Digressions&Impressions

My dad's dusty books

If the makes the I of his story is a little quicker on the uptake, a little more level-headed, a little shrewder, a little braver, a little more ingenious, a little wittier, a little wiser than he, the writer, really is, the reader must show indulgence. He must remember that the author is not drawing a faithful portrait of himself, but creating a character.---W. Somerset Maugham.

A Jewish burial and mourning is heavily ritualized; and a few weeks ago I took advantage of the ritual in order not to make any decisions. But now that my sister and I are confronting his estate there are many choices to be made in cleaning out his house and dealing with the administrative aftershocks of a completed life. In the division of labor between us it fell to me to go through my dad's library in order to decide what we may wish to keep and what we will give away.  There was another reason for this; in my academic wandering and moves, many of my books had ended up in his library. And in recent years I had moved most of my stuff back in with him. So, the exercise also involved deciding which of my own external memories to discard and which to hold on a bit longer. 

Not unlike me, dad clearly did not like giving or throwing away books. But he was not a serious book collector; the vast majority of his books have a use and sentimental value only. Nearly all of his books are, in fact, cheap paper-back editions; the vast majority of them were never commented on not even in passing. Most of these are once best-selling spy-novels, detectives, historical novels, and thrillers (but almost no horror stories): on his shelves there are countless Dick Francis, Nancy Mitfords, Deightons, Folletts, and Macleans--most of these bought at airports. It's not that he didn't read more literary books in that genre (Graham Greene, le Carré, Mailer, etc.), but I am sure he bought those at the very same airports without any distinctions.

During the last few years of his life my dad lost interest in reading. So the books on many of his shelves were lined with a thick layer of dust, untouched by any hand. I noticed that birthday presents of the last few years from us, cruel optimists, who pretended nothing had changed, clearly had never been so much as caressed. He kept playing bridge long after he stopped reading.

While cleaning out the book-cases, I noticed quite a number of titles he owned in duplicate and triplicate (sp?) He had once confessed that sometimes at the airport he could not remember having read a book only to discover, after 80 pages or so, on his way to the Far East, that the story-line was familiar. (Some of these duplicates had different covers, not uncommon among English and American editions.) In a few cases, I suspected that we had bought the same book separately (for example, I found multiple copies ofThe Bonfire of the Vanities). 

I could tell and recall that he had gone through a brief phase of interest in the biographies (and autobiographies) of once famous politicians (Gorbachev, Reagan, Moshe Dayan). His library reminded me of his interest in the 1960s and 70s counterculture (well represented fictionally), including the gay underground scene -- I was struck he owned a biography of Joe Orton and John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw, which itself is dedicated to "all the anonymous outlaws."

In his youth (teenage and early twenties), he read more serious fiction in German. About thirty of these are well-preserved hardbacks (including a few in the older Gothic font). Several of them have his name inside the cover. He read almost no Dutch literature (except a few authors which were big in the 60s and 70s). He owned a few coffee-table art books, including one he cherished with works of Brancusi. I found over twenty Holocaust autobiographies given to him by his generational peers; all of these seemed in pristine condition and surely never opened. 

As the hours past, and dusk started to approach, I started to get antsy. The dust was triggering an asthmatic reaction, and I had a feeling of unease over the fact that all this dusty, cheap ink and paper had outlasted my dad. I did not smell him in their pages. There was nothing sentimental about this exercise. Just the dull fact that most of these books would be discarded. And the more sober realization that his library was filled with books that -- unlike the paintings and sculptures he owned -- could properly be called distractions from his thoughts. 

Yet, at one point I had been convinced my dad was a great admirer of W. Somerset Maugham. But I could not say why. I did not encounter his works among the cheap paperbacks.  I was about to call it a day when I stumbled upon a well-worn, hard-back with a nearly destroyed spine. I was strangely pleased, even excited that it contains The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham,Vol II, with my dad's handwritten name inside the cover. I hope to find find Vol. I soon.

 

 

On a Dissonant detail that got me thinking about love.

My phone rang on the table in front of me. It was my younger's son number. I picket it up and said that I would call him back later.

'I am lost,' he said. 'I don't know where I am.'

Holding the phone to my chest I told that there was a minor emergency and that we would take a short break....I asked my son whether he could see a sign with a road name on it."

'I'll just look,' he said.

I could hear traffic in the background and the sound of his breathing. After a while he gave me the name of the street, and I asked him what on earth he was doing there.

'I am trying to get to school,' he said.

I asked why he wasn't going to school the way I had arranged for him this week, with friend Mark and Mark's mther.

'Mark isn't coming to school today,' he said. 'He's ill.'

I told him to turn around and walk back the way he had come, telling me the name of each street he passed, and when he reached the right one I told him to turn down it and carry straight on. After a few minutes, during which I listened to his puffing breath and the tapping of his feet on the pavement, he said: 'I can see it, I can see the building, it's all right, I can see the building.'--Rachel Cusk (2014) Outline, pp. 150-1.

There is something dissonant about quoting this passage. It does not have a memorable line, in the way, it seems, just about every other page of the book has. It is also not representative, in a certain sense, for the novel's conceit. (I call it a novel, but not much happens. It reminded me a bit of the film, Night on Earth.)

The narrator is an English (or English speaking) writer who is teaching a week-long, creative writing class one hot summer in Athens (Greece). The phone-call interrupts the class. After the quoted paragraph, the next paragraph starts, "in the classroom the group was waiting..." For much of the book, the first-personal narrator is an attentive, almost passive listener. (We follow her around, as she listens to other people's stories.) In fact, shortly after this scene, she claims that she "had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unremarked by self-will as possible." (170) She has an interesting explanation for her passivity; she treats it as a decision, which, itself, is a consequence of frustrated desire and her inability to accept the mismatch between what she wanted and what she could have.* From a similar mismatch, the great systems of morality, political vision, and religion are born as well as the grotesque techniques of personal transformation.  Cusk’s Outline revisits the effects of such mediated mismatches throughout her fascinating novel (recall my post on her Aftermath). It would make a good blog post.

But today I digress. Through the quoted passage we are made to be aware that for all of the narrator’s passivity, she has maternal ties and responsibilities to others that are dependent on her. She is literally always available to them—one can decide to turn off the mobile phone during one’s lectures, after all, even do without such a device altogether. This dependence goes quite far: her young child has a mobile phone, but does not seem to know how to use maps.google; even when her arrangements fail, he can still rely on his absent, yet ever-at-hand, mom.

In reading the passage, I was a bit baffled: kids don't get lost like that anymore. Which is why I interpret it is a symbol of dependence. Now, one may think that the absence of maps.google is a mere oversight. Yet, technology matters greatly to the book: on the back page (where one sometimes finds acknowledgments in novels) we are explained that the photograph cover photo is an "example of solarisation a technique rediscovered by Man Ray and the photographer Lee Miler, who was his assistant, muse and lover." The novel really starts aboard a plane on the tarmac at Heathrow. 

But is notable that the novel is book-marked by two intrusive men: one (who disappears from the novel) is a nameless software billionaire (with ‘liberal credentials’) who, creepily, has access to her itinerary; the second a thrice-divorced Greek by now elderly man, who is not especially attractive or interesting (she could only feel ‘absolute ambivalence’ (184))** about him, but despite this she goes with him on two boat trips. He is a kind of nameless everyman; he is called 'neighbour' throughout the novel. On the second boat trip, he tries to kiss her which she does not want. The novel closes with the information that the narrator has been ignoring his text messages since their second outing. So, oddly, one feature these two men have in common, in addition to not accepting boundaries, is the use of technology to reach (and track) her.

In reflecting on my puzzlement, I noticed that the internet is never mentioned in the book. It's not because the novel is supposed to take place, say, in the 1980s (or early 90s). Its decidedly contemporary: there are smart phones in the book, and we encounter Athens ravaged by the financial crisis. Most of the book reads like an extended diary by an especially astute observer who is attentive to detail. Yet, somehow, along the way, she has effaced facebook, google, snapchat, twitter, youtube, etc. So what we get is a peculiar illusion: an apparently contemporary novel in which talk and the imagination matters so much that we are liable to forget the little screens that draw our attention (and on which you may be reading this post). 

That is to say, the book tries to enact something it calls "the shared world of imagination"--a "shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have said to exist." As readers, each of us is invited to imagine seeing the world as the narrator sees it. And this is a world in which technology does not guide our imagination. And as it happens, this "is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see;" a bit like the son and his narrator-mom.

I could stop there, but I'll add this thought. Of course, good story-telling relies on the reader's individual imagination; while each of us read the same text of (say) the (same) novel, it's very likely we each experience -- through the train of associations and differential attention -- a somewhat different novel. And so, peculiarly, while we may both appreciate the same novel, the love we may feel for it, the shared vision of our individual readership and the text, will be distinct. Unless, perhaps, we talk about the novel.

 

 

 

On the Interior Freedom of an Authentic Liberal Education; Or How the Sheltering Sky nearly ruined my life

Can we imagine college classes being conducted without agendas, either political or scholarly?

If this seems a fantasy, can we imagine ways that the agendas that inevitably emerge would be constantly subject to self-critical eyes?

The small-scale culture of a college — not its rhetoric or its bureaucratic shortcuts — would be the only source of such a possibility.

Consider the serious challenges that an ordinary college lecture class faces in this regard. The content-providing professor proceeds according to his or her preestablished conclusions. Grades are constantly dribbled out in a way that can encourage followers or punish dissenters. The student as content-consumer has little incentive or indeed encouragement to undertake an inquiry where much of anything is at stake.

The architects of the liberal arts program at St. John’s and of the original core curriculum at the University of Chicago had an ingenious solution: Demote the professor to the status of a guide and give students the responsibility for the discussion.

The “teachers,” as my college’s advertising boasts, are the authors of great works, Plato, Newton, Austen or DuBois. Let students pursue the questions they bring to the classroom with the books as interlocutors and with their fellow students and teachers as helpers. Let the faculty step back and ensure that the discussions are careful, respectful and relentlessly pursue the truth. And use grades only to signal to outside institutions the student’s fitness for further study.

A great work is one sufficiently complex and majestic to support conflicting interpretations. But it is also one that exposes questions crucial to humanity: on the just structure of society, yes, but also the existence or nonexistence of divinities; the nature of matter and the laws of nature; the inner workings of mathematics; and the pitfalls of the human mind and heart.

Discussing such works is a bottomless journey, pursued in acknowledged ignorance and punctuated by flashes of insight.

Such discussions train us in respecting others, in facing our own inadequacy and in patiently seeking out the reality of a situation. Training the natural and spontaneous interest of a young person in fundamental questions is an excellent preparation for life.

After all, agendas come and go. The challenge is to maintain a broad perspective in an environment driven by money-making fads and more sinister attempts to exploit human beings in the search for power and profit.

The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth.--Zena Hitz "What is a Safe Space?" Washington Post.

Hitz's article in the Washington Post responds to the debate about safe spaces and trigger warnings, but is really a further articulation, if not development, of her position that a certain kind of education develops interiority (recall her piece in First Things, and my response here). While it is true that the core curriculum and the way of teaching that accompanies it is not political in the sense of taking sides in conventional party politics, she is mistaken to suggest that there is no politics in the conception at all, or that it instantiates a kind of (Weberian) neutrality in which the only politics it produces is an emergent, indirect quality.

The core [recall] she lovingly discusses was developed by President Hutchins at The University of Chicago (and given widespread familiarity by Mortimer Adler) during the Great Depression and is a species of secular humanism (in which, as Hitz notes and exemplifies, religious thought is welcomed). The (slowly evolving) core simultaneously instantiates a great conversation over perennial issues by exemplary minds, and presents the development of thought. Among the self-conscious underlying aims is to produce citizens and thought leaders, and simultaneously be a rescue mission (Wikipedia has a useful intro). I would be the last to suggest that such a rescue mission is not needed today.

The very idea of 'flashes of insight' as a way of knowledge contribution is itself Goethe's contribution to the Romantics (although clearly modeled on a species of religious experience and celebrated in Archimedes Eureka moment), and, in part, an elitist response to the more egalitarian, more democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. To be sure, this is primarily a nobility of the mind acquired through Bildung.

But my point here is not to quibble with Hitz's claims about neutrality and politics. Rather, despite the fact that her piece warmed my heart and made me feel in the company of a true educator, I was troubled by it. After a day's mulling, I recognize that something is missing in the closing line of Hitz's piece (recall),  "The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth." To put the point philosophically, freedom is never a safe place. True freedom, even if reduced to interiority (as Hitz suggests), always presupposes (as a kind of constitutive principle) the possibility of making disastrous mistakes from which no practice of self-criticism can save us.

Because (recall) I recently read Gertrude Himmelfarb's (1994) "On Looking into the Abyss," I am reminded of a famous, somewhat facetious remark (which she quotes) by Lionel Trilling in his (1961) "On The Teaching of Modern Literature:"

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.

Trilling points to the phenomenon in  which books have lost the capacity to destroy by, say, making a bad or troubled soul worse, and accentuate immoderate desires.  Hitz does not allow for this when she insists that the true guide through these books, in an atmosphere of mutual respect in which young souls are turned toward the good, provides "an excellent preparation for life." But As Trilling reminds, books can also undo life in ways that are not merely a preparatory experience. I think this is true. I can't convince you of this, but the best I can do is offer some hint of an autobiographical remark.

When I was a late teenager, I read Sheltering Sky. I am unsure how I stumbled upon it (I am pretty sure I read it before the movie came out). But it brought me extremely close to suicide. I have no idea why the story of an overconfident American couple who travel through Africa unnerved me so badly, but I was not just physically shaken by the felt experience, but also overwhelmed by the meaningless of life. (When, later, I read Nietzsche, I found him tame and too refined for my taste.) There is a famous passage in the novel (it was used in the film) that while flirting with the pretentious (and bordering on the incoherent) kind of points to the underlying theme of the book (which I have never re-read again):

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

What gets to me in the passage is not the actual remarks about death or the finiteness of life (I know about that), but rather the sneaky claim that everything, even the most constitutive memories happens a very small number (four or five) times, really. Yes, you can try to cheat: by doing a daily exercise to remember the event many more times or by denying that any thought really matters to you, but so doing would also distract from the art of living, of being alive.

Much of professional philosophy blabbers on about truth, rationality, and morality and never allows the sneaky claims. By contrast, the close reading and shared discussion of the texts that Hitz and I both admire makes space for it. The aim is not, of course, to generate a stream of psychiatric patients or suicides in the class-room--a skilled guide and teacher can forestall it often--, but in the very possibility of unsettling even the skilled guide can slip sometimes and make us worse off, genuinely worse off, than before the conversation started.

Epistemic Peers don't always get it (a problem for contextualists historians of philosophy); Dennett on Bennett

Rationality (1964), Jonathan Bennett’s first book, was published when he was thirty-four years old, and it exhibits the intensity of a young philosopher who is quite sure he sees a way to cut through a forest of dubious, ideology-ridden, squishy philosophy of mind and set a few things straight. Since the terrain he was scouting and clarifying was the same terrain that I was then embarking on, with similar ambitions, I read his book when it first came out through the dust and smoke of my own earliest efforts to conquer these topics. The result, I confess, was that I simultaneously misread, underestimated, and covertly absorbed much of what he was on about and then proceeded to reinvent some of his wheels in my own work without realizing it until years later...I was not the only explorer of this territory who chose to find other paths to Bennett’s destination, but here we all are, and a review of his book may consolidate the gains.--Daniel Dennett, (2016) Jonathan Bennett's Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy [ed. E. Schliesser], 256.

Dennett graciously and generously admits here, with the benefit of a half century's worth of hindsight, that he did not fully grasp the content ("misread") and significance ("underestimated") of a work written by a contemporary who shared, in many ways, his intellectual outlook. Bennett went on to have a distinguished career, both as a philosophical historian and philosopher of language as well as as a metaphysician. At Syracuse he helped nourish and steer the revival of analytical metaphysics (less noticed because it does not fall easily in Kripke-Lewis centered narratives we tell ourselves). While this is not a tragic story of gross injustice, it's fair to say that Dennet's reaction to Rationality is not unique; the little book, while not ignored (it has about 250 citations in google.scholar) did not have a huge, recognized impact on the profession. (The impact of Dennett's own Content and Consciousness, which appeared half decade later, is a useful contrast.) This despite the fact that the book is written in accessible, lively language; it appeared in paperback in a then "unduly prestigious series of books" (Dennett, 257), and it avoids unexplained jargon. It also anticipates, as Dennett notes throughout his piece, quite a few insights later developed by others.

The failure of impact is especially notable because Bennett announces, as Dennett notes in his article, that he is doing something significant (and as Dennett notes, original): he describes the work as “extremely ambitious conceptual inquiry”? on p. 1 of Rationality. Before I get to the significance (and further characterization) of the phenomenon that this is an instance of, Dennett offers a few useful suggestions on the lack of impact. For example, the series in which Rationality appeared was associated with ordinary language philosophy, already in decline by the mid 1960s (258). (Dennett also indicts ordinary language philosophy for its comical lack of ambition--a judgment worth reconsidering some time.) By contrast, Bennett's kind of conceptual analysis was more ambitious (and Dennett recognizes that in a sense Bennett is trying to displace Kant's synthetic a priori.) Dennett notes in passing that, "Philosophers get largely ignored by Bennett, aside from brief passing acknowledgments of Kant, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Popper, but it is clear that he is deliberately avoiding tussles with a host of contemporary philosophers, indirectly criticizing their positions." (261) So one may suspect that other philosophers ignored Bennett because he ignored them and was, then, not in a position to get away with it.

One could read Dennett as implying (it's not his main point in context) that part of the problem for Bennett is not sociological, but philosophical:

Here I think the main strength of Bennett’s method is also its weakness. As a piece of conceptual analysis it is hard to fault the claim that conventionality presupposes reasons had by reasoners, but this blinds him to the prospect of an intermediate position which is not readily articulated without a helping of initially counterintuitive innovation— a “move” that I have only recently perfected (to my satisfaction): drawing a quite sharp distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things. There are reasons aplenty in nature (I call them free- floating rationales): trees do things for reasons, fungi do things for reasons...but they do not (usually) have reasons for doing these things. (262)

My interest here is not Dennett's philosophical point (important as it is! -- the distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things will be very useful in the (philosophy of) social science(s) because it will remove the stranglehold of methodological individualism and renew interest in a species of functional explanation). The point is rather that even if one grants that Bennett missed a step, everybody else did too.

There is, however, a more subtle version of the point in Dennett: "By not quite nailing the distinction between there being reasons and an agent’s having reasons, Bennett misses the intermediate cases that naturalism requires, in order to account for the gradual emergence of function by the march of evolution and by the development of the individual." (264) This suggests a more historical explanation of the lack of uptake for Bennett: he is not easily slotted into the rising wave of philosophical naturalism (associated with Quine and, of course, Dennett). There is something to this point; the non-naturalists that gained distinction (e.g., Nagel, Searle) situated themselves against it. That gave them a place as the opposition. Bennett is much harder to slot into simplifying narratives teachers tell their students. (He was not obscure in the period, because Dennet himself includes Bennett in his "Mid-Term Examination" included in the Intentional Stance, and in that piece Dennett had explicitly recognized the "parallel paths" (348) between himself and Bennett, and their lack of mutual citation (349, where Davidson is included.))

A central theme of Dennett's chapter is that he is not alone in having missed Bennett's point (even when they directly confronted each other's views in print), and he calls attention to the fact that Quine, Millikan, and the Pittsburgh school all did so, too. While there is some self-interest in not fully crediting another with one's own insights, it remains remarkable that such excellent peers missed the point. This is significant because both epistemologists and contextual historians of philosophy put great faith in the discern-ability of such peers. But the fact is, as is recognized in principle, but often not in practice, is that their judgment is fallible. The market in ideas is imperfect, after all. That is to say, sometimes not being a peer or an outsider or being later in time allows one to see with greater clarity (than previously) what is at stake than an active participant. It is an obvious point, but it is dis-allowed by those that privilege peers in epistemology and historical context in history (of philosophy). This is why (a) in epistemology we should also find a place to canvass non-peers, and (b) in history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy.

I encouraged Dennett to write about Bennett because I was curious what he would say. For, (a) I had noticed that Dennett (who is one of my undergraduate teachers) notes Rationality in passing in the Intentional Stance; I did so only after (b) I had been a course assistant in a class by Bill Wimsatt on "Philosophy of Mind and Science Fiction" in the mid-90s at Chicago. Wimsatt, a contemporary of Bennett and Dennett, trained at Pittsburgh (and represents the naturalistic wing also associated with the Churchlands), who is primarily known as a philosopher of biology. Wimsatt assigned Rationality and taught it with gusto to his undergraduates. Wimsatt also taught Dennett (in his philosophy of biology graduate seminar), but (to the best of my fragile memory) did not compare Bennett with Dennett.

Somebody eager to defend the judgments of peers may suggest that Wimsatt ought to count as a peer. I fully grant the point. But while it's true that Wimsatt grasped some of the significance of Rationality he did not (I think) really use Bennett in his own work and so his judgment is not reflected in the profession's conversation. This points the way toward a distinction between formal (public) and informal (private) peer judgments, but about that some other time.

 

 

A composer meets a philosopher on the bus

The only coöperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true coöperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will coöperate with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To coöperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together.--Thoreau, Walden, "Economy."

I arrived at dusk at Istanbul's Taksim square to the start of the Muezzins's Azhan surrounding us from all sides. I enjoyed the moment to get roasted walnuts. I looked up at Ghezi park--oddly familiar from the protests despite the (minor) construction at the edges. I knew that at the metro stop, I was going to say goodbye to Niklas Seidl, my unexpected travel companion of the last ninety minutes; Niklas is a German composer and cellist with the Cologne based group, Hand Werk; he has a (German) state fellowship to be in (part-time) residence in Istanbul. (You can see and hear him play here.) He told me about the sights and sounds encountered through his explorations of Istanbul's neighborhoods. We had met earlier in line at the airport-bus-stop, and we had talked through the Friday afternoon slow, rush hour bus-ride into town.

I had been given a glimpse of the creative life, and I felt refreshed; the short night's sleep and my travel forgotten. Sometimes an encounter with a stranger can be exhilarating because ordinary reserve and strategic behavior is absent. (To be sure I don't think of contemporary classical composers as the exemplars of the creative life.) As the sounds of the azhan faded into the background, I descended into Istanbul's metro system. I had to resist the urge to send Bellow's Herzog a text-message, see; once underground I looked for the token machine.

The next morning I woke to the view below. The news from Paris had kept me up late (and I was pleased by Facebook's safety check button); I overslept from a non-restful sleep. I had too little time to go down to the shore-line for a breakfast and hike. Instead, I enjoyed a quiet morning in the hills reading and savoring Walden.

As I contemplated Thoreau's stirring words and the beauty of my surroundings, I was struck by the recurring temptation to view Thoreau's self-described life of true philosophy as somehow a refuge from the real world. Yet, if it is a refuge then it is not a cowardly one; it requires courage to live an experimental life, to avoid embracing despair, and, not to put too fine a point on it, to resist the call to war.

Before writing this post I explored some of Seidl's compositions on youtube. (He works in multiple media at once.) My favorite one today, which is simultaneously funny (even satirical) and sad, is an uncanny meditation on a certain, ordinary-life-presence-of-the-sublime that resonates with my mood this week-end. It also illustrates one of Seidl's claims he made during our shared bus-ride: a lot of contemporary classical music can, despite the reputation of avant-garde elitism, be appreciated at once without prior musical background (unlike, say, much of the Baroque chamber music -- which we both admire --, which often presupposes familiarity with other music in order to be enjoyed). It doesn't follow, of course, that there are no puns and motifs that can be savored only by the advanced student. It's called talgwaren & Absterben; I like that the meaning of 'talgwaren' is mysterious to me. Anyway, here it is:

 

Dennett's Faustian Bargain, revisited

For several years, I have been posing the following choice for my fellow philosophers: if Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come. 

Some philosophers reluctantly admit that they would have to go for option (B). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. Like composers, poets, novelists, and other creators in the arts, they tend to want their work to be experienced, over and over, by millions (billions, if possible!). But they are also tugged in the direction of the scientists’ quest. After all, philosophers are supposed to be trying to get at the truth.

When I have presented the same Faustian bargain to scientists they tend to opt for (A) without any hesitation—it’s a no-brainer for them.--Daniel C. Dennett (2013) “A Faustian Bargain” Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, p. 411.+

Daniel Dennet was one of my undergraduate teachers, and I am pretty sure I heard him try out versions of the “Faustian Bargain” on visiting scholars. (In his book, Intuition Pumps, he describes further variants.) I mention this because at some point, while I was completing my dissertation, I articulated a descendant of the Bargain that I have tried out on some fellow historians of philosophy. It goes something like this:

(A*) You conclusively settle all interpretive problems about the relationship between the infinite and finite in Spinoza’s metaphysics (like Descartes's Circle a notorious problem) such that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, Spinoza becomes easy, and you get a footnote in history).

(B*) You generate interest in a previously overlooked text so that it (not you) gets on the required reading list for centuries to come.   

Most scholars happily and promptly settle for (A*); that’s what we are trained to aim at. The spirit of contemporary scholarship in the history of philosophy has its origins (mediated via Quentin Skinner, perhaps) in Germanic Wissenschaft, after all. But a few respondents are, after some hesitation, tempted by (B*). For, ever since some professional philosophical historians of philosophy started to read canonical works in context, it was likely they would stumble across texts that might seem candidates for (B*). And while getting the past right is a non-trivial task, doing justice to the past and thereby shaping a better future is nobler yet.

Moreover, (B*) is also a near-self-less-act; in it one is the nearly anonymous hand-maiden to another's success. Even if it is motivated (one concludes after reading Nietzsche) by a strange kind of desire for revenge or (echoing Walter Benjamin) by a desire to speak for history's losers, it remains the case that one uses one's skill and judgment to make somebody else's previously overlooked views, insights, or arguments available for discussion. Of course, plenty of scholars are motivated by the true and the good, and (B*) might be one way to promote these. Even so, there is also something quixotic about (B*) because it is so unlikely to succeed. After reflecting on canon-formation throughout history, I suspect that enduring novelty is introduced into the curriculum and people's reading habits not by the conjoined efforts of scholars, but by the ideological and curricular needs of history's proverbial winners who write and rewrite the past to give their own commitments an air of inevitability, the so-called (to adopt a fine phrase by Michael Kremer) 'royal road to me' (recall).

Of Four Kinds of Writer's Block

In the imagination there is no daylight and,                                              

Like Wallace Stevens, I know the dark is crucial.                                         

I sing, I grieve in it, I dream what haunts each night:                                                       

These bodies, even lynched, still are thinking.                               

Nothing is final, I’m told. No man shall see the end—

But them, my fathers, lifted into fire, like tongues.--Rickey Laurentiis.    

 

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.--Wallace Stevens.

I am often teased by my peers that I write so much;* I frequently answer truthfully that I am no perfectionist and that I have always worked with low (and very low) teaching loads with courses that directly (or indirectly) fed into my research. So, I may be utterly unqualified to write about writer's blog -- 'look who thinks he is nothing!' --, but I am intimately familiar with four kinds of staring at a blank page:

1. I have nothing to say despite (or, perhaps, because) having embraced the image of being a poet or philosopher. No, no (you suspicious mind) not so much from some purported high status that is derived from these venerable terms 'poet,' ('philosopher'), nor with the idea that if I wear black and smoke Gitanes, some beautiful woman will whisper her phone-number into my ear while I babble on about Rilke and Sartre.  No, it's because I regularly have sensory overload, where each pleasure and each pain has an exquisite and hitherto ignored delicacy so that I assume that the world requires me to channel the cosmic fire into words. Even so I stare at blank pages recognizing the painful truth that, perhaps as of yet, I have nothing to say of enduring consequence (few do I learn over the years, but that offers little consolation). Professional philosophy solves this problem by after considerable education, inserting us into a tradition that either embraces the intellectual division of labor, which bequeaths each of us open-problems, or  that allows us to re-tell the same historical story with minor, corrective variations in both cases advancing 'the discussion.' It's possible that if one is 'productive' enough, or mesmerized by chasing the next career step (dissertation, a job, tenure, etc.), one forgets this kind of writer's block.** I have speculated that the existence of  this kind of half-forgetting helps explain some of the professional bullying we encounter.

2. I lack skill. At some point half way through my graduate education and a few years out after the PhD, I could spot problems in what I read and I could sense that an alternative might be philosophically more satisfying, but I didn't know how to start organizing my thoughts. Sometimes the blank space would be filled with extensive notes, and long copiously footnoted excerpts from others (many of my dissertation chapters started like this), but even so I would be unable to find a path from the complexity I perceive (and that I think eminently worth sharing) to something that might count as intelligible to an outsider. Within analytical philosophy, this problem is solved by decomposing the complex mess to something that one can take a stance on, a thesis, (and then argue for while recognizing and incorporating a sub-set of  the innumerable objections one might discern.) In addition, there are tacit templates for journal articles that help set further constraints. At some point, practice, repeated feedback from more skilled others, and, eventually, repeat 'success,' evaporated this kind of writer's block. I re-encountered a version of this kind of writer's block, when I started to write for non-professional audiences or new formats (e.g., newspaper editorials, interdisciplinary venues, blogging, etc.), but without accompanying panic (hence, the past-tense in this paragraph): decomposing and practicing in the new genre always removed the writer's block over time.

What is the History of Philosophy?

If history of philosophy is about anything, it is about understanding historical texts accurately…The first goal is to understand the texts, which might be an end in itself (as it is for me) or might be a step towards doing something else afterward, like playing around with the ideas on one's own, comparing them to other ideas from history, etc. -Peter Adamson

I believe that the fundamental purpose of the history of philosophy (which is continuous with the fundamental purpose of history more generally) is to accurately capture what philosophers of the past were trying to say. If that's not what the history of philosophy is, then I am ready to be corrected. - Sam Rickless

Rickless, an important scholar, turns the history of philosophy fundamentally into inferring intentions of authors. The published texts are means to this end, but obviously one can also draw on unpublished material and other sources of evidence (biography, letters, etc.). We can't always trust what authors say about this, of course, they may be deluded about their intentions or they may deliberately or playfully mystify. They sometimes may discover their own intentions in the process of writing—texts and arguments take on a life of their own, or -- if one dislikes the anthropomorphism in that -- have an internal logic constrained by form and genre (etc.). For example, I did not set out to write on depression in graduate school last week; rather I think (now after the fact) I wanted to capture a vague sense of disconnect and empathy with younger scholars at a conference and, more romantically, try to convey some long-distance encouragement (etc.). But while writing in a tightly constrained format (a blog with a certain voice, history, and trajectory, etc.) I found a form in which to make some such point while simultaneously being (especially after I settled on a particular headline) about something else. Even if a future historian of philosophy were interested in my writings, they would not be very interested in capturing the canonical intentions of that particular blog, or even the whole as of yet indefinite series of Digressions that I know will follow. This is not to deny I have insanely ambitious ambitions for these blogs—to change our philosophical culture, to touch the hearts of some and draw them into a philosophical life, to promote projects I think noble, to showcase Schliesser's ideas, to redefine how we understand what philosophy can be, to hit the ball out of the philosophical park with an essay a day, etc. But the interest, if any, in these Impressions is not the ways they reveal the self-fashioning of an author, but rather their sporadic effects on others and what they reveal about our profession in my times. (I return to this below.)

Adamson, in responding to my post, offers us a subtly different goal than Rickless's for the history of philosophy: it's about understanding texts. (Neither comments on this difference.) Author's intentions may play a privileged role in Adamson's enterprise, but what matters is capturing meanings. The benefit of this approach is that one need not infer to invisible attitudes, but can resolutely stick with the textual evidence. But the moment you start putting pressure on this idea things start to unravel. What exactly is the textual meaning that needs to be understood, and whose understanding are we to privilege? Now, in a famous (1969) article, Quentin Skinner, tried to settle this with an appeal to a counterfactual, privileged observer. To folk interested in learning from sophisticated explorations of this issue I wholeheartedly recommend the papers by Mogens Lærke, Justin Smith, Julie Klein, Ursula Goldenbaum (in this volume). They all offer ways to avoid Skinner's mysterious counterfactuals while using means to stabilize and fix the meaning of a text in time and over time such that (alas, competing) understanding is possible. For some texts this is a very fruitful enterprise.

But there are philosophical authors (paradigmatically I am thinking of Plato, Nietzsche (recall)), who self-consciously may well want (a) affective responses from their readers and (b) may intend different audiences to discern different things in their texts. (Note that with Nietzsche we are in decent position to get at his intentions, with Plato not so.) The way I like to put it is that they expect different readers' souls to disclose different features of the text. A historian of philosophy setting out to get at the meaning of the text will miss this feature. In fairness, Adamson's approach does not rule out an understanding of these texts that can account for (a) and (b), but by sharply separating the understanding of a text from its effects and from doing something with it, he puts himself in a bad position to grasp all the features of a text. (That is to say, his rules are self-defeating.) For, one need not be a pragmatist to understand that often we only understand all the systematic entailments of a text by applying some or its all ideas to new (or old) problems. It's only after reading Rocknak (proto-Transcendental), Baxter (analytical metaphysics), and Bell's (Deleuzian) Hume that it becomes visible that Hume, for whom the law of non-contradiction does quite a bit of work, is simultaneously willing to bracket, when doing metaphysics, self-identity (or A=A).* Of course, this understanding can be contested (probably by all three just named authors), but the key is that the understanding of a text is a hard-won result by way of application. For a lot of folk the denial of self-identity is itself a sign of philosophical incompetence or lack of intelligibility, etc., so it would never be a starting point.

Stoner and Augustus On Love and Freedom (and Parenting)

There is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die, and the children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of low in which you…have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.

And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surround this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power…It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.

I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, thought it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. "Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus"--John Williams Augustus: A Novel (306)

In the face of death and delirium (when one can be "more reasonable than most men"), there are, we are told, three kinds of love:

1. One consequent the pleasure of, let's say, body-coupling. (This is fleeting.)
2. One (Platonic) consequent our intellectual awareness of our lack of knowledge about our intimates—a form of unstable, self-knowledge that is revealed to be an imprisonment.
3. An enduring love that the scholar-craftsman feels for one's necessary creations, which – upon further reflection – is revealed as love of power.* 

It is no surprise that an emperor would identify his own ruling passion with a love of power; nor surprising that a novelist would have him say so. It is a bit more surprising that at the end of this novel about the art of ruling, which is simultaneously about the art of parenting, the novelist would allow his reader to entertain the thought that her immersion in the written text is a form of subjugation to the author's craft.

So, we are back in familiar terrain of the modern novel: the novelist as prosecutor of his own craft. We might say that the main defense of the novelist is that he acts from "necessity" ((305) or "destiny" (295)). While the propagandist's utility for the novel can be aimed at directly (recall), if there is genuine utility to the novel – elevating minds toward greatness (recall this post on Grunberg/Coetzee) – it is an unintentional byproduct of the love of power. (This is the secondary defense.) Williams lets us enjoy the irony that the emperor is wiser on the novel's possibility, and takes it more seriously, than his poet-propagandist (recall Maecenas here and here). But this very possibility is also destabilizing psychologically and politically; for the novel leaves no doubt about the dissatisfaction that follows from wise rule. Our excellence is revealed under duress (privation), not in prosperity.

This writer's necessity is not opposed to freedom (although there seems little room for the readers's/subjects' freedom--John Williams's sudden popularity offers a window on our limited aspirations). On the contrary, Augustus is recorded as claiming:

On Historical Necessity and Morality (Art & Propaganda in John Williams's Augustus)

In the matter of passion, whether of love or war, excess is inevitable. Yet I have always been bewildered when, in the ease of peace, men raise the questions of praise or blame. It seems to me now that both judgments are inappropriate, and equally so. For those who thus judge do not judge so much out of a concern for right or wrong as out of protest against the pitiless demands of necessity, or an approval of them. Necessity is simply what has happened.--Maecenas to Livy, in John Williams Augustus: A Novel (70)

You forget that I am artist myself, and know the necessity of asking what to ordinary people would seem the most insulting and presumptuous things. How could I take offense at that which I myself would do, without the slightest hesitation, for the sake of my art? I detect the odor of a moralist. And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. And it would be a heavy burden for even the deepest friendship to bear.—Maecenas to Livy (128)—John Williams Augustus: A novel

There was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue; and no effective idea of virtue that was not encoded in the law.--Octavius to Damascius (302), John Williams Augustus: A novel

If we allow ourselves the thought, we probably tend to think of propaganda as not-art or, perhaps, as bad art.+ Williams's clever novel reminds us that some of the greatest art (Virgil, Horace, etc.) is, in part, propaganda for what we might call, military dictatorship and empire. In addition, in the second quoted passage above, Williams portrays the chief artist-propagandist, Maecenas, not just as a Spinozistic-fatalist -- with his repeated invocation of necessity --, but as would-be-censor of the historian Livy. It is to Williams's credit that he makes us see both the case for benevolent, imperial dictatorship as well as the price the establishment this extracts not just on the protagonists themselves (notably Augustus and his daughter Julia – ultimate Augustus trades the daughter of flesh and blood for an "adoptive daughter" [the Roman empire], a trade that, in turn, is said to be made legitimate because "acknowledged" by "the adoptive daughter" [that is the laws] (306; as if all trade requires the sanction of law) -- ), but also on the arts (history, poetry, and philosophy).

Few professional historians would claim that they are in the business of judging. In so far as Historicism has won the day (see Beiser's majestic book), historians see themselves as scientists (if not akin to natural scientists than at least as practitioners of their very own special Geisteswissenschaft) and not as moral judges. Obviously, even those that advocate moralism in history would wish to see it consequent knowledge.* Williams's (1972) novel (recall this post) subtly invite us to see constraints and power in (or outside) the margins of works of art, history, and philosophy. Williams's readers were familiar with the McCarthy era, of course, so, perhaps, they need little such reminding. It is an open question to what degree some readers at the time thought the US was, itself, heading -- amidst major disagreements over civil rights and Vietnam war -- toward its own civil war (and to what degree they were tempted to follow the model of benevolent dictatorship). Perhaps, too, Williams makes the reader reflect on the nature of the post US-Civil War settlement (which, after all, is a key feature of Butcher's Crossing (recall my post)).

In Williams's portrayal of Maecenas, art (poetic and historical) is (amongst other things) supposed to be useful. In context, it is entailed that if political circumstances had been different some other art would be useful. The moralist is said to be useless because he can't contribute to knowledge-generation and, less explicitly, change what's happened. Meacenas's argument presupposes not just the Hobbesian idea that within the context of state of nature, there is no justice, but a distinction between two kinds of judges (moralists/artists). Those that judge appropriately with authority (and force) and those that judge – for lack of a better word -- frivolously. By 'frivolous' (recall) I do not mean consequent-free; the novel is very clear that death (Cicero) and exile (Ovid) may well await frivolousness.