The Detachment Collaboratory

What exactly did we mean by ‘detachment’?

Reconsidering Detachment: The ethics and analytics of disconnection

Conference, Girton College Cambridge, 30 June – 3 July 2010

Different definitions of detachment:

1.Detachment as objectivity
2.Detachmment as impartiality
3.Detachment as explanatory reductionism
4.Detachment as disinterestedness
5.Detachment as lack of prejudice
6.Detachment as ‘blinding’ (in ‘blind trials’)
7.Detachment as technology-mindedness
8.Detachment as high-mindedness (remoteness from everyday life)
9.Detachment as refusal to be co-opted
10.Detachmment as ethos of bureaucratic office/personality
11.Detachment as removal of parts from a whole where other parts stay in place
12.Detachment as interest created by ‘external’ incentives (e.g. research funding)
13. Detachment as not caring
14.Detachment as bracketing an issue or analysis to avoid openness to criticism
15.Detachment as the closing off of/turning away from something in pursuit of an end
16.Detachment as a pathology/disorder (e.g. social phobia)
17.Detachment as a bulwark against moral zealotry and managerial enthusiasm
18.Detachment as inter- patience/disengaged participation (the integrated, but non-interfering observer)
19.Detachment as forgetting
20.Detachment as non-differentiation
21.Detachment as industrial mechanization
22.Detachment as distancing
23.Detachment as autonomy/freedom
24.Detachment as cognition/judgement (as opposed to affect)
25.Detachment as invisibility/absence
26.Detachment as untouchability
27.Detachment as excess of scale for being intuitively grasped
28.Detachment as rationality
29.Detachment as division/separation (e.g. of soul from body)
30.Detachment as exclusion/expulsion
31.Detachment as disgust/repugnance
32.Detachment as removal from public view
33.Detachment as mediation
34.Detachment as separation (e.g. of property)
35.Detachment as discipline/order/security
36.Detachment as abstraction (e.g. of concepts)
37.Detachment as a sign of the sacred
38.Detachment as disbelief
39.Detachment as observation
40.Detachment as death
41.Detachment as safe distance (e.g. from spirits)
42.Detachment as the untying of a knot
43.Detachment as sacrifice/giving up something
44.Detachment as using a substitute rather than the real thing
45.Detachment as balancing
46.Detachment as oppression
47.Detachmment as liberation through confession
48.Detachment as irony
49.Detachment as spiritual renunciation
50.Detachment as anti-spiritual renunciation(e.g. cutting off from religious practices)
51.Detachment as meditation/prayer
52.Detachment as equanimity
53.Detachment as living without property (’the carefree life’)
54.Detachment as freedom from strain/having a balanced mind
55.Detachment as seeing without acting
56.Detachment as fasting to death
57.’External’ detachment: NOT [A is related to B]
58.’Internal’ detachment: A is [NOT related to B]
59. Stronger, third, reading: A is related to NOT B]
60.Detachment as mutual accommodation/co-operation.