Ideas of Imperfection

Summary

2010-10-23T07:35:00.003-05:00

Coogan's Bluff

2009-11-16T10:06:00.001-05:00

Joshua Prager has written a sublime, prosaic book about the "shot heard round the world": Bobby Thomson's home run to win the National League pennant on the final playoff pitch of 1951. It has been compared to The Boys of Summer, but it is less parochial, more truthful, and more serious.

Prager's research is both exhilarating and exhaustive. In 2001, he became notorious for an article about the Giants' telescopic stealing of signs. Here it is catalogued in merciless detail.

As are the lives of Branca and Thomson. In a chapter that is a tour de force, Prager interrupts the 1951 season at the playoff to narrate in synchrony their paths to this defining moment: Branca's huge and happy family, Thomson's taciturn father and supportive brother. The intermission takes up a fifth of the book.

It is emblematic of Prager's digressions that the final game itself is paused, as Thomson steps into the batter's box, before the pitch – the swing – Russ Hodges' call – for a paragraph that begins thus:

Pitcher and hitter had both awakened that morning at 7:30 in the home of parents. Both had eaten eggs prepared by his mother, Thomson with a side of bacon, Branca a side of ham.

"We are not so different, you and I." How could we understand this miracle before we knew the breakfasts of which it was made?

If the events of Prager's narrative are deliberately inverted and pulled apart, so too his words. In the first ten pages:

Thus did a bloody digit and enflamed appendix now convene Durocher and Horace Stoneham in New York's center-field clubhouse.

Durocher was obnoxious, would from short instruct his pitcher to throw at opposing batters.

All about the city were starting nines, and the consequence most embraced of its newfound proficiency was the overtaking of New York.

There are dozens of these throughout the book: prepositions, verbs, scattered through sentences to surprise the reader. Meaning waits, as a string of signifiers, names and dates is given sense at last by the missing term, on which everything pivots. Call no man happy till he throws the final pitch.

What is a life, asks Prager? Facts and facts and facts: eggs eaten, girlfriends left, wives kissed and parents grieved. But there is only one fact about Branca: he threw the fastball Thomson hit.

The Sole Text of Rational Psychology

2009-11-09T06:41:00.006-05:00

Two passages to begin with. First, from Martin Amis, The Information:

"What did they say? Did anyone say anything?"

Yes. The man said, "I'm a child."

"The man said you're a child?" And Richard went back four or five years, to the natural confusions of early speech. "How are you?" he would ask him; and Marco would say, logically enough, "You're fine." And Marco would reach out to him with his arms and say, "Carry you." And Richard would pick him up and carry him…

No. He said I'm a child.

Then the following echo, from Life As We Know It, a memoir by Michael Bérubé:

Well into his second year, in fact, Nick persisting in saying "take him" to his parents whenever he wanted to be picked up. "No, no, take me," we said to him, to which he answered, logically enough, "take you."

Adorable, huh? But such inversions can also be symptomatic: many autistic children call themselves 'you' not 'I'; they struggle to master the conventional use of pronouns. Thus the natural confusions of childhood, logical enough in themselves, are marked as pathology: red flags.

Nor is this just any conceptual muddle, like a failure to grasp that numbers are for counting, or the eccentricity of Wittgenstein's wood sellers, who measure quantity by the area covered by a pile of wood, regardless of its volume. That there is an intimate connection between cognition and the first person concept is a thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason:

It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.

What kind of mind could lack this capacity? What form of thought is available to those who cannot distinguish themselves from others?

These questions evoke a persisting trope in the literature of autism: that of autist as alien. Temple Grandin writes that, for her mother, dealing with her was "like dealing with somebody from another planet." This is the obverse of the notorious defects of social cognition characteristic of autism. Grandin memorably called herself, in relation to others, "an anthropologist on Mars."

In the opening chapter of Thinking in Pictures, Grandin tries to depict the contents of her kind of mind. "Depict" is right, since she is an intensely visual thinker.

Unlike those of most people, my thoughts move from video-like specific images to generalizations and concepts. For example, my concept of dogs is inextricably linked to every dog I've ever known. It's as if I have a card catalogue of dogs I have seen, complete with pictures, which continually grows as I add more examples to my video library. If I think about Great Danes, the first memory that pops into my head is Dansk, the Great Dane owned by the headmaster at my high school […] the images I visualize are always specific. There is no generic, generalized Great Dane.

This is Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas – and something like Hume's solution. If ideas represent pictorially, and there is no such thing as a generic picture, we have to construct our concepts from images as associative files.

Reviewing Grandin's book in Hume Studies, Elijah Millgram went so far as to call it

a window into a mind of which Hume's psychology is for the most part true. […] he was, it now appears, inadvertently describing not his own experience, and not human mentation in general, but a certain type of autism.

It is a tempting move, to map the alien to the familiar – though which is which will depend on what you know. But it can't be right. Millgram is too mild when he remarks that "twentieth-century philosophers no longer find the psychology [of the British empiricists] convincing" because it "did not make good on its explanatory obligations […] a thought's being a mental picture is not a satisfactory account of why it has the content it does." Even if we drop the question of content, how to make sense of such mundane phenomena as belief, which Hume was led to equate with an indefinable "force" or "vivacity" of ideas? Quite apart from its obscurity, Hume's conception only works for ideas of particular things: it is an account of belief in x, not belief that p. Propositional belief would have to relate distinct ideas, some of them abstract – but not by association. Hume leaves no room for this.

To say this is not to question Grandin's testimony: she does not claim to be a Humean mind. But it does imply a certain failure. Her book explains how acute visualization may compensate for cognitive shortfalls. But we want more than that. When we read her words as a field report from another planet, they promise a window to the alien mind: a mode of thinking that is nothing but pictures. However it may seem, this cannot be made intelligible. It is just an illusion of thought.

Philosophical Experiments

2009-11-02T13:18:00.011-05:00

[Warning to the reader: the remarks that follow cite no-one and do not attempt to engage with details; but they are in part a response to the first two essays in this book.]

What is called "experimental philosophy" is diverse and does not admit of unified treatment. Some of it enlists the existing work of empirical scientists where it might be relevant to the questions of philosophy. While I may not always agree about the relevance, this seems innocent enough.

But there are more radical threads. One is a variety of "naturalism" that entails the complete rejection of a priori knowledge and non-empirically justified belief. Let the armchair blaze.

It is sometimes claimed by advocates of "naturalism" that the armchair method rests on a hopeless view of philosophy as conceptual analysis: what could one discover from the armchair, if anything, but the shape of one's conceptual space? (Can one discover even that? See below.) But whatever we make of the rest of it, the sociology of Williamson's recent book is sound when he denies that this view is orthodox. Many philosophers reject the conceptual analyst's account of a priori knowledge.

Some do not, of course, but others give other accounts, and there is a silent majority. Moreover, the pressure to countenance the a priori and to do so in a way that outstrips conceptual analysis or "epistemological analyticity" can be seen in the traditional problem of induction. According to a tempting principle,

One can be justified in believing p on the basis of evidence, q, only if one is independently justified in believing [if p then q].

This has the fairly rapid upshot that, if we are justified in believing things inductively, we must be non-empirically justified in believing contingent propositions. The argument may go wrong, but it must be faced by any honest attempt to live without the a priori or to confine it to the analysis of concepts.

This is the briefest sketch; I have not tried to say why the principle above should tempt us. But let the record state that there is an argument for a priori justification that has nothing to do with analyticity and everything to do with the threat of scepticism.

It is ironic, in this context, that the most baffling experimentalist project – the taking of surveys that elicit folk intuitions about such matters as knowledge, intentional action, and moral responsibility – would have a definite point if the content of our concepts was fixed by the corresponding dispositions, as some conceptual analysts believe. Witness the idiom, "folk concept of ____," as if one could make this theory true by stipulation. If the theory is false, we need some other incentive to care what the surveys say.

One of the reasons commonly given is that when we find that our intuitions are parochial, the beliefs that rest on them are undermined. But we should ask: what justifies that response? Perhaps the view that intuitions are evidence, akin to perceptual appearances. For if things look different to others, whose perceptual mechanisms we have no reason to question apart from the present discrepancy, that should give us pause. The problem is that we need not – should not – think of intuitions in that way. We could think of them, instead, as beliefs that are justified non-empirically, if at all, and not by the "evidence" of intuitive appearances.

Alternatively, the threat of parochiality might rest on a controversial view in the epistemology of disagreement, that we should give as much weight to the opinions of others as to our own unless we have antecedent reason to doubt their reliability. On the contrary, if some of my beliefs are justified a priori, quite apart from evidence, won't that give me reason to doubt the reliability of those who disagree, antecedent to – well, everything.

Again, these arguments may be wrong. But let the record state that inferences from surveys to the application of concepts or the justification of beliefs rely on hidden machinery: theories of concept-possession or epistemology disputed from the armchair, which stand in need of further defence. In its absence, the point of the surveys, however entertaining, is seriously opaque.

There is a final heresy, espoused by some, that is irrefutable by design: the surveys do nothing more, and need do nothing more, than map the cognitive powers by which "the folk" identify something as cause or effect, intentional action, exemption or excuse. There is no call to map them on to more familiar philosophical pursuits, as the strategies above purport to do. They stand on their own.

Still, we can ask for guidance. Why survey these particular questions? Why not study what people believe about just anything, or anything that has been a topic for philosophy: say, the meaning of life? It is no good responding that surveys are apt when philosophical problems are posed by "the basic concepts people use" or that an interest in such concepts is obviously philosophical: part of what is in dispute is how the study of folk beliefs relates to the study of concepts and their conditions of application.

Not everything is philosophy. But the boundaries of the field are controversial; and it would be wrong to refuse publication on grounds that reasonable philosophers dispute. There is, therefore, a standing risk that non-philosophy will be taught and studied as philosophy. This much follows from the proper humility of peer review and a wise refusal to police the borders. The borders should not be policed: these things must work themselves out. That doesn't mean it's philosophy, any more a heap of flesh and bones is a human being.

The Sense of an Ending

2009-10-26T08:03:00.001-05:00

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

So begins John Berryman's Dream Song 14. His instruction was ignored by Bernard Williams in "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immorality." His argument, in brief: if one lives sufficiently long, one must either remain the same, and so become hopelessly bored; or become so different that one might as well be someone else. If you want to live forever from self-interest you are out of luck.

One might hope that an argument against immortality would reconcile us to death. But it does not follow from Williams' conclusion – that I should not want to live forever – that I should ever not want to live. Nor that I should want there to be a future time at which I die. For even if I will become so different that self-interest cannot sustain concern for my 'future self,' that is no reason to wish him ill!

In any case, both sides of the dilemma have their flaws. Why should even radical change in my desires, my character, my occupations, destroy identity of the kind that underwrites self-love? And if it does, why should consistency in those matters precipitate boredom?

Not that having final ends is sufficient to prevent it. As Elijah Millgram argues, one can have things to do for their own sakes, even things that matter very much, without being the least bit interested. Along with practical rationality, we have "a kind of intellectual phototropism": "interest and boredom […] are involuntary" and "[their] function is not to stabilize the self" but to push us towards the adoption of new ends.

Part of this seems right: we must distinguish interests – in the colloquial sense – from ends. But it does not explain why we need to be pushed: why it is that ends stagnate or fail to sustain our indefinite engagement. It is oddly circular to argue for the necessity of boredom as a provocation to new pursuits. More economical, surely, to have our interests last forever.

These questions may defeat philosophy. Perhaps this is simply how it is: a matter of psychological fact. But I wonder, with hesitation, if there is not something more to say. Think about the possible objects of interest, among our possible ends. They are, it seems to me, completable, things that can be done but only if one makes it to some final point. Walking aimlessly is pleasant enough, but it cannot be interesting. More exalted aims like doing philosophy, or being happy, or treating others well – they can be sources of much interest, but not in themselves. The interest lies in the projects one undertakes in order to be happy, do philosophy, act decently. Again, this may be mere psychology, if it is true at all. But it may instead reflect the logic of interest, the sort of end by which it can intelligibly be sustained.

That would explain what is so peculiar in Aristotle's picture of the ideal life as one of contemplation, not discovery: not that contemplation must be boring, as my students insist, but that it cannot be interesting in itself.

If interest depends on completable ends, it is inevitably finite. It expires. It must be renewed. This conflicts with a certain philosophical vision – Platonic-Aristotelian – of life as governed by a single inexhaustible end. If everything I do is for the sake of philosophy, still my interest turns on finding problems to solve. If I fail, no good. If I solve them, I need more. To the problem of boredom itself, there can be no permanent solution: no end to the need for difficulties, enterprises, work.

The Rest is Silence

2009-10-19T12:24:00.004-05:00

Hilarious, inscrutable, disturbing, Melville's Bartleby both tempts and rebuffs interpretation. The basic facts are two: that we do not and cannot know what troubles Bartleby or why he ceases copying; and that the lawyer is a decent man.

In a fashionable reading, obtuseness about these matters is combined. Bartleby is Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," set against "the numbing world of capitalist profit and alienated labor." The lawyer is a vain and self-deceived protagonist of that world.

Dan McCall's inspiring book demolishes this line.

Bartleby is Thoreau? No, the whole point of Bartleby, the maddening and precious thing about him, is that he is a lost cause. He is inconsolable.

Nor would things be different if the lawyer were an anarchist or a labour organizer. When critics condemn him, they fail to see that they are doing so in his own words: "Here I can cheaply purchase a morsel of delicious self-approval." The lawyer sees through himself: "The truly remarkable thing about [him] is just how reliable he really is." Can we question an observer whose adjectives are so generous and so sincere?

I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.

"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.

What vanity in the critic not to recognize that by "decoding" Bartleby, he recapitulates the lawyer's "helpless reaching" in the Dead Letter paragraph. And how humourless. Bartleby's demurral is comic, a mild assessment of options – when I compare doing it with not, on balance – not a petulant "don't want to" or an oppositional-defiant "I won't."

To the catalogue of readings refuted by McCall, we may add a few that have tempted me.

Bartleby as Meursault: "one wouldn't be far wrong in seeing ["Bartleby"] as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth." (So Camus wrote of L'Étranger in the Afterword written in 1955.) But Bartleby does not die for anything we can divine. We have no more reason to think he tells the truth because he hates hypocrisy than for any other reason.

Bartleby as furniture: "Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim grinding motion, as if the table were a perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him"; "Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs". But Bartleby is not inanimate: his will is implacable.

Bartleby as non-rational agent: "the occurrence of other answers to the question 'Why?' besides ones like 'I just did', is essential to the existence of the concept of an intention or voluntary action." (Anscombe's Intention, §20) But Bartleby neither refutes nor confirms this conjecture: we do not know why he prefers not to, nor do we know that there is no reason.

What moral can be drawn from such critical pathologies? For McCall, that confinement in symbols "parochializes literature and limits rather severely its claims on our attention." Worse, it does Bartleby "great violence – it takes his silence away from him." In reading Bartleby, we assault his dignity more severely and more evasively than the lawyer ever does. Unlike most of us, he honestly confronts his task. McCall concludes:

The deepest question in the story is what you do with Bartleby. The deepest answer the story provides is that you can do nothing.

A Critique of Rawls

2008-04-01T18:05:00.007-05:00

John Rawls (1921-2002) is to be revered primarily for two doctrines: his conception of justice as fairness, and the proposition that baseball is the best of all games. There is no longer an opening day, but in this opening week it seems apt to consider his arguments for the latter. There are six:

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play.

It is as if these words were written behind a veil of ignorance. Baseball's rules were in serious flux for at least 50 years, with sigificant changes afterwards. Some highlights:

1845: pitching distance is 45'.
1865-9: pitcher's box introduced and modified year to year.
1872: pitcher allowed to snap the ball but must still throw underhand.
1880-1: number of balls for a walk reduced from 9 to 8 to 7.
1881: pitching distance increased to 50'.
1883: pitching allowed from anywhere up to shoulder height.
1884: base on balls to 6.
1886: to 5.
1889: and finally to 4.
1893: pitching distance is at last increased to 60'6", and pitcher's box eliminated.
1895: foul balls become strikes.
1904: height of pitcher's mound established at no more than 15".
1920: abolition of the spitball.
1968: pitcher's mound lowered to 10".
1973: DH rule introduced in the AL.

Not to mention changes in the size of the strike zone, official and otherwise...

Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.

These claims will be tempting to anyone with a soft spot for David Wells. But they were rejected by no less an authority than Phil Rizzuto, in verse:

The legs are so important.
In golf they're very,
People don't realize
How important legs are in golf,
Or in baseball,
And football, definitely.
Track.
Oh, in track.
All-important.
Jumping.
Soccer.
Is there anything, what?
Is there anything where the legs
Are not the most important?

Even in philosophy, I hasten to add.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view...

Fifth: baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball...

Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer.

These are familiar thoughts, but 4 and 5 apply to cricket, too, and the last is notoriously misleading. As Bill James is fond of pointing out, before the installation of lights, baseball did have a clock: it was dusk, when the Owl of Minerva flies.

I am British and I love baseball, but I never liked cricket and they are different in a crucial respect, which is the deepest attraction of baseball and which Rawls omits: the stillness at the centre of the game. Cricket may be dull, but the bowler runs to the crease before launching the ball. In baseball, the pitcher stands, looking for a signal to which he responds with a barely discriminable nod or shake of the head, breathing into his glove, staring, staring - as we hold our breaths, and everything waits.

Unwritten Books

2008-03-10T10:24:00.015-05:00

My greatest intellectual fear – one that afflicts me whenever I finish writing something – is that I will have no more ideas, that I will realize that I have nothing to say. It could be worse, of course: I could fail to realize that I have nothing to say.

By way of insurance and with the inspiration of George Steiner, I here record five proposals for books that I would like to write. Steiner's own unwritten books include one on artistic envy, others on Jewish identity and animal rights. Notes for a book on his attachment to privacy appear beside a chapter on copulating with partners of every nationality: a penetrating study of language and sex. Steiner's erotic descriptions defy parody; read the Sunday Times review.

The suggestions that follow are not so erudite or, I hope, quite so embarrassing; nor are they all entirely serious…

1. Oxford's Hypatias – For about a decade from the late 1930s to 1940s, Oxford was home to five of the most influential women in 20th century philosophy: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Mary Warnock. Two of them – the least important in academia – have written memoirs, and we have Peter Conradi's meticulous biography of Murdoch. But there is no serious intellectual history of this unparalleled time.

2. What Does It All Mean? – Despite their numerous flaws, these posts at least did not ignore the question: "Does life have meaning?" not "What does it take to live a meaningful life?"

3. Oscar Charleston: the Hoosier Comet – Charleston may have been the greatest all-around baseball player in history, next to Honus Wagner. He played center field for a series of teams in the Negro Leagues, ending up at first base and managing the Pittsburgh Crawfords at their peak, from 1932-36. Unlike some contemporaries, like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and even Willie Wells, he has yet to attract a biographer, though his life was surely as memorable as any.

4. Epistemology of the Old Ones – When I was 15, I compiled an enormous box of notes for a book contesting the now orthodox reading of H. P. Lovecraft as a "mechanistic materialist." I don't recall the particular charges and I could not recommend the notes – "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." – but I suspect that there was something there.

5. Hull is Other People – As previously advertised, the story of my path from Kingston-upon-Hull to Pittsburgh, the Sheffield of Western Pennsylvania.

Let me stress that I make no claim of copyright here: with the obvious exception of number 5, these titles are yours to take. I ask only for a brief acknowledgment – "from an original concept by…" – and for a copy of the published book.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

2008-01-17T13:23:00.002-05:00

[The setting is heaven, with the old foes reunited at last.]

GRASSHOPPER: I didn't expect to see you here!

ANT: Believe me, I'm equally shocked! – Glad, too, since I recently read a book about you that contained some thoroughly implausible claims, and I've been looking for an opportunity to take them up.

G: Ah yes, my authorized biography. Tell me, though, what do you find implausible in it?

A: This, for a start (the ant begins to read from page 34):

[To] play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

So Wittgenstein should quake? As a definition of game-playing, this is hopeless. It may work for sports like running a marathon, where the goal of being 26 miles from here before the others would be achieved more efficiently by taking a cab. But what about chess? Checkmate is defined in terms of the rules: it is not a goal that could be achieved more efficiently without them!

G: Perhaps you didn't read the book with sufficient care. What I call the "prelusory goal" of chess is that the pieces should be arranged so that the conditions for checkmate are satisfied, which indeed makes no sense apart from the rules, but can be achieved without following them, as when someone cheats, or sets up the board as an illustration without ever playing a game.

A: Hmm. Fair enough. Let me try again. Now that you've mentioned them, there seems to be a problem about those who cheat. Your definition mistakenly counts them as not even playing the game. Professionals will be tempted to do this all the time. Come to think of it, they cause problems anyway, since they don't accept the rules just because they make the activity in question possible, but in order to make a living.

G: You are certainly persistent, my friend. No surprise there! Professionals do accept the rules in order to make the activity possible, even though they have further reasons for welcoming its possibility. You were misled by the phrase "just because," which was never meant to conflict with this. And I deny that cheats play the game, strictly speaking; they merely pretend to.

A: Are you serious? Well, of course not, but still…you are proposing a definition on which the majority of baseball players are not playing baseball, since they pretend to have caught balls they merely trapped, to have tagged runners they missed, to have touched bases they merely passed by.

G: Not playing baseball when they do those things, that's all.

A: I can see that it's hopeless to press this line. Here's another: your definition counts as game-playing all kinds of activities that are not games at all. Think about the institutions of promising and punishment, as they are analyzed by Rawls in "Two Concepts of Rules": we engage in activity directed towards cooperation or deterrence using only means permitted by the rules of a practice, and we accept them because they make this activity possible – though, like professionals, we have further reasons for welcoming its possibility.

G: Ant! I would have expected you, of all insects, to do your homework. This is dealt with in the book. Rules against punishing the innocent or creating false expectations are not accepted because they make punishment and promising possible, but on moral grounds. That is why these institutions are not the institution of games.

A: But your proposal doesn't work. Yes, there are moral constraints on the institutions of punishing and promising, as there are on any activity – "Don't kill the shortstop sliding into second base" – but so long as the rules of those institutions are to some degree arbitrary, as Rawls suggests, you can't deny that they are games.

G: Let me answer you with a riddle, which came to me in a dream…

A: Don't play with me, grasshopper! The truth is that you don't have any reply to this objection. In fact, it's worse than you think. Almost any ritual that we engage in self-consciously is going to count as a game for you, along with a vast array of practices whose rules we adopt because we need some practice of that general kind. No wonder you find yourself able to argue that life in utopia consists exclusively in playing games: what doesn't? Alarmingly absent from your discussion, as reported in the book, is any reference to fun!

Not Pure Drivel

2007-12-17T10:52:00.001-05:00

Some years ago, I wrote a post about philosophical humour. It ended up dwelling on philosophers. But there are also comedians who do philosophy.

Woody Allen is one of them, though he doesn't suit my taste: "When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." More compelling, perhaps, is Steven Wright, as in this incisive contribution to debates about absolute generality: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

But these intellects suffer from a lack of formal philosophical instruction, without which comedy is at best contingent. They should learn from such luminaries as Bill Murray, Steve Martin and Ricky Gervais.

In Born Standing Up, Martin describes his comedic and philosophical education. The latter took place at Long Beach State College, was stoked by Lewis Carroll's logic, and ended in Wittgensteinian despair. The former began with the discovery of jokes, "musty one-liners from other comedians' acts, but to me they were as new as sunrise." Like John Stuart Mill, however, who in his nervous breakdown was "seriously tormented by the […] exhaustibility of musical combinations," and Frank Ramsey, who found that there was nothing to discuss, Martin faced a crisis: what to do when the jokes run out, like the periods of Times Roman?

His solution was a construction of genius, the rigorous application of logic to the problems of life. Objecting to the Freudian theory of laughter as the release of pent-up tension, Martin asked:

What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension?

This refutation of the tension theory inadvertently confirms its rival: the conception of comedy as incongruity. What could be more incongruous, and thus hilarious, than set-up after set-up deflated, no punchline ever supplied?

On this basis, we can prove the necessity of humour. If a set-up is followed by an incongruous punchline, then the joke is funny; if there is no punchline or if it is not incongruous, this too is incongruous and therefore funny. Our happy conclusion – Steve Martin's sublime discovery – is that it is impossible not to be funny. You've got to laugh.

Philosophy for Elliot

2007-12-04T11:14:00.001-05:00

Plato, Republic:

Suppose that we were painting a statue, and someone came up to us and said, "Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body: the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black"; to him we might fairly answer, "Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful."

Kant, Critique of Judgement:

The faculty of desire, so far as it is determinable only through concepts, i.e. to act in conformity with the representation of a purpose, would be the will. But an object, or a state of mind, or even an action, is called purposive, although its possibility does not necessarily presuppose the representation of a purpose, merely because its possibility can be explained and conceived by us only so far as we assume for its ground a causality according to purposes, i.e. a will which would have so disposed it according to the representation of a certain rule. There can be, then, purposiveness without purpose, so far as we do not place the causes of this form in a will, but yet can only make the explanation of its possibility intelligible to ourselves by deriving it from a will.

Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932-35:

In teaching a child language by pointing to things and pronouncing the words for them, where does the use of a proposition start? If you teach him to touch certain colours when you say the word "red," you have evidently not taught him sentences. [...] What is called understanding a sentence is not very different from what a child does when he points to colours on hearing colour words. Now there are all sorts of language-games suggested by the one in which colour words are taught: games of orders and commands, of question and answer, of questions and "Yes" and "No." We might think that in teaching a child such language-games we are not teaching him a language but are only preparing him for it. But these games are complete; nothing is lacking.

This is my body which is given for you

2007-08-27T10:18:00.000-05:00

What are the metaphysics of Antony Gormley’s bodyforms, the lead cases cast from plaster moulds of his body that he has described as "three-dimensional photographs"?

Like photographs, they are films, hollow skins containing a pause that their stillness recalls. They do not move. These are not Giacometti’s walkers, so urgently kinetic that they have no time to bend their knees, but standing, lying, upright, bent, immobile.

They are houses, places in which to live, "intimate architecture." The comparison is made explicit in Gormley’s most recent exhibition:

The body is our first habitation, the building our second.

In Allotment, buildings are shrunk to the scale of bodies, with apertures for mouth, ears, anus and genitals. Space Station magnifies the crouching form of the artist into a perforated mass of balanced crates that echo the brutalist architecture of the Hayward itself.

The tendency is disturbing. It hints at a kind of immaterialism even Descartes disavowed:

I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but […] as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and my body form a unit.

Gormley writes that "architecture is another kind of body, another container." But the body is not a container, and our relation to it is not instrumental. We do not use our bodies as tools with which test our view of the world. Or perhaps only Gormley does. When it is not alienated from itself, action is a form of practical knowledge: knowing what one is doing by doing it, and thereby knowing one’s own materiality. This knowledge is misplaced in the ineluctable stasis of the bodyforms.

I love them anyway. As beings at rest. As performances, their incarnation of everyman at odds with their palpable origin in the artist’s particular body. Most simply, there is the physical graffiti of Event Horizon, attentive and demanding our attention, like the blurred bodies of other people in Blind Light, the most impressive work in the present collection.

Gormley once wrote: "I am tired of art about art. I am now trying to deal with what it feels like to be a human being." A feeling is not a worldview. Like some critics, we may tire of the demand for art to be about anything, tire of interpretation, feeling its presence in the presence of others.

Rousseau Bites

2007-08-13T08:55:00.000-05:00

In Rousseau's Dog David Edmonds and John Eidinow embark upon an impossible task. They aspire to make Hume seem less than a saint. Their strategy is equally quixotic: to find Hume guilty in the affair with Rousseau. Their book is exhaustively researched, but its argument pivots on innuendo. On conflicting accounts of their first quarrel:

Another discrepancy is over the nature of Rousseau's apology. In Hume's version, Rousseau is apologizing for his folly and ill behaviour; in Rousseau's version, the apology concerns Hume's character. Unquestionably, Rousseau's record of Hume's stilted reaction – so reminiscent of the Scotsman's embarrassing inarticulateness when playing the sultan in Paris to the two slaves – has the ring of veracity.

One need not be as sceptical as Hume to question an inference from his awkward reaction to the prospect of a public seduction to the cold reception of a private apology. The authors cite no other evidence.

They are willing to speculate elsewhere, too, always on behalf of Rousseau. When Madame de Boufflers ignores his letter vilifying Hume, they wonder whether "[perhaps] she recognized that some of his remarks about Hume were justified"; and they all but endorse the unprovable allegation that Hume was responsible for the nastiest quip in a fabricated letter from the King of Prussia written by Horace Walpole:

If you persist in perplexing your brains to find out new misfortunes, choose such as you like best; I am a king and can make you as miserable as you wish.

Rousseau was mad: neurotic, paranoid, aggressive, leaving a trail of broken friendships across Europe on his way to England. But it is Hume who is described in lunatic terms, writing "berserk letters to d'Holbach" – these have been conveniently destroyed; there is no evidence for claims about the "extraordinary violence" of their language – and exhibiting signs of "mania":

Perhaps the moral of the whole sad encounter is that while sane men cannot make madmen sane, madmen can make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau's complaint: that though Hume had carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit.

This is savage to Hume, who was loved by so many, and insanely generous to Rousseau. Do our authors forget the true cause of Rousseau's suspicions, which they carefully document? By his own account, Rousseau was terrified on the journey to Calais by Hume's muttering to himself, "Je tiens, Jean-Jacques Rousseau" and terrified again by his stare after dinner, "a frightening look that no honest man would ever have encountered." He suspected the domestic staff at a château in Normandy of being Hume's agents.

Rousseau was pursued by phantoms, not by the failure of others to conform to his demand for spiritual friendship. And Hume was rightly afraid that his reputation would be harmed by the brilliant, vindictive rhetoric of his accuser. With the appearance of this book, Hume's fear is finally justified.

A Constantly Prevented Falling

2007-07-24T20:50:00.000-05:00

My son Elliot is learning to walk. He seems oddly unmoved by the preposterous gravity of this development. This is not the mere acquisition of a skill, like drinking from a cup, but a change of substance, a form of generation or coming to be. If Heidegger was right to hold that there are kinds of being, being-pedestrian is one of them.

The parallel claim is often made in the case of speech, as the onset of reason. But to my mind, the contrast is overdrawn. Each transformation corresponds to one of the classical definitions of man: as rational animal and as featherless biped. (The shedding of the feathers is an equally miraculous event, though somewhat more disturbing.)

Walking is the paradigm of human activity, the principal object of action theory, the prime example of normativity allegedly found in the very fabric of things:

'Put one foot in front of the other' is a norm of walking […] And yet, you can try to walk, fail to put one foot in front of another, and trip […] Although these norms are constitutive, they are still norms, and not mere descriptions of the activities in question. And so there's room to ask why you should follow them: if you don't put one foot in front of the other you will not be walking and you will get nowhere […]

What Korsgaard wants is the idea of standards for walking that follow from the bare idea of what it is to walk – not just that you can try to walk and fail, but that you can try to walk, succeed, and do so badly by a canon contained in the nature of walking itself. The thought is more controversial than she suggests. If someone is not putting one foot in front of the other, he is failing to walk, not walking badly. Beckett supplies a more nearly persuasive illustration of her claim:

Watt's way of advancing due east […] was to turn his bust as far as possible toward the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible toward the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and so on, over and over again, many many times, until he reached his destination, and could sit down.

What makes this parody of action so affecting is that Watt is trying to get somewhere. His digressions would be innocent enough if he were merely taking a stroll.

Walking without a purpose: this too is not another skill, perhaps not even separate from the power of rational thought. It is an attempt to think. Or it is an attempt to silence thought, to quiet the incessant "Why?" In his delightful essay, The Walk, by which this post was inspired, Jeff Robinson quotes the following passage from Thoreau:

At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they, all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread.

Thinking while walking is contemplation. Having no end beyond itself, it is absolutely final, completing itself in pleasure like the bloom on the cheek of youth.

Experimental Philosophy…

2007-07-15T10:50:00.000-05:00

…in action.

Beethoven, Hero

2007-06-18T15:42:00.000-05:00

With Beethoven, the human element first came to the fore as the primary argument of musical art. (Ferrucio Busoni)

This claim could be set against the idealist reading of Beethoven's symphonies as expressions of the ineffable Absolute: it neglects the "human element." There is a powerful tendency to hear the heroic style as narrative, as in the liner notes to an excellent recording on period instruments:

The Fifth, that cosmic tale of tragedy leading to triumph, is the Star Wars of symphonic music. And the Third is a swashbuckling thriller which, for sheer passion, romance and gusto had to wait for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark to find its visual counterpart.

Obstacles to this take on the Eroica include the death of the hero in the second movement, and perhaps his birth in the close. But the impulse is not confined to blurbs.

The history of programmatic accounts of the heroic style is told with sympathy and verve by Scott Burnham in Beethoven Hero. Despite occasional lapses – "To consider Beethoven's music as a projection of experiential temporality presupposes a temporal actant." – it is a beautifully written book, and intricately argued.

Burnham's defence of the "vulgarly" ethical response to Beethoven's style seems at first to dismiss the idealist reading altogether. We are affected by the sense of self as hero, not by more abstract intimations:

For the same reason, our minds will drop the loftiest metaphysical trains of thought to snatch at the merest tidbit of human interest: what avails the ding an sich when we hear the latest gossip about someone we know?

But this is doubly qualified. First, by a move towards synthesis:

Beethoven's enhanced sense of drama entails a new relationship between theme and form: the form no longer serves to present prestabilized thematic material but rather becomes a necessary process in the life of a theme. […Now] the theme as subject truly appears to create its own objective world (its form), thus musically embodying one of the principal conceits of German idealism.
Beethoven's heroic style merges the Goethean enactment of becoming with the Hegelian narration of consciousness.

Second, by a latent suspicion of "heroic" listening, which Burnham finds sublimated in the language and structures of music criticism:

[Recent] tonal theories […] are controlled by the paradigm of the heroic style: the engaging pull of this style compels us to process all music in a linear fashion, to expect implications to be realized, balances to be disturbed and then restored, closure to be unarguable, endings to be culminations.

I don't know whether to believe this. But it does reflect the terms most often invoked when philosophers talk about the representational power of music: struggle, conflict, return, resolution.

What Burnham finds admirable in the programmatic approach it that is not dishonest in its employment of concepts drawn from heroic narrative. In becoming covert, the human element becomes insidious: presenting itself as the form of music, as such, it prevents us from listening in other ways.

[Does] the ability to place yourself on the map, knowing how far you have come, how far you have left to go, does this type of knowledge take precedence over an awareness of your actual surroundings, of where you in fact are?

The question leads to an invocation of film rather different from the one that was cited above:

[The] thrill of listening may be more a matter of simply being in the world of the piece […] This is comparable to the pleasure of watching a favorite movie repeatedly. It is certainly true that we might pick up new details of the unfolding of the plot with each viewing, but what really keeps us there is the world the movie creates: we like being there.

Purgatory

2007-05-13T10:03:00.000-05:00

Troy Jollimore was a contemporary of mine in graduate school. He now teaches ethics at California State University, Chico. He also writes poetry, and his recent book, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Jollimore's imagined folk hero is the namesake of an iconic Canadian landscape painter, and the object of a sonnet sequence reminiscent of John Berryman's Dream Songs: wry, conversational, whimsical, full of Yoda-esque inversions and grammatical lapses.

The miscellaneous poems ("From the Boy Scout Manual") are wonderful, too, rippled with the thrill of things as they are, sources of passion and pleasure - but not without ambivalence, like the fireflies we find

Poised, aflutter, between two
thoughts, two possibilities, each one
desiring our belief, though they cannot both be true.

Departure

2007-02-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

After two years and over a hundred posts, I have decided to take an indefinite break from Ideas of Imperfection. There are not enough hours in the day, I'm afraid – though if there were another three, I would probably want to spend them sleeping. Appropriately, the final substantive post returns to the subject of the first.

There may be occasional updates in the future. I'm sad never to have written about – or finished reading – Randall Collins' massive Sociology of Philosophies, which takes up Ernest Gellner's advice, in Words and Things:

Any sociologist of knowledge, wishing to trace the mechanism of the institutional and social influence on thought, could hardly do better than choose modern philosophy as his field of enquiry. It provides him with an area of thought where the social factors [...] operate, if not in an experimentally ideal state of isolation, at least in greater purity than they generally do in other fields.

Gellner's execution of the project was marked by a somewhat hysterical lack of charity for its object, and a disappointingly crude inventory of sociological moves, as in the following exemplary quote:

The minuteness, pedantry, lack of obvious purpose, in brief, the notorious triviality of [linguistic philosophy] can only be explained in Veblenesque terms. Conspicuous Triviality is a kind of Conspicuous Waste (of time, talent, and so forth). Not everyone can afford it [...]

Collins, I assume, is more sophisticated and more sympathetic. Perhaps I'll let you know…

Thanks to everyone who has read or commented on things that I have written here. I've enjoyed your reactions, and learned from them, more than I had any right to expect.

"On Truth"

2007-01-29T12:44:00.000-05:00

If font size is a measure of profundity, Harry Frankfurt's sequel to "On Bullshit" is even deeper and more insightful than its predecessor.

Its question is: what is wrong with bullshit, anyway, in its indifference to the truth? The proper response, according to Frankfurt, is that "truth often possesses very considerable practical utility." The obvious rejoinder is not quite ignored, but it is rather scandalously deferred to a final "chapter":

[What] can be said about the value of truth itself, as distinct from the rather commonplace suggestions I have already offered concerning the value of individual truths?

What Frankfurt goes on to provide, however, is not a reason to care about getting it right when doing so is not of practical use or is useful only to other people, or a reason to care about truth for its own sake, but a reason to be glad that there are truths to be acknowledged, even when those truths conflict with one's desires. The argument is that

our recognition and understanding of our identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves. In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control. If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are.

Even if Frankfurt is right about this, one has to admit that it's pretty lame. We might have hoped for fireworks, as at the end of the earlier book: "sincerity itself is bullshit"! But the fireworks themselves were quite indifferent to the truth. And this book, too, instantiates its theme. However much he may have wished for his topic to be interesting, and its examination fruitful, the facts were not in his control.

Sonata, what do you want of me?

2007-01-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

So asked Fontenelle, according to Rousseau. His frustration is one that I have shared. It is hard to articulate the content of abstract music in a way that could explain why it matters so much, at least to some of us, and annoying to be left with nothing to say.

This plight is addressed with brevity, and an apt historicism, in a recent book by Mark Evan Bonds. Music as Thought recounts the valorization of instrumental music, and the symphony in particular, at the turn of the 18th century. In 1790, Kant could dismiss non-vocal music as "more pleasure than culture". By 1810, Hoffman would write, in a celebrated review, that Beethoven's Fifth "open[s] up to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable."

What happened in between, according to Music as Thought, was the aesthetics of post-Kantian idealism, in Fichte, Schelling and others. If abstract music conveys the infinite or the Absolute, or a unity of subject and object that lies beyond our conceptual grasp, there is no embarrassment in our inability to capture it in words. The philosophers and critics – not the musicians – could thus invent a new way of listening and, in doing so, a new kind of music.

Even if one is sympathetic to the need for generic and thus historical context in the explanation of art, there is something puzzling in this account. If it is right, we face a problem of belief – or worse – when we aspire to listen without anachronism. It is not just that we may not accept the metaphysics of idealism; we may not even attach a sense to the putative thoughts that Hoffman and others took Beethoven's symphonies to express.

Nor does Music as Thought say very much about how to interpret specific works. In part because the philosophy is so lightly sketched, what we get is not a map of the conventions of the idealist symphony against which particular symphonies stand out in relief, but something more like a reading of various works taken together – an approach that is "generic" in the negative sense.

This is only to say that the book is incomplete: it is a provocation to further thought. One of its best ideas is about the indeterminacy of abstract music. The facts of production and reception are sufficiently messy that they may not fix upon the form of a given piece, a single generic context. In an ingenious coda, this argument is applied to the musical formalism of Eduard Hanslick. Rather than divining the essence of abstract music, we might regard him as proposing – inadvertently, perhaps – yet another way in which it can be heard. The question is not what the sonata wants of us, but what we want of it.

Wittgenstein

2007-01-15T09:51:00.000-05:00

Why do I like this ridiculous film? In part, because it is beautiful, with its sheer black landscape and stark colours. And in part for its humility: it is, by its own confession, a Martian's view of philosophy; and it is framed by three remarks of Wittgenstein, spoken as a child:

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing.

and

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

If the film's portrait of Wittgenstein's thought is a cartoon or caricature, it is not a bad one: we learn about the picture theory of the Tractatus, the reversal – with continuity – of the Investigations, the assault on privacy and the inner theatre of ideas. There are disappointing omissions, as when an effete Keynes expands to fill the boots of G. E. Moore, in Terry Eagleton's original script. But as Steven Wright remarked, you can't have everything – where would you put it?

For reasons that are hard to articulate, the many inaccuracies and infelicities of portrayal, the superficial depiction of philosophical argument, the sheer silliness and campiness of the whole enterprise – it all seems irrelevant to me. Perhaps that is because I find it hard to imagine doing a better job, however bad this one may be. Or perhaps I should follow Wittgenstein, and describe my feeling by the metaphor that, if a man could make a film about him which really was a film about him, this film would, with an explosion, destroy all the other films in the world. It's a good thing no-one has tried.

Love's Confusions

2007-01-08T13:07:00.000-05:00

At a pivotal moment in The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch's protagonist is deserted, suddenly and without explanation, by the woman he loves. He reports this experience in a sentence I have always found breathtaking, despite the cliché:

You die at heart from a withdrawal of love.

What crushes the jilted lover is the unintelligibility of love's withdrawal. How could someone's feelings change like that? By what right? It is as if we want to hold our ex to account: justify yourself.

Taken this way, the demand is one of love's confusions, since it asks for reasons where reasons are not required. No-one needs an argument for falling out of love. In pressing the demand, one protests not only the loss of a particular relationship, but the implacable nature of love itself.

The example would be pleasing to C. D. C. Reeve, whose recent book about love begins with themes that have preoccupied me here: whether it can be promised or given at will, its relationship to work, and the perplexities of loving God. He is emphatic about love's passivity: recognizing that one's happiness depends on someone else is "more central to love than the desire to confer benefit – an acceptance of our lover's power, rather than an expression of our own." And he is a relentless critic of rationalism about the source and sustenance of love.

On Reeve's loosely Freudian account, love is never fully liberated from its infantile and "alimentary" origins. This poses difficulties for those who want to integrate sex with respectful loving commitment: sexual excitement may continue to depend on the politically incorrect – fantasies of dominance and abjection, or of being treated as an object.

I am less interested in the details of this speculation – on which I refuse to comment here – than in the incipient role of philosophy as therapy. "Dear Professor Reeve: my wife and I both work away from home, and believe in sexual equality. But things are falling flat between the sheets. What can do we do to spice them up?" Though they are not exactly framed this way, answers to this question appear throughout the book: exploiting jealousy or flirtation as a stimulus to desire, experimenting with other partners, keeping gender politics out of the bedroom.

Reeve is not alone in trying on the therapeutic form, even if he does so in a specially provocative way. He has a nice blurb by Paul Woodruff, whose book about the virtue of reverence – which manifests itself in feelings of awe for what surpasses human limitation – approaches the oracular style of the self-help manual:

Reverence is not enough by itself for a completely good character. You will need to develop other capacities in order to live a morally good life. But you may find that reverence is necessary – as is courage – to the regular exercise of all other virtues.

If one has doubts about the philosopher as moral guide, one is liable to be even more suspicious when he tacitly adopts the role of relationship counselor. I am reminded of Harry Frankfurt's nice response to a question about contingency that followed a series of lectures he gave at Princeton some years ago.

Audience member: What I can't see, on your account, is how there is any assurance that my wife will continue to love me.

Frankfurt: I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid I can't help you with that.

A New Orthodoxy?

2007-01-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

The canonical form of title for a book of philosophy used to be X, Y and Z – though an occasional lack of inspiration would reduce this to X and Y. Thus we have Language, Truth and Logic, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Being and Time.

The model has served us well for decades, but there are signs of change. As we have jettisoned the 18th century's Essay, Inquiry and Treatise, so the new millennium abandons conjunction in favour of subtraction. Hilary Putnam turns his back on Reason, Truth and History, opting now for Ethics without Ontology. There is "Vagueness without Ignorance", Libertarianism without Inequality, Ethics without Principles.

Reluctantly, I am adding to the list: my book, Reasons without Rationalism will be published this month by Princeton University Press. I conceived the title some years ago, before its structure became routine, and it is too late to change it now. Perhaps I should be cheered by the development. Whatever the fate of its contents, the title of my book reflects a pattern whose time has come: X without Y.

On the Side of the Apes

2006-12-25T10:56:00.000-05:00

One of the chief culprits in the theft of "human nature", according to Garber, is Edward. O. Wilson. I wanted to like his recent book, Consilience, if only out of perversity: it was trashed by the philosophically informed reviewers.

The principal complaint is that Wilson never explains what "consilience", or the unity of knowledge, is supposed to be. Hints vary from the agreeably bland – the different branches of human learning had better be consistent with one another – to the dramatic: nothing of explanatory value is lost if we appeal to "only one class of explanation", the kind that invokes the laws of physics. As the commentators note, ontological reduction may be supported by the history of science; the redundancy of explanations framed in unreduced vocabularies is not. Wilson's pivotal step is an unexamined inference from the former to the latter.

The failure to think about the point of consilience in anything by the vaguest terms, as the synthesis of a worldview, lies behind most of the bad theorizing that occupies the rest of the book. For instance:

Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions. […] Who or what in the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.

Wilson's completion of the Enlightenment project in the philosophy of mind looks suspiciously similar to the bundle of ideas that appeared at its beginning. Even if we set aside the long history of refutations, it is hard to think of a good question to which this might be the answer.

Elsewhere, the question is made tolerably clear, at the cost of changing the subject. Thus, the alleged consilience of art and science rests on an evolutionary account of human creativity – as though the deepest problem of interpretation were the novelist's worst friend: "Where do you get your ideas?"

The answer, not surprisingly, is that "[artistic] inspiration […] rises from the artesian wells of human nature." What doesn't? The controversial claim is not that our capacities were shaped by evolution, but that they come in relatively focused packages or dispositions, tied to specific behaviours, and that they are always or mostly adaptive. Wilson insists on the more ambitious theory, of fixed "epigenetic rules", modeled on the case of incest-avoidance, and extended to the power of reason itself:

I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules.

There is only one exception:

The human mind evolved to believe in gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not under-written by genetic algorithms. […] The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.

No wonder Wilson is keen to unify everything under the banner of science: it is the sole capacity of the human mind that is not hopelessly trapped in the Pleistocene.

Who Owns "Human Nature"?

2006-12-18T10:52:00.000-05:00

The question is posed by Marjorie Garber in the second lecture of her Manifesto for Literary Studies, an attractive booklet published a few years back, which I recently discovered. Her topic is the theft of "human nature" – which "was once the intellectual property of poets, philosophers and political theorists" – by natural science. According to Garber,

[This] shift in the disciplinary custody of "human nature" has serious consequences for the value of that amorphous enterprise called "the humanities." For if the place to investigate "human nature" is not "the humanities," what is the use of the humanistic disciplines? What else gives them cultural authority? And, equally to the point, what is the use of funding, supporting, studying and teaching them?

She spends the rest of the lecture in a rather scattered attempt to recover the stolen goods.

Garber's principal weapon is the claim that "[language] is not a secondary but a primary constituent of human nature". She might intend the view that human nature is linguistically constructed – whatever that means. But her remark could also be read more modestly, as the doctrine that man is a cultural animal: it belongs to our nature to participate in varied cultural and historical formations, to which human language is essential. "[What] I have been contending", Garber writes, "is that today's humanists are asking 'human nature' questions all the time, when they talk about psychic violence, or material culture, or epistemic breaks, or the history of the book, or the counterintuitive."

The problem is that studying these variations of culture is studying human nature the way a field guide to the insects of Western Pennsylvania is about the nature of life. If it is worth using the concept at all, human nature must refer to what is common and essential to human beings: in this case, the fact of culture, and its mutability, not the particular mutations.

What puzzles me in Garber's approach is why the prestige of the humanities should be thought to rest on a pervasive engagement with human nature in the first place. It is as though she concedes to the critics of the liberal arts that the study of a local tradition or form – lyric poetry, Greek tragedy, the Victorian novel – is pointless, in itself. The only questions worth asking – and more significantly, worth funding – are what she ends by calling "the Big Questions: the Who Am I questions, the What Am I Doing Here questions".

It would be tempting for a philosopher to accept the praise implicit in this idea. But the proper response is to doubt the assumption on which it rests. Why concede to science, and philosophy, that the relative generality of their questions makes them more important? A defence of the humanities should be a defence of history and anthropology and literary studies, even when they tell us nothing about who we are.

Narrative, deferred

2006-12-04T09:04:00.000-05:00

A structural property shared by two books I have read in the past few weeks: they are anonymous narratives of someone else's life.

The story of Jacques Austerlitz – his arrival in England on a Kinder-transport from Prague, his subsequent attempts to discover where he came from and who is – all of this is told at second hand, in W. G. Sebald's haunting novel. These conversations, scattered across Europe over many years, unplanned and structureless, create a sense of insubstantial identity, as if Austerlitz is himself the ghost of his parents.

The effect is quite different in Primo Levi's The Wrench. Here the vicarious narrative traces the exploits of Tino Faussone, itinerant mechanical problem-solver. From his elaborate descriptions of physical and intellectual labour – rigging cranes, distilling acid, beating copper, building bridges, welding steel – we are invited to draw the moral that, except for miracles, "loving your work […] represents the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth."

And yet, despite this happiness, what we are given directly is never work itself, but stories about work, told at leisure, over drinks or on aimless walks. It is the prospect of narration that justifies the hardship of work:

[If] there aren't troubles, it's no fun telling about it afterward. And you know, you said so yourself: telling about things is one of the joys of life.

What reconciles the threatened contradiction – is happiness work, or telling stories about work? – is the implicit argument that story-telling itself is work, that Faussone's listener must take the ore of conversation, "grind it, hone it [and] hammer it into shape". The deferral of narrative draws attention to these tasks: it is essential to the book.

It is hard to find a similar explanation for the structure of Austerlitz, which is marked by a second property, no less distinctive than the first: its sentences and paragraphs are enormously long. The first indentation appears on page 27, the next on page 59. A sentence describing the concentration camp at Theresienstadt goes on for eight pages before coming to a stop. The movement is not headlong; it is slow, mesmeric, aimless.

What is the point of these eccentricities of prose, and of form? Merely to generate an atmosphere of dislocation? In a novel about the paralysis involved in having no story – "I am living the wrong life" – there must be more to it than that.

There is Something Outside the Text

2006-11-27T13:09:00.000-05:00

Having argued against "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant", we face a threat of critical imperialism: if our target is not the intention of the artist, why limit our interpretive interest to works of art? Why not interpret the songs of birds as music, politics as theatre, or the marks of waves upon a beach as words?

The most plausible reason, I think, is that our interest in art is an interest in intentional action, even if the intention does not extend to the meaning of the work. Art always belongs to a specific tradition or practice, with which the artist is deliberately – though sometimes perversely – engaged. The intention of the artist is relevant, primarily, to the form of the work; its meanings are fixed in turn by the conventions of the form, to which artist and audience defer. It is not up to the composer whether a passage of music is bleak or courageous; nor are the facts of motive and theme in fiction immediately responsive to the author's will.

The autonomy of artistic meaning, and its dependence on form, can be seen most readily in contrived examples, like Robert Graves' recasting of "The Solitary Reaper" in "Wordsworth by Cable":

SOLITARY HIGHLAND LASS REAPING BINDING GRAIN STOP MELANCHOLY SONG OVERFLOWS PROFOUND VALE

If you are inclined to object that the words have also changed, compare the recent setting of Phil Rizzuto's baseball commentary as free verse:

Challenge to Youth
I tell you what I would change:
That NO BALK to second base.
You know,
You can do anything to second base.
Yeah, I never did like that.
What would you change?

It is not a consequence of this account that the artist's intention is never directly relevant. Is the ending of the Shostakovich Fifth ironic, "as if someone were beating you with a stick, and saying 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing'"? That depends, in part, on whether Volkov's Testimony (in which those words are attributed to Shostakovich) is true or false.

The more pervasive effect of the generic approach is to suggest that questions of interpretation are always historical, and thus to vindicate critical interest in the artist and her context. There is no sharp distinction between the interpretation of art – a certain kind of cultural artifact – and the understanding of culture in general.

The study of criticism can therefore take two different forms: it may be the philosophy of history – not confined to artists and their work – or it may be the history of painting, or the novel, or the string quartet. There is a sense in which Socrates was right to doubt that interpretation is an art, that the rhapsodist has a single expertise. If the philosophy of criticism is meant to investigate, a priori, the principles of meaning and interpretation that apply to art, as such, it follows that there is no such thing.

Naïve Interpretation

2006-11-20T12:31:00.001-05:00

In the philosophy of criticism, the intentionalist holds "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant". Resisting for a moment the temptations of self-reference – the difficulty of saying more precisely what the intentionalist means by this – we face the immediate objection that his view is false. When I use a word or a phrase or a sentence of English, it does not mean "just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." The meaning of my utterances, and of the texts that I produce, is not entirely up to me.

According to a common diagnosis, the intentionalist fails to understand the Gricean distinctions between speaker meaning, sentence meaning and what is said. What is expressed by an utterance on a given occasion is conventional and depends on the intentions of the speaker only to a limited degree. Only of a fraction of this, in turn, is relevant to the sentences of poetry or fiction: a fictional demonstrative or quantifier-domain is tied to the intentions of the character or narrator, not the author.

It seems to follow that the interpreter can virtually ignore the historical author and what he meant, turning instead to the fixed, conventional, autonomous meaning of the words that he wrote down.

The preceding paragraphs are meant to give a relatively orthodox account of one path through familiar terrain. It is a trail that leads into a morass. Many of the questions we ask as critics are not directly concerned with the meaning of a sentence or a stanza, but with motivation, theme, mood, voice. Even if we grant the autonomy of linguistic meaning, we need to know how the answers to these further questions are fixed.

Thus we are led to place inordinate weight on the meanings of words – as in "The Intentional Fallacy", where the tradition is shoved into the dictionary. Or to extravagant forms of interpretive charity – as when the author becomes a postulate, a hypothetical agent whose actions would give as much significance to the features of the text as it is possible for them to bear. Or to a form of critical pluralism, on which there are simply games we play with texts. Or finally, to proclamations of the death of the Author, who takes the Critic along with him in a suicide pact. No wonder some have been inspired to resurrect intentionalism or to make it more sophisticated.

The point has been made here before, if not at length, that there is something peculiar about this whole debate: it treats the philosophy of criticism as part of the philosophy of language. The inclusion is made explicit in Monroe Beardsley's bracing and humorous book, The Possibility of Criticism:

What does the literary interpreter do? He tells us what a literary work means. And whatever else it is, a literary work is first of all a text, a piece of language. So what the interpreter reveals is the meaning of the text.

From the fact that we are interested in meaning and that our object is a text it may follow that we are interested in the meaning of a text, but not that we are interested in a kind of meaning specific to texts. Questions about interpretation and the intention of the artist are not confined to linguistic art: we can ask, for instance, whether the Sibelius Violin Concerto is, or is not, desolate and bleak, and what Sibelius intended it to be. Texts are just one object of interpretation, in the more expansive sense that applies to paintings and performances. It is not obvious, a priori, that the interpretations of texts will be fixed by the meanings of the words and sentences they contain.

The problem with intentionalism is therefore not that it gives a wrong account of linguistic meaning, which is not the sole or principal object of criticism; nor simply that there is room for artistic failure; but that an artist's intention will often be about the meaning of her work. It is no use explaining what it means for the Violin Concerto to be bleak by asking whether Sibelius intended it to be, since the content of that intention is precisely what we do not know. The fundamental error of the intentionalist is to think that it is easier to understand what artists mean to be doing than what they do.

Action Theory

2006-11-13T19:58:00.000-05:00

A passage from Ian McEwan's immaculate novel, Atonement:

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger close to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was the not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she new that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self – was it her soul? – which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.

The Comfort of Strangers

2006-11-06T08:13:00.000-05:00

Philosophy written in English is overwhelmingly analytic philosophy, and the techniques and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary.

This passage appears in the introduction to the book that I discussed last time, and it serves to set the tone. It's us versus them: the antiquarians against the philistines.

Why should analytic philosophers study the history of philosophy? It is alarming that, in a volume about the importance of contextual history, not a single contributor gives serious attention to the meaning of "analytic philosophy", to the development of the tradition, how its origins relate to the present composition of Anglophone philosophy departments, how the alleged hostility to historical study emerged, and why it survives.

The most frequent defence of history in philosophy is independent of the peculiarities of the "analytic" style. According to many, the study of past thinkers can help to upset received opinions, to show them as local or contingent, to demonstrate other ways of conceiving an issue or of conceiving philosophy itself, and so to raise new questions. In short: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

It would be a mistake to object that these benefits are merely instrumental, since the question is precisely about the usefulness of history to the practice of philosophy. But they may disappoint the advocate of history. They depict her project as a causal means to philosophical insight – not as partly constitutive of philosophy done well.

Can more than this be said for the history of philosophy? Maybe so. In attempting to say it, or part of it, I'll return to a question left hanging in the previous post, about the employment of anachronism in properly antiquarian accounts of past philosophers.

Consider the mildly Wittgensteinian view that philosophical puzzles sometimes arise through conceptual confusion, as when we conflate two different things, or see two when there is only one. Such confusions, as human phenomena, must have histories. It follows, then, that philosophy can be done historically, at least when certain conditions are met.

What is more, when we undertake to tell the history of confusion, it may be impossible to avoid anachronism, to refuse "criteria of description and classification not available to the agent himself". This fact is familiar in the history of science, where the story of Newton notoriously contends with his failure to distinguish invariant and relativistic mass. There is no way to translate his words without inadequacy, and no way to explain his conflation in terms he would have been willing to accept.

Something similar is true, I think, of practical reason in early modern thought. The British moralists of the eighteenth century were sufficiently muddled that we have to do for them what historians of science do for Newton. Since Wollaston and Clarke did not distinguish practical from theoretical reason, at least not with any clarity, no simple translation of their claims will work. In order to make sense of what they wrote, we have to rely on an array of "distinctions and classifications" that were, precisely, unavailable to them. It is in this context that we should place Hume's infamous refusal to speak of "reason" in ethics: not as a rejection of practical reason in the proper sense, but as an attempt at linguistic hygiene prompted by the confusions of his peers.

If this is right, the history of philosophy cannot be philosophically innocent. Whenever we are obliged to describe and disentangle the confusions of the past, we will be forced to rely on the philosophical equivalent of Einstein's theory of relativity: on theories and distinctions that our subjects knew nothing about. When philosophy is done historically – at least in one way – it answers to a form of history that can only be philosophical.

Making History

2006-10-30T08:13:00.000-05:00

"History of philosophy" is the name of an intellectual discipline and of its object. I am interested in both, but this post is about the former. Searching for ways to avoid ambiguity, I thought of using "historiography" – except that this term, too, stands for a discipline and its object: for the writing of history, and the study of such writing. Henceforth, I'll use "history" to mean the discipline whose object is the past.

What is the relationship between philosophy and its history? Or, as a recent book demands: why should analytic philosophers care about the history of philosophy? Why shouldn't they simply ignore it, as – allegedly – they tend to do?

In laying the groundwork for an answer to these questions – to which I'll return next time – several authors make a distinction between two modes in which the history of philosophy can be pursued. In what Daniel Garber nicely calls "antiquarian" history, the dead are invited to speak in their own tongue, as they did to their contemporaries. In "collegial" history, they are compelled to speak about questions that occupy us. In an earlier paper, "Does History Have a Future?", Garber gives the example of Jonathan Bennett, who insists, at he beginning of his book on Spinoza, that he is concerned "not with Spinoza's mental biography but with getting his help in discovering philosophical truth."

What puzzles me here is why Garber is willing to speak of both projects as "historical". He does not object to collegial history; he merely contrasts it with something else. On the face of it, though, Bennett's claim is barely coherent. If you want Spinoza's help in discovering the truth, his "mental biography" is something you cannot avoid. And if all you mean is that you are reading the Ethics for inspiration, not doing history at all, why labour under any constraint of fidelity to the text? Why aim for something that makes sense of most of what Spinoza wrote – but not all of it, and not in context? Why not simply present the arguments that interest you, and mention, as a matter of your own "mental biography", that they popped into your head while reading a certain book?

A different distinction is made by Richard Rorty in "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres". He contrasts "historical" with "rational" reconstruction, but sees no conflict between them: "We should do both of these things, but do them separately." Historical reconstruction is marked by obedience to a constraint devised by Quentin Skinner:

no agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.

According to Rorty:

If we want an account of Aristotle's or Locke's behaviour which obeys this constraint […] we shall have to confine ourselves to one which, at its ideal limit, tells us what they might have said in response to all the criticisms or questions which would have been aimed at them by their contemporaries.

The difficulty is that, on this reading, Skinner turns out to be a behaviourist: we can do history only by putting words in people's mouths – not thoughts in their heads. This is nominally apt, but a substantive travesty: Skinner's essay is a plea for intention in the history of ideas; and he repeatedly insists that we cannot make the past intelligible without applying to it our "own familiar criteria of classification and discrimination." His point is not to compare two legitimate activities, but to engage in a polemic against anachronism that will destroy the pretensions of "collegial history" and "rational reconstruction" once and for all.

The residual question is what to make of his proposed constraint on interpretation. It certainly does not prohibit the ascription of propositional attitudes, but, for Skinner,

it does exclude the possibility that an acceptable account of an agent's behavior could ever survive the demonstration that it was itself dependent on the use of criteria of description and classification not available to the agent himself.

For reasons I will try to explain in the following post, this seems to me too strong a condition to place even on the most rigorously antiquarian history of thought.

Buzzing Confusion

2006-10-23T19:52:00.000-05:00

Another book with a misleading title: Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.

Despite the author's ambitious promise, and despite the inclusion of some elegant experiments on infants – the well-known preference studies that demonstrate a sense of "object permanence" in three-month-olds, and a lovely task in which children are introduced to the word "whisk" in connection with a picture, and go on to apply it immediately to whisks themselves, not to further images – many of the chapters give only cursory attention to child development. In a treatment of artifact concepts, three pages deal with their early acquisition; and the theory of morality is ninety per cent evolution, ten per cent sprog.

The most striking and dramatic doctrine of the book is about infant development. According to Bloom, we are "Descartes' babies" in that we are "natural-born dualists": more or less from birth "we see the world as containing bodies and souls". Among the "basic notions" that are absent only in "psychopaths […and] severely autistic children" are the recognition that "your body will change radically as you age, but you will remain the same person" and that "when you die, your soul may live on".

This is certainly impressive, if it is true: Cartesian dualism comes to us automatically, as part of the package in which we understand our own persistence through time. But it is terribly misleading as an account of what Bloom's evidence supports. His principal observation is that infants deploy quite different strategies of explanation for the activities of intelligent creatures than they do for physical goings-on. The most one could conclude from this is that we are Davidson's babies, that we make an innate distinction between the natural and human sciences – not that we accept a dualism of substance. And in fact, this weaker view is echoed in some of Bloom's more cautious formulations, according to which we have "two ways of looking at the world: in terms of bodies and in terms of souls."

Bloom cites only one experiment on behalf of ontological rather then explanatory dualism in infants, which is due to Henry Wellman:

For instance, one tale [told to young children in the experiment] was about a boy who had a cookie and another boy who was thinking about a cookie. Even three-year-olds understand the difference between a real cookie, which can be seen and touched by another person, and an imagined cookie, which cannot be.

Read as an argument for Bloom's conclusion, this passage makes an elementary mistake: it confuses the object of a mental act, which may not be a material thing because it may be something that doesn't exist, with the mental goings-on themselves.

It is possible that Bloom has simply failed to report on a wealth of evidence for his Cartesian hypothesis. But even if it is out there, that would not make the title of this book more apt: it does not argue that we are Descartes' babies; and its theory of human nature does not mainly derive from the science of the child.

From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein

2006-10-16T09:12:00.001-05:00

Intrigued? So was I. But the title of Anthony Quinton's book turns out to be a trick. Quinton has essays on these titans of the twentieth century, but the essays are quite distinct.

My disappointment was more severe because it is so easy to find connections between them. They share, among other things, a formidable attention to language, association with a notorious Club – the Drones and the Moral Sciences, respectively – and a fondness for double-barreled names: Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Not to mention P.G.'s mid-career conversion from the logical atomism of Psmith in the City to the mature linguistic pluralism of Right Ho, Jeeves!

Seven Types of Ambiguity

2006-10-08T19:43:00.000-05:00

The first blow falls, with energetic vulgarity, on page 9:

Critics, as 'barking dogs,' […] are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like the reasons for anything else; one can reason about them; and while it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.

Thus the scheduled opponents – the advocates of Atmosphere and Pure Sound – are floored in the first round of Empson's book, published when he was twenty-four and spoiling for a fight. We spend the rest of it waiting for more formidable opposition, which never arrives.

If the project is in part to reassure us of the value of poetry – by giving reasons for beauty – it depends on the answer to a question that Empson does not address. Why does ambiguity matter? Backed into the ropes, Empson flutters away, taking his reassurance with him. Ambiguity is everywhere:

I remember a very fine [headline] that went 'ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER'. […] Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. […] The extended use of the adjective [Italian] acts as sort of syncopation, which gives energy and excitement to the rhythm, rather like the effect of putting two caesuras into a line; but of course, the main rhythm conveys: 'This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy,' and there is a single chief stress on bomb.

The roots of beauty may not be violated by the critic's scratching, but it is hard to distinguish them from the roots of a weed.

When a counter-punch is imminent, Empson anticipates, and his face disappears behind his fists.

I have continually employed a method of analysis which jumps the gap between two ways of thinking; which produces a possible set of alternative meanings with some ingenuity, and then says it is grasped in the pre-consciousness of the reader by a native effort of mind. This must seem very dubious; but then the facts about the apprehension of poetry are in any case very extraordinary.

It's a pity that his guard is so close, because the implicit objection is important: the idea that there are reasons for beauty can be as tempting and as puzzling as the idea of reasons for love. How do these reasons operate in the "properly-qualified mind" when it takes no notice of what they are, and when its pleasures are not within its own control? How far can they constitute a rational response?

If Empson does not "treat poetry as a branch of applied psychology" because "the act of knowing [a poem] is itself an act of sympathizing" and therefore not an act of science, and if his book "make[s] poetry more beautiful, without [our] ever having to remember the novelties, or endeavour to apply them", what kind of reasons does it provide?

There is no need to apologize for all those "niggling pages": the outcome of the match is not in doubt. But after seven rounds, the sceptic is left standing. Empson wins on points.

The Rationality of Despair

2006-10-01T18:17:00.000-05:00

Philosophers rarely reflect upon the plight of the fan. Committed to a team in ways that are largely involuntary, one is compelled to ride its fortunes as a wave, cresting occasionally – one hopes – but often dashed on the rocks of failure and defeat. As I write these words, the Pittsburgh Pirates' record stands at 67-95, and their season is at an end.

These thoughts were prompted by an engaging essay that appeared quite recently – in fact, two years ago, now – in the Journal of Philosophy: "The Irrationality of Unhappiness and the Paradox of Despair".

Its central argument is disarmingly simple. Almost everyone agrees that some of what we take to matter in itself is irrelevant to our own happiness. We must distinguish an idle wish, whose frustration does not harm me at all, from the good things to which I am committed in such a way as to be made happy by their realization and unhappy by the absence of it. I'd love to be a major league pitcher, but it would be wrong to mourn the fact that I am not.

Sarah Buss provides a simple criterion: something is an object of commitment, and therefore relevant to one's happiness, only if one adopts it as an end; and a condition of being an end is being taken as a practicable object of pursuit.

This is what generates the "paradox of despair". For if despair is unhappiness about the impossibility of achieving some good, the good must be an object of commitment – or else irrelevant to one's happiness – and so it must be something one thinks one could achieve. At the very least, one must hope for its attainment, and in hoping believe that it is possible. It follows that despair is epistemically irrational: it depends on having contradictory beliefs.

The "irrationality of unhappiness" turns on the further claim that all unhappiness is despair. For how could one be unhappy about the frustration of an end one thinks one could achieve? Maybe you are unhappy that it hasn't been achieved yet, or that you aren't getting there faster. But are those things possible? If not, your unhappiness is despair. If so, and if this is really an end that you adopt, why not simply achieve it, or get there faster? After all, you've admitted that you can. Perhaps you will reply that, although it would be possible to achieve the end more rapidly, doing so would conflict with other ends. But then the object of your unhappiness ought to be the fact that it is impossible to achieve the conflicting ends together, all at once. And again, your unhappiness is despair.

It follows that unhappiness is not only unfortunate but irrational – though it is crucial to stress that the irrationality is epistemic, and that one might have compelling practical reason to be unhappy, even if one must thereby live in contradiction.

There is something moving about these arguments, I find, even if they do not work: they represent in a pure form the philosophical aspiration to overcome the difficulties of being alive by the sheer exercise of theoretical intellect – an aspiration also found in some arguments that it is irrational for us to be immoral.

Against the second argument: it is a fact of life that we fail to pursue some ends that we take to be both possible and essential to our happiness. This may be practically irrational – a form of akrasia – but it makes room for unhappiness without despair.

Against the first argument: it is a fact of life that many of us are made unhappy by the dismal record of our favourite teams, even though we do not adopt their improvement as an end, and may regard it as impossible. I do nothing, and would sacrifice little, to make the Pirates win; nor can I see how to achieve that goal. When I buy tickets, it is not in order that the money should improve the team – though I'd rather it do that than line the pockets of the avaricious and incompetent upper management – it's in order to watch them play, which I would just as soon do for free. Still, I regard myself as a typical fan: it depresses me to think about my team's pathetic performance.

It may be irrational to commit oneself to something that is, in this way, out of one's control – an indictment that would apply to millions – but it does not involve an incoherence of belief. The feelings of the hopeless fan are an all-too-common illustration of the epistemic rationality of despair.

A Boy's Life

2006-09-24T09:52:00.000-05:00

I remember the film quite differently. In my recollection, the doctors are villains bent on vivisection, and Elliott is betrayed by the scientist who purports to comfort him. In fact, although the hunters are framed by the conventions of the horror flick – darkness, muffled voices, torchlight, silhouettes – they simply try to find E. T., place him under quarantine for everyone's safety, and prevent his premature death. The avuncular scientist is quite sincere:

I've been wishing for this since I was ten years old. I don't want him to die. [His] being here is a miracle, Elliott. It's a miracle – and you did the best that anybody could do.

Another aspect that I did not recall: the absent father, poignantly but implausibly invoked by Elliott – "Dad would believe me!" – and now in Mexico with "Sally". ("Where's Mexico?" asks Gertie; he might as well be in outer space.)

There are various threads from the theme of abandonment winding through the film. It is tempting to look for models of fatherhood, as in the teasing scene in which Elliott weighs E. T. ("35 pounds – you're so fat!"), and, less successfully, measures his height (what to do with that retractable neck?). When she meets him, Gertie proclaims, canonically, "He's a boy!"

But E. T. doesn't need a father, and he doesn't take to Elliott's lessons in goldfish, Pez and peanuts. (It's Gertie who directs his real education, through the auspices of Speak & Spell: he is principally an autodidact.)

Perhaps, then, it's the other way around: E. T. as substitute father for Elliott? But, as a father figure, E. T. tends towards delinquency. He stays home drinking beer, slumped in front of the TV, and his psychic influence causes Elliott to misbehave.

If the theme culminates in anything – I must painfully admit – it is with the redundancy of fathers. No-one needs them: not E. T., not Elliott or his siblings, not even Mary, their mother, who seems only mildly grieved by her husband's flight. The scientist, Keys, emphatically does not become a substitute parent; his only memorable speech identifies him as a child.

The film ends with an assurance of self-sufficiency. "I'll be right here," E. T. insists, glowing finger directed at Elliott's brow – meaning that he won't be here, and he doesn't have to be. The father is dispensed with, or consumed. It doesn't matter if he never comes back.

How to Read a Book

2006-09-17T12:53:00.000-05:00

When I first read philosophy, as a teenager, I didn't know what it was. I did not know, for instance, that you could question what a great philosopher said, or that you should only believe it if the arguments worked. To be honest, I didn't know that these books contained arguments. My reaction to Russell on Our Knowledge of the External World was not scepticism, but shock that, despite all appearances, this is how it must be: I was constructing my whole system of the world from echoes and two-dimensional discs of colour. A miracle!

There are other ways to read philosophy: as poetry; as fiction.

[No] novelist has created a more dashing hero than the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic extrications – the soul's escape from the body, for instance, or the will's from cause. […] Novelist and philosopher are both obsessed with language, and make themselves up out of concepts. Both, in a way, create worlds. […] But the worlds of the novelist, I hear you say, do not exist. Indeed. As for that, they exist more often than the philosophers'. Then, too – how seldom does it seem to matter. Who honestly cares? They are divine games.

This extraordinary passage was written by William H. Gass, in an essay called "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction". Unlike him, I do care that philosophy is not a game, any more than it consists in lessons from the Oracle. The more interesting question runs the other way: how far is the novel a form of philosophy?

For Gass, the answer is: not, for the most part, in proposing a metaphysics, but in presenting a world of which some metaphysics holds. The business of the novelist is creation not depiction; and the business of the critic – at least, the properly philosophical critic – is to lay bare the principles of the created world.

The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? The ontological significance of the subordinate clause, […] or new words, or inversion – all passed over. […] The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized.

This theory has a certain purity; but it is a recipe for misprision, since it matters to the metaphysics of some novels that they are ways of understanding this world. In order to read a book, you need to know what kind of book it is – as I learned from my experience with Russell. (This point is developed with both insight and generality in Kendall Walton's "Categories of Art".) It would be a mistake to read Jane Austen as science fiction – which is, in effect, what Gass would have us do.

It is, correspondingly, no mistake to be baffled by a novel, like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, that defies generic thought. The uncanny passivity of the characters: is it something we must simply grant – like the native English of beings from outer space? Or is it a picture of ourselves? For Gass, only the first response is warranted, and the friction of the book is planed away.

Even to focus on the characters is confused, on his account: it is the activity of the sentimentalist, someone who believes in them as people she has met, who forgets that "novels [are] made of words". Or rather, she resists this recognition, in distress:

It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years, the fears…from sponge.

The parody has a point: that even at their best, the "people [of fiction] have less spontaneity, are less intricate, less free, less full" than anyone's parents, or children, or friends. But the same is true of the worlds in which they live. Are we more justified in speculating on the form of cause and the elementary particles of Beckett's "Ping" than on the reasons for Cordelia's silence, Iago's treachery, or Hamlet's delay?

An Unheard Melody

2006-09-10T12:04:00.000-05:00

The objection was made by T. S. Eliot:

This line ["Beauty is truth, truth beauty"] strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue.

I used to agree with this, but I recently changed my mind. This happened in the course of reading Cleanth Brooks on "Keats' Sylvan Historian" – though not because I was persuaded by his take on the disputed lines, as a dramatic interjection by the urn not to be attributed to Keats. The poet who wrote these words was surely concerned with their topic on his own behalf, writing, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth."

The question raised by Eliot is a version of Richards' "problem of belief", which has been mentioned here before. What is fascinating about the present example is that the object of putative belief is a doctrine about the aesthetic significance of belief. In the presence of self-reference, paradox should come as no surprise.

Consider the principle that a poem is harmed, as a poem, by philosophical error. This would be the premise of Eliot's objection to Keats. If the premise is false, the objection is mis-placed. But if the premise is true, the objection fails again. For it is plausible that the doctrine expressed at the end of the poem is precisely the one that is being discussed, that what is beautiful must be true. The poem ends with a mistake only if this principle is false. But if the principle is false, it doesn't matter that the poem ends with a mistake.

Eliot's objection can therefore be ignored. What cannot be ignored is the sheer inelegance with which the doctrine of truth and beauty is framed. Right or wrong, it is ineptly said in Keats' bald and clunking syllables. I continue to believe, with Eliot, that the line is a serious blemish on an otherwise beautiful poem – but for reasons that have nothing to do with the problem of belief.

Out of Context

2006-09-04T09:56:00.000-05:00

In the latest Critical Inquiry, there is an essay by Marjorie Garber, "Loaded Words". Having enjoyed some of her previous writing, I read it with interest – and only mild dismay. Garber's topic is epistemology, and her initial treatment is facile to the point of incoherence. As well as the standard flirtation with relativism, on utterly misleading grounds – "Facts can change. What was once regarded as fact can be disregarded or discarded." – there is the following passage from the opening page:

How can one distinguish between knowledge and belief? You could say that one is "truth" and one is "opinion," but that seems an unreliable gauge. President Bush "knows" that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He has good "intelligence" on this matter. It is for him a matter of firm conviction, of belief.

A prize will be awarded to anyone who can explain the relevance of the last three sentences to the question posed in the first and the proposal considered in the second.

More promising is Garber's assertion, a few pages later on, of contextualism about knowledge attributions:

Knowledge and belief are good (or bad) examples of what linguists call shifters: words like you and I, here and there, that change their meanings depending on the location and nature of the speaker.

In a paper in which "knowledge" and "belief" receive scare-quotes at least half the time, one would have welcomed the use of quotation marks where they are in fact required. And it wouldn't hurt to cite some of the extensive philosophical literature on the topic. But it's an interesting view.

Its connection with the rest of the argument is unclear. Garber's strongest points emerge in her expressions of frustration with the rhetoric in which knowledge is now clothed: "knowledge worker"; "the knowledge industry" – to which I add the most hated phrase, "production of knowledge". In anxious moments, I ask myself: how much knowledge have I produced this year? Could I be producing more? Is it possible to produce too much? Will it all fit in my office, piled up and shoveled like – well, you know what it's like.

What Garber is protesting is the hypostasis of knowledge, and the "banking model" of education. Her solution is to re-discover knowing as a process, "active, transitive and transitory". I respect the impulse, and even endorse it, but not the formulation. In Aristotelian terms, knowing is not kinetic: it is not a process of becoming, but a state complete in every instant. The right conclusion for her to draw is therefore not that we should re-conceive knowledge, but that we should spend less time worrying about its production, and more time thinking, learning and reasoning well.

Logophilia

2006-08-28T12:06:00.000-05:00

My favourite book was written in 1852 by a medical doctor, influenced by Bentham but far surpassing him in philosophical genius. He was a founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and is known principally for two books, Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology – and the one that I adore. The first was commissioned by the Earl of Bridgewater to propound "the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation", which might serve as a motto for the second.

The book is Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, the most prodigious work of systematic metaphysics that England has produced. We owe to his son, John Roget, the glorious expansion of the index. But it was Peter Mark who conceived the sublime arrangement of opposites – Mixture and Simplicity, Life and Death, Necessity and Will – displayed in parallel columns like Kant's "antinomies".

The comparison is apt. Like Kant and Wittgenstein, Roget turned metaphysics against itself. His work is not only a fearsome cannon in the war against cliché, but a fortress against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. He must have been consulting his own book when he wrote this splendiferous passage from its introduction:

Truisms pass current, and wear the semblance of profound wisdom, when dressed up in the tinsel garb of antithetical phrases, or set off by an imposing pomp of paradox. By a confused jargon of involved and mystical sentences, the imagination is easily inveigled into a transcendental region of clouds, and the understanding beguiled into the belief that it is acquiring knowledge and approaching truth. A misapplied or misapprehended term is sufficient to give rise to fierce and interminable disputes; a misnomer has turned the tide of popular opinion; a verbal sophism has decided a party question; an artful watchword, thrown among combustible materials, has kindled the flame of deadly warfare, and changed the destiny of an empire.

Meta and Meta*

2006-08-21T13:23:00.000-05:00

A fun game to play while reading is verbal tics, in which one attempts to identify and list the idiosyncrasies of the author's style. Is he in love with the first person? Unable to resist the parenthetic remark? Wedded to the footnote? Or obsessed with rhetorical questions?

Sometimes, the task is embarrassingly easy, and one has to wonder whether the repetition is deliberate. A recent example of this is can be found in Rebecca Goldstein's memorable book on Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness. In a scathing review in the LRB, Solomon Feferman points to Goldstein's misuse of "metamathematics" to mean philosophy of mathematics (not the mathematics of formal systems), as part of a more general linguistic quirk. Among the best examples of its expression are these:

metaquestion, metaconviction, metaimplications, metaresult, metalight, metaview,

and, best of all,

metaovertones.

Such extremes of self-parody cannot be accidental. Nor can Goldstein's cute description of the incompleteness theorems as "prolix" – speaking to questions about logic, arithmetic, philosophy, and the mind – and later as "loquacious", "verbose", and even "gabby".

I hesitate to say what is going on in Goldstein's book, but presumably part of it is a relentless informality – which blurs into carelessness, and thus infuriates Feferman – intended to bring out, by contrast, the distinctive reticence of Gödel himself. The over-excited use of "meta" is precisely "gabby", and (perhaps?) deliberately so. None of this would excuse the errors of fact that Feferman describes. But it makes one sympathetic to the otherwise distracting tics of Goldstein's prose.

On the Nature of Things

2006-08-14T09:54:00.000-05:00

In the early chapters of his recent book, Paul Boghossian considers a generalized relativism about facts that he attributes, with some hesitation, to Richard Rorty. The idea is to make sense of Rorty's remarks about the equal validity of conflicting worldviews – like those of Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine – by interpreting their claims as follows:

According to such-and-such theory, which we accept: p.

Rorty is therefore saved from self-contradiction: when he insists that two conflicting views are equally valid, he is not committed to the truth of both p and not-p.

According to Boghossian, however, a problem remains. We cannot make sense of sentences like the one that appears above without conceding their absolute truth, or initiating a vicious regress on which the facts take an infinitary form:

According to such-and-such theory, which we accept, there is a theory we accept, and according to this latter theory, there is a theory we accept…according to which: p.

Such facts would correspond to "propositions that we could neither express nor understand".

It is true that Rorty interpretation is "tricky" – as Boghossian complains in a footnote – but this is not the only way to conceive his view. We are led to the relativistic theory if we take "conflicting" to mean "contradictory", so that conflicting theories cannot both be true. There is an alternative pragmatist reading, which attends to the rhetoric of passages like this:

Given that it pays to talk about mountains, as it certainly does, one of the obvious truths about mountains is that they were here before we talked about them. If you do not believe that, you probably do not know how to play the language games that employ the word "mountain." But the reality of those language games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as it is in Itself, apart from the way in which it is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it.

Here, and elsewhere, the picture seems to be one in which propositions about mountains are simply true, as we can see when we use them to think about the world. The question is whether it pays to do so. In the background is a theory of intentionality on which employing a concept is a matter not only of inferential habits but habits of action. The kind of conflict that reality does not resolve is not between p and not-p, but between families of propositions that do not contradict one another, but whose concepts are incompatible in practice: one cannot act on both conceptual schemes at once.

This approach is tempting for pejoratives: a natural response to propositions about "Krauts" is not to contradict them, but to refuse the concept, even though one knows what it would it be to use it. (Hence the scare-quotes in the previous sentence.) This analogy is invoked by Rorty, when he refers to "true" and "justified" as "compliments we pay to propositions".

On this form of conceptual pragmatism, we dispense with the relativity that Boghossian finds troubling. But we still get to say that no language game is favoured by "Reality as it is in Itself": the choice of concepts is not a matter of correspondence, but of whether it pays to think of mountains or molecules, or both, of justification-as-science or justification-as-scripture. In this limited sense, "there is no description-independent way the world is".

In the end, I don't think any of this can be sustained. But its confusions are at least a bit more subtle than those of the relativist. One puzzle emerges when we try to think through a case of conflict, in which we respond to practical inconsistency by rejecting another's concepts altogether. If we do not understand those concepts, the disagreement makes no sense. But if the concepts are ones that we can grasp, it is unclear what we can say to ourselves in setting them aside. As pragmatists, we are not permitted to deny the claims of our interlocutor, since they are on a par with our own and do not contradict them. What we have to say is something like, "That's quite true – but it's not how we think about these things." The problem is that one can't acknowledge the truth of a proposition without being compelled to think it. Once we are inside the alien perspective, there is no rational way to give it up – short of concluding that its claims are not correct.

I doubt that this perplexity amounts to a refutation, or that the interpretation I have sketched is exactly right. But in its attention to the pragmatist theme, it seems to me more promising than the forms of relativism – global and epistemic – that Boghossian's book confronts.

Petros: a Dialogue

2006-08-04T19:10:00.000-05:00

[The speaker is Aristotle, who repeats to his companion a conversation he heard from Plato, and had already once narrated to Theophrastus.]

Ah, yes, I do know something about the questions you've asked. A month ago, I was talking to a student of mine, who said that he had heard from Acastos about a report by Antisthenes of a conversation in which Xenophon mentioned vaguely that someone had heard of a meeting once between Socrates and Petros at which I was present.

Your informant must have been vague indeed, I replied, if you imagine that the event was recent or that I could have been there. Nor did I hear of it from Socrates himself, but from Plato, many years ago; and he remembered it only in part. Unlike him, I am blessed with perfect recall, so it is easy to repeat the dialogue exactly as he told it to me…

PETROS: Socrates! You don't know me, but perhaps I can be of use. Since coming to Athens from New York City, I've been following the news of your trial. I have prepared what I think is a compelling defence. You should appeal to the right of free speech, which lies at the heart of Athenian democracy. How can the assembly turn their backs on this sustaining principle, and so convict you of corrupting the youth?

SOCRATES: I know who you are, Petros, and if you know who I am, you must know that I would never consider such a defence. I am no friend of democracy and the liberties it protects. Plato, here, rightly depicts me as deriding the license of the city, in his beautiful Republic.

P: I'm well aware of that. In fact I've written a book about it, and about your shameful association with Critias and Charmides, who plotted the dictatorship of the Thirty only five years ago. Why did you teach those monsters? Why did you tolerate them? Why did you never try to intervene?

S: I think, perhaps, you don't accept that I'm sincere! I believe that it's worse for one to do injustice than to suffer it. Critias and Charmides were more deeply harmed by those events than were the ones they killed. In teaching them, I tried to save their souls.

P: I shouldn't have asked. I knew you'd respond with a paradox, some stratospheric nonsense designed to baffle me. But it's irrelevant, in any case. I won't have you convicted for your unorthodox views, or executed through guilt by association. I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

S (laughing): To the death, eh? Yours or mine? No matter. I am interested in your ideas about free speech. Perhaps you would be willing to answer a question or two about them?

P: I suppose so, if that would persuade you to accept my defence.

S: We'll see. Presumably, the speech that should be free is the sort of thing that plays a role in politics, in the assembly, and so on?

P: That's right.

S: And it must be sort of speech that can alter a vote or turn a jury?

P: Sometimes, yes, if the rhetoric is good, and the argument persuasive.

S: Well said! If speech were impotent, why struggle to defend its freedom? But then you agree that speech could deceive the public, rouse an army – or inspire a dictator?

P (cautiously): It could.

S: Ah, but now I become confused. Why do you call the charge against me "guilt by association"? You know that I was the teacher of Critias and Charmides?

P: Yes.

S: And I taught them to despise democracy.

P: That's true; it is part of what my book was about.

S: And they became tyrants: they overthrew the democracy of Athens, participating in a brutal oligarchy.

P: Yes.

S: Then how can you be sure that my words had no effect, and not the most violent? Would you say of a man who brings his children up as thieves that this is "guilt by association", and nothing more?

P (reluctantly): No, Socrates, I would not.

S: Then how can you say it of me? You find it ironic that I stayed in Athens, depending for my freedom to do philosophy on the democracy that I reject. It is more ironic that you are able to defend free speech only by ignoring the power that makes it worth defending. If you were ever to acknowledge that my words could have effects, you would see that your view is indefensible. By your lights, my conversations were the political equivalent of Nazi propaganda, and the "Socratified" aristocrats, the Hitler youth. You frame the trial as a test for my political principles; my influence – or even its possibility – is a sterner test for yours…

At this point, Plato recounts, Petros rolled his eyes in disgust and walked away, muttering that, while Socrates had the freedom to speak, he had the freedom not to listen.

In a final irony, Socrates did employ the freedom-of-speech defence – but was convicted anyway. The prosecutor showed that he was guilty of impiety, on the basis of a dialogue that Plato had written down. At the trial, Socrates denied that he had ever said the things attributed to him, and Plato confessed to having made them up. But he was not believed. Such is the power of words.

Brief Hiatus...

2006-07-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

...caused by the birth of my adorable son, Elliot, on July 24th; normal service will resume when I recover from paternal post-partum euphoria. (I'm working on a post for next week.)

Meanwhile, a book recommendation for the sleep-deprived: Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov. Funny, pithy, suspenseful, with an average chapter length of three pages, it's perfect for the short attention span.

Great Books (VI): Woolf

2006-07-24T14:09:00.000-05:00

The contrast with Austen could not be more severe: here is London, agitated, sonorous, euphoric, at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway; here is Clarissa, with her "narrow, pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's"; "button-faced Miss Pym, who hands were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers."

In "Modern Fiction", Woolf protests against the novels of Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy:

If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only to the desert, the better for its soul.

If there is a paradox here – since Woolf, unlike Austen, is concerned with objects, with bodies, with the appearance of material things – it is resolved by her conception of experience, which echoes Moore's remark in "The Refutation of Idealism":

And, in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent – we look through it and see nothing but the blue.

For Woolf, the envelope of consciousness is "semi-transparent", "a luminous halo": to capture the contents of the mind is to capture its objects in the external world. (No wonder Denby is less excited by Woolf than by Austen: he is a moralist, not a metaphysician.)

The evidence for Moore's influence on Woolf is, as far I know, merely circumstantial: his work was an intellectual prop for her confederates in Bloomsbury. But it is tempting to speculate.

While everyone knows that Mr. Ramsay is a portrait of Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, he is not a historian of thought or a moral philosopher, as Stephen was.

When [Lily Briscoe] 'thought of his work' she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. 'Subject and object and the nature of reality', Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant, 'Think of a kitchen table then', he told her, 'when you're not there'.

The example of a table existing in space is used by Moore in the "Refutation"; and the implicit problem, about idealism and sense-data, was his. It is imagined, on a different scale, in the ecstatic language of time passing, as the Ramsays' house sits abandoned for a decade.

Not only was the furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say 'This is he' or 'This is she.'

In Mrs. Dalloway, the privacy of consciousness – a Moorean theme – appears in the windows and doors that open into separate rooms, and in the particulate selves that pass through one another like waves on the streets of London. Only Septimus makes a momentary breach:

[Lucrezia] held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its claws upon the bough.

But there is another force in these pages, in the web that connects the characters, and in Woolf's inscrutable pronouns: her monadology, the same world contained within each one.

The literal rooms of her most wonderful book resound with these notes of defiance, and with a picture of the soul like nothing to be found in Moore: a kind of historical materialism, of minds furnished with the property one's income can afford. The most mundane of material needs – a room of one's own, five hundred pounds a year – are priced in the currency of thought, and invested with reverence.

Great Books (V): Austen

2006-07-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

My indifference to the novels of Jane Austen has been a source of suspicion to friends, and of mild anxiety to myself. Am I still the fifteen-year-old who made fun of Mr. Knightley's entrance at the tops of the stairs, "slick, black and creamy [sic]" like a pint of Guinness? I hope not.

Still, I can't share Denby's enthusiasm, even as I am persuaded of Austen's gifts as a moralist and social critic. My quandary is made a theme in her first published novel:

"I think you will like him," said Elinor, "when you know more of him."

"Like him!" replied her mother, with a smile. "I can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love"

"You may esteem him."

"I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem and love."

Like Elinor, "I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of [Austen] – that I greatly esteem [her], that I like [her]" – but I cannot go further: I do not love Jane Austen.

There is no question of justifying this disdain, but I can perhaps explain it. What I miss in Austen's prose – at least in Sense and Sensibility, which I read for the first time last month – is any sense of physical reality. Its absence is almost eerie. Thus, none of her protagonists have faces: Elinor and Marianne are first described, programmatically, in Chapter 10. And apart from functional descriptions of cottages and estates, the material environment is barely there. Like Edward, Austen will not praise a landscape "on picturesque principles": their common sense prefers a straight to a crooked tree, but nothing more.

This virtual absence of colour, space and movement is deliberate, I think: it is part of an experiment in writing only about character and society. But it, too, becomes a theme. Marianne walks, runs, falls, is carried, swoons, cries, sweats, groans, shakes: she is the only one who has a body, and it almost kills her. Only when her physical beauty is dulled by grief and illness is she permitted to wed.

Readers have been willing to accept, on Elinor's muted testimony, that she feels as strongly as her sister – and to criticize Marianne for doubting her. According to Ryle, the novel asks, "must Head and Heart be antagonists?" And it answers – correctly, in Ryle's view – that they must not:

Marianne and Elinor are alike in that their feelings are deep and genuine. The difference is that Marianne lets her joy, anxiety or grief so overwhelm her that she behaves like a person crazed. Elinor keeps her head. (Gilbert Ryle, "Jane Austen and the Moralists")

If Elinor loves Edward, however, it is without the somatic vigour of Marianne: she makes no sharp distinction between love and esteem. As the novel ends, her sister's "lively friendship" for Colonel Brandon fades into devotion. Can we suppose that Elinor has ever felt more than this for Mr. Ferrars?

Neither of them controls her passions; it is just that Elinor's are less intense. Think of her lenience to Willoughby in the scene of his thoroughly incredible confession.

She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction – that open, affectionate and lively manner which it was no merit to possess; and by that still ardent love for Marianne, which it was not even innocent to indulge. But she felt that it was so, long, long before she could feel his influence less.

When Elinor's emotions are violent – as they are on a few occasions – their subsidence is alarmingly prompt. "Much as she had suffered from her first conversation with Lucy on the subject [of her engagement to Edward], she soon felt an earnest wish of renewing it." And when Edward finally proposes, she is so "overcome by her own felicity" that "it require[s] several hours to give sedateness to her spirits". Marianne would be exalted for weeks.

Austen tempts us all to read against the grain – as in Denby's perverse apology for Mrs. Bennet. Is it going too far to say that Sense and Sensibility condemns, not Marianne, but the institutions that make impossible or imprudent any form of love that is more than mutual esteem?

Great Books (IV): Interlude

2006-07-10T14:08:00.001-05:00

A little mystery: why is Denby's book so much fun to read? He is perceptive about the classics he encounters – but not tremendously so; the insights are modest. And his writing is fluent without pyrotechnics. Yet, despite its shortcomings – which were catalogued by Helen Vendler in The New Republic (add that to the list of mean reviews) – the book is consistently entertaining.

Part of the reason is contained in a blurb by Joyce Carol Oates:

The tone of prose [of Denby's book] is one of unqualified enthusiasm: energy, vigor, intellectual curiosity and what might be called an ecstasy of imaginative journalism.

Perhaps because of his background as a reviewer, Denby is not afraid to praise – as when he observes that Virgil's account of the fall of Troy is "one of the greatest things I have ever read". Happily, he can joke about this:

Reading the Aeneid again after thirty years, and knowing now what I couldn't have known earlier – how difficult it is to write anything well, even a thousand-word movie review, a short essay, a decent letter – I was amazed by Virgil's skill. What a surprise! Journalist discovers that the most famous poet of classical Rome can write!

Like beauty, however, pleasure can be confusing, and Denby's receptivity becomes a vice. For all the wit he levels against the critics of the canon, he has no theory to offer in its support:

Pleasure was the key, the only way of approaching the arts that wasn't false. You went from one pleasure to the next, one work to the next, and you made a chain of delight. […] Did the requirement that all students listen to a little Mozart – or a little Armstrong, Ellington, and Charlie Parker – set up a hierarchy of values? Of course it did. It was a statement that many people in the past with intellectual equipment and social opportunities similar to [yours] had received extraordinarily intense pleasure from this music. You might not feel it yourself – but at least give it a chance. Give pleasure a chance. That was all such courses really said.

This evasion was picked up by Frank Kermode in his review of Denby, and, arguably, in his most recent book. That it is an evasion is something I have argued before. In this context, the problem is that an appeal to pleasure does nothing to justify these works over others you might more readily enjoy.

The insufficiency of pleasure to encompass what seems valuable in art is one source of the Romantic attachment to poetry as knowledge – as, perhaps, in knowledge of how to feel. This idea is developed by Raymond Geuss – but then is briskly dismissed:

To say that some determinate, coherent (or, for that matter, incoherent) 'feeling' or even range of feelings is fitting as a response to this poem is like saying that there is one proper emotional response to human life in the twentieth century.

Geuss himself is not disturbed by this, or by the failure of the Romantic view:

If, however, there is nothing inherently wrong with pleasure, and certainly nothing wrong with feeling 'what I want to feel,' there would be nothing inherently wrong with an art that was (merely) entertaining, and no one would need to claim that poetry is knowledge in order to defend it.

But the problem was never that pleasure is bad – the sub-Platonic objection – but that it may be at war with taste: Geuss is shoved into the same disabling position that Denby was abandoned in, above.

None of this is meant as a defence of the Romantic conception, which seems in its own way distorting. But the incoherence of Denby's enthusiasm is a symptom of the fact that suspicion of pleasure in art, far from being joyless or puritanical, is a condition of explaining why it should be enjoyed.

Great Books (III): Dante

2006-07-03T14:06:00.000-05:00

The most interesting moment in Michael Tanner's influential essay, "Sentimentality", occurs at the very end:

I am inclined to think that nothing can secure us against sentimentality to anything like the degree we need. Most of our basic attitudes and feelings are sentimental, on the analyses I have adumbrated of the concept. For my answer to the question whether sentimentality is a historical phenomenon is that it is, to this extent: enormous numbers of our feelings and attitudes towards the most basic issues are based on some more-or-less traditional Christian outlook. But we are no longer living in a Christian society, in any serious sense, and most of us are not Christians. Our general view of the world is not at all like Christ's. And yet we depend for much of our emotional and spiritual succour on art and teaching that not only presupposes the truth of Christianity, but actively propagates it. Many an atheist thinks that the B minor Mass is one of the greatest works of art; that is what I feel. But I am not at all clear that I should. The brevity with which I have mentioned this matter means not that it is an after-thought, or tangential to the subject-matter of the paper, but that I am too disconcerted by it to know what to say.

Tanner's "analyses" are in fact quite hard to make out. Certainly, he regards a feeling as sentimental only if it is inappropriate or unwarranted. There is also a tentative connection with pleasure; for when painful emotions like grief are sentimental, as they can be, they are also in some way consoling. But it is hard to be more specific. Thus:

Sentimentality […] is the name of several kinds of disease of the feelings, in which the elements of feeling 'in the void', of unfocused emotion, and of being prepared for huge bouts of emotional response to virtually random, or alternatively, direly predictable stimuli, are all closely connected.

As well from being (perhaps forgivably) vague, however, this definition seems to miss the valence of sentimentality. As it stands, the account would apply to many cases of depression. But depression is rarely sentimental, even when it is inflected with the pleasures of self-pity, because – roughly speaking – its distortions do not turn on seeing the world as sweet or gentle or tender in ways that it is not. A hard emotion like anger can be sentimental, but only when it is, say, righteous indignation at an offence that the tough-hearted would merely expect.

The atheist's reaction to religious art is sometimes sentimental in this sense, as when Denby reads the Torah in Contemporary Civilization:

I looked around me and struggled to take in what was happening. Not just Jews and Christians but also Muslims, who recognized the Old Testament prophets as their ancestors, had long contended with this ornery, ungovernable text. Suddenly, I was extraordinarily happy. […] We were in this place, at this moment, with one another. We were also part of an endless chain of such discussions, a link of immortality. The core curriculum was a secular manifestation, but it had become, this day, part of that eternal chain.

The sentimentality of these remarks lies in exploiting the Biblical resonance of immortality and eternity outside of the context in which it makes sense.

But this is not inevitable. It would be wrong to say that an atheist who is deeply moved by Dante's Inferno is being sentimental. Whatever is disproportionate in his feelings, it does not turn on seeing the world as more forgiving than it is.

No barrel, even though it's lost a hoop
or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I
saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart:
his bowels hung between his legs, one saw
his vitals and the miserable sack
that makes of what we swallow excrement.

Why does Tanner over-estimate the scope of sentimentality? In part, I think, because he is interested in something at once more narrow and more general: the emotional impact of art that rests on false beliefs. The problem is hard to formulate. In reading fiction we routinely work with propositions that we know are not the case, ways of seeing things we do not share; we enter into them as make-believe. But Tanner is right to think that there are limits here. For Denby, the gate of hell is where the limit is passed: "the violence [of the Inferno] was too exact, too thorough; one had to believe in it or reject the poem altogether."

The question is not confined to religious art, where reading as fiction can feel irreverent. It is about the extent to which appreciation makes demands upon belief.

Great Books (II): Homer, Shakespeare

2006-06-26T14:05:00.000-05:00

One of the themes of Great Books is pedagogy, which Denby struggles to describe, and – with Pride and Prejudice – to undertake. Thus, his chapter on the Odyssey begins with a teacher's rhetorical challenge:

You are all Telemachus, aren't you?

Teaching is a dirty business: how far can one wade into the swamp of compromise, before it is too late to get back? Denby's starting point reminds me of a talk by John Fleming, in which he described a student's excited reaction to Hamlet:

Oh, Hamlet is just like me – because, like, I can't decide what to major in, either.

Have you driven your girlfriend to suicide? Coldly arranged the execution of two childhood friends? Perhaps Hamlet is not quite so much like you – for which we give thanks. Ditto for Telemachus.

Denby is eloquent about the "unreachably alien" in Homer: the shock of Achilles' speech of refusal in the Iliad, and of Odysseus' bloody return. It would be perverse to confine these books to what is already in oneself – the opposite of reading well. But you can see the temptation. (Denby succumbs to it at length only once, when his mother turns out to be a synthesis of Lear and Oedipus; more briefly, Denby himself is Faust and Elizabeth Bennet.)

I assume that his professor was actually very good: successful teaching is hard to represent. Thus, the suggestion that Hamlet is "just like you" was offered as a moment of pedagogical brilliance in NBC's dismal new sit-com, Teachers. And I still cringe to recall the "philosophy class" that opens The Life of David Gale.

Has skilful pedagogy never reached the screen? It has, in documentaries. If you get a chance some time, watch a tape of C. Roland Christensen, his gestures drawing thoughts from mouths like exhaled mist, almost involuntary. (An old jedi mind trick.) Even then, I'm not sure how much one can imitate. Teachers are performers, with their distinctive masks and styles; not everything is adaptable. And teaching is specialized. Although it may seem otherwise, there is no irony in watching the best of teachers teaching badly how to teach.

Great Books (I): Introductory

2006-06-19T14:04:00.000-05:00

To invert a blurb by Peter Watson, on the back of David Denby's engaging book, this series of posts will be the least original response to the "culture wars". Where Denby went back to school at Columbia to take the demanding year-long primers in Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, I am reading Denby's book and lazily consulting classics I already know, while picking out a few of those that I do not.

One of the enviable features of the American academic system is the breadth of undergraduate education, and the lack of it is something I regret about studying in England. It isn't that, like many, I was unready to choose a discipline; I knew I wanted to read philosophy, and almost knew that I wouldn't want to stop. But it was never my desire to study nothing but.

Near the end of his first semester, Denby interviews a British professor who is leaving Columbia for the (allegedly) more radical halls of Sussex. (A time before Spivak?) She dismisses the "canon" as "a modern American invention […] a shopping list […] some fantasy of control." He attributes her resistance in part to the fact that "an Oxbridge undergraduate, better educated at high school than his American counterpart, would likely have read many of the books before arriving at university." I don't believe it, and it certainly wasn't true of me.

Nor does it seem right to scorn the "fantasy of control", so long as it is not a fantasy of controlling students, but a fantasy that shares their anxiety about the lack of it, fear of being out of one's depth. The open secret of academia is that almost everyone almost always feels this way: not waving but drowning, an intellectual fraud. It may be a fantasy for it to be otherwise, but the vertigo is real, and the fantasy can be productive.

There are other complaints about the "great books" course, both political and pedagogical. Denby is pretty impatient with them. He is sold on the enterprise: suspicious of capital, but not the cultural kind. In any case, the main argument of his book is surely implicit: Denby will defeat the critics of the canon by torturing them with envy. Going back to school is an academic's dream.

An Ontological Puzzle

2006-06-15T07:57:00.000-05:00

The Age of Reason

2006-06-07T08:06:00.000-05:00

One of the more likeable books I have read in recent months is Paul Levy's study of G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, now unforgivably out of print. It is an attempt to explain Moore's anomalous influence outside philosophy, on the artistic and intellectual giants of his time: Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf. The answer is meant to lie in the purity and innocence of his attachment to the truth – a force of character paradoxically combined with shyness and modesty, and reinforced with boyish good looks.

Moore does seem innocent in Levy's account, and quite appealing – but not especially impressive. In fact, Moore's early attempts at philosophy, in papers presented to the Apostles, are gratifyingly similar to the efforts of any beginning undergraduate.

In his debut, he argued that "we can know absolutely nothing", but boldly embraced his result: "this universal scepticism will no doubt produce the dissolution of society, which I should welcome." This is the sort of thing that make makes the teacher of freshmen roll her eyes.

In his first paper, of May 12, 1894, Moore defended – by equivocation and confusion – the truth of ethical and psychological hedonism. Levy's response is comically over-generous:

It is obvious that Moore was trying to reconcile the Epicurean hedonism he had absorbed from his reading of Lucretius, with McTaggart's reading of Hegel, which assimilated the egoistic principle of self-realization to 'being in harmony with the World Spirit'.

The defects of hedonism ought to have been apparent in the question with which the meeting closed: "Are all martyrs voluptuaries?"

Moore followed up these efforts with a paper endorsing Plato's apparent argument in the Protagoras that no-one errs willingly. Not until February 4, 1899 do we see in Moore the "great advance" of rejecting egoism.

Such humble origins give hope to us all: how the mighty have risen. Less than ten years later, Moore published Principia Ethica, and Lytton Strachey wrote these words:

I date from Oct. 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason.

Even after reading Levy's book, it is hard to see how someone could have felt this way.

In truth, the anecdotes that give the greatest sense of Moore's adorable qualities do not concern his intellect, at all. They focus rather on moments of vulnerability, as in Keynes' priceless description of Moore, waking from "a nightmare […] in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables"; and in Moore's note to himself in a diary entry of December 7, 1915:

Feel very incapable of thinking, so read Mind.

Anyone Can Learn

2006-05-31T16:32:00.000-05:00

After scandalous delays, I recently took the Pennsylvania driving test. Alas, I failed. (Parallel parking.) Perhaps I should consult a learner’s manual.

When I learned to drive in England, over a decade ago, I had the advantage of a book employed by my parents before me, circa 1965. It was memorable for two things. First, the blurb that adorned the back cover, in enormous font:

Driving made easy.
Anyone can learn.
Even the wife!

Second, for its holistic approach to driving well, which it conceived not as an isolated skill, but as an aspect of eupraxia. Hence this remark, from the section on driving mishaps:

One accident to avoid at all costs is the head-on collision. It is sometimes possible to avoid such a collision by veering on to the pavement. But if this would endanger the lives of pedestrians, you may prefer to choose an honourable death.

What is Art?

2006-05-23T10:11:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post, I gave brief attention to Tolstoy's view that art is a form of communication, and so is to be evaluated, as art, to the extent that it communicates well what is worth communicating.

Whatever its defects, this view has the merit of making clear the point of thinking about the essence of art: not to effect a classification, but to derive an evaluative standard. If a work of art is by nature a kind of F, it is supposed to follow that it is good, as such, such in case it is good as an F. The essence of art reveals the nature of artistic value.

In this light, the problem with Tolstoy's conception is that it leaves out a great deal of what we ordinarily take to matter in art, as art. For some of the most extraordinary artistic creations, we are hard pressed to say what the "message" could be. And even where this seems possible, to some extent – as with The Kreutzer Sonata or Hadji Murad – it is wrong to conclude that nothing else is relevant. It matters to artistic value how a content is conveyed – and not just how efficiently.

The only way to save the present view is to identify what is communicated by a work of art with everything that is involved in experiencing it. But then the view is deprived of interest. It would have been illuminating to learn that art is good, as such, just to the extent that it is good as communication. It is not helpful to be told that a work of art is good, as such, just in case the comprehending experience of that work is good, as an experience. The question, "What makes an experience good, as such?" is no less obscure than the question of artistic value; and unless restricted in some way, it threatens to be irrelevant. For instance: an experience might be good, as such, because it is morally good, in ways that have no aesthetic significance.

The fundamental issue raised by Tolstoy's view is about the autonomy of artistic value: can the value of a work of art be reduced to values of other kinds? No doubt his theory is too simple: art does many things, and can be good in many ways – as communication, as artifice, as entertainment. But this is consistent with his principal, reductive claim.

It is also consistent with his rejection of beauty, that "all-confusing concept". Beauty is an obvious candidate for autonomous artistic value. But even if we can isolate artistic beauty, as distinct from the beauty of nature, it is hard to see how this could work. If artistic beauty is just artistic value, the proposal says nothing at all. If it is something different, we need to know what it is.

A common suggestion associates the beauty of art with pleasure. But here, again, we should be moved by Tolstoy's critique. If he is wrong to say that causing pleasure is frivolous, and thus unworthy to be the aim of art, that is because pleasure is not to be conceived in Bentham's terms. As Aristotle saw, pleasure involves the apparent perception of value. But then the problem of autonomy is simply deferred. (This is why it is misleading to rely on pleasure as the ground for critical judgements, as Frank Kermode purports to do in Pleasure and Change. If it is relevant here at all, pleasure can only be a symptom of something else: what is the value in which we take pleasure, when we take pleasure in art?)

I should confess that, although I have read some work in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, I haven't read that much. I've been trying to isolate the problems I want to think about, first. One problem is about intention and the meaning of a work of art; the other is about artistic value. The question is: what should I read next?

Listening to Abstraction

2006-05-16T16:31:00.000-05:00

I begin with two embarrassing confessions. First, that I am intensely fond of instrumental mimesis: the cuckoo in Mahler's First, the barrel organ at the end of Bartok's Fifth Quartet, and the music that descends from another world in the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor (Op. 132). Second, that I am pretentious enough to listen to Bach on my iPod while jogging.

In each case, there is an obvious challenge. If you are so desperate to hear something else, why are you listening to this? And what is wrong with "Eye of the Tiger"?

The second question is unanswerable. But something can be said about the first. For the logocentric, like me, imitation has the virtue of being a form of expression in music that is readily described: it gives you something to say. And so it gives the illusion of a response to puzzles about the value of instrumental music.

The puzzle I mainly have in mind is raised by Malcolm Budd, in an otherwise disappointing book:

Music seems to be a paradise essentially unrelated to the world in which we live our ordinary lives, deriving its import and sustenance from itself alone; and its effects on us appear unaccountable or out of all proportion to their cause and object.

Budd's formulation is (deliberately) ambiguous between what he calls "psychological" and "constitutive" readings. We are interested in the latter: in aesthetics, not empirical speculation. The task is to explain what makes instrumental music worth listening to, what accounts for its importance in our lives – given that it seems to be, for the most part, abstract or non-representational.

A partial response would appeal to the power of music to express emotion. But this covers so little ground that I propose to set it aside. More interesting is the view, developed by Kendall Walton, that music is more often representational that we might think: it conveys such things as struggle, return, conflict and resolution. What is distinctive of musical expression – what makes it "abstract" – is, in part, its generality.

As Walton remarks, this generality might be offered as virtue of music by the purist, "allowing a work to speak to many different interests and concerns." But the appeal of generality itself is problematic:

Here is a story of great generality, one which abstracts from an enormous number of specifics:

Once upon a time there was a person.
The End.

It is "about" personhood, I suppose. All of us have a considerable interest in people […]; no doubt this is true of everyone in every culture and every age since the beginning of time. But the story I just recited is notable for its excruciating lack of interest. It is vapid.

I think I like Walton's story more than he does: while dull, in certain respects, it doesn't take long to read, and this is an enormous boon. Still, I take his point.

The solution proposed in the rest of Walton's paper – if I understand it – is that the generality of musical expression lies in its being restricted to properties or universals, not particular situations perceived from a particular point of view, but that it is nevertheless capable of being quite specific. (Mendelssohn was on to something when he said that musical meanings are often too precise to be expressed in words.) Thus, the abstractness of instrumental music is consistent with something like mimesis – if not the embarrassing, auditory kind.

Walton ends by claiming that, "since music treats of things that matter to us in ways that are beyond description […] we needn't be any more astonished by its power than by that of the obviously representational arts." I suppose that's true: we needn't be astonished. But it would be wrong to infer that the worth of instrumental music always lies in what it means. I don't prefer Bach's Art of Fugue because its message is more rousing than Survivor's. After all, how could it be?

It Must be Human

2006-05-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

You will search in vain for voices in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Pick a passage from any of its 29 entries; you will not know who is writing. Anatoly Karpov, the Soviet chess master, once boasted: "Style? I have no style." Philosophers take equal pride nowadays in an absence of rhetorical effect. Arguments, circulated and refined like a chess opening 12 or 15 moves deep, are their stock in trade.

This striking passage appeared in a recent review in the Economist, at roughly the same time as a New Yorker article, "Your Move", about the triumph of the chess computer. This conjunction triggered the oppressive image of the philosophy computer, able to defeat even the best human intellects. (Deep Thought, perhaps?)

Stylistic variation may be lacking in the Oxford Handbook, but I think it can be found in recent work. Davidson, Kripke, Lewis, Rawls: each has a distinctive presence in his work, and the same could be said of many others. (This is especially true of some philosophers with whom I am obsessed, but about whom it is not easy to write: Wittgenstein, Murdoch, Stanley Cavell.)

In any case, the real fear is not that philosophical writing is unpoetic, but that this is true of philosophical ideas: "It is as if / We had come to the end of imagination / Inanimate in an inert savoir."

Wallace Stevens (who wrote those words) addressed our question in an unpublished lecture, "A Collect of Philosophy", the theme of which is that the concepts of philosophy are, or can be, poetic. His chief example of this is the infinity of the world. Other proposals are found to be less successful. Thus Leibniz' monadology is "the disappointing creation of a poet manqué [...] a poet without flash."

The highlight of "Collect" is a lovely compendium of condensed philosophers sent to Stevens by Paul Weiss:

Plato: all things participate in the good; all beings love what they do not have, to wit, the good. Aristotle: all beings strive to realize their peculiar goods, already exemplified in some being somewhere in the natural world. St. Francis and St. Bonaventure: all beings have at least a trace of God in them. St. Thomas Aquinas: all existence is owed to God. Descartes: all bodies are machines. Leibniz: the world is at once the best and most rational of worlds; all the things we know in experience are combinations of spirits. Spinoza: all things happen by necessity; all things are in God. Kant: to be free is to be moral, and to be moral is to be free.

Can philosophical ideas still be poetic? The idea, for instance, of numberless worlds, each as real as this one, as concrete, in which everything possible is realized? Or must we fall back, at last, on an argument that ends the poem I quoted above?

Yet the absence of imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

The Standard of Taste

2006-04-26T07:34:00.001-05:00

Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.

To which we might add the names of JOHN HOME and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, about whom our hero had this to say:

When [Home's play, Douglas] shall be printed (which will be soon) I am perswaded it will be esteem'd the best; and by French critics, the only Tragedy in our Language. (Letter to Adam Smith, March 1757)

Whereas…

In [Shakespeare's] compositions, we regret, that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them […] His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect; yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way, only by intervals, to the irradiations of genius. (History of England, Volume 5, Appendix on the Reign of James I)

Hume is not alone in his sceptical judgement of Shakespeare, which was shared by such giants as Wittgenstein and Tolstoy; but his obtuseness became proverbial. Thus, Adam Smith was damned by Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as "the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this weed seems natural, has produced."

Hume's taste was sounder, by his own insistence, in its literal guise. Having retired to Edinburgh in 1769, without "the least Thought of Regreat to London, or even to Paris", Hume wrote to Gilbert Elliot to describe his plans:

I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old House in James's Court, which is very chearful and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life; I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe à la Reine, copy'd with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me. I make also Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it for eight days after, and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself Apprentice to my Lass to learn it.

Picture Hume: apron-clad in his cramped kitchen, surrounded by the vapours of stewing meat, preparing to "dine, [to] play a game of back-gammon", and to give his literary ambitions, not just his sceptical thoughts, a rest.

Vanity

2006-04-18T04:01:00.000-05:00

I am writing these words in the Reading Room of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, sitting next to Hume's manuscript copy of the Dialogues concerning natural Religion.

I did not expect to be moved; and in fact, I wasn't – at first. But it is hard to resist Hume's auto-obituary, "My own life", written in the past tense some months before his death. The script is confident and cleanly legible: it is fitting that Hume, the most agreeable of men, should have such lovely handwriting. Here is what he wrote:

In spring 1775, I was struck with a Disorder to my Bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy Dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my Disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great Decline of my Person, never suffered a Moments abatement of my Spirits: Insomuch, that were I to name a Period of my life, which I shoud most choose to pass over again I might be tempted to point to this later Period. I possess the same Ardor as ever in Study, and the same Gaiety in Company. I consider besides, that a Man of sixty five, by dying, cuts off only a few Years of Infirmities: and though I see many Symptoms of my literary Reputation's breaking out at last with additional Lustre, I know, that I had but few Years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from Life than I am at present.

To conclude historically with my own Character: I am, or rather was (for that is the Style, I must now use in speaking of myself; which emboldens me the more to speak my Sentiments) I was, I say, a man of mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper, of an open, social, and cheerful Humour, capable of Attachment, but little susceptible of Enmity, and of great Moderation in all my Passions. Even my Love of literary Fame, my ruling Passion, never soured my humour, notwithstanding my frequent Disappointments. My Company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the Studious and literary. And as I took a particular Pleasure in the Company of modest women, I had no Reason to be displeased with the Reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of Calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful Tooth: And though I wantonly exposed myself to the Rage of both civil and religious Factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted Fury: My Friends never had occasion to vindicate any one Circumstance of my Character and Conduct: Not but that the Zealots, we may well suppose, wou'd have been glad to invent and propagate any Story to my Disadvantage, but they coud never find any which, they thought, wou'd wear the Face of Probability. I cannot say, there is no Vanity in making this funeral Oration of myself; but I hope it is not a misplac'd one; and this is a Matter of Fact which is easily clear'd and ascertained.

Hume has been a Muse of these pages, on several occasions. As Adam Smith wrote in the account of Hume's death he sent to his publisher:

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

Economy of Prestige

2006-04-10T18:39:00.000-05:00

It is time to announce the results of the competition to supply an exquisitely mean review. The criteria of judgement were as follows:

The review must have a worthy target. Thus, I was forced to ignore, among other things, A. O. Scott's review of Gigli.
The review may be grossly unfair, but…
It has to give good arguments, or memorable ones that contain a grain of truth.
Finally, preference was given to reviews that made good use of sarcasm.

We received 16 entries:

John Kekes on Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity
Peter Medawar on Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
Michael Dummett on G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Frege: Logical Excavations
Charles Pigden on Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics
Hilary Putnam on Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference
Henry Sidgwick on F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies
Myles Burnyeat on Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy
Peter Geach on Philip Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements
Michael Dummett on Ernest Gellner, Words and Things
Alasdair MacIntryre on Hans Kung, Does God Exist?
Alasdair MacIntryre on Ved Mehta, The New Theologians
Alasdair MacIntryre on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
Simon Blackburn on G. E. M. Anscombe, Human Life, Action and Ethics
Alex Oliver on David Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs
Garrison Keillor on Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo
Colin McGinn on T. M. Scanlon, What we Owe to Each Other

It almost goes without saying that the reviews were uniformly bad, and comparative assessment was difficult. But decisions had to be made…

Thus, the award for meanest reviewer goes to Dummett, on the basis of two ferocious assaults. Honorable mention goes to Keillor on Lévy, which was certainly the funniest review submitted. Professional standards permit philosophers to be harsh, but not to engage in undue ridicule, so their scope for humour is limited. (I still think the funniest philosophical mean review is this one; see the paragraph on Wiggins at the end.)

Finally, the grand winner is…

Myles Burnyeat on Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy

Admittedly, Burnyeat has an unfair advantage of scale, since his "review" runs to 6000 words. But, as mean reviews go, it has everything: a worthy target, memorable (even influential) arguments, and a wonderful line in invective.

(Zed: Send me an e-mail with your mailing address to claim your prize!)

Utter Rubbish

2006-04-03T08:55:00.000-05:00

Having partly defended one, I've been thinking a bit more about polemical reviews. They are, for me, a guilty pleasure. I don't like the idea of trashing what may have been the work of many hard years, and it's painful to imagine how the author must feel. But I can't deny that they are fun to read.

A recent example is Joe Queenan's vicious jab at The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs. Here the bitterness was soothed when the New York Times gave Jacobs an op-ed in which to reply, and he was able to hold his own. On other occasions, the rancour is not diminished by going back and forth.

One could publish a very satisfying anthology of mean reviews. My collection begins with the following two:

James Klagge on David Wiggins, at the end of this review

and

Joseph Ullian on Paul Weiss, writing about the "philosophy of sport".

Readers are invited to submit their favourites; a prize will be awarded for the best.

A Genetic Fallacy?

2006-03-27T09:54:00.000-05:00

This post is a belated contribution to the "Dennett Wars": the explosion of scientific and philosophical invective directed at Leon Wieseltier's notorious review of Breaking the Spell.

I haven't read the book; nor do I mean to defend the whole review. But much of the invective strikes me as being unfair. Part of the pleasure of reading reviews is the occasional polemic, and given the constraints of space, the polemical review is bound to involve some measure of unargued assertion. If it is to concede this point, the objection to Wieseltier must be that his dismissal of Dennett's book depends on assumptions that are simply unreasonable, ones that no competent reviewer would make. That seems to be the implication of some of his critics.

The problem is that, for the most part, the implication is false. Resistance to "scientism" is perfectly reasonable – at least if it is sufficient to make an opinion reasonable that it is held by perceptive thinkers who have thought carefully about the matter. (A stronger test for reasonable belief would make the polemical review impossible.)

To take one central case, consider Wieseltier's suspicion of genetic tests for the credibility of our beliefs:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason.

These remarks are easy to dismiss. But everyone knows that the simple genetic test – on which a belief is justified only if it was formed on the basis of appropriate evidence – will have to be revised. If there is sufficient evidence now, who cares how the belief was formed? You can't refute belief in God, however it arose, without tackling the ontological argument.

More significantly, even a qualified genetic test will threaten to undermine our moral and political beliefs: suppose that our basic ethical stance is formed by acculturation, not rational argument; and that it cannot be defended against every alternative – at least not without begging the question. These assumptions are no doubt controversial, but they deserve to be taken seriously. (Witness the anxieties expressed by G. A. Cohen, in the introduction to his wonderful book on egalitarianism.) One reasonable response is to reject or further qualify the genetic test – and this may well leave room for the credibility of religious belief.

It is also reasonable to fear that a crude genetic test will undermine science, by undermining our belief in the reliability of scientific method. (Think of "inference to the best explanation": why do we assume that the world is simple, or that more elegant descriptions are more likely to be true?) Even worse, the test might indict belief in itself. It doesn't matter, here, whether such fears turn out to be correct. What matters is that reasonable people are moved by them – and so they are sceptical of anything but an extremely qualified version of the genetic test.

This may not be Wieseltier's point, of course. His rejection of the test may be the product of sheer ignorance – not a shorthand for the need to qualify it in ways that might permit religious belief. But it would be clear instance of the genetic fallacy to dismiss his critique of Dennett's book on that account.

Creation: Pro and Con

2006-03-20T14:15:00.000-05:00

We have examined an argument against marriage; now for an argument against children.

In the case of marriage, the argument turned on a positive objection, a reason not to marry. In the case of pro-creation, the con is typically expressed by a rhetorical question:

What reasons can one give for having a child?

This is sometimes pronounced with cynicism: who would bring a child into this fine mess? But I think its force is meant to be more general. It stems from two constraints on what the critic is willing to accept in response.

In the first place, the answer cannot appeal to the interests of the parents. It is – the questioner assumes – not a reason to have a child that one would enjoy it, or that it would benefit one's relationship (if it would). Or, more accurately, it is not that such considerations have no weight at all, but that they seem defective or mis-placed, at least when offered by themselves. These cannot be the only reasons that a good parent has.

Perhaps the missing reasons are altruistic ones? But this threatens to violate a second constraint: our answer to the question cannot turn on benefits to the child. There is a puzzle about whether causing someone to exist can benefit that person, at all. (See Part Four of Reasons and Persons.) But even if the answer is yes, and there is an altruistic reason to procreate, the critic seems right, once again, to doubt that this is the sort of reason we want to give.

Even worse is the argument from the threat of extinction. ("The world must be peopled!") And this is not much improved by the invocation of public goods. ("The world must be peopled – to some extent; and in refusing to participate, we free-ride on the arduous labour of parents." This could be, at most, an argument for public child support.)

Although I haven't presented the point with care, I am sympathetic to the critic of procreation, at least to this extent: that the answers to the question considered so far feel palpably inadequate. If the question is pressing, remarks like these will not put it to rest. What is less clear, and much more puzzling, is why we should feel obliged to answer the question, at all. Justifications come to an end; why not here? What makes us think that we need a further reason to do what comes naturally?

I wonder if the source of pressure, for those who feel it, is a rationalist fantasy whose effects reverberate in other, more prominent parts of moral philosophy: the fantasy that practical reason is more than human. Here is a familiar challenge in the discussion of "animal rights":

Why assign moral status to human infants but not to non-human animals that have greater mental powers? What if the infant lacks even the potential for rational thought?

The assumption is that "It's a human being" is not a good enough reason by itself. Nor is "in order to have a child." It is as if reasons must speak to reflective thought, as such – to angels and Martians, as well as to us. We feel the need to convince an interlocutor who will not accept the argument, "This is what human beings do." But when we try to meet this demand, what we say seems to miss the point.

Of course, "human nature" is a pretty feeble guide. But one need not embrace it blindly to doubt that there is anything wrong with a (defeasible) prejudice in favour of human life.

Love and Marriage

2006-03-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

Why marriage? It's an impertinent question: why the hell not? But "An Argument Against Marriage" has recently been proposed.

It takes the form of a dilemma, framed around a question: is the marriage vow binding in the unilateral absence of love? If it is, then the risk of ending up in a loveless marriage ought to be a strong deterrent. If not, then the vow will be redundant. So, why bother?

The issues raised by this argument range from the exalted to the tawdry. Tawdry, first: even while it lasts, love is no guarantee that one will be honoured and cherished, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others. Neglect and adultery need not signal the end of love; a commitment to avoid them, even if conditional, would not be redundant.

The more exalted question is: can love be promised, or given at will? On the face of it: no. Love is not voluntary; it is a passion, and therefore passive. But the orthodox view among philosophers is (I think) that love is active at least in the way that judgement is: there are reasons for love, as there are reasons for belief, even if we cannot decide to love, or to believe.

There is something right about this. But it is immediately worrying. We don't want to be loved for our qualities: that would seem to make love conditional, and to allow for fungibility and "trading up". Nor does it help to appeal to relational properties, or relationships: love can be capricious, unfounded, unrequited; there can be love at first sight. (In any case, how self-centred to love people only for how they relate to me!)

We need to re-examine the arguments for taking love to have reasons in the first place. It is true that love seems intelligible from the first-person perspective. But so do many things that have no reasons, in the ordinary sense: tearing one's clothes in grief; stabbing out the eyes of a photograph in anger; jumping for joy.

It is also true that love can seem appropriate, desirable – or not. It is bad to be in love with an abusive spouse. But why conclude that there are reasons for love, not just reasons to wish for love (or for its absence). Compare: it might be good to believe in God; but that is at most a reason to wish for belief, not a reason for belief itself.

In its typical form, the idea of reasons for love seems to conflate the feeling of love with such things as caring for someone, or with emotions and judgements directed towards them. Love need not go along with caring, or valuing, or judging to be good. (Back the tawdry point, above, about the marriage vow.)

I wonder if the truth is more like this. There is love as passion, which has causes but not reasons, and which lies outside of our control. (The causes are often trivial, and so the "reasons" that we give for love are often trivial, too: think of the final scene of When Harry Met Sally.) And then there is the activity of love, which has reasons in the way that any action does. (The reasons may be good or bad; selfish or disinterested; tied to relationships, obsessions, or genes.) Love in the active sense is struggling to see the beloved in ways that sustain the passive sort of love. It can be promised and it is, in part, the object of the marriage vow.

Perhaps this is quite wrong: I'm not sure. It would explain how love can be unconditional, even though it has reasons. And it would explain the point of asking, "Why do you love me?" – wanting in answer not reasons for love, by which it might be justified, but for signs of what Iris Murdoch called "the capacity to love, that is to see."

Cock and Bull

2006-03-06T09:13:00.000-05:00

It would be hard to find a more apt description of Tristram Shandy than Tristram's own account of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

I will tell you what the book is. – It is a history. – A history! of who? what? where? when? Don't hurry yourself – It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man's own mind.

Woolf called it "the greatest of all novels" – though Hume was more reserved:

[As] to any Englishman, that Nation is so sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction that you may as well think of Lapland for an Author. The best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years […] is Tristram Shandy, bad as it is.

In a similar vein, the best film to appear in the last few months is Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, bad as it is – "A Remark which may astonish you; but which you will find true on Reflection."

Tristram Shandy is, in part, a book about the suspicion of words: the deferral of contact with the world that permits it to out-pace its own articulation – as Tristram finds that the narration of his first day takes a year; – and Walter struggles to prepare his Tristra-paedia,

at which (as I said) he was three years and something more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce completed, by his own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless, – every day a page or two became of no consequence. –

Sterne is cheerfully haunted by the aspiration to represent nature in its own terms – a pure resemblance theory. – Consider Uncle Toby, modeling the progress of the battle day by day in the miniature trenches and forts of his kitchen garden, and never falling behind; – or the page on which we are invited to draw our own impression of widow Wadman. – Tristram Shandy is a comical version of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

It follows that the filming of the book must pose a special challenge and a special opportunity. For the medium of film inspires one form of the illusion that Sterne is out to mock: what Bazin has called "the Myth of Total Cinema" – "a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time."

There are brilliant moments here – as when Uncle Toby's map of Flanders comes alive; – the melon that stands in for baby Tristram's head is crushed by a pair of forceps; – Steve Coogan dances to the agony of a "real" hot chestnut dropped down his trouser-front.

Yet the film's exploration of the central issue – its own mimetic character – feels routine. Yes, Steve Coogan plays "himself," or a version of himself. – And what seems to be the filming of another film of Tristram Shandy turns out to be the filming of "itself." None of this is sufficiently new to match the shock and intellectual penetration of the book.

– But perhaps that is the point? Moving pictures falling short of words – a further repudiation of the resemblance theory, made with tongue in cheek.

You may object that I am taking all this too seriously. – I can only plead, like Walter, that my thoughts proceed "after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest, – but ending in downright earnest."

Bookshelf

2006-02-27T14:11:00.000-05:00

In which I recommend some excellent books that I decided not to post about…

• Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind, by Charles Nicholl
A magical but down-to-earth portrait of Leonardo as impish inventor, charming entertainer, dandy and flake. Quote (from da Vinci's notebooks): "If you want to see how a person's soul inhabits his body, look at how his body treats his daily abode."

• Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel

A classic study – to be read with Anscombe's marvel of obscurity, "The First Person".

And finally…

• The Promise of Happiness, by Justin Cartwright
I don't have much to say about this one. But it was recommended by my step-sister-in-law, and it is very good. One character reads Bernard Williams on morality.

Footnotes

2006-02-20T11:48:00.000-05:00

I am not alone in lamenting the decline of the footnote. Everyone is familiar with the frustrating comedy of endnotes: the tangled fingers and multiple bookmarks (or post-its), the vain struggle to recall the number of note and page as one prays that they are adequately marked at the back of the book. Having performed this extraordinary feat, one is greeted by the demoralizing "Ibid."

I have not attempted to trace such complaints through history, but I have found an early occurrence, in a letter by David Hume to the editor of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall:

One is also plagued with his Notes, according to the present Method of printing the Book: When a note is announced, you turn to the End of the Volume; and there you often find nothing but the Reference to an Authority: All of these Authorities ought only to be printed at the Margin or Bottom of the Page.

Hume's remarks concede that digressive footnotes, as opposed to mere citations, are justly confined to a cellar adjacent to the index. Rousseau made the same concession, in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. But it should not be made. It is precisely the witty aside, the nugget of research one could not bear to leave out, even though it didn't fit, that I look for in a footnote. Michael Dummett once remarked that reading a scholarly book without a preface is like arriving at a dinner party and being led directly to the table. Reading a scholarly book without footnotes is like having a conversation with a monomaniac.

Anthony Grafton's otherwise wonderful history of the footnote is not sufficiently sensitive to this. His topic is narrow: the footnote as a tool of historical scholarship; the book is a partial history of historiography, from Bayle to Gibbon to Ranke. A more indulgent treatment appears in The Devil's Details by Chuck Zerby, but it is characterized by an irritable anti-intellectualism, as though the scholarly use of the footnote is somehow incompatible with the digressive. On the contrary: it is only when one isn't sure what to expect in glancing down the page that digression can have its full effect; uncertainty is an essential part of the foonote's charm.

This is not to deny that the footnote is apt for parody. But it is already self-parodic. The avid footnoter knows that he is undisciplined, that he is on a slippery slope to the dissolution of the text, that he is borderline schizophrenic.

What we need is a strenuous but still affectionate history of this phenomenon, a cultural remembrance of the aside, from parenthetic remark to hyperlink. We do not know what the footnote means to us, how life would be impoverished without it. In the absence of that knowledge, the defence of the footnote is bound to be incomplete. We will tend to focus on the threat to scholarship that lies in the adoption of the endnote, or in the obliteration of notes tout court. But this is only part of the story. The decline of the footnote is a threat to philosophy, to personality, and to intellectual love.

A Succession of Automatic World Projections?

2006-02-13T11:19:00.000-05:00

Having so far puzzled things out, one is confronted with the following remark from Cavell's book on film:

The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.

This can't be right: it cannot follow from this kind of asymmetrical presence that one is presented with the past, since the events in a play are meant to be happening now. If photographs present the past, that is further fact about them.

Even if we grant this further fact, Cavell's account of film is almost impossible to square with what I took to be his conception of theatre. He argues, in effect, that since film is screened photography, it too presents what it presents as past. Thus we can explain, without need for the theatrical convention of make-belief, why no-one attempts to intervene:

In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory).

But, again, this can't be right. I suppose one could treat the screened images in a movie theatre as photographs: watching a film as, in effect, a documentary about its previous enactment. But that is not what we typically do.

As Cavell points out, a photograph – unlike a painting – is always implicitly of a whole world:

You can always ask, pointing to an object in a photograph – a building, say – what lies behind it, totally obscured by it. [...] You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond the frame.

Imagine asking these questions as you watch a film. If you are properly immersed, you won't say: "Behind the building is the studio parking lot; adjacent to the actors are lights and a trailer."

To watch a film is to make-believe that these are not photographs, in Cavell's sense: and so there is, so far, no reason why what is presented must be presented as past. (Mulhall is therefore wrong to find a "conflict between the genre of science fiction, with its projections of future social and technological arrangements, and the grain of the film medium." We can travel in time.)

In effect, Cavell's account of film conflicts with the premise on which his conception of theatre rests: that, when immersed, our practical reasoning is in the direction of what we make-believe, not what we believe. We know that these are screened photographs, just as we know that they are actors on stage. But this is quite irrelevant. What matters, and what Cavell leaves quite opaque, is the content of the make-belief (or of the many kinds of make-belief) through which we engage with film.

Metaphysics and Make-Belief

2006-02-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

The theoretical inspiration for Mulhall's book on film is an earlier book by Stanley Cavell, which develops, in part, a way of thinking about the metaphysics of artworks initiated in "The Avoidance of Love".

Like all writers whose style is idiosyncratic, Cavell runs the risk of self-parody: the long paragraph consisting of a single sentence with fourteen semi-colons; the enigmatically repetitive phrasing; the glorious allusion. But he is a master of the unexpected question:

What mistake has the yokel in the theater made [when he leaps on stage in an attempt to rescue Desdemona]? – He thinks that someone is strangling someone. – But that is true; Othello is strangling Desdemona. – Come on, come on; you know, he thinks that very man is putting out the light of that very woman right now. – Yes, and that is exactly what is happening. – You're not amusing.

How should we explain why the "non-yokel" fails to intervene? Not because he is uncertain. But also not because he is sure it isn't real:

"They are only pretending" is something we typically say to children, in reassurance [...] The point of saying it there is not to focus them on the play, but to help bring them out of it. It is not an instructive remark, but an emergency measure.

In a similar way – Cavell apparently insists – it mistakes the reasons of the audience, as immersed in theatre, to say that they do not intervene because they know it's all pretend.

When I first read it, I thought this argument was obviously bad. My reasons for acting need not be conscious, or salient to me, even as I act on them. Why not say, then, that I let Desdemona die because I know it's make-believe? How does that get the phenomenology wrong?

There is a prior question: what is Cavell up to when he insists that Othello is strangling Desdemona, after all? I think the picture must be this: in just the sense in which Sherlock Holmes lives at 221b Baker Street, Othello is strangling Desdemona. According to the fiction: Sherlock Holmes had that address. According to the make-believe in which the audience is engaged: Othello is strangling Desdemona.

Seen in this way, Cavell's argument is controversial, but not lame. It rests on the premise that the reasons for which we refuse to intervene must be reasons that are true in the make-belief. If we are properly immersed, our practical reasoning is in the direction of what we make-believe, not what we believe. (Think of the games that children play, and that we play with them.)

In theatre, we make-believe that actors are characters; that they are in our presence, but we are not in theirs; that we cannot affect them. There is no path from us to them: "we do not occupy the same space".

We do, however, occupy the same time [...] And the time is always now [...]

"Always already"

2006-01-31T14:34:00.000-05:00

I once offered a friend a beer for every time he used the phrase in a talk. He only managed two. Others have been more successful. The world record for "always already" always already belongs to Gayatri Spivak, whose introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology contains at least twelve.

A more modest contender is Stephen Mulhall. His perceptive book about the 'Alien' series, On Film, has only four – but it is very short. Here is the first appearance:

From beginning to end, the 'Alien' films present us with small, isolated groups of human beings framed almost immediately against the infinity of the cosmos. Each individual's inhabitation of the universe appears unmediated by the more complex interweavings of culture and society, those systems of signification which always already determine the meaning of any actions and events encompassed by them [...]

My brief attempts to discover the meaning of "always already" suggest that it is, indeed, always already determined by a certain culture; translation or extraction is virtually impossible.

In one use, however – which apparently derives from Heidegger – "always already" seems to be involved in statements of essence. To say that F is always already G, on this reading, is to say that being G is part of what it is to be F, and, perhaps, that the very concept of an F can be fully grasped only through this connection. That would make sense of the passage above, and of the claim that reality is always already given to us through language.

But "always already" is imperialistic. It finds itself deployed in contexts where it has to mean something else. From later passages of Mulhall, On Film:

[David] Fincher has always already lost [...] faith in the significance of [suspense and fear as] narrative artifacts.
[...] Christianity has always already acknowledged the worst that nihilism can tell us [...]
[...] the generativity of her flesh has always already been exploited [...]

I have mixed feelings about this linguistic expansion. You might expect me to whine about it. But I can no longer do so without hypocrisy. I write in contrition, as someone who has used "always already" in conversation – without irony – and who has been tempted to use it in print. The time of the "always already" is always already here.

89 Pages, 33 Figures

2006-01-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

Or more than one figure every third page. Thus begins my attempt to quantify the content of Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees – an endeavour of which he might approve. If Moretti succeeds, future historians of literary history will track its progress to the sure path of science with graphs that illustrate the growing use of graphs over the course of generations, and with trees that display the survival of the fittest branch of literary history – the one in which trees appear.

The book is a paradox. Sold as a "heretical argument" against close reading, it contains not a word of critique. (See, instead, Moretti's "Conjectures on World Literature".) And perceived as a work of brilliance, its principal "results" can seem quite lame:

Graphs: Novelistic genres are born and die off in cycles of twenty-five or thirty years; but we don't know why.

Maps: The geographical or geometrical arrangement of narrated events in the "village novel" was changed by such political upheavals as rural class struggle and the industrial revolution.

Trees: People who read detective fiction like to be given intriguing clues, and preferably ones they could in principle decode; this explains why Sherlock Holmes survived.

Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible not to be caught up in the magic of Moretti's approach, which begins with the brute fact of quantity.

[A] canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows – and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day would take a century or so…

To know the canon is not to know what people used to read. Hence the need for alternative methods in literary history. The lame conclusions sketched above are really just illustrations of these methods, whose introduction is the main ambition of the book: using graphs to chart publication figures, maps to locate narrated events, and trees to study variation in the tropes that define a literary form.

In each case, the application of the methods is mostly inconclusive. But it belongs to Moretti's charm that he is at once grandiose and terribly modest. As he remarks about his own efforts (in Graphs): "Clearly, we must do better."

The book is very short. (89 pages with 33 figures: only 56 pages of text!) It is compulsively readable. And it is visually beautiful: perfect for "distant reading", though not quite in Moretti's sense.

Closer

2006-01-17T09:31:00.000-05:00

An unexpected benefit of myopia is that one can view things with an illusion of distance. For instance: the Chuck Close self-portraits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the absence of optical correction, the graph-paper of Kandinsky blots dissolves into the pulpy flesh of a Lucian Freud.

It is a synthesis of figure and abstraction that is denied to the well-sighted, at least in just this form. The spaces are too small to bring the features into focus – or properly out of it? – by backing away. One would have to stand on an imaginary scaffold suspended in the air some yards beyond the museum walls, which must in turn be made transparent.

Still, everyone does instinctively back away: retreating in awkward unison as the image descends into greater clarity – and others step in to obscure the view. The effect is one of forced or unearned intimacy, followed by distance and repulsion.

Some earlier paintings reverse the pattern: one stands at eye's width from an acrylic or watercolour that is a virtual photograph; from here, the brushstrokes can at last be made out.

More recent works must viewed one by one: a shadowy case of daguerrotypes, and a creeping corridor lined with luminous blue rectangles. They seem to be blank, at first: not so strange in a museum of modern art. But the crowds are staring in; the pictures are holographic.

I don't know how to articulate the point of these Close encounters; but I am sure that they communicate something. Is this an instance of non-discursive thought?

A Recent Letter to the New York Times

2006-01-09T10:15:00.000-05:00

This year is the centennial of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, during which he explained Brownian motion and the quantum nature of light, discovered special relativity and, as an afterthought, showed the equivalence of mass and energy. The 2005 Year in Ideas [in the New York Times Magazine] mostly offers a range of mildly amusing consumer products and the possibility of selling your forehead to advertisers.

NICHOLAS RYAN
Washington

Tolstoy without God

2006-01-02T13:35:00.000-05:00

Why resist the conception of art as communication proposed by Tolstoy in What is Art?

Art is that human activity which consists in one man's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.

One reason, already mentioned here is that it depends on a facile equation of communication with sharing. But this is easily remedied: what is conveyed when feelings are communicated is a way of understanding those feelings. Nor are we limited to "feelings" in a narrow sense: art communicates ideas of all kinds, ways of taking the world.

A more fundamental objection is that, when it thus revised, Tolstoy's picture "involves a confusion between life and art, even a failure to allow for the existence of art at all."

[This] appears as the belief that all good books are good primarily because they give us knowledge, teach us 'truths' about 'life'.

(These sentences are from C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism.)

If the point of art is to provide us with understanding, don't we have to say that literature is best "because it is the only art capable of reasoning"? (Thus John Carey, in What Good are the Arts?) Presumably, philosophy and science are best of all, at least when they are done well.

But these objections rest on a mistake. The understanding conveyed by art, on Tolstoy's conception, is non-discursive. We shouldn't be suspicious of this. To reject the idea of "non-discursive understanding" is to engage in the heresy of paraphrase: the view that the knowledge contained in a metaphor must be something we can express in non-metaphorical terms.

The same point applies to kinds of art: we should no more expect to put musical and visual understanding into words than to produce a discursive translation of John Donne. In the latter case, it may be tempting – but still hopeless. In the case of music, discursive expression is obviously limited. We reach for metaphors, and even these fall short. Tolstoy's conception does not imply that discursive literature is best.

It does neglect "the all-confusing concept of beauty", and deliberately so. But even this point can be exaggerated. Tolstoy's picture need not ignore mode of expression, or style. Rather, it presents these things as means: tools deployed in the communication of feelings or ideas. If art communicates well what is worth communicating, it cannot be defective in mode of expression. It must be well-written or well-composed. What artifice lacks, for Tolstoy, is final value.

It does not follow from this that the value of communication is merely instrumental, so that art is to be assessed, as such, by its consequences. It is this further claim that explains Tolstoy's hostility to difficult art, and his notorious view of what is "worth communicating":

[The] evolution of feelings takes place by means of art, replacing lower feelings, less kind and less needed for the good of humanity, by kinder feelings more needed for that good. This is the purpose of art. And therefore art is better in its content in so far as it fulfils this purpose better, and is worse in so far as it fulfils it less.

Since the best feelings are contained in the "the religious consciousness of a given time", the best art must be religious.

We can detach this conclusion from the communicative theory of art if we insist that communication is something good in itself. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: the question "What good are the arts?" is like the question "What is the good of listening to what anyone says?"

Modern Culture

2005-12-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

Roger Scruton is not a man of the people. In fact, he is John Carey's worst nightmare, someone who believes that "the high culture of our civilization contains knowledge which is far more significant than anything that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication": "not facts or theories but states of mind and moral virtues"; "high culture [is] a 'rite of passage' into the kingdom of ends."

The positive doctrine of Scruton's Modern Culture is not as clear as these phrases suggest. When he says the arts preserve "the ethical vision of man", he cannot mean that moral virtue is impossible without them (which is false). Nor is it plausible to claim that they are a source of "moral and emotional knowledge" that operates apart from how the arts are used. (Carey is right to criticize that. See, also, the extraordinary study by George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.)

At times, he suggests that art is valuable as an instance of "the unconsumable thing, wanted not as a means but for its own sake, as an end", or, more strongly, that it is final without qualification (in Aristotle's sense): "the mark of rational beings" is that they are "satisfied only by supremely useless things." I am partly sympathetic to this, but I cannot see why art (and in particular, Wagner) should be the only unconsumable good.

What Scruton really believes is not that art is uniquely final, or that it supports the everyday virtues, but that it is a secular religion.

We know that we are animals, parts of the natural order, bound by laws which tie us to the material forces which govern everything. We believe that the gods are our invention, and that death is exactly what it seems. Our world has been disenchanted and our illusions destroyed. At the same time we cannot live as though that were the whole truth of our condition. [...] The artistic goal is to make us recognize that we can live as if that higher life – the ethical life in extremis – were ours.

The problem is how to square this pretence with the idea that high culture contains significant knowledge. We cannot discard the cognitive aspiration of religion, and still retain its power to give meaning to life. If we hold that aspiration in place, what Scruton recommends can only appear as self-deception: an invitation to fake being profound: "to live as if it matters eternally what we do". This would explain the desperate rhetoric of Modern Culture; but it would not make it more persuasive.

A Man of the People

2005-12-19T09:40:00.000-05:00

The tone of John Carey's polemic, What Good are the Arts?, can be gauged from the author bio:

John Carey has been at various points in his life a soldier, a barman, a television critic, a beekeeper, a printmaker and a professor of literature at Oxford.

Presumably he was pulling a pint when he happened to notice an ad in the classifieds: "Wanted: Professor of Literature"; he sent a CV and the rest is history.

He would certainly object to the claim that his appointment turned on any kind of aesthetic expertise. In the first part of his book, he argues that there is no such thing:

[The] absence of any God-given absolutes, together with the impossibility of accessing other people's consciousness, prevents us – or should prevent us – from pronouncing other people's aesthetic judgements right or wrong.

For Carey, if God is dead, everything is permitted – in ethics and aesthetics alike. He sinks into relativism as into a warm bath.

My answer to the question 'What is a work of art?' is 'A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that person.'

Maybe everything is relative? It would be a mildly entertaining task to criticize this self-devouring view, or to investigate how it is meant to be consistent with the second part of the book, in which Carey makes a case "by rational explanation [...] for the superiority of literature to other arts." He is aware of the latter problem and confronts it head-on:

Just in case anyone should seize on these aims as inconsistent with the relativist cast of the first part of my book, let me emphasize that all the judgements made in this part, including the judgement of what 'literature' is, are inevitably subjective.

Well, that's a relief.

The real pity is that Carey conflates these routinely refutable views with ones that are more challenging. He is passionately critical of the moral pretensions of the arts. (Hitler figures predictably as a villain here, along with Kant and Iris Murdoch; the idea that art makes us better is a "farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion.") And he is incensed by the exclusiveness and arrogance of "high art". He directs his venom most fiercely at opera, and the visual art of the 20th century.

What sort of difficulty, it might be asked, do those attending operas encounter? What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing? Getting served at the bar in the interval often requires some effort, it is true, but even that could hardly qualify as difficult compared with most people's day's work.
[Taste] has nothing to do with intrinsic aesthetic values in the objects it chooses. It is a marker of class, reflecting educational level, social origin and economic power. [...] Its purpose is to register one's distinction from those lower in the social order.

Is "high art" obnoxiously elitist? What justifies the public expense that supports our art museums, and institutions like the National Opera?

These questions were pressed more likeably, though just as polemically, by Tolstoy, in What is Art?, a book to which Carey only partly marks his debt. Like Carey, Tolstoy finds opera ridiculous – witness the dead-pan description in War and Peace – and he objects to the exclusiveness and expense of modern art.

Nothing is more common than to hear said of alleged works of art that they are very good but difficult to understand. We are used to the assertion, and yet to say that a work of art is good but incomprehensible is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but people cannot eat it. [...] The business of art consists precisely in making understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning.

For Tolstoy, what art should communicate is "the religious consciousness of a given time".

Carey deprives himself of Tolstoy's argument by denying that art can communicate feelings: he is convinced of "the impossibility of accessing other people's consciousness". Thus, instead of claiming that good art must communicate well and therefore be accessible, so that difficult art is simply bad, Carey can only say that it is not good – at least not objectively good – since nothing is.

Admittedly, there is something naive in Tolstoy's conception of art, on which it causes the very same experience that was had by the artist. Nor it is easy to follow him in regarding Beethoven's Ninth as "artistic gibberish". His examples of good art belong to the "Hallmark" school, and include such things as porcelain dolls. But Tolstoy is deep where Carey is shallow, and his challenge to exclusive art deserves a response.

Art and Intention Revisited

2005-12-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

The new Museum of Modern Art is spectacular: so vastly transformed that it is difficult to recognize it as the same site. Such renovations can be painful for those of us who resist change. But there is nothing here akin to the desecration of the Rothko room at the old Tate Gallery. In fact, my favourite work at the Museum enjoys a wonderful new location: Umberto Boccioni's Development of a Bottle in Space now inhabits a windowed corner, where sunlight interacts with its own plastic and moving depiction.

Other revisions are more puzzling, though some of them induce a smile. Here is the curator's note to Carl Andre's 144 Lead Square:

Rejecting the notion of sculpture as art to be mounted on a pedestal and viewed from a distance, Andre wished to make sculpture that someone might perhaps not even notice, and might purposely or accidentally walk on. However, recent research into the properties of lead compels the Museum to caution visitors against stepping on this work.

Is this intended as an exploration of questions about art and intention – textual accompaniment as conceptual art? If so, it belongs with a pair of items by Robert Morris which occupy the same floor: Litanies (a lead cast resembling keys on a chain), and its partner, Document, the relevant part of which reads as follows:

The undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality or content. (notarized 11/15/63)

I can confirm that "esthetic quality and content" are now entirely absent from Litanies. But this is uninformative: I do not know how "said construction" looked before the 15th of November, 1963.

Two Notes

2005-12-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

First, that one of my favourite poets, Craig Raine – who wrote A Martian Sends a Postcard Home – has a long piece in the last TLS, "I remember my mother dying". It is less opaque than much of his other work, and very moving.

Second, that The Squid and the Whale finally came to Pittsburgh, and it is an extraordinary film. It has something of the feel of Wes Anderson's movies – he was a producer of this one – and a similar line in feckless, self-involved, male protagonists. Jeff Daniels is the equal of Bill Murray in Rushmore and The Life Aquatic, or Gene Hackman in The Royals Tenenbaums. The child actors are magnetic. I can't remember when I last saw a film I so much wanted not to end.

Truth in Ethics

2005-11-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

More "popular philosophy": this time philosophy of language, with applications to ethics.

In True to Life, Michael Lynch sets out to defend "four truisms about truth": truth is objective, a "cognitive good", a worthy goal of inquiry, and something valuable in itself. On the back cover, Nussbaum says that the book "performs a major public service".

The argument of the book is intricate, though it is presented with an enviably light touch. It begins with the platitude that a belief is correct if and only if its object is a true proposition; deduces that, if p is true, it is good to believe p, other things being equal; interprets this as final or non-instrumental value; and concludes that truth is itself a normative property, and, given Moore's "open question argument", an irreducible one: "If truth matters, reductive naturalism is false."

In a different context, it would be interesting to engage with these steps, each of which is controversial. Here, my focus is rhetorical. Who is Lynch writing for, and what are his chances of convincing them?

I think he cannot be writing for the post-modernist "enemies of truth" alleged to inhabit our English Departments. They will rightly feel that they are not taken seriously here. There is no mention of Derrida, and only a page or two on Foucault. In any case, the whole operation will seem to them naïvely unhistorical. To engage with them, one has to sink, or rise, to their level – as in Literature Against Itself.

Perhaps the aim of the book is prophylactic: it is meant to forestall the attractions of subjectivism and the cynical equation of truth with power. But if this is his persuasive task, Lynch has adopted an unfortunate strategy. Arguing that one cannot accept the value of truth without Moorean non-naturalism is bad salesmanship, even if is sound. It is not just the post-modern crowd who cannot stomach Principia Ethica: most philosophers find its commitments incredible.

The effect of True to Life, if it carries conviction, will thus be to enmire the truisms about truth in a swamp of metaphysics, to retrench the suspicion that those who believe in the possibility and the value of objective truth inhabit a Platonic jungle. As I said, that might be so – I haven't tried to engage with Lynch's arguments – but it would be terrible news. This truth might be one of those we do better not to believe.

What does it all mean? (III)

2005-11-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

It may seem that we are getting nowhere fast. My excuse is that the question is not easy. But I am ready to attempt an answer, for what it's worth. What follows is less philosophy than autobiography. It is tentative and provisional in the highest degree.

Life may come to seem meaningless in many different ways. What do they have in common? I think it is this: they are all ways of bringing out the contingency of life. What is really upsetting about Darwin is not mechanism, but the opposite: the sense that our very existence is happenstance, the product of random forces that might easily have gone another way. Fear of death is about the precariousness of one's existence.

The stories that might give meaning to life are stories of necessity. The idea of God's design, of teleology, is a story in which we have to exist, we are needed by God, we are essential. Nietzsche's myth of the eternal recurrence answers to part of the same urge: this life will happen again and again because it must.

In discussing the problem of evil, John Cottingham describes the theodicy according to which imperfection is inevitable because, in creating the world, God had to subtract from himself. He connects this with the inevitability of death:

Any creatures inhabiting a material planet, and themselves made of matter, formed of 'the dust of the earth', will necessarily be mortal […] we cannot coherently wish […] that God had created a material world not subject to change, decay and suffering […] the very possibility of existence […] depends on mortality […]

If this were true, if it were really a metaphysical necessity (not just a natural law) that we are mortal, I think – though it is hard to be sure – I would no longer be afraid to die. It would be incoherent, in a way, to rail against death from love of life, if life were strictly impossible without death. (I say it is hard to be sure because the claim of metaphysical necessity seems to me obviously false, and barely intelligible. Mortality is a physical necessity; it is not part of the essence of things, and I am not sure how it could have been.)

At any rate, the interpretation of the demand for meaning as a demand for necessity explains why it is satisfied for all of us, or none. It accounts for the relevance of God. And it makes sense of the importance of size. Contemplating the vastness of the cosmos is another way to bring out the contingency of our existing at all.

None of this explains why necessity should matter to us, or how contingency would justify the fear of death. But what did you expect? Surely it's enough that I have answered the question of life's meaning, even if I have not explained what the question is. The answer is sung by the strings in the final movement of Beethoven's last quartet. The meaning of life is the reason why whatever is, must be.

What does it all mean? (II)

2005-11-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sensation, and death is the privation of all sensation. [...] Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation.

Thus Epicurus in his Letter to Menoeceus. His arguments – there are others, too – prompt a standard reply: even if (what seems doubtful) pleasure and pain are the only things that matter in life, death may still come as a harm to us in depriving us of the pleasure we would otherwise have had.

Suppose that is right. Would it be enough to justify our attitude to death? If death is not bad for us, there is no reason to fear it. But the converse is less clear: not everything bad is worthy of fear. Fear has to do with the uncertain. It is just as irrational to be afraid of an inevitable harm as it is of something harmless. The proper emotion is dread, or resentment, or grim resignation. In any case, the violence of my terrified reaction to the prospect of death is completely out of proportion to the deprivation that orthodox philosophers describe. If I am not irrational in this, the answer to Epicurus must have left something out. But what?

Here is my conjecture, which takes us back to our original topic: if you know the meaning of life, you will not be afraid to die. If life has meaning, it must be something to reconcile us to extinction – even if it does so by denying that the death of the body is the death of the soul. That is why I was not satisfied, last time, by the teleological interpretation of the meaning of life, at least when it is unadorned. Even if I believed in it, I would still be frozen with anxiety at the thought of death. What justifies this fear (as it seems to me) is the thought that life is meaningless.

Wittgenstein made it fashionable to defend non-cognitivism about religious conviction: what we call "belief" here is a certain attitude, not the representation of a fact. Hence his impatience with The Golden Bough:

Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors. Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?

In his book, On the Meaning of Life, John Cottingham flirts with a version of this:

[Faith] is hard to describe in purely cognitive terms; for it is not primarily characterisable in terms of propositions assented to, but is a matter of a certain orientation in which emotions and beliefs and practices of worship and moral convictions merge together in what Wittgenstein called a 'passionate commitment' to a certain form of life.

This approach to the spiritual can be tempting, but if I am right about death and the meaning of life, then it must be wrong. To grasp the meaning of life – which religion is meant to provide – it is not sufficient to undergo a non-cognitive change through which one ceases to fear death. (Therapy or yoga might do that.) Instead one has to know something that makes it wrong to be afraid. This knowledge may depend on emotional transformation; but it must be knowledge all the same.

To know an answer to the question 'What is the meaning of human life?' means to be religious.

So Einstein claimed. And while his statement must be qualified, at least this much is true: knowledge of God is sufficient for knowledge of meaning (if there is any such thing). Since knowledge of meaning is cognitive, so is knowledge of God.

What does it all mean? (I)

2005-11-07T10:23:00.000-05:00

In the opening chapter of his book, On the Meaning of Life, John Cottingham asks: "Can a radically immoral life really be meaningful?" He proposes some conditions that might rule this out: "the meaningful life for human beings is an integrated life", whereas the life of the torturer, say, is likely to be fragmented. What is more, "in order to be meaningful, life must meet the standards of some pattern tailored to our human nature, rather than being a pure function of isolated individual choice."

Forget, for a moment, whether these claims are true. What do they have to do with the meaning of life? It is a famously opaque question, but as I understand it, when we ask whether life has meaning, we are not interested in the meaningfulness of individual lives, but in human life in general. Scepticism about the meaning of life is not piecemeal: "Ned's life isn't meaningful, nor is Kate's, nor is mine. I wonder whether anyone has a meaningful life?" If human life has meaning, all human life has meaning; if not, none. Consequently, much of Cottingham's discussion strikes me as mis-directed. (I have the same complaint about other recent work on the topic.)

To repeat: the demand for meaning is obscure. How to get a grip on it? One strategy is to look at the ways in which it might be satisfied – or not.

So, what could give meaning to life? The overwhelmingly instinctive response is: God. Thus, I think it is a constraint on any adequate account of the question of life's meaning to explain why this would seem to do the job.

In much the same way, we need to make sense of the argument that life is meaningless because we are tiny specks in an endless cosmos – even if we reject that argument in the end. Much as I adore it, I cannot be satisfied with Ramsey's charming riposte:

Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.

A tempting proposal is that life has meaning just in case human lives play a role in a larger functional whole. After all, the question of life's meaning is often framed as a question about the point of life, about whether it has a purpose. This would account for the relevance of God, but also for the view that life has meaning only because it is social, and the attempt to give meaning to life by putting us "in harmony with nature".

There must something in this "functional interpretation", but it does not take us very far. For one thing, it won't explain why the magnitude of the universe seems like an argument against the meaning of life. On the functional view, appeal to size is no more than a stand-in for mechanism or the rejection of purpose, as in the planetarium scene of Rebel Without a Cause. But the problem of mechanism is about freedom and agency, not about meaning: it is not the problem I have in mind.

In any case, the functional interpretation makes it hard to see why we should want life to have meaning. What is the appeal of being cogs in a divine machine? As well as explaining why God seems relevant, and why size really matters, an interpretation of our question must explain why anyone should care about the meaning of life.

Thinking in Action

2005-10-31T10:23:00.000-05:00

In search of "popular philosophy", I have decided to read some volumes in the Routledge series, Thinking in Action, edited by Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney. I recommend Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, but it is too political to be examined here. (Dummett is famous for giving up work on Frege: Philosophy of Language to fight against racism in Britain, returning only when he was sure he had failed. The preface to the Frege book is painful to read.)

The series offers many possibilities. I was tempted by Zizek's On Belief, but it has already been pilloried by John Holbo. Instead, I settled on two: On Humanism, by Richard Norman, and On the Meaning of Life. (Further volumes that may be of interest to this audience: On Anxiety and On the Internet.)

On Humanism is a nice corrective to Straw Dogs. For Norman, "humanism" is not blind faith in progress, or in some radical difference between us and other animals, but, principally, belief in ethics without God. This a pretty modest conviction, I think. The style is sober and unpretentious. Not much here will be new to philosophers: a critical review of standard arguments for the existence of God, an attack on the "divine command theory" of morals, a survey of utilitarianism and objections to it. The book would make a good introduction to philosophy – although, in that role, it could do with a guide to further reading.

It is not flawless. In rejecting God, Norman assumes that a belief is unjustified unless we can provide a reason for it that would apply to others. He does not acknowledge the notorious difficulties in meeting this foundationalist demand. For instance, in questioning religious experience, he argues that knowledge of the content of perception always depends on having "reliable independent grounds" by which to establish its cause. This could be the premise of a valid argument for scepticism about the five senses. It is therefore not a good premise to use in argument against belief in God.

The more interesting claim, anyway, is that we can make sense of ethics without God. Norman gives the usual objections to the divine command theory: if God's commands are not arbitrary, they must appeal to an independent standard of right and wrong; and it is in any case bad to be motivated by mere commands, or out of fear punishment and desire for reward. You might think that no-one holds so crude a view, but I can point to at least one: my geographical forebear, John Clarke of Hull (1687-1734). In an accounting of the most influential philosophers to come from my home town, he would, unfortunately, be first. His brief glory was to have been refuted by Francis Hutcheson – though it is a tribute to the retrograde character of British philosophy that he was taken seriously at all.

The best part of Norman's book is the final chapter, which begins with a puzzling fact.

Looking back [...], I cannot escape the feeling that everything I have said is obvious. [...] That view sits uneasily alongside the recognition that most of [it] would be rejected by most human beings, now and throughout history.

If it is apparent to Norman, and to me, that there can be ethics without God, why has it been orthodox to assume otherwise? He doesn't really attempt to resolve this quandary, and perhaps it lies outside his, and my, expertise. Let the sociologists go to work. But I can't resist a speculation. God seems necessary, I think, not directly for ethics, but for life to have meaning. (Ethics would be threatened by the death of God only if, as I doubt, it depends upon the meaning of life.) If atheists like me want to make sense of the moral-philosophical significance of religious belief, it is this inscrutable question that we must address.

Nostalgia for the Stone Age

2005-10-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

It is occasionally good to read a book you expect to hate, a book designed to irritate. I have done so, and now you, dear reader, must suffer the consequences.

The book is Straw Dogs by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the LSE. It is a sustained attack on what he takes to be the prevalent "humanism" of modern culture: the claim that humans are radically different from other animals (for instance, in being free, or conscious, or rational, or moral), which supports an unbending faith in progress. His goal is to put humanity in its place, to prick our misplaced arrogance: "human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould".

Home rapiens [sic] is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

It is clear from similar passages that Gray identifies with Gaia – to use his term – not with humankind. He is looking forward to our extinction almost with excitement. Straw Dogs gives misanthropy a bad name.

I had expected to write a post attacking Gray's arguments, but this is not to be. For one thing, the book consists largely of unargued assertion, so it is hard to know where to resist (if not everywhere). There are many contradictions. For another, I don't question Gray's doubts about our future happiness – though that doesn't stop me from hoping for it. I do think he gets carried away, in hinting that the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age enjoyed a neo-communist utopia, in suggesting that "humanism" leads inevitably to the search for virtual or cryogenic immortality (!), and in his apparently sincere (gleeful?) prediction of the rise of the machines:

Natural life forms have no built-in evolutionary advantage over organisms that began their life as artefacts. [...] As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings [...]

The question, how we are different from other animals, is more recognizably philosophical. But Gray is impatient with, and frankly ignorant of, philosophy and its history. He remarks without irony that Socrates "was guided by a daimon, an inner oracle, whose counsels he followed without question", and suggests that "Hume has had little influence". While being critical of philosophy, Gray does not attempt to do better – though he gives the impression that he thinks it would be easy. (His treatment of freedom and determinism is sophomoric.) When we do find arguments, they tend to the bizarre, as in his critique (?) of science:

According to [...] Karl Popper, a theory is scientific only in so far as it is falsifiable, and should be given up as soon as it is falsified. By this standard, the theories of Darwin and Einstein should never have been accepted. [...] As pictured by philosophers, science is a supremely rational activity. Yet the history of science shows scientists flouting the rules of scientific method. Not only the origins but the progress of science come from acting against reason.

When Popper's theory conflicts with scientific practice, the right moral to draw is not that he is wrong about reason or scientific method, but that science is irrational? It's certainly an original move.

Gray's book has been hailed as "powerful and brilliant" (J. G. Ballard), as "a remarkable new work of philosophy" (Will Self), as "daunting and enthralling" (Adam Phillips). In reality, it is shallow and lazy. It makes one despair to think of it as an emblem of public philosophical reflection.

The topic could have been important, and even timely: one of the great conflicts in philosophy of mind is between reductive naturalism (which, despite Gray, is the orthodox view) and what might be thought of as a kind of "humanism", on which there is a radical discontinuity between rational beings and "brutes", between the space of reasons and the space of natural law. These questions about our place in the scheme of things are much discussed by philosophers, though you wouldn't know it to look at Gray. They have a long history, from Aristotle to the present. (Gray is wrong to suppose that "humanism" is a Christian legacy, or that it is obviously refuted by Darwin.) But they are difficult. If there is to be such a thing as popular philosophy, it will have to make much greater demands on the attention and intelligence of its readers. I hope the reception of Straw Dogs is not good evidence of what we can expect.

Deus Ex Machina

2005-10-17T10:29:00.000-05:00

I said in a previous post that I would like to believe in God. I should clarify this. I do not crave ritual (I have plenty of that), or organized religion. I don't want to worship God. I just want Him to exist. It would make the world unimaginably different to see it in the divine light.

My sense of the God I want there to be is captured by an anecdote about my wedding. We had trouble finding an officiant. The first person we asked turned out to be an evangelical talk radio host (long story...). He did not want to do anything "pagan". The parting was mostly amicable, and entirely mutual. Cautioned by this, we began to search for someone with both gravity and flexibility. We found Bob Epps, who used to be the campus minister at IU. Our meeting with him was reassuring. He voiced a willingness to do almost anything, with minimal provisos: no livestock or drugs during the ceremony. While disappointed, we were prepared to compromise. At last we reached the sticking point: what should be the text?

"We are thinking about the Book of Common Prayer," I said, "but I don't want 'God' to be there."

"Whether you mention Him or not," he replied, "God is going to be there."

That seems right.

Strategic Opacity

2005-10-10T09:13:00.000-05:00

Shakespeare's biography is impossible for a different reason: an insufficiency of facts. Stephen Greenblatt's recent stab at the task is at times so self-consciously speculative as to resemble a literary experiment. Where Georges Perec wrote a novel (Things) almost entirely in the subjunctive – "They would open the mail; they would open the newspapers. They would light their first cigarette. They would go out." – and another in the second person (A Man Asleep), Will in the World is composed in the mode of epistemic possibility. It tells us only what could have been the case. This generates some comic moments, as maybe compounds upon might, and we end up imagining something that almost certainly was not. But Greenblatt's prose is exquisitely atmospheric, and it motivates the suspension of disbelief.

His best interpretive argument is not that Shakespeare's leather imagery stems from working in his father's glove shop, or that Falstaff was based on Robert Greene, but this:

Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.

If Hamlet does not fain madness in order to protect himself until he comes of age – as in some earlier versions of the story – why? If Lear does not test Cordelia's love in order to force a profitable marriage – why?

The theory of strategic opacity deserves a fuller treatment – which it perhaps receives elsewhere. The quoted description suggests, I think unhappily, that it has the character of an empirical discovery, as though Shakespeare noticed the reactions of his audience, and figured out the recipe. This is not what Greenblatt intends. But then he owes us something more, an account of what it means to excise motives, a hermeneutics of the explanatory gap.

It is curious that, in puzzling over the scarce remains of Shakespeare's life – the absence of letters, confessions, essays, even books inscribed with his name – Greenblatt does not mark the irony: if this was deliberate, Shakespeare made himself strategically opaque. Our relation to him is like our relation to Hamlet, or King Lear. He is a figure of myth. That is why, as Woolf remarked, his plays "seem to hang there complete by themselves." I am not sure how to feel about this. Should we want to think of Shakespeare's life as a "riddle to be solved"? Or is the biographer who does so akin to a critic in search of Othello's missing coda – the scene in which Iago grants that, yes, he was in love with Desdemona all along.

Rosebud

2005-10-03T09:24:00.000-05:00

Biography is impossible. As Iris Murdoch wrote (describing the protagonist's first discovery in La Nausée), "[There] are no adventures. Adventures are stories and one does not live a story." But a biography is a novel. And so it is inevitably false.

This argument assumes, with Forster, that a novel tells a story – not always true in these post-modern times. But the thirst for biography is a thirst for novels that do tell stories: for Victorian novels, with a moral, a beginning, a middle, an end. A human life is bound to have at least two of these; the problem is that the others must be supplied.

If this is impossible in any case, it is especially dangerous in one's own. But I was disappointed, all the same, to see that the title of my prospective autobiography had been scooped by A. N. Wilson, for a chapter of his anti-biography, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her: "Hull is other people." ("Hull" is the name of my home town in Yorkshire.)

Wilson's book is gripping and occasionally brilliant: he wrestles lazily with the problems of explaining a life by telling it in order, opting first for an account of Murdoch's (possibly disingenuous) request for him to write her biography, and then for a series of episodes in the attempt to understand her work through aspects of her life: her "Irishness", her philosophy, her friends, her attitude to God, and her tactic in conversation of asking incessant but trivial questions.

His approach is resolutely impious. Wilson's Murdoch is no saint, a flawed artist, not much of a philosopher. Amidst the criticism, which is sometimes forced, and which he retracts ambiguously in his final pages, Wilson frames what I think of as the fundamental question about her work: what are we to make of the fact that so many of her novels begin with gravity – with metaphysics and morals – only to descend into melodramatic farce? In a perceptive review, Elijah Millgram argued that even Murdoch's best novels are, by her own moral and aesthetic standards, bad: escapist entertainment, full of comic and erotic capers. They must "be counted as consoling fantasy rather than as truthful art." I am sure he is wrong about this; but the critical challenge is right.

I don't have a firm answer to it. One might attempt to trace the problem to her own life, which was apparently one of intellectual attraction to the Good, combined with a toxic and destructive lust for affairs and intrigues and lies. Murdoch was well acquainted with what she called "the greedy organism of the self".

As befits his scepticism about biography, Wilson has a different idea: that the modern novel lends itself to existentialism, and that this worked for Murdoch in some early attempts, until her conversion to Platonism got in the way.

Is not such a concept [that of a Platonist novel] self-contradictory at a very deep level?

I don't know. After all, what would one expect of a Platonist novel, if not that the souls of its characters should be dragged back to the sordid material world?

A rhetorical question is not an argument – not for Wilson, and not for me. But, still, I can't help thinking that there is a solution to the puzzle, if not of Murdoch herself, then of the novels she so fluently and carelessly wrote.

In Praise of Post-Its

2005-09-26T13:16:00.000-05:00

They have made an incalculable difference to intellectual life, pushing at the boundaries of human ignorance. How was research possible without them – or systematic thought? One is led to speculate: did Aristotle's edition of Plato flash with pale yellow? did Leonardo make a blueprint for the post-it note, beside the helicopter and a sketch of the Mona Lisa? Wittgenstein once wrote (to Gilbert Pattison) that he would like to "card-index" his mind. Thanks to Romy and Michelle, this is finally possible.

"A difficulty is a light"

2005-09-19T14:05:00.000-05:00

Recent debates about "bad writing" have been occupied almost exclusively with "theory". Judith Butler was the target of the most fearsome assault: according to Nussbaum, she "collaborates with evil". Having embraced obscurity – after a fashion – I have been thinking about bad or difficult writing in philosophy.

To begin with, these are not the same, since difficult writing can be very good, and also very clear. A crude operational definition: with difficult writing the risk is incomprehension or lack of understanding; with bad writing, it is mis-comprehension, thinking one understands when one does not.

This distinction is stressed, though not defined, by many contributors to Just Being Difficult?, a humourless and somewhat smug defence of "theoretical" writing edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Much of the book is hardly worth discussing, since it operates at a level of generality that is bound to miss the point. As I understand it, the accusation of "bad writing" can only be piecemeal or inductive: this or that writer is needlessly obscure, and his bad arguments are disguised by impossible prose. The charge is properly made in focused essays like Nussbaum's, and properly defused in the same way – as, for instance, in Culler's effective paper on Stanley Cavell. There is little to be gained from operatic gestures towards the political subversion of grammar and the (alleged) paradox of using language to describe itself – or from yet another invocation of "Politics and the English Language".

The more interesting questions are sociological. For instance, "theorists" and philosophers alike are plausibly said to write in inaccessible ways, even when they write well. (There are exceptions to this, but it is more or less the rule.) It is also true that they are not very widely read. But which is cause and which effect, if either? Does philosophy have a narrow audience, mainly of professionals, because it is esoteric? Or did it become more esoteric with the contraction of its audience, which allowed for the indulgence of technicality, and ensured a readership of (only) experts? I have no idea – nor am I sure that the audience for philosophy has very much declined in this century, or how to measure such a thing. I doubt that McTaggart was on the bookshelf of every educated Brit.

The debate about bad writing has a longer history still. In one of the better essays in Just Being Difficult? it is traced to David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature "fell dead-born from the press". A review from 1740:

I should have taken no notice of what he has wrote, if I had not thought this book, in several parts, so very abstruse and perplex'd, that, I am convinced, no Man can comprehend what he means; and as one of the greatest Wits of the Age has justly observed, this may impose upon weak Readers, and make them imagine, there is a Great Deal of deep Learning in it, because they do not understand it.

Poor Hume. I am afraid that his unfortunate fate endures. In teaching the history of ethics to undergraduates, I assign Book Three of the Treatise instead of the more friendly exposition of the second Enquiry. Still, I was never prepared for its reception: by some inversion of the order of nature, my students prefer the prose of Kant's Groundwork to that of Hume. They read Kant in contemporary translation, of course. (This fact is the impetus for Jonathan Bennett's re-compositions of early modern philosophy.) But however hard it is to convey the pleasure of Hume's style, one has to try. By the operational definition, the Treatise of Human Nature is badly written: elusive, ambiguous, obtuse. How does one learn to experience its difficulty as a sun?

Philosophy and the Two Cultures

2005-09-12T11:41:00.001-05:00

In a recent edition of the LRB, Rorty reviewed Scott Soames' two-volume history of analytic philosophy. The books are absolutely packed with arguments; Soames is a kind of anti-Gellner: meticulous, discriminating, unhistorical.

The review is positive, I think, and it is initially hard to fathom the antagonism in Soames' response. He objects to Rorty's desire for "grand synthesis", praising the specialization of contemporary analytic philosophy. What is puzzling is that philosophy remains relatively un-specialized: it is still possible for the very great to have an educated view about the whole range of philosophical questions. There was only one David Lewis, it is true, but there are others who are like him in this respect. And even those of us well-advised to aim at smaller goals should be able to say how their minutiae relate to the big questions. Philosophical specialists typically can describe these relations, even if their publications do not always spell them out.

In the background, I suspect, is a picture of Rorty as anti-philosophical, and as willfully obscure, specialization being understood as the price of clarity. Neither charge has much to do with the content of the review. Both are pursued at greater length – though Rorty is not named – in a paper that resonates with Soames' remarks: Timothy Williamson's "Must Do Better". It, too, is an argument in favour of small questions, of philosophical specialization, and especially of patient, rigorous intellectual care: we must spell out the criteria by which to judge reflection, the "forms of philosophical discipline".

In one way, this self-described "sermon" is impossible to dispute. Of course, yes, let's work hard, really try to the find the truth and not be lazy. Why, then, do I find myself resisting its appeal? Not because I have much sympathy with the quietists, those "opponents of systematic philosophical theorizing". (This could be misleading: apart from Rorty, I'm not sure who these people are.) And only in part because of the tone – which is, as Williamson notes, "like the headmaster of a minor public school at speech day, telling everyone to pull their socks up after a particularly bad term". What I mainly resist is the demand for explicit methods in philosophy, at least as something universal.

This is a tricky point. In trying to make it, one can seem to advocate "work that is not properly disciplined by anything." That is not what I mean to do. And I think we should be self-conscious about the fraught epistemology of philosophical thought. But I am wary of the moments in "Must Do Better" that sound like expressions of faith in philosophy as science, and of the rousing final remarks:

This is not the end of philosophy. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

That philosophy will become science, that there are rules for the direction of the mind – this has been the illusion of every sage in every age. It has produced work of genius. (Williamson quotes Grice with approval: "By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed, I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers.") But any method tends to exclude. There is a tension between Williamson's standards and a kind of openness we definitely need.

I am tempted by a tenuous comparison. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Snow argued for the replacement of "traditional culture" by science, in the service of a practical goal: the alleviation of poverty. One wants to say in response to this: yes to the goal, and to the details; but no to the idea of science as culture, and no to the expulsion of the vague, blundering, creative, method-less humanities. Snow's main error of fact was to claim that "the writers" did not respond to the Industrial Revolution. He seems not to have noticed the political impact of Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin. Or rather, he says that they "shuddered [and] produced fancies, which were not much in effect more than screams of horror." But whether they had policies to propose (as some did) or not, they were necessary.

You can see where the analogy is going (and why it is limited). My fear is that the tension between novelty or imagination and transparent methodology is one that we cannot eliminate. If philosophy were in its endgame, it might be right to insist that every move be played by set rules. But if the idea of an endgame makes sense, which I doubt, I am sure it is not here yet. We will need new ideas, unexpected ones, ones that seem obscure and difficult and hard to make precise. Philosophy, no more than culture, is ready to be scientific. So, while some should formulate explicit methods, and do the work that Williamson describes, I do not see that everyone must. The value of diversity is greater than the benefits to come from universal rigour. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The Aristocracy of Taste

2005-09-06T09:32:00.000-05:00

A disappointing film, The Aristocrats, and not only for the predictable reason that it was excessively praised in the New York Times: A. O. Scott called it "one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time."

Perhaps that was a joke? If so, it is not nearly as good as the joke that forms the basis for the film – which is itself not good enough to sustain us for 90 minutes. Criticism is very thin on the ground, but it is desperately needed: The Aristocrats in fact makes almost nothing of the analytical potential of its material.

By now, everyone knows the focus of this documentary, so it is not much of a spoiler to describe it here:

Set-up: A man goes to a talent agent to sell his act; the agent asks him to describe it.

Development (improvised): "It's a family act"; the description is scatalogical and utterly obscene – shitting, pissing, vomiting, incest.

Punch-line: "What do you call yourselves?" "The Aristocrats."

It is a very mediocre joke, and part of the consequent interest is that its success depends massively upon the telling. Jokes and risk: the public invitation of failure. That's a worthwhile theme. But the documentary cannot address it, because it is (understandably) unwilling to criticize any of its comedians. Some tell the joke well; some do it badly. This is the data that the film provides – but from which it is deprived of access by a conviction that its contributors are uniformly great.

Still, the evidence is available to us. What does it suggest? If the film were an argument, it would be a sustained defence of Hutcheson's theory in his Thoughts on Laughter of 1725:

That then which seems generally the cause of laughter, is 'the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance to the principal idea: this contrast between ideas of grandeur, dignity, sanctity, perfection, and ideas of meanness, baseness, profanity, seems to be the very spirit of burlesque; and the greatest part of our raillery and jest are founded upon it'.

In the best performances of "The Aristocrats", there is a double incongruity, between the material and the punch-line, and (as George Carlin points out) between the content of the material and its delivery as entertainment or matter of fact. (Bergson's "mechanical encrusted on the living"?) This is "burlesque", not "gross-out" humour, or the comedy of sheer obscenity – which explains the failure of many comics in the film, who mistakenly try to shock.

There is a final incongruity: that of sophisticated observational comedians adopting (but revising) an old-fashioned vaudeville form. This is not material they would use on stage – with the exception of Gilbert Gottfried's remarkable (though not very funny) rendition, shortly after 9/11.

This discrepancy may prompt light-hearted speculation about "the death of the joke" – another issue virtually unexplored by The Aristocrats. The question is addressed more rigorously by Alexei Sayle, in a wise remark about acculturation, historicity and the perspectival character of humour:

Why did music hall die out? Because it was crap!

Realpolitik

2005-08-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

Last time, I elected to forgo criticism; but Hampshire's argument is serious. It deserves a response.

He needs to establish that justice is a matter of hearing both sides, that this demand has bite, and that it is politically neutral: it is established by a "kind of transcendental argument" as a matter of practical reason alone.

The rational ground of respect is rationality itself, the habit of balancing pros and cons in argument, a norm [we] cannot without disaster discard in [our] own thinking.

Suppose we grant that the weighing of reasons in our own lives is inevitable. How is it meant to follow that reason requires us to weigh the claims of others in public discourse? Two answers are suggested by the book.

First, while "questions of fairness in the distribution of goods and of penalties are always matters of opinion and often give rise to conflicts [...] it is a necessity, and not a matter of opinion, that such conflicts should be resolved either by argument or by force." True enough; but why not opt for the latter, if one is powerful enough?

Second, in Hampshire's version of the Platonic analogy between city and soul, individual practical reason derives from public adversarial debate: "the habit of argument within the solitary soul [...] is modeled on the habit of argument within assemblies, committees and law courts."

The public situations I have mentioned give rise to corresponding mental processes [...] the idea of an individual's being unbiased, open-minded, and rational in his thinking has sense for us because we know what it is for a public procedure of discussion to be unbiased, open-minded and rational.

Procedural justice as practical reason is therefore presupposed by individual rationality, which we cannot do without.

I am not sure what to make of this claim. It does not follow, as Hampshire sometimes suggests, from the platitude that we learn the language of reasoning (like all language) from its public use. And there is no other argument here.

Nor does the analogy give much content to procedural justice. After all, what does it mean to "hear both sides"? For Hampshire, the answer to this question lies in an appeal to brute convention: the contingent facts of how we happen to proceed. My suspicion is that this is the book's more basic "transcendental argument", one that is suggested by a passage in which its project is first spelled out:

I shall argue that Plato is right about the existence of the analogy between the soul and the city and also right that the concept of justice is best explained by this analogy; but I shall argue that justice cannot consist of any kind of harmony or consensus either in the soul or in the city, because there will never be such a harmony, either in the soul or in the city.

This argument against justice as harmony relies on a suppressed premise: that justice is possible (as harmony is not). Despite Hampshire's claim to a "thoroughgoing skepticism and negativity", it is a kind of optimism that supports his pragmatic approach. Justice must be fair procedure, and fair procedure must be roughly what we take it to be, if there is any justice in the world. (That would explain Hampshire's praise of "shabby compromise", of politicians and statesmen who "sacrifice some of their own ideals and moral commitments for the sake of preserving their alliances.")

I respect and understand the impulse to realism in Justice is Conflict, but I am afraid that Hampshire does not see the danger here, or does not see it vividly enough. "It is the best we can manage" has often worked as an excuse for the evils of poverty, imprisonment and humiliation that he so evidently detests.

Justice as Practical Reason

2005-08-22T13:06:00.000-05:00

Bradley's dictum about metaphysics, which I cited last time, has an analogue in ethics, well expressed by Stuart Hampshire in the Preface to Justice is Conflict:

"In moral and political philosophy one is looking for adequate premises from which to infer conclusions already and independently accepted because of one's feelings and sympathies."

Because practical reason is not distinct from the rightness of one's emotional response (that is, from character), this is not a sceptical or relativist claim, and Hampshire is not deterred by it:

I came to recognize that my socialist sympathies, and loyalty to the political left, were far from unreasonable, and not at all difficult to defend, in proportion as they were traceable to emotions engendered by the persisting evils of human life: and poverty in all its modern forms is certainly one.

We should be moved by the perennial evils, and one "can read about the mutilations of war, tyranny, massacres, and starvation described by ancient writers, as if one is reading a twentieth-century newspaper." This is exactly right. It is what Simone Weil argued in "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" – force being "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." And it is a reason for the permanent impact of Beethoven's Fidelio.

Hampshire's remarks might lead one to expect a book with few arguments, a book against argument in ethics. But it is really the opposite: a plea for procedural justice, in which both sides are heard. Justice is conflict – if conflict is conceived as adversarial reasoning.

Although he does not put it this way himself, Hampshire's argument for the plea can be seen as a radical response to the distinction between "ideal" and "non-ideal" political theory. He stands against the ideal tradition, in Plato and as it survives in Nozick and Rawls. The tactic of A Theory of Justice does not go far enough: we need to find an account of fairness that is not only neutral with respect to competing moral conceptions in liberal society, but with respect to societies that are illiberal (for instance, theocratic). Consequently, practical politics cannot be seen as the application of ideal theory, at all; the picture suggested by "non-ideal theory" is a mistake. For Hampshire, practical politics must always and everywhere be defined by fairness as the hearing of conflicting claims, though there is "no rational necessity about the more specific rules and conventions determining the criteria for success in argument in any particular institution".

The cardinal problem for this view is to explain why the demand for procedural justice, even in this vague form, is not itself a substantive claim, an illicit application of ideal theory. What justifies it? And how can it stand above the fray? Hampshire's response is suggestive but obscure. He presents "a kind of transcendental argument" that the "authority and the justification are to be found in the structure of practical reason itself." Individual rationality is the weighing of considerations; and Plato was right to draw an analogy between city and soul. Thus, procedural justice is part of practical reason.

This move is impossible to evaluate on the slender basis given by the book. In any case, I do not want to criticize. I have the habit of underlining memorable sentences or passages in whatever I read. With Justice is Conflict, I found myself marking up half of every page. The prose is perfect; not a word is wasted. And what it argues, however schematic or incomplete, is wise.

Wishful Thinking

2005-08-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

Philosophy has never recovered from the damage done to its image around the middle of the last century: it came to seem dull, insipid and mechanical, a pedantic exploration of how language works. One of the great polemics against "linguistic" or "ordinary language" philosophy is back in print, in a handsome Routledge edition: Ernest Gellner's Words and Things.

Reading it now, you can see why it was explosive, with its combination of wit and flagrant disavowal of interpretive charity. Gellner is happy to attribute bad motives, bad ideas and sheer confusions to the philosophers he dislikes, and he is often very funny in doing so.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [...] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words...

There are many more passages like this; although it is quite repetitive, I recommend reading the whole book.

It is a shame, however, about the preface to the new edition by Ian Jarvie, which is a missed opportunity. What Gellner mainly objects to in the "ordinary language" approach is its attack on philosophical doctrines as meaningless, its argument that philosophical problems always arise from linguistic confusion, and its consequent resistance to constructive theory: philosophy is therapy. Jarvie insists that "Linguistic Philosophy continues to be the tacit backbone of 'analytic philosophy', uncritically unacknowledged." This is simply false. Most of the strategies and arguments that Gellner rejects are dormant nowadays. Constructive theory is rife. The only general continuity lies in paying attention to language, but Gellner is rightly tolerant of that: it is a problem for him only when it becomes exclusive. A good essay could have been written, in the spirit of the book itself, about the recent history of philosophy, and the complicated place of Austin and Wittgenstein within it.

In any case, the value of Words and Things is not mainly in the light it casts on contemporary practice, or in its critical arguments – for Gellner, "exposition and refutation are one", and subtle distinctions are not worth bothering about – but in its sociological attitude to philosophical thought. This is easy to caricature. It can be reminiscent of an article once published in the The Sun, about a psychiatrist who diagnosed Wittgenstein as schizophrenic, observing that his work is "superficially profound, but on examination, meaningless." In Gellner, it occasionally amounts to pseudo-science: "[a] rough law holds for the history of philosophy, namely: P = 1/p, where P is Platonism and p psychologism." It has to be legitimate, however, to ask about the motives of philosophers. Some of the best insights in Gellner's book are of this kind, as when he explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

Apart from its sarcasm, this seems to me an apt account of the attractions of anti-foundationalism, in one of its forms. It is akin to the "naturalism of second nature" in John McDowell's Mind and World: we hope to integrate irreducible normativity into the natural world by giving a naturalistic account of how we come to think about irreducible norms. You can see why someone would want this to work.

I don't mean to be disparaging. In fact, I find it striking that my own philosophical views, with one or two exceptions – atheism, for instance – are ones that I want to be true. Does that apply to other philosophers? How often do we argue against our heart's desire? And would it undermine philosophy to learn that it is, like metaphysics in Bradley's definition, "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct"?

But everything good is better

2005-08-03T09:40:00.000-05:00

Critics of popular culture are not a homogeneous bunch. They have various complaints: that it is filled with sex and violence; that it is partly responsible for the decline in reading (at least, the reading of books); and that it has become increasingly simplistic, narcotic and dull.

The key to Steven Johnson's panegyric to pop culture, Everything Bad is Good for You, is that he is only concerned with the last of these: with what he calls the "Brave New World critics". One could be misled by his euphoric rhetoric to expect unqualified praise of Unreal Tournament and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? But the argument is really quite narrow: that television and video games are now more structurally complicated than they were in 1975, and that this has had a positive effect on our IQ. The proper reaction to the book is not, "How does he get from that limited evidence to such sweeping conclusions about the benefits of pop culture?" but "How many of the critics will bother to deny his claims?"

This is not to say that the book is boring or banal. It contains some nice analysis – for instance, of current reality television as the adaptation of the game show to an era of puzzle-solving video games, and of syndication as a pressure towards the kind of narrative and emotional depth that rewards repeated viewing. But the central thread, a diachronic study of computer games and television series – comparing Pac-Man with Sim City, Dallas with 24, Wheel of Fortune with Survivor – is far less surprising than the book's impressive publicity might suggest. Who would doubt that you need to perform more complex tasks to survive Sim City, and track more characters and plots to follow 24?

The only favourable comparison of pop cultural forms with books is directed at "cognitive benefits" like "attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads", and the alleged intelligence that is tracked by IQ tests. Johnson barely raises the question how much value any of these "benefits" have. He assumes that IQ measures transferable skills: "problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic". But when pressed to defend this, or its significance, his logic is curiously circular: the development of these skills is useful in "managing more complex forms of technology, mastering increasingly nuanced narrative structures – even playing more complicated video games." So: the virtue of pop culture is to make possible more intricate pop-cultural forms.

Despite being an apologist for television and video games, Johnson's utilitarian approach in fact suggests that he doesn't think much of them. He doesn't hesitate to announce, at the beginning of his book, that the phenomena he investigates "are not, for the most part, Great Works of Art":

The conventional wisdom the [evidence] undermines is not the premise that mass culture pales in comparison with High Art in its aesthetic and cultural riches.

And he is happy to patronize the people who analyze The Apprentice on fan sites for their bad spelling and imperfect grammar, even as they are meant to indicate the interactive vivacity of reality TV. (I was amused to note that, immediately after his disparaging remarks, he manages to spell "Hazzard", as in "The Dukes of", with only one "z".)

Perhaps this is why his argument takes the tack it does: having no faith in the content of popular culture, he looks to the form, to the cognitive demands of sheer engagement. When he argues that exposure to pop culture inflates IQ, he is no more concerned with Myst than he is with programming the VCR.

The consequence is that he avoids what is, I think, the more interesting question, about the emergence of the video game from an era in which its value (if any) is purely instrumental, to the level of art. This has already happened in television – for instance, with Dennis Potter, conspicuously absent from Johnson's US-centric view. It is happening in the medium of the comic book – with Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, among others. But these forms are at least similar to ones already in place. The work of video-game art will be something new, with its own rules and standards. In understanding it, we must resist the temptation simply to apply the expectations with which we approach the other media. Since this is true, and since so little effort has been made in that direction, it is possible that "Great Works of Video-Game Art" already exist.

Interpretive Charity

2005-07-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

In 1982, a minor conflagration broke out in literary studies, with the publication of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels' "Against Theory". Their thesis is that it is a mere platitude that the meaning of a text is what the author intended, so that theoretical discussions of this relationship, denials and elaborate defences, are equally redundant.

The claim is so bold and so extraordinary as to invite a parodic response: presumably, any objection depends on mistaking the meaning of the argument, since the authors intend it to be irrefutable. (See Goodman's proof that p.) So, criticism is a treacherous business.

How do Knapp and Michaels argue for the trivial truth of what would seem to be a controversial claim? They appeal to a now-famous example: the "wave poem", in which the random lapping of water on a beach inscribes, by astonishing coincidence, the characters of Wordsworth's lyric, "A slumber did my spirit steal". As they point out, the absence of intention seems to make the marks meaningless: "what you thought to be poetry turns out not to be poetry at all [...] because it isn't language."

Apart from its obvious defect of logic – it could show, at most, that the author's intention is necessary, not sufficient, for meaning – the use of this example is puzzling. No claim about the relation between linguistic meaning and intention could settle the dispute about "intentionalism", since it arises just as well for non-linguistic art. Is the meaning of painting a matter of the painter's intention? Or the meaning of a symphony just what the composer intended it to be? In any case, the meaning of the sentences of a novel, however it relates to the intentions of the author, underdetermines what we call "the meaning of the text": it leaves the most interesting thematic and psychological questions about the fiction wide open.

Critics of Knapp and Michaels sometimes stop at this point. (Philosophers have been especially harsh.) But we can see how absurd it is to interpret them as making a claim about the meaning of words by repeating a question pressed, albeit with some embarrassment, by W. J. T. Mitchell:

What happens [...] if we (whether theorists or plain practitioners) intend these terms ["meaning" and "intention"] to mean something different?

Taken as a theory about linguistic meaning, the Knapp-Michaels doctrine is latently paradoxical. They must be up to something else.

The problem is that distinguishing linguistic and artistic meaning doesn't seem to make their claim more plausible. Intention is not sufficient to generate the meaning of a sculpture, or a sonnet, or a song. Art is not magic: one can fail, and failure is precisely a discrepancy between the actual meaning of your creation, and what you wanted it to be. This shows, in turn, that art can mean something unintended: intention is not necessary, either. ("I meant to write a biting satire of materialism, but ended up with an affectionate farce." "I meant to depict a glorious hero, but created a comic fool.") There is such a thing a biographical speculation about an artist, but it is not what we principally mean when we talk about "interpretation". The "platitude" is not a platitude, after all.

When I reflect on what I am trying to do when I engage in interpretation – and here I make no claim to generality – it seems to be the opposite of "intentionalism": casting a veil of ignorance over the artist's actual intentions, but not her literary and historical conditions, I ask what hypothetical intentions would make most sense of the work. "Making most sense", here, goes beyond the ordinary principle of charity: the target is not the most plausible intentional story, but the one that attributes the most intricate intentionality. The more significance it finds, the better the interpretation; and the best gives meaning to everything: it leaves nothing inert.

Put this way, it seems a pretty queer activity. Why abstract from intention but nothing else? Why give in to this hunger for meaning, which flatly ignores the limits of the artist? It has its satisfactions, but so do many other games one can play with a text, a composition, or an installation. It doesn't seem to correspond to anything. (Thus the pull of critical pluralism.)

Here we find the real force of the wave poem example. Just as no string of marks has linguistic meaning unless it was the product of intention, so, I believe, nothing counts as a work of art unless it was intended to be one. But if interpretation is what I have said it is (at least for me), why should it be attentive to this one intention, among others? Why not play the same game with the wave poem, with a cauliflower that happens to be shaped like a human head, or with nature itself?

On Television

2005-07-18T08:34:00.000-05:00

Some weeks ago, a question was raised here about the literary depiction of work. My interest then was in work as vocation, and its relation to love. But there was another issue, about the representation of work in all its repetitive, miniature glory. I was provoked by the claim that, while this is neglected by the novel, it is the daily bread of television.

On reflection, I doubt that this is true: someone argued at the time that much of television "work" is sensational: the work of detectives, criminal lawyers, astronauts. This observation echoes Raymond Williams, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form:

it is doubtful whether, before the epoch of television series and serials, anything like the current proportion of dramatic attention to crime and illness had ever existed.

One reason for this is obvious enough: we have to be hooked, both in order to resist channel surfing, and in order to survive the incessant distraction of advertising breaks.

There is a characteristic kind of opening sequence, meant to excite interest, which is in effect a kind of trailer for itself. [...] It is then not surprising that so many of these opening moments are violent or bizarre: the interest aroused must be strong enough to initiate the expectation of (interrupted but sustainable) sequence.

Some of the most ambitious parts of Williams' book are attempts to analyze the distinctive "flow" of television sequencing, the pattern of an evening's entertainment, which he finds almost unprecedented.

It is indeed very difficult to say anything about this. It would be like trying to describe having read two plays, three newspapers, three or four magazines, on the same day that one has been to a variety show and a lecture and football match.

These excerpts may suggest that Williams always argues from medium to message, finding the content of our experience to be determined by apparently extraneous facts about the economics and technology of its production. That isn't so: his central theme, in fact, is the role of intention in the organization of broadcasting, its indeterminism, and our responsibility for it.

But, however qualified it must be, the slide from form to content is irresistible...

I love television, but apart from sporting events, I rarely watch for an extended period: I don't want the kind of structure and flow that Williams investigates. What I like is to have "my show": an engagement of ritual and habit, of repetition, a weekly encounter with distant friends. Can it be a coincidence that the shows I adopt are themselves quotidian, if sometimes in playfully eccentric ways, series of variations on a theme, like Northern Exposure and Scrubs?

These programs are about work, in both senses of the earlier post: about trying to inhabit a meaningful role, and about the small triumphs and failures of doing so. They treat relationships (not always romantic love) as ongoing projects of mutual attention. They are exercises in the moral philosophy of everyday life. And the form is not irrelevant to this: it is a pattern of routine and renewal; these are shows to be watched each week, not in the marathons that the networks occasionally put on.

The medium may not be the message; but for me, the television of love and work could only be television – nothing else.