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    • Sartorial Lessons from Jean Jacques Rousseau

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on April 28, 2014

      On the heels of my two part Philosopher Fridays installment on Jean Jacques Rousseau, I came across a few articles and posts about ethical problems (and attempted solutions) in the global fashion industry, including Darling Magazine’s  interview with Greta Eagan, author of the book “How to Change the World with your Wardrobe”, Everlane’s Instagram campaign to raise awareness for efforts to raise money for the victims of last year’s Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, and lifestyle blog Hey Natalie Jean’s giveaway with MADE UK.

      When it comes to it, wealthy consumer nations are completely dependent upon exploited factory workers for clothing and shoes, but we’re completely disconnected from the real human impact of that exploitation. The result is that we reward companies that take shortcuts and hide their tracks, and allow ourselves to think egocentrically, rather than considering how our choices and economic savings contribute negatively to another person’s life story.

      But there is some truth to our rationalized complacency – it is really expensive to buy ethically made clothing, and often difficult to find sources that fit your body shape and size. For the most part, ethical consumption is a privilege available to those with the money and time to devote thought, research, and care to sartorial ethics. And there’s no simple way to fix it – we seem to be in one of Rousseau’s paradoxes, wherein we’re dependent upon a system of production that’s shrouded in secrecy.

      While some may think they’re untouched by this paradox, if we follow Rousseau’s line of thinking, their detachment is only an illusion. When the paradox crashes in on itself, there will be no one left to make or buy clothing, and the economy, the very thing making it possible for the wealthy to fancy themselves independent of such a struggle, will collapse from beneath their feet.

      But the articles I’ve linked above are just a small sampling of a much larger – and ever growing – movement. There are a lot of people who are trying to solve these issues by offering solutions steeped not in rationalization or enlightened self-interest, but in empathy. Here are just a few companies who are augmenting their business models with real human stories:

      1) Everlane – This is a company that makes high quality, lasting clothes out of natural fabrics at prices that are, if not affordable, reasonable. They’re transparent about what they’re skimming off the top, where and under what conditions their clothes are made, and who is making it. You may or may not like what you see, but at a base level, it’s really something that they’re showing it at all. I think they can go even further, engaging third party documentation of their practices and revealing how much workers make compared to their cost of living, but I think this is a powerful first step.

      Everlane is also helping to raise money for the victims of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. You can check our their efforts here, here, and here. I have no connection with the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, so I recommend you research everything thoroughly before deciding to donate to make sure you’re comfortable with how the money is being handled. 

      2) Accompany – While the goals of this company are similar to Everlane’s, the approach is different, more focused on fair trade with existing artists than on executing a centralized industrial vision. Their mission is to connect consumers directly to producers so that the exchange is mutual, emotional, and human. They also attempt to contextualize their efforts to remove barriers to the makers’ sovereign success by engaging in humanitarian and philanthropic projects outside of the consumer connection. While the prices are aspirational for most people, Accompany brings consumers to hand-crafters from across the world, which is an exciting way to use technology to build open connections, rather than hiding them in systemic red tape.

      3) Cuyana – This is a company that focuses more on reducing consumption and incentivizing the redistribution and reuse of already purchased clothes. It encourages its customers to favor fewer, higher quality pieces, which is in itself antithetical to most marketing approaches. Also, when you purchase one of their items, you can elect to have them send you a reusable bag to fill with clothing and send back to Cuyana. They’ll donate the goods to people in need, and give you a $10 coupon in exchange. While I’m more of a “bag it up and drop it at Goodwill” kind of person, this could be a great way to win over people who prefer to sell their clothes, and Cuyana also helps provide guidance on thinning your wardrobe – so that even if you don’t donate through them, you’ll have more to give. While they do also engage in sustainable sourcing, they’re hitting the issue from a different angle than Everlane and Accompany.

      4) Brilliant Earth – What I love about this company is that they don’t just sell conflict free diamonds, they also work to keep skilled tasks – the ones which pay the highest – in the same region where the diamonds are mined. They also use recycled gold and donate 5% of their profits to people who suffer from exploitative diamond mining. They’re expensive, but if you’re in the market for gold and diamonds, you’re already in the land of expensive, and Brilliant Earth attempts to be as transparent as possible.

      5) Factory 45 – In an effort to go beyond bringing ethics to the industry, this company aims to make it easier for makers to break into production and bring the process of clothing production closer to home. Basically, this company aims to remove the secrecy and mystery around clothing production in consumer cultures where big companies go to great lengths to keep customers and competitors in the dark.

      One fascinating thing that all of these companies have in common is how often they frame their goals and missions in terms of telling stories about their products and the people who make them. Its about shifting our focus from purely rational economics to the empathetic consideration of the narrative, physical human experience. I recommend you do your own research on the companies listed above, as I have no affiliation with any of them and therefore no authority with which to speak on the legitimacy of the their claims. But I think the approach is inspiring, and I’m excited to learn and do more.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 4 Comments | Tagged brilliant earth, clothing, cuyana, empathy, everlane, factory45, fashion, Rousseau, shopaccompany, social justice
    • Philosopher Fridays: Rousseau, Part Two

      Posted at 11:30 am by Michelle Joelle, on April 25, 2014

      Welcome to Part Two of this installment of Philosopher Fridays, dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Last week in Part One I laid the groundwork for the failure of human progress, and this week I’ll get into the paradox of leaving the state of nature and Rousseau’s criticism of metaphysics (and philosophy as a whole).

      A quick recap from last week:

      When we leave the state of nature to join forces and beat the odds, we create a system wherein we protect and hide our weaknesses, giving ourselves the illusion of independence and strength, causing the breakdown of society and a return to a state of nature for which we are no longer prepared.

      The best we can do is hide our growing weaknesses, and hope they don’t turn up when we least expect it. As our technology increases in power, our interdependencies become less overt and more subtly structural in the way that it holds us up, allowing us to ignore our own survival instincts in favor or reason and choice, and our empathetic instincts in favor of the illusion of independence and power. More than that, it gives the illusion that those who climb to the top are actually holding the foundation up on their own. We’re able to climb this artificial scaffolding to such great heights, but when the foundation crumbles beneath, we have no natural strength left to catch us when we fall. If we stop ourselves from progressing too far, we can survive, but if don’t, we risk losing our natural selves altogether.

      But why is important to hang onto our natural selves? Why, once we become so interdependent that we cannot survive alone, can’t we just keep ourselves connected to each other?

      Because, Rousseau argues, the very means by which we build our interdependence are the same means by which we create the illusion of our independence, and in the end, it’s a paradox built into the metaphysical functions of language.

      How it works:

      The initial empathy that leads us to come together and form civilization is aroused by our very first statements of weakness and despair, what Rousseau calls: “the cries of nature”. When we hear the sound of another in pain, we respond, finding ways to augment that communication. At the same time, we develop reason as a respond to a perceived weakness in our survival skills – we need to find a way around what is given to us naturally, and so reason is born of deficiency, just as language is born of the cry of weakness. And the two – language and reason – grow together.

      At first, we have only gestures that physically represent what we want to communicate. This level is tied very particularly to our bodies and our surroundings, and it only works for those who live together and communicate on a regular basis. The time may come when the small community formed from empathy discovers that its weaknesses exceed its strength, and so other communities must be found. But then, we need our language to do more than merely point or mimic – we need concepts, and thus we need words for those concepts.

      It’s reciprocal – according to Rousseau, this kind of thinking requires words, and so the development of human thought parallels the development of human language. More importantly, this combination leads us away from the particularities of the body. We need general ideas, and words are our tools for logical organization. They create umbrellas for not just items, but constellations of topics, creating labels that build upon themselves.

      At first, this is useful. Rousseau says:

      …general ideas can be introduced into the mind only with the aid of words, and the understanding grasps them only through sentences… Every general idea is purely intellectual. The least involvement of the imagination thereupon makes the idea particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in general; you will never succeed in doing it. In spite of yourself, it must be seen as small or large, barren or leafy, light or dark; and if you were in a position to see in it nothing but what you see in every tree, this image would no longer resemble a tree.

      To create new technologies that solve our problems by circumventing nature, we need reapplicable concepts – mathematical concepts, structural ones, and the like.

      Purely abstract being are perceived in the same way, or are conceived only through discourse. The definition of a triangle alone gives you the true idea of it. As soon as you behold one in your mind, it is a particular triangle and not some other one, and you cannot avoid making its lines to be perceptible or its plane to have color… For as soon as the imagination stops, the mind proceeds no further without the aid of discourse.

      But for Rousseau, this move away from true physical reference means stepping off of our foundation. Language used in this way makes it possible for us to abstract not only from physical representations (as in the case of the tree or the triangle) but from our abstractions themselves, until language is off and running on its own, meaninglessly dissolving into thin air as we tackle philosophical concepts like “substance” (find two philosophers who agree completely on what this word means, and I’ll give you a cookie), “mind”, “matter”, etc.

      When we ascend beyond the limits of the bodily, we think we have learned to fly – but according to Rousseau, we’re actually falling. As we move further and further from materiality, we begin to lose track of what differentiates ideas from our imagination. And in this imaginary world, we have no need of the body or its instincts. The more we live in a world of our own making, the less we connect back to those original drives – pity and self-preservation seem less important than power, knowledge, and mastery.

      This is the paradox – the very things which bring us together to build civilization in the first place are the very same things which become their own undoing. Rousseau makes the claim that humans alone are capable of making themselves miserable, and of choosing options that actively work against their self-interests. Free-will is not the key to heaven, for Rousseau, but the path to self-destruction. Reason is the means by which we are able to talk ourselves into thinking we are gods – when we are not.

      Says he:

      Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what separates him from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering man, ‘Perish if you will; I am safe and spun.’ No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank him from his bed. His fellow man can be killed with impunity underneath his window.

      In short, empathy begets language, which aids survival, but then language also takes us away from both instincts, allowing us to rationally construct a world for ourselves where our fellow human beings don’t matter – and neither do our own bodies. Pity brings us together to develop reason, but reason pulls us apart. Says Rousseau:

      Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of its members.

       

      empathyAnd the entire thing – the entire means by which he comes to his conclusions – is itself a fiction, an abstraction of an abstraction. for Rousseau, the concepts of philosophy are as made up as his vision of the “noble savage” and about as useful, thereby proving his point even though it comes from a fictive starting point.

      Its a fascinating and provocative perspective – one with which I’m not sure I’ll ever feel finished.

      Posted in Series | 5 Comments | Tagged paradox, philosopher fridays, philosophy, Rousseau
    • Philosopher Fridays: Rousseau, Part One

      Posted at 11:30 am by Michelle Joelle, on April 18, 2014

      Philosopher Fridays are back! This is a weekly series where I take a brief look at philosophers who inspire me. These posts are not meant to be comprehensive in any fashion, but are instead meant to focus on what I find to be thought-provoking, compelling, and occasionally even haunting. This edition will be done in two parts, because Rousseau’s work is laden with intriguing paradoxes and erudite observations.

      ROUSSEAU: Genevan writer and composer Jean Jaques Rousseau (1712-1178) is probably best known for the influence of his political theory. He first became famous for winning an essay context in 1750 with his Discourse on the Science and the Arts, which argued that we ought not have such faith that “progress” is really taking us somewhere ideal, and that luxury does not, as we assume, make our lives better; instead, he says, it breeds vice and leads to our downfall. He takes these ideas a few steps further in 1753 for another contest. His entry, The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, didn’t win, but he published it independently the following year. There are a lot of wonderful things in this text (and others by Rousseau), including paradoxes of freedom, a biting wit, not to mention the seeds of the French Revolution. For a thorough look at Rousseau, and at this text in particular, I recommend the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry.

      While it’s easy to take Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality as his treatise on the state of nature, what he actually delivers in the text is a scathing critique of metaphysical philosophy. The first thing he says about it is that it never existed. Anyone who thinks they understand human nature is, he argues, just making something up. Most other philosophers of his imagined natural man as a savage in the wilderness, but none of his contemporaries (Hobbes and Locke, for instance) have any scientific justifications for their ideas, nor historical, or even biblical ones at that. He decides then that in the absence of true knowledge, he too can craft a fiction that would serve his intellectual explorations. He says:

      Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question.

      But he doesn’t guess wildly; instead, he looks to the difficulties facing the question for his inspiration. The main challenge is that we have no clear point of origin, and we don’t change in clearly defined stages. Rather, we are constantly in flux, which makes knowing ourselves, either as individuals or as human beings in general, a nearly impossible task. We can never then concretize our nature and look at it as though it were an object, for the act of looking at it involves some kind of intellectual motion.

      To rephrase: every time we reflect, we are changing as we add new knowledge or reconsider previous knowledge, and to so when we reflect upon ourselves and our nature, even in its most immediate state, we are in a process of changing the thing we’re trying to understand:

      Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying man that we rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him.

      Since we cannot divine the true core of original man, what we have to do instead is look at the changes that have occurred in our move away from the most natural state, assuming it ever existed. To this end, he attempts to identify what traits we see change over time, but which don’t ever appear to be invented, even if they change and wither and grow as humanity progresses. In addition to our changeableness, we are marked by the intensity of our “well being and self preservation” and “a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow man, perish or suffer.” He rejects the popular notion that reason is at all important to the identity of a human being. Says he, in one of my favorite quotes:

      It is not necessary to make a man a philosopher before making him a man.

      From there, he starts to build an image of natural man that is our opposite, and stresses that we have not merely built upon that starting point, but have taken things away. Our development is like that of a statue dropped to the bottom of the ocean for many years, he says, in that we have not simply covered ourselves with barnacles and growth, but have also suffered erosion, destruction, and decay.

      And so he posits a natural man that is strong where we are now weak, and weak where we are now strong. What it comes to, for Rousseau, is a tradeoff between the body and the mind; as we rely ever more heavily on our mind, our bodies grow weak from lack of use, and so the natural man must be one who is strong in body, yet weak in mind. He would be non-verbal, nomadic, operating according to instinct, and unfettered by social attachments. Rousseau romanticizes his fictional savage, an animal immune to diseases, hardy against environmental forces, and strong enough to break tree branches with his bare hands. He compares this ideal with his contemporaries who eat and drink themselves into diseases and use tools to avoid developing skills and muscles for survival.

      The rationality of the civilized man, Rousseau argues, leads him to fight natural evolution, find ways around true growth and strength, and essentially devolve into a weak shadow of his former self. What we’ve done, and continue to do, he claims, is supplant our natural instincts with an artificial order – one that will inevitably lead to our downfall.

      Here’s how it works on a macro-level:

      In the state of nature, we have those two main instinctive impulses: self-preservation and pity. Occasionally, these impulses will be at odds with each other; to work for your own survival, you may have to harm another, at the very least by neglect, and to work for the survival of another might require some self-sacrifice. Most animals would merely listen to whichever impulse was strongest in the moment, but humans, in their reflexive changeableness, have the capacity for self-perfection, and for finding alternative solutions.

      In this example, we’d have the unique ability to break out of the conflicting pull of our main instincts, respond to that initial cry, and find a way around the conflict, and this, for Rousseau, is the moment we enter into community and create language. Instead of the stronger person letter the weaker person die, or else sacrificing himself for the other person, the two come together and share in order to ensure the survival of both.

      It its thus we begin to deprecate our bodies in two ways. Firstly, we ignore our natural instincts in favor of an artificial (meaning made by humans) process of decision making. Second, instead of the strongest surviving, a stronger person will share with a weaker one, both ensuring the survival of the weaker, and the weakening of the stronger. In supposing ourselves to be free agents, we effectively water down both our physical prowess and our connection to the natural impulses which made us strong in the first place.

      From this moment we are able to grow and change in ways that simultaneously move us forward and coddle every manner of weakness, protecting our inadequacies even as we try to overcome them. Every new solution we come up with to fix our problems actually creates new problems. When we form a community to cover our individual weaknesses, we create social problems. As we solve social problems, we create economic ones. As we solve economic problems, we create health problems. And each grows in degree and scope, with every new advance unwittingly creating a host of new needs and vulnerabilities.

      Simultaneously, we leave behind our isolationism and enter into society, we begin to exercise our free agency and give birth to human reason, and possibly more damning of all for Rousseau, this is also the moment we start to create language.

      Once we start to think in words, we also begin to replace our physical strength with tools, our resistance to illness with medicine, and our natural physical brilliance with idiocy and reflective despair. The development of our minds through language, for Rousseau, means the active suppression of the body and its instincts – including those of self-preservation and empathy. The more we attempt to rise above our limitations through, the more willing we become to make bad decisions under the guise of prioritizing “mind over matter”. And in the end, all we have left is weakness. The ties holding us together will break, and we will be returned to the isolation of nature – but without the strength we need to survive in it.

      Rousseau

      I think that’s a good place to pause, for now. Check back in next Friday to find out more about how this happens, why Rousseau thinks its inevitable, the role of language, and a look at why this is such a scathing critique of metaphysical philosophy.

      Posted in Series | 0 Comments | Tagged Metaphysics, philosopher fridays, philosophy, Rousseau, state of nature
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