Hi Philosophers, I am working on some ideas about whether philosophy can address cataclysmic events and have writted the following proposal for a practical philosophy conference in Seville this spring. I would appreciate any comments or reactions or ideas to this proposal. Thanks.

On the possibility of Catastrophic Philosophy: Personal reflections on Katrina

In a time when each day brings news of another major natural disaster around the globe, I am asking the question as to whether, out of the classroom, the library or the parlor, philosophy can be of any relevance in the midst of the ruins and the mess of destroyed lives. Many people consider philosophy an interesting contemplative diversion for people who have intellectual pretensions. Can philosophy be more than this? Can it practically aid in the working through process and if so, when and in what way? These are some of the questions I wish to address in this presentation.

I have been living this question for the past three months since my life was shattered by the worst natural disaster to hit the United States: the hurricane known as Katrina. I lived and ran a school in New Orleans and overnight my entire life changed; there was no going home. In this presentation I wish to illustrate and amplify some of the important writings on philosophy and disaster through my own experiences and those of the networks of people I followed closely in their recovery process.

I will be looking first at Theodor Adorno’s critique of reason in Negative Dialectics where he says, “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.” Next I will take up Maurice Blachot’s The Writing of the Disaster and show how, for both philosophers, there is a termination point of rational thinking beyond which one can only suggest a new form of philosophy. What is this new form? I will ask the participants for their ideas of what this might entail along with sharing some ideas of my own.

Adorno, Blanchot, Frankl, Sartre have written about the psychological effects of the Holocaust and suggested ways that a robust and practical philosophy may mean the difference between living onward in integrity or perishing, literally or through living as an empty shell devoid of meaning and purpose. This form of philosophy can not claim to totalize, integrate or rationalize the experience. I have felt this first hand in the absurdities generated by the media spin about Katrina and New Orleans and how very irrelevant it all is to the people struggling there.

The people there and among the vast diaspora, of which I am a part, need to feel hope, not so much in a collective vision, but in the restorative capacities of their own processes. We have all been comparing our reactions and trying to normalize them, fearing that we might stay too depressed for too long, that our sleep continues to be disturbed beyond the point it should, that our panic attacks are not diminishing. The challenge of a practical philosophy is to provide a common grounding and yet not standardize or normalize. Catastrophic philosophy might be veiwed as a sort of windowless monad of an unfolding process.