Category: Finn Janning

Mindfulness og skolen

I medierne kan man til tider læse, at folkeskolens elever er stressede, angste og urolige. Nogle foreslår mindfulness som en løsning på problemet, mens andre mener, at mindfulness ikke er andet end et plaster på en syg præstationskultur.

Jeg er enig i, at præstationskulturen er syg, men uenig i, hvorvidt mindfulness blot er et plaster. Faktisk mener jeg, at mindfulness sagtens kan bidrage til udfoldelsen og vedligeholdelsen af pædagogik baseret på en kærlig tilgang til læring i stedet for absurde præstationsidealer.

Kigger vi nærmere på kritikken af mindfulness, er den ofte ganske paradoksal. Enten er mindfulness for religiøst, eller også er den for lidt i kontakt med den smukke buddhistiske livsfilosofi.

Så hvad er mindfulness i grunden?

Læs resten af kronikken i Information

Is it happening again?

‘It is happening again,’ says the giant to FBI Special agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s mystery series Twin Peaks. This sentence came to me today, as the trial against 12 Catalan separatist leaders began in Madrid. The sentence made me reflect:

Witnessing the Catalan separatists’ campaign for independence, I couldn’t help but recall the warning signals revealed by my old German teacher when he showed us the symbols and manipulation used by German supremacists.

What concerned me was not just the flags; rather, it was their degradation of the rest of Spain while simultaneously elevating themselves. Similarly, when the separatists claimed to be victims, suppressed as an endangered species, I saw no real victims, only a very calculated form of control (I don’t refer to the unnecessary police brutality October 2017, but to life in general in Catalonia, see also Compassion in Catalonia).

I think that the mixture of creating a culture of victimisation combined with establishing a society of control, where our minds are controlled through unconscious social conditioning, is what makes the Catalan separatists powerful, but also scary if one casts an eye over history.

It’s common to view what is happening in Catalonia through the lens of history, especially the Spanish Civil War, which took place from 1936 to 1939. And it goes without saying that General Francisco Franco ranks among the worst dictators in human history.

Still, some simple facts should be pointed out: today, Spain is not a totalitarian regime; Spain is no more Francoland than Germany today is Hitlerland. Contentions to the contrary are as incongruous as they are wrong.

To clarify another fact: the Catalan language and culture are not under threat today. On the contrary, instead of giving children the opportunity of a bilingual education, most schools in Catalonia teach only in Catalan. Spanish is being taught as a foreign language. Through this, a basic right is being taken away from Spanish citizens.

For the separatists, language is not a means of communication, but an identity marker; it’s a password that separates ‘true’ Catalans from those Catalans who feel Spanish. Hereby, the separatists have – quite paradoxically, in the style of Franco – created a control system that differentiates and categorizes people.

What is needed is not more communication for or against; rather, it’s noncommunication; a reflective pause that eludes the current communicative control in which people blindly say and do what they say and do because this is what other people say and do.

Unfortunately, such a break seems unrealistic. The PR campaign of the Catalan separatists can’t stop without everything collapsing. To make things even worse, the turbulence of the last few years has awakened other nationalists in Spain, such as the political party Vox.

Perhaps, here we are at the core of the problem: All identity markers, whether national or cultural, are prisons. Nothing more than fictions. The problem with the novel written by the Catalan separatists is not that it is full of lies and exaggerations; rather, that it’s provincially tiring because all the characters are stereotypical and far too predictable. It’s a fantasy that has lost its grip on reality.

The challenge in Catalonia – and elsewhere in the world – is to regain trust in humanity. So far, the separatists have mostly promoted distrust in everything and everyone but themselves and their world view. Yet, without basic trust between humans, life cannot function.

Democracy is the ongoing organisation of disagreement. For example, I disagree strongly when artists and comedians in Spain are hindered in their right to express themselves freely – including when they criticise nations, politicians, and religions. But I also believe that people who deliberately violate the laws of the constitution should be held juridically responsible. To violate the law is to disrespect the principle of the equality of all citizens. Since all human beings are, by definition, different, the only thing that makes us the same, socially, is the law.

A democracy stresses that we are in it together. All of us. Equally. Here and now. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catalan, Danish, a man, a woman, white, black, speak this language or that. Writing this seems embarrassingly banal, yet I see many around me who appear to have forgotten this fundamental concept. For this reason, ‘it is happening again’: the victimization, the exaggerations, the lies …

This opinion was first published in Spain in English, 17th February 2019

When I Am Gone

In the late spring of 2014, I left my home in Barcelona to walk in Norway for twenty days with my friend Jeppe. We planned to follow the last 300 kilometers of the pilgrim path to Trondheim, St. Olav’s Way, named after the Norwegian king who brought Christianity to Norway in ad 1033. 

I am not a religious person; I do have not faith in any of the marketed Gods but a strong belief in life. And yet, during this journey, I experienced an encounter with a muskox that I can only describe as healing, perhaps even spiritual.

Read the rest of my essay in Amethyst Review.

Philosophy as Poetry


In 2004, the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty spent three days holding his Page-Barbour lectures entitled Philosophy as Poetry. Its beautiful title captures important aspects of Rorty’s philosophy. 

Philosophy is not about presenting solutions to problems but inventing problems worth exploring. Some of the problems that Rorty addresses relate to the notion of origin and reality—both concepts are not something given or static. For example, philosophy is not a thinking tool aimed at representing reality; rather, it’s a curious and creative exploration of what is possible.

For Rorty, at least in these three lectures, philosophy begins when we overcome the representational figure of thinking (i.e. reality versus appearance); actually, it begins with a wondering imagination. Perhaps for this reason, he—like many continental philosophers—sees philosophy as a literary genre. According to the French philosopher Michel Serres, a work of fiction can often produce far more experience, knowledge, and testing of our moral limitations than some philosophical papers. 

So what is Rorty saying? 

“… we need to think of reason not as truth-tracking faculty but as a social practice,” he says, continuing, “We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical, is to do something new and to be lucky enough to have that novelty be adopted by one’s fellow human, incorporated into their social practices.” 

Later, he clarifies: “What we call ‘increased knowledge’ should not be thought of as increased access to the Real but as increased ability to do things—to take part in social practices that make possible richer and fuller human lives.”

Philosophy is a creative and imaginative practice proposing new ways of living more humanely, which always seemed to be one of Rorty’s concerns

From Emerson, Rorty takes the notion that there “is no outside, no inclosing wall”, there is nothing outside language. Language comes to us with the world like a wave hitting the shore. 

“Every human achievement,” Rorty says, “is simply a launching pad for greater achievement … There are only larger human lives to be lived.” 

Referring to Schiller, Shelley, and Nietzsche he emphasizes that we must become “the poets of our own lives”, echoing Nietzsche’s commend; however, not just our own lives (which would be an ego trip) but for “the world in which those lives are lived is a creation of the human imagination.”

Imagination is the principle vehicle of human progress. If you can’t imagine another world, then you can’t act responsibly. Thus, the task of philosophy is to create better poems, to achieve something better, to expand life. 

In a similar way, when Nietzsche tried to overcome Platonism, he said that it’s not about self-knowledge but “self-creation through self-description.” Reason, in other words, works only within the limits set by imagination. Or, as Wittgenstein, another of Rorty’s companions, said, “We should not ask about meaning but only about use.” For example, “… if we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding.” 

Rorty’s philosophy as poetry is narrative and inconclusive—just like life is. The words we use to describe the world change because everything in life changes. Therefore, the search for truth is also a search for justification, and being “rational is a practice of giving and asking for reason, not the employment of an innate truth-tracking faculty.” 

If there is a romantic formula, it goes something like this: you imagine something novel, like catching an idea; you then test and experiment with this idea, and perhaps this novelty is so good that it will become a new social practice. 

Kunsten ikke at arbejde

Det er vist nok ti år siden, at jeg skrev om Kunsten at arbejde.

En anmelder skrev følgende:

“Med et filosofisk udgangspunkt præsenteres nye opfattelser af nogle af arbejdslivets store problemer i dag: stress og depression. Bogen er henvendt til medarbejdere, ledere og andre, som professionelt beskæftiger sig med disse ting.

I denne bog går han filosofisk til modstand mod det, han betegner som en tidens trend, angsten – som får os til at søge coaching og guidebøger, fordi vi ikke stoler på os selv. Med bogen vil han vise, at der er en anden vej. Vi skal eksperimentere med livet og arbejdet.

Der er skrevet mangt og meget om at håndtere nutidens vilkår i arbejdslivet, stresshåndtering og coaching. Bogen her adskiller sig ved sit filosofiske udgangspunkt og ved ikke at servere færdige løsninger, men bibringe læseren nye og anderledes perspektiver på stres-suppedasen

Der er ikke decideret tale om en populærpsykologi. Hertil er den sprogligt og forståelsesmæssigt for krævende. Alligevel vil den have visse ledere, konsulenter, coaches og medarbejdere som målgruppe, hvorved dens ambitiøse budskaber om nyt fokus vil have chancer for udbredelse til en større kreds.”

Hvis du stadigvæk er stresset, så læs bogen!

Drugs and Society

My brother died from an accidental overdose when he was 26 years old. Ever since, I have had an interest in drug addiction—never in a scientific way, but always with an eye on the debate. On this blog, I have reviewed and mentioned some of the authors mentioned below, just as I have published a few chronicles in Danish newspapers (Narkomaner er (også) mennesker, Udbud og efterspørgsel slog min bror ihjel og Legalisér narko).

Recently, I read Carl Hart’s book, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. The title says it all!

Hart is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Columbia University. In High Price, the author mixes memoirs with summaries of his and others’ scientific research into drug abuse and addiction. This blended approach gives him street credibility. 

His reason for telling his own story is to illustrate how growing up in certain areas with lower income, poor education, unemployment, and racism affects people negatively. Basically, the underlying—and very important—moral of the book is that drug addiction is caused bymany of society’s problems, not the reasonfor them. This contradicts many of the stories most people are being told about drugs and crime. 

Similarly, Italian writer Roberto Saviano and journalist Johann Hari both claim that anti-drug policies (e.g., the war on drugs) are causing more harm than the drugs themselves. Why? Because the criminalizing drug policy marginalizes poor, undereducated, and (at least in the US) often black people. However, to actually solve the problem of drug abuse, a government ought to focus more on education, employment, racism, and alleviating general life anxieties and loneliness. 

Loneliness plays a crucial role in addiction. At one point, Hart refers to Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” (which made me think of the Rat Pack!) experiments of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Hart describes how rats in a social, enriched, and engaging environment self-administered morphine on offer in their cages at a significantly lower rate than rats kept in solitary cages with no alternatives offered to them. 

Most of Hart’s own research follows Alexander’s results. For example, Hart tested whether drug users would choose financial rewards over a certain kind of drug and determined that it depends on the alternative and the context. Sometimes the drug abuser would choose money or sex instead of drugs. Also, addiction is not a consequence of drug use. Sometimes people just use drugs because there is nothing else. In Alexander’s work, the rats lived in isolation. For this reason, the studies suggest, they preferred drugs over water, even if it meant killing themselves. Hart mentions that, if you were in isolation with only one film to watch or one book to read, you would probably watch or read it many times simply because you had nothing else to do. Yet, that doesn’t make you an addict! 

Again, this is related to the social environment. If you grow up in a place with little future, no money, no care, a lot of violence, discrimination, etc., then perhaps alternatives to drugs are few (or less obvious).

Thus, the conclusion High Price offers is: change the people and environment around you; then, you will change yourself. Or, change the world, and you will change accordingly.

Carl Hart’s book is an important contribution to a discourse that still seems to be governed by ignorance and prejudices.

Can I Involve You?

I took the elevator up to the third floor. Normally, I would have taken the stairs in order to get a bit of exercise. But normal doesn’t exist anymore. Did it ever?

I just turned thirty-seven and I am feeling slightly lazy after having written books for the last decade or so. Not that writing books is a cushy job. Quite the contrary. It’s freaking hard work. It’s just that I do it sitting down, five to six hours a day. And I do it every damn day! That takes its toll on the thigh muscles. At times my limbs creak more than the chair I sit on. I know, it’s an overused metaphor, but I can only blame IKEA for this unpleasant sound. Well, nevertheless, or maybe because of all this, I took the elevator. I also didn’t want to arrive sweaty or out of breath. I hate sweaty people. I hate people who are out of breath.

Up on the third floor, a youngish artist had an exhibition called Moving Borders. I had been sent to cover the exhibition for a major Spanish journal. The artist was “up and coming,” they said (the journal in Spain that is) when they called to offer me the assignment. Up and coming. Who isn’t? I thought, but of course I didn’t say that. Like so many other writers before me, I said basically nothing unless in writing. Instead, I watched everything with all of my senses open. I watched and watched until my eyes stung. I looked like the English comedian Marty Feldman. Google him, if you don’t get an instant image.

Read the rest of the short story in Daedalus Magazine

How will I be remembered?

He sits on the sofa and looks at their wedding pictures. It was three years ago. Not even three years, he thinks. They both looked so happy. Drunk. Elegantly wasted, as they had been so many times before. And later. Everything was later for them, postponed. For nearly thirteen years they had been together. That’s a long time. At such an age, most kids would be baptized.

Was it too long?

Read the rest of my short story in Daedalus Magazine.

Against the bandwagon mentality

I

The philosopher André Comte-Sponville, once said: “It is better to be too honest to be polite than to be too polite to be honest.” 

Although I agree with Comte-Sponville, I think that disagreements can be managed with kindness. For example, one should never be too polite to confront people who are discriminating, manipulating, lying or harming other people, but always try to do so in the friendliest manner. 

One way of meeting the world with kindness could be by following the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss  (who was inspired by Spinoza and Gandhi and made an important contribution to ecological thinking). In his book, “Communication and Argument,” he suggests the following recommendations for objective public debate:

1. Avoid tendentious irrelevance, e.g. personal attacks or claims about opponents’ motivations.

2. Avoid tendentious quoting, e.g. quotes shouldn’t be edited to fit the argument.  

3. Avoid tendentious ambiguity, e.g. ambiguity can be exploited to support criticism.

4. Avoid tendentious use of straw men, e.g. views shouldn’t be assigned to the opponent that he or she doesn’t hold

5. Avoid tendentious statements of fact, e.g. information put forward should never be untrue or incomplete, and relevant information should not be withheld.

6. Avoid tendentious tone, e.g. irony, sarcasm, pejoratives, exaggeration, subtle (or open) threats

These suggestions, today, are rarely seen. Due to social media (specifically, its rapidness and the need to be present or visible constantly), we see a growing “cowboy mentality,” where people shoot first without thinking. Online shaming is an example of this “bandwagon mentality,” where the herd uncritically follows what appears or sounds to be right or good. 

II

A recent example of this “bandwagon mentality” is the Junot Diaz case. When the Dominican-American writer was accused five or six months ago of sexual misbehavior (i.e., forcible kissing and yelling), few questioned the credibility and gravity of the claims, whereas many uncritically jumped on the bandwagon and even upgraded the accusations to label Diaz a sexual predator. Now, after the Boston Review, M.I.T., and the Pulitzer Prize Board have conducted thorough investigations, Diaz is welcomed back. The accusations against him weren’t credible. 

What happened?

Facts, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour once said, are a product of a trustworthy inquiry. Thus, some facts are stronger than others. The reliability of facts depends on the strength and practice of the institution or network that produced these facts. In other words, facts and moral values hang together. It is morally wrong to claim something without evidence or to claim the opposite of what the evidence shows. Unfortunately, the moral debate surrounding false accusing is rare, almost as if accusations are accepted because of powerful men having silenced women for so many years. Yet, morality is not a contest to get even; it is a long, persistent practice of acting responsibly, demonstrating care and respect, and showing trust and equality in all situations. This is the only way to overcome oppression, whether related to gender, race, religion, or sexual preferences. 

The “bandwagon mentality” emphasizes that public philosophy is needed. One of the challenges of contemporary philosophers is to do work that inspires people to philosophize.

A simple way of addressing the “bandwagon mentality” is through imagination. Actually, being kind, polite, and civil requires imagination, such as imagining that we might be wrong or what we are being told might be wrong. In short, being humbler. For example, we could question what we take for granted, question why we take certain things for granted, question what kind of values our lives produce, question the identity that some people cling to, etc. (see e.g. All women are not angels)

For instance, we may ask why some people deliberately lied or exaggerated about Junot Diaz being a sexual predator and misogynist when he wasn’t. Is the problem epistemological, as when some people don’t know what they say when using certain concepts? Is it a semantic problem, as when some people misunderstand certain utterances, even utterances that most other people find meaningful? Is it a moral problem, as when some people claim and postulate what they can’t prove? Is it a mental problem, as when some people see and hear things that other people can’t?

Then again, it might just be an example of admiration turning into envy, frustration, and hate. After all, artists are known for self-pity and narcissism.

So, what to do? Civility, kindness, and politeness are never acts of blindness; rather, they are acts of compassion, in the sense that none of us can live without others. The others help us stay alert.

Simple advice: Before communicating, debating, or politicizing with others (especially if we accuse them of bad things), we need time to reflect, analyze, and think. We are thereby able to find solutions to those problems that few people dare consider today because, unfortunately, it is easier or more convenient to just follow the herd.

When life blooms

I’m pleased to announce that my new book, When life blooms – Breathe with Jeppe Hein will be released November 28th.

The publisher writes about the book:

“Danish artist Jeppe Hein soared to the top of the international art scene before the age of 35. His works were showcased at the world’s finest exhibitions and sold for sky-high prices. Then suddenly his body said stop. In 2009 Hein went down with stress.

In this book philosopher Finn Janning follows Jeppe Hein’s development from the tome immediately after his diagnosis with burn out and onward – a period where Hein underwent psychoanalysis and developed and interest in yoga, breathing exercises and spirituality.

Janning shows how spirituality has become more present in Hein’s works, and in the book, he develops an existential philosophy in continuation of the artists spirituality and art.”

I may add:

Although I was commissioned to write this book, I aimed at turning it into a philosophical biography that describes the life of the artist Jeppe Hein. In doing so, I’ve tried to exemplify Gilles Deleuze’s idea that “life is not personal,” that is to say, each life is a case study.

I choose this approach as a way of addressing the narcissism of the artist without making the narrative confronting, or in anyway judgmental.

Instead, I illustrate how Jeppe is formed by the major cultural trends during the last 40 years, such as the growing accelerating and spirituality and social entrepreneurship. He is an artist of his time.

It’s a book that tests and nuances the popularity of today’s spirituality through a philosophical, primarily existential lens.

ENJOY

 

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