The Rebel of Windsor — Jeff Noonan
A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.
I am a philosopher and professor at the University of Windsor. I have taught here since 1998, following two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I received my PhD from McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, in 1996. I would call myself a social philosopher, interested above all in how the structure of social institutions increases or decreases the range of concrete possibilities for experience and activity for the people whose lives are shaped by them. However, since social institutions always have a normative foundation in a social value system, my social philosophy includes an ethical-existential dimension. The problem of good lives is not an abstract moral questions in my view, but a problem of social organization: if people are capable of sentient and aesthetic experience, reflective, scientific, and critical thought, creative and productive activity, and mutualistic forms of relationship, then the fundamental social problem, from my perspective, is how to organize social institutions, nationally and internationally, to create the political, economic, social, cultural, and ethical conditions each person's being able to realize those capacities in ways that are valuable to self and valued by others. This position differs from self-maximizing ego-centrism because it has in-built limits defined by what the Canadian philosopher John McMurtry called the "life-coherence principle." Since all living things depend upon material nature, it is materially irrational, i.e., life-incoherent, to valorize forms of life that systematically undermine planetary life-conditions.
What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?
I have never devoted any systematic effort to thinking about humour in a philosophical way, but I think it has philosophical—or maybe better, existential—implications. I think of humour as a sort of power for turning things upside down, making the unbearable bearable (the bearable heaviness of being, to play on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being). I think my philosophical understanding of humour was influenced by my childhood and youth. I grew up in a small mining town in Northern Ontario, where most of the fathers of my friends worked underground in the mines or, like my father, in the smelters where the ore was processed; dangerous and potentially body- and soul-destroying work. But it also encouraged an ubiquitous sense of humour in everyone: sarcastic, self-deprecating, and dark, which taught me that nothing is so difficult and dangerous that it cannot be laughed at, and that if we only have one spin on the earth it should be accompanied by constant laughter.
Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?
Like humour, I have never thematized cruelty in my work, but I have examined the subjective dispositions that allow people to become cruel. In my view, all forms of cruelty are functions of the systematic dehumanization of others: we can treat with brutality only that which we regard as in some essential respect different from ourselves, such that we convince ourselves that they deserve what they get. Cruelty is the outer limits of xenophobia, where fear turns into hatred, and hatred turns into the desire to inflict psychic and physical suffering. I don’t know whether cruelty can be eliminated from the life of human beings—I don’t believe in anything like Freud’s death instinct—but I admit that it does seem to recur even though there are abundant philosophical and religious arguments against it. As with political problems more generally, I think that philosophers have to insist on the openness of the future and that lessons not learned in one period could be learned in a later one.
Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?
I think people should read absolutely everything they can get their hands on, from the ingredients on the toothpaste tube to War and Peace. I think inspiration and ideas can come from anywhere, so one must be open and receptive to everything in the world and everything anyone has written about it. However, that is not the question you asked, so, I will try to answer in the terms posed—or something closer to them. As a young philosopher, my thinking was most influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Looking back over 40 years of philosophical work, the argument seems much looser than it did when I was 18, but the ideas retain their evocative poetic and philosophical power. From the poetic side, I would have to pick—if I must pick—Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. There are points where the narrative drags on, but the philosophical-poetic heights to which it soars (The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan’s Testimony to his brother Alyosha,) are unsurpassed, I think. And in between the philosophical and poetic, I would recommend Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. There is no better argument that life can be lived well even in the absence of ultimate (divine) purposes: “What counts is not the best living, but the most.”[!]
N.B. You can read Jeff Noonan's own blog here: https://jeffnoonan.org