blameworthy sort. After all, as I’ve already written, even and especially praiseworthy blaming is never done for its own sake, but always for the sake of finding solutions. Blame alone will never solve our problems, as the author of the citation above indicates in the last line I have citated.

Kitty Stryker is an activist and writer endorsing and contributing to the creation and spread of  “consent culture” in “alternative communities.” “Consent culture” means  no more and no less than genuine culture itself — that is, culture arising from and continuing to depend upon the knowing consent of all who belong within it. Such true culture stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the coercive false- or pseudo-culture imposed upon everyone everywhere by the contemporary global capitalist market-system. Calling for and helping to build such genuine culture is dwelling in the solution, rather than in the problem — which includes, as a necessary component, placing blame where it truly belongs.

In the article from which I have taken the lines above, Stryker clearly identifies what accounts for the sort of discrimination that struck especially against “transgender people and cisgender women” by denying so many such individuals access to the sorts of  healthcare so many of them, along with the rest of the population of this nation, needed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stryker’s telling argument is that what was to blame for such unfair, discriminatory, community-destroying denial, during the Covid-19 pandemic, of needed healthcare to so many such people in the Bay areas of California, where Stryker lives and works as an activist and writer, is the entire system of capitalist exploitation of which such entities as San Francisco’s Lyon-Marten Health Services, or even the whole city of San Francisco as such, are but parts. To blame those parts, rather than the system as a whole, is to misidentify what is to be blamed, a misidentification that only hides what is really to blame, and therefore any useful endeavor to correct the unacceptable situation.

What’s to blame for such blameworthy misdirection of blame itself? Once again, no single part or individual, nor any combination of many parts and individuals, within the whole system is to be blamed. Rather, to repeat yet again, the entire system is to blame.

What is the remedy to such a system, the use to which such praiseworthy, correct identification as Stryker’s of what’s to be blamed for the destruction wrought by the system itself as a whole is to be put? Why, what else than to build and dwell in “alternative communities,” just as Stryker commendably recommends?

May we all take part, each as befits each, in such cultures of consent as we dwell all together in all our differences in such alternative communities! That would really be a world worth living in!

[1] “Seeing Queerness in the Time of COVID-19,” in Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, edited by Scott Branson, Raven Hudson, and Ray Reed (Oakland: PM Press, 2023), p. 77.

READERS PLEASE NOTE: After this post, I am taking my annual holiday break. My next post will not occur until January 8, 2024.

Shifting Blame

In Judaism, we have a concept called free-floating hatred. That human beings are prone to project outwards with blame. When they’ve grown up in societies where “the other” is somehow bad and at fault for your suffering, they will go down that lane, because it is a natural human fault. And that’s, I think, why it’s so important to really understand oneself.

                                                                             — Abby Layton

Abby Layton is one of the many activists who repeatedly bear witness in It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History. [1]That book, put together by  Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, Alec Dunn, Celina Flores, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke, consists of testimony from  many individuals, including those authors themselves, to the resistance that sprang up against fascist terrorism in Portland, Oregon, during the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, Layton was a member of The Coalition for Human Dignity, a national organization that began elsewhere but participated in the antifascist Portland resistance, as did various other organizations that began elsewhere, including SHARP, “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice,” whose logo is just below.

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Thoughtfully reading Abby Layton’s lines will give one pause to think. Various questions will arise in the mind of any thoughtful, patient reader. For one thing, one might well ask oneself whence such “free-floating hatred” as Layton mentions in her first line stems. One might also ask whether such hatred always or predomi-nantly involves, as her second line suggests, casting blame and, if it does, whether such blame is inevitably projected outward — that is, upon “others.”

After all, it is far from uncommon to place blame for one’s suffering upon oneself, rather than upon others. We may, to be sure, be all too quick to point the finger of blame when we experience suffering, but often that finger is one we clearly point toward ourselves, saying that the suffering was really “our own fault.” For example, if I suffer a car accident because I am weaving in and out of lanes trying to go faster than the general flow of traffic, and I end up hitting or being hit by some other car in the process, it would not be unusual for me to blame myself, if blame I must, instead of — or at least more than — the other drivers.   

Furthermore, whichever way the finger of blame is pointed, whether at others or back at oneself, is the blaming itself a virtue? Or is it a vice? If the latter, then who or what is to blame for our vicious blaming itself?

At any rate, it certainly is important and rewarding to read Layton’s remarks meditatively. One should mull over every line till one has extracted all the juice from it, like a cow chewing its cud.

Only that way of reading anything truly worth reading is itself actually praiseworthy. Every other way of reading is blameworthy.   

*     *     *

Listening not to me but to the Word, it is wise to acknowledge that all is one.                                                                                                            — Heraclitus[2]

 There is indeed one way of blaming that is blameworthy, and another way of blaming that is praiseworthy. Listening not to me but to reason, we should refrain from placing blame in the first way but fully embrace placing it in the second way.

The blameworthy way of blaming is one that strikes back viciously against whatever has caused some upsetting occurrence. Such blameworthy blaming often just causes more damage in the process of casting blame.

In contrast, the praiseworthy way of blaming locates the problem. So doing, it points to the path one should take in attempting  to rectify whatever is at issue.

If I have a traffic accident with another car, it need not be because I am driving recklessly, as in my example from the preceding section of this post. Neither I nor the other driver involved in the accident may be to blame. Instead, the accident may have been caused by an unexpected, not to be anticipated failure of the break-system in either my or the other driver’s vehicle. That break-system would then be to blame for the wreck.  

However, that hardly means that I should take the jack-handle out of the trunk of my car and begin to hammer the malfunctioning break-system with it. Not only would that be stupid, but it could also even make things worse. Suppose, for example, that in doing such a stupid thing as hammering the break-system with the jack-handle, the handle at some point flew out of my hands and hit some innocent pedestrian who was unfortunate enough to be walking by at the time. If that were to happen, then I would certainly be to blame for it.

However, were I so to blame, it would also not be praiseworthy for the person I accidentally hit with my jack-handle to pick the handle up and strike me back with it. That would be at least as stupid than my hammering my car’s break-system with the jack-handle in the first place — and more vicious, to boot.

We should all do our best to shift away from any sort of such blameworthy blaming, and shift into praiseworthy blaming instead.

*     *     *

What is to blame for us coming habitually “to project outwards” what Abby Layton’s Jewish tradition calls our “free-floating hatred.” If she is right to suggest that such projection is to be blamed on the fact that we have “grown up in societies where ‘the other’ is somehow bad and at fault for [our] suffering,” then what needs to be done is in one form or another to work to change — or to leave — that society, rather than just to bad-mouth it.

The same would still apply even in the very unlikely case that it is we ourselves who are to blame for such projections, or at least for succumbing to our society’s blameworthy traditions along such lines. Even if it is finally we ourselves who are to blame, what that means is that we should aim at changing ourselves, not beat ourselves up for being  gullible. Such game-changing blaming, and it alone, would be praiseworthy blaming: just so should we blame, and not otherwise.  

Note to readers: I shall continue pursuing the thoughts at issue in this post in my next post, to be called “Praiseworthy and Blameworthy Blaming,” set to go up this November 14.

[1]Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2023. My citation from Layton occurs on p. 55 of the book.

[2] My own freely reasoned translation of what I hear in Heraclitus’s remark.