Digressions&Impressions

Quining Quine, Dennett/Borges and Tocqueville's Spinosizing Spinozism

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly reference to the eight (!) edition of "The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c"--I love that well-placed 'c'!-- in the second paragraph. The give away, the tell, is the earnest claim that "I don't deny the reality of conscious experience" in the fourth paragraph. 

Perhaps because I tend to read "Quining qualia" as high comedy, I started to misremember the title as 'Quining Quine' in graduate school. As memetic evolution goes, this is minor slippage. Now, in the original 'to quine' means "To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." But in my fictitious Quining Quine, 'to quine' means "to offer an immanent criticism and/or a reductio that turns out to be an extreme example of what's being criticized." {Look up it up in the fifteenth edition!}

I was reminded of these halcyon days by the sixth chapter of Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Tocqueville is a critic of the so-called system or "doctrine of necessity," (p. 197 & 201) that is, Spinozism. And Kirk hints at a neat argument -- a Quining Quine par excellence -- in which Spinozism is itself historicized. Before I allowed myself a further flight of fancy, I thought it useful to re-open Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and take a sober look at Volume 2, Chapter VII: "Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst Democratic Nations" in the Henry Reeve translation of 1840 (for any scholars complaining, it's the edition reviewed by J.S. Mill). 

The chapter is a very brief two paragraphs. For the sake of simplicity I just quote it:

I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas manifests itself in politics; but I would point out, at the present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it: the Germans introduce it into philosophy, and the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from a permanent cause.

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man – nay, rather because it destroys that individuality – will have secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine.

So, the first thing to notice is that Tocqueville is treating of Spinozism, which he associates with "the Germans" (Hegel, Schelling, etc.), not Spinoza. I return to that below. But writing in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville sees Spinozism as the rising ("most of the works") background ideology of the age.

Somewhat surprisingly, Tocqueville, who is purportedly critical of the doctrine of necessity, ascribes the rise of Spinozism not to chance (an 'accidental cause'), as one might expect, but to a structural (in his terminology a 'general') cause. To be sure, I am not accusing Tocqueville of a kind of inconsistency, because a general cause is compatible with the working of providence (itself the effect of the most general cause, after all). That is, Tocqueville is critical not just of Spinozism, but also the system of chance (Epicureanism). 

The structural cause of Spinozism is, in fact, egalitarianism (or democracy), or in Nietzsche's terms (which Tocqueville anticipates) the homogeneity or uniformity of last men. And because it eliminates all hierarchy of being (no angels, demons, superior men), Spinozism "fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds." The chapter closes with a call to arms (again anticipating Nietzsche) that against the false magnanimity of such Spinozisms those who wish to foster true magnanimity must organize ('combine') and fight (struggle).   

Now, it's a core commitment of Spinozism to historicize the holy texts inspired by revelation. And so, I joked on twitter that here Tocqueville is Spinozing Spinozism (in the manner of Quining Quine).

I could stop here, but as always the joke is on me.

In the "preface" of Spinoza's (1670) Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) Spinoza claims, in aside, that already before his time all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and (echoing Foucault [recall Lecture 5 on, 7 February 1979, pp. 113 and 117]) Sombart, and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. (See my paper on Spinoza.)* So, while Tocqueville may be Spinozing Spinozism critically, Spinoza got there first. Spinoza, too, understands his own era as an age of flattening homogeneity. And, in fact, the main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum], lacking in inner refinement and substance.

Again, I could stop. But it is worth noting that in Chapter VII of TTP Spinoza explicitly alerts his reader to the fact sometimes, when dealing with "simple and most intelligible" matters (of the sort we find in Euclid) we don't need biographical and contextual knowledge in order to understand the intentions of an author. Geometrical entities lack power and have simple (generative) definitions, and so are simple and most intelligible in his terminology. In context, Spinoza seems to imply that in order to understand the author(s) of biblical texts "we need to know about his life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when he wrote, or the fate of his book, or its various readings, or how and by whose deliberation it was accepted." [VII.67] To be sure, in order to understand the moral teachings, which are also fairly simple and straightforward, of the Bible, such historicism is unnecessary Spinoza suggests.  Oddly, in the following chapter, Spinoza goes on to suggest that Ezra is the author of the (first main parts) of the Hebrew Bible and then goes on to historize Ezra who gave Israel the Bible as we have it in order to provide the re-founding of Israel with a religion that simultaneously teaches politics.

I have long thought that Spinoza invites us here to be alert to the circumstances of his own life and times, that is, to historicize his own text. And that's because unlike Euclid, Spinoza's works (even the ones in geometric order) do not merely deal with the simple and most intelligible matters. Spinoza is concerned with power and its differentiated effects. In fact, as an aside, in returning to Spinoza's text, I noticed that Spinoza introduces VII.67, with a proverbial remark that "For things which by their nature are easily perceived can’t be said so obscurely that they aren’t easily understood. As the proverb says: to one who understands a word is enough.” [VII.66] Caution ahead. Be that as it may, Spinoza is explicit that he is writing in a leveling age. 

Again, I could stop here. But I was reminded that Spinoza, too, hints at an account of greatness of soul in the Ethics. At E4p46, Spinoza writes, "He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives, as far as he can, to repay the other's Hate, Anger, and Disdain toward him, with Love, or Nobility." Now what Curley translates with 'nobility' is generositate in the Latin. In the glossary, Curley explains he avoided the use of 'high-mindedness' because it has negative connotations nowadays (in, we might add, our democratic, leveling age). Curley notes that Spinoza's generositas echoes Descartes' générosité, which in Descartes explicitly replaces magnanimity (see Passions of the Soul, paragraph 161).** In the Dutch translation of Spinoza in De nagelaten schriften, the connection with magnanimity is explicit because 'edelmoedigheit' (literally 'noble courageousness') just is the common translation of magnanimous. So, Spinoza, understands his own philosophy as a defense of magnanimity.

And, now we're back to Tocqueville. That Tocqueville understands Spinozism/patheism as a religious seduction of democratic man that is simultaneously a self-confirming projection of democratic man is compatible with (even Tocqueville being aware of  the fact that) Spinoza generates a project of Spinozism in order to make true religion, namely living under the guidance of reason, possible. However, my interest today is not to resolve to what degree Tocqueville and Spinoza are on the same side, or not. I leave that open.

Rather, I want to turn the knob one more time and return to a passage in Dennett that long intrigued me. It's from near the end of the book (chapter eighteen) that he taught in a seminar I attended while still in manuscript, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

In chapter 3, I quoted the physicist Paul Davies proclaiming that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless purposeless forces," and suggested that being a byproduct of mindless purposeless forces was no disqualification for importance. And I have argued that Darwin has shown us how, in fact, everything of importance is just such a product. Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing explanation about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature. As we saw in chapter 7, Darwin offers us one: it is in the distribution of Design throughout nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could never be exactly duplicated in its many details. What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years.

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

Amor fati! (Some other time I return to Dennett's life-long fascination with Nietzsche.) Several of us have noticed Dennett's flirtations with Spinozism before (see Huebner (2017); Schliesser (2018) here; Veit (2021)). Here Dennett assimilates Darwinism to pantheism. What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism).  Dennett eliminates the need for worship altogether and displaces it with pure affirmation.

Dennett explains his Darwinism as a strand of pantheism through his own Darwinism. However, from Tocqueville's perspective Dennett's  Quining elimination of providence and any distinction in kind in nature is (anticipatorily) itself to be explained through social causes in virtue of the democratic age we live in. Do you place your bets on natural or a social explanation? Dennett and Tocqueville insist that there is a real choice here, but I prefer a Borgesian, skeptical solution in which, inspired by Escher’s Drawing Hands, the left hand and the right hand write each other. 

• This first appeared at: <Quining Quine and Spinosizing Spinoza; reflections on Dennett and Tocqueville (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*Here's what Spinoza writes: "Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life." (In Curley's translation.)

**"J’ai nommé cette vertu Générosité, suivant l’usage de notre langue, plutôt que Magnanimité, suivant l’usage de l’École, où elle n’est pas fort connue.
I have called this virtue ‘nobility of soul’, in keeping with the usage of our language, rather than ‘magnanimity’, according to the usage of the schools, where this virtue is not much in evidence." (Quoted from Michael Moriarty's chapter, "Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents.")

On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

I once met John Perry for a few minutes in line at a hotel Starbucks at an Eastern APA when those were still the job-market. We didn't know each other, and we never met again (so far). But I knew his name because I owned his A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality; our chat was brief, but it was kind not the least because his eyes didn't wander to scan the room while we talked. I forgot what we talked about, but, as the kids say, sometimes the vibe is more important than the words and it was one of the few sweet moments during that otherwise dismal APA.

So, I'll forgive him that in his (2007) Amherst Lecture which offers a reading of “Borges and I,” Perry opts for "the more straightforward interpretation" in supposing that the implied author of "Borges and I" is Borges the (famous) actual author of the piece, and not some fictional counterpart or doppelgänger of the actual author. After all, we're dealing with Borges, the author of Pierre Menard!

"Borges and I' is, in fact, about the estranged relationship between the implied author of "Borges and I" and the famous author, Borges. So, it's not impossible that the implied author of "Borges and I" is the fictional counterpart.

Perry actually acknowledges this possibility on some level later in his argument when he concedes that "in following the writer’s thoughts, we must to a certain extent pretend that the writer is not Borges." But Perry thinks we can't sustain this perspective because "the interest of the story is the thoughts that the writer has about himself" (emphasis added) and not the implied fictional counterpart.

As an aside, the less straightforward interpretation that Perry rejects is that "Borges could have written a story like this about some other author." But that's compatible with the implied author being (not just a counterpart/doppelgänger of Borges, but) also (say) Eric Schliesser. And it's quite clear that the latter option is not really implied by the story. So, while I agree with Perry that this is less likely and should be rejected, I don't think, as I hinted in the previous two paragraphs, Perry has canvassed all the relevant options when he opts for what he takes to be the more straightforward interpretation.

Perry's interpretation of "Borges and I" actually goes off the rails, I think, shortly thereafter when he writes that "It would not only be odd, but quite impossible, for Borges to survive the writer. Even if all that is meant by “survival” is living on as a literary figure, if Borges lives on in that way, so will the writer."  This is not right if we reject the more straightforward interpretation.

But even on the straightforward interpretation there is a wrinkle that Perry does not confront. (I say this with some trepidation not just because I remember his kindness so fondly, but also because between the two of us, he is actually the expert on identity.) Before I get to that, for Perry, "Borges and I" is fundamentally about the expression of "a certain alienation [the actual Borges] feels about certain aspects of himself and certain achievements of his." The alienation thesis is quite plausible. But the reason for Perry's confidence here is that he is working with a theory of identity (let's call it a 'classical' one) in which "the relation that A and B have when there is just one thing that is both A and B. It is the relation that Tully has to Cicero, the evening star has to the morning star, Mark Twain has to Samuel Clemens, Bill Blythe has to Bill Clinton, and so on. Identity is the relation that each thing has to itself and no other." This is familiar enough for philosophical readers.

In order to hold on to this classical theory of identity and to handle the ways in which A and B (Borges and I or I and Borges) may seem to come apart in "Borges and I," Perry introduces the idea of "motivating cognitive complex." If you are interested in finding out what that is read Perry’s lecture. I'll stipulate here that it can do the job Perry wants it to do.

To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Perry may be playing an elaborate, Borgesian game with us, too. After all, along the way, while discussing a thought experiment of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Perry notes that "then I see on the web that the date when John Perry published his Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality was 1978, that information goes into the same mental file where information about what is in front of me, whether I am hungry or not, and the like, is kept. I get the information “John Perry published the dialogue in 1978” and this leads to the thought, “I published the dialogue in 1978.”" One may well wonder who this I really is supposed to be. 

Be that as it may, I don't think that Borges (in the straightforward interpretation) or the implied author, Borges's counterpart (in my preferred interpretation) is relying on the classical theory of identity in "Borges and I." And my reason for thinking that is two-fold: first, the story ends with an epistemic claim: "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." On Perry's reading this ought to be deeply puzzling. For, by stipulation (the straightforward interpretation), the persona who is writing the piece is Borges the famous author. So this doubt really can’t arise on Perry’s straightforward reading.

Second, Perry completely, and somewhat oddly (he is a professional philosopher, after all), skips the explicit invocation of Spinoza in "Borges and I" (which in the translations I am familiar with is shorter than a double-spaced page). 

It's pretty clear that Spinoza rejects the classical theory of identity. This is obvious in Spinoza's doctrine of eternality in which the X that becomes eternal loses all the particularity one naturally  (and also on the classical theory of identity) associates with X and becomes, in fact, in a certain sense co-extensive with the true or the truths (Y). But it’s not so that from the perspective of eternity, X=Y. (See here for an attempt to describe this.) In fact, Spinoza also rejects what Tarski calls the 'classical' conception of truth (and defends what one might call a metaphysical identity theory of truth (recall here)). Rather, like the Muslim philosophers' views of God’s knowledge (as Al-Ghazali infers, they deny that God knows individuals), from the perspective of eternity, Spinoza's individuals and individuality are ephemera (and so unknowable). My point here is not to defend Spinoza.

Now, it's possible, of course, that the implied author of "Borges and I" has a different interpretation of Spinoza than the one hinted at in the previous paragraph. Fair enough. In the story, the following is claimed: "Spinoza understood that all things want to be preserved in their being." This is an evocation of a feature of the so-called general 'Conatus doctrine' (EIIIp6). In fact, it echoes Ethics IIIp9 (and a whole series of propositions developed in parts IV/V of the Ethics): "The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and also insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in being." In "Borges and I" the doctrine gets glossed as follows (in the translation of Ilan Stavans): 

the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others and in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried freeing myself from him and went from the mythologies of the arrabal to the games with time and the infinite, but those games are Borges’ now and I shall come up with other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

Again, at first one may think it's pretty clear Perry is onto something when he suggests that this expresses alienation. Perhaps an alienation so extreme, that the conatus doctrine ends up in a kind of inversion: rather than tending toward eternity, it tends in the implied author toward oblivion or near-total loss of identity.

Before I close this digression, I should admit that I ended up returning to Borges' story because my friend Petra had bait-and-switched me into buying Amina Cain's fascinating essay, A Horse at Night. This essay mentions two of Borges' stories (including "Borges and I”.) I write ‘bait-and-switch,’ because Petra had sent me a picture of a paragraph from Cain, which I only later realized (while reading Cain's essay) was an excerpt from Annie Ernaux's The Possession.

A major theme of A Horse at Night, is how in "writing and life" two things can be imaginatively projected on top of each other without eclipsing each other and, thereby, generating something new. That is, Cain explores the complex nature of identity. To put this as a serious joke: I find Cain's implied author in A Horse at Night nearly insufferable and banal when she is engaged in autobiography and mesmerizingly evocative and interesting when discussing other artist’s works of art. For the record: Cain treats the implied author of "Borges and I" as sad.

Neither Perry nor Cain discusses Spinoza or the skeptical conclusion of "Borges and I:" "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." It's not obvious on Perry's reading why this occurs. It's a rather extreme form of skepticism; it denies knowledge of the self-identifying features of the Cartesian ego in the very act of affirming its existence. It is especially notable — alerted by Cain — that this occurs in the writer’s life that one forgets or losses oneself in a certain sense. (Cain touches on this from the perspective of the Soto Zen tradition, not Spinozism.)

If we glance at Spinoza's theory of identity the puzzle disappears if we imagine, as we are allowed in fiction, that the sentence, "I don’t know which of the two writes this page," is written from the perspective of eternity/oblivion. For from that perspective such individualizing marks are not known/knowable. Of course, the joke is knowing that one is Borges, or the implied author, or his very vain counterpart, wouldn't matter from that perspective either, or at least it shouldn't.

• This first appeared at: <On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 3.: Utopia without Satire (on Le Guin and Borges)

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, Chapter 6, pp. 141-143 (in the British edition). 

This post is the third in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.). Annares is an anarchist society without public laws, property, nor guilt. Relatively minor violations of local norms and practices are generally sanctioned by social criticism and ostracism. The exchange between Bedap and Shevek, the initially foolish hero of the story, reveals that some major violations of norms are medicalized; one is viewed as psychologically diseased if one murders, rapes, or systematically refuses to contribute work to society (a society -- it should be noted, in fairness -- that teeters on the edge of subsistence and otherwise is quite generous). Presumably the Asylum aims at rehabilitation. (In chapter 10, we hear the Asylum understands itself as a "refuge.") Bedap's suggestion is that those who show too much independence of  thought are also nudged to the Asylum.

What makes Tirin's situation so interesting is that his free-thinking is expressed in terms of a satire. And it becomes clear through the narrative that Annares is unfamiliar with such comedy. In this respect Annares, a community devoted to sympathetic mutual aid, is not unalike to how Socrates legislates Kallipolis and, perhaps more pertinent, how J.L. Borges imagines (recall) Ibn Rushd's Muslim Spain (which also lacks satirical comedy). That Le Guin was very familiar with Borges' thought, and took it rather seriously, is suggested by her (1988) introduction to Borges' co-edited volume The Book of Fantasy, which focuses exclusively on Borges (without paying much attention to the two other editors) and the "honours" she thinks he is due, and scattered remarks in her non-fiction writing. Among the noteworthy claims of that introduction is that she treats fantasy and science fiction as a joint genre, each (to convey her thought rather reductively) devoted to making visible the moral questions of our age.

The arts are key to social life to the relatively isolated communities of Annares. And, in particular, the theatre is very important, "the Art." (Chapter 6; p. 131) But the syndics who put up art-works also have rather restrictive interpretations of what art should be shown. So, comedies do exist on Annares, but are not as central: ‘They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. … Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.’ (p. 131) So, satire is unknown.

My students and I had some initial difficulty in understanding why Tirin's play created such trouble for him in Annares. It looks rather innocent. Here is a brief, post-facto summary by an eye-witness (in chapter 10):

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.--chapter 10, p. 269

At first sight, Tirin is merely making fun of the money-obsessed Urrasti, drawing on the shared prejudices or ideology of the anarchists of Annares. These views are taught on Annares from a young age. In addition, Urrasti are not allowed to visit Annares. (Annares and Urras are each other's moons.) This is, in fact, part of the founding "Settlement" that governs the isolationist anarchist society (which is developed out of the refugees of the members of a failed revolution on Urrasti). They keep outside influences and people, which are seen as dangerously corrupting, out of Annares. This is achieved by limiting planetary entry to a few commodities that are exchanges with mining commodities that are useful to the much wealthier Urrasti societies. 

So, Tirin's play is a fantasy about the troubles an Urrasti might find in adjusting to life on or trying to subvert life on Annares. And since the Urrasti is not presented in attractive fashion and is, in fact, held up to ridicule, it is at first odd that Tirin is sanctioned so badly for staging the play (and his life haunted by it), and that Shevek eventually decides he has to publish it independently despite social disapproval. 

Now, eventually, we are informed that Shevek learns to understand Tirin as an "inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage." (Chapter 10, p. 270.) This goes very much against the purpose of drama on Annares, which really frowns on (i) individuality in all the arts and tends to praise works that (ii) promote (without being shallow) uplifting harmony. (This is also seen in the treatment of choral music on Annares.) 

So, let's take stock: in virtue of (i) and (ii) and (iii) representing immorality in satirical fashion Tirin's play is called "immoral" by some (270). Even in the narrative of The Dispossessed, it is recognized that calling an author immoral in virtue of (i-iii) is not an especially sophisticated response to the play.  But despite the Urrasti being the but of the joke, there is an important feature of the play that is highly critical of Annares. While the satire seems to be primarily directed against the traditional capitalist or properterian enemy it also expresses a criticism of the isolation of Annares. As Shevek puts it, this satire also teaches, "what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners." Annaeres is simultaneously a great social project, and a prison.

Now, for us as readers with only partial and second hand access to the play, it's not entirely clear how this interpretation follows from what we have been shown. But it is not entirely unclear either: the local Annares women does not get satisfaction, and the interaction between the man and women is governed by mutual misunderstanding. And all of this is due to the fact that the Settlement has built a theoretical and empirical wall around Annares. To keep capitalism out, the locals also deliberately keep themselves uninformed and to avoid nearly all mutual exchange.* The outside world is a source of contamination--and needs to be quarantined out. (This point is actually made on the very first page of the book.) 

And taken like this, Tirin's satire is not misunderstood at all by those who criticized and socially ostracized him. And while they may seem initially outlandishly vindictive and dangerously totalitarian to us, Tirin's audience accurately perceives that his ridiculous satire is taking aim at the foundational commitments of their society of mutual aid.+ (Notice that in the play, the Annares basically leave the Urrasti to his own devices.)

To close: one of the main questions that The Dispossessed makes us ask -- this is played out in a number of set-piece debates in chapter 12  -- is whether a society founded on the noble ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, can tolerate individual, intellectual commerce with the rest of the world (especially if that commerce is not governed by social utility) without risking its own survival by it. The question is, of course, not limited to such admirable societies. Le Guin's book offers no platitudes of reassurance or an answer to the question; each of us have to think it for ourselves with our communities.**

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On subaltern horrors, Borges, and the Natural History of an Idea

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism .... I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.--Borges (1939) The Total Library.

I have quoted the concluding paragraph of "The Total Library," which is the forgotten sibling of Borges' more celebrated (and slightly younger) "The Library of Babel" although it shares some underlying insights. The Total Library is an articulating of the thesis that "the fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues." That we recognize the name of the story in the sentence describing the utopia of the total library alerts us that use and mention, and even baptistic designation intermingle on macro and micro level, which is a feature of the story, not a bug. 

The main narrative, such as it is, of The Total Library, is a history of ideas in Lovejoy's specific sense: an idea is treated as an isolated cultural unit with a clear natural history ("Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of European history"). The most familiar token, Dennett calls it proverbial, of the "typographical image" whose natural history is recounted is Huxley's claim that "half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum."

Inscribed in this narrative in the history of ideas, is a report on the "polemic" between the system of chance or necessity and the system of divinely organized order. This polemic is decided in favor of Democritus (the proponent of the system of chance). 

As an aside, Borges treats Cicero (not his character) as refuted. But Cicero had been introduced not as a proponent of the system of divine order, but as an ironic skeptic. In other words, Borges treats the rise of Darwinism (who is represented by Huxley) and Logic (Carroll) not, altogether without wisdom, as a refutation of the system of divine order, but rather as a defeat of ironic skepticism. This is, of course, not just an aside because one can understand Borges' story as the revenge, or eternal return, of ironic skepticism (which competes with a more successful skepticism familiar from the extension of the holographic principle to a holographic universe.)

The version told by one of Cicero's characters, and now I quote Borges, goes like this:

 I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade him-self that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.

Because of the familiarity of Huxley's token of this image in recurring debates over Darwinism, we might overlook that in Cicero the image is used to undermine an epicurean cosmogony (recall yesterday's post on Newton)--the existence of species is a mere subset of this. This cosmogony held that the structure we encounter is the product of the collision of atoms, which have an innate gravity, subject, as we learn from Lucretius and Cicero, to random swerves.

I don't mean to suggest that Cicero or Huxley are idiosyncratic to connect cosmogony to the origin of species. As I noted a few weeks ago, in the revised preface to his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell trots out Cicero's sibling argument -- which I have dubbed 'Posidonian,' which is just before the passage recounted by Borges' narration  -- in response to Darwin's Origin (as I learned from David Haig). And while Whewell treats the nebular hypothesis as plausible, he does not think it is sufficiently explanatory about the origin of the order it exhibits.

But rather than returning to that material, my eye stops at Borges' two-fold claim that Swift's "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul," (i) is a "museum of commonplaces," and (ii) itself a token of this idea. Part of the joke here is that the correct title of Swift's essay is "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind."  "Tritical" being (now archaic) "trite" or "hackneyed." And in the joke Borges' discerns that a single typographic mistake can be memetically or fitness enhancing.

And when we turn to Swift we find indeed a museum of commonplaces, which presents us not so much with a natural history of the typographic idea, but with a philosophical history, which as the title already suggests, itself a polemic against (ahh) then recent philosophy (and the commitments of an Enlightenment age: democracy, science, etc.).

And lurking in the essay is not so much the observation that democracy is vulnerable to demagoguery, which is indeed trite, but rather the more philanthropic point that would have been evident to Borges' initial readers -- that democratic theorists fail to grasp the true nature of the best kind of democratic public speech. This nature is not truth-telling (as democrats deceives themselves) nor flattery (as the the critics of democracy claim), but rather the art of hiding its artfulness ("in oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art.")

There is no better way to hide artfulness if the surface is random characters which "chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence." And this would be the case "for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings."

It is tempting to domesticate the thought by saying 'it's fiction' or 'science fiction'. But in the refutation of Cicero  the ground from which to deny we inhabit the subaltern horror became unstable, even a trapdoor.

 

 

"Skyscraper" is a metaphor: On Azzouni on Aesthetics & Outlaws:

• 1. We express our personality by what we say and by what we do.
• 1.1 What we say we say with words...
• 1.2 What we do, we do in many ways, and these ways "show" a personality.
• 1.21 "Style" is a word sometimes used to describe this. Style is the invention of a pattern of variations where variations are allowed t be invented.
• 1.211 (It cannot be seen ahead of time what variations are allowed to be invented.)
• 1.212 Personality  is shown when variations coalesce into a pattern we can "grasp."
• 1.2121 (Consistency is not required of such a pattern. What would it mean to be inconsistent? To open and close a door simultaneously.)
• 1.213 Those who invent a pattern of variations which is not allowed to be invented always show the same personality -- the outlaw -- as long as those variations are not allowed. (Later retrospection can reclassify outlaws as showing distinct personalities.)
• 1.2131 "Outlaws are capable of anything." (Of course, this is never true.)...
• 1.231 And our actions always show more than we say. (Unless they don't coalesce into a pattern. Unless we are outlaws.")---From: "Numbered Paragraphs: An Essay on Aesthetics, in The Lust for Blueprints: A Collection of Poems by Jody Azzouni, (Providence: 1999) p. 71.

Azzouni's "Numbered Paragraphs" has attracted almost no (published) philosophical attention.  This is a shame because it raises interesting puzzles and also expresses, we may say, philosophical style.

To start with a surface puzzle of classification: the "essay" (which I have partially quoted above) can be naturally read as a kind of appendix or commentary on the poems that precede it in the collection and, less naturally, as itself a poem (or both; or neither). In either case, it can also be read as an imitation of, and simultaneous homage of/commentary on, Wittgenstein, and so be seen to rival Kripke's (1982).

What kind of dizzying control over language must one have to pull off these projects simultaneously?

--But, but, numbered paragraphs cannot be a poem!

If I understand Azzouni correctly, [A] "Numbered paragraphs" is a poem if and only if it is included in something like "A Collection of Poems" and it gives aesthetic pleasure.* 

For [A] to be taken as true, requires the intervention of the critic, which helps grasp the poem and so increases -- or makes possible -- our aesthetic pleasure at Numbered Paragraphs. A poet can be her own critic, and simultaneously need more critics. 

*Azzouni's Lust precedes the impact of the internet -- technology is represented by video --, so it would require some updating. For example (both on this note and on the nature of an outlaw), we learn about the poet (p. 95) that "Jody prepared a series of miniature cards which, inserted into books in stores, provided a sort of alternative to the sparsely attended readings and to restrictive conventional media -- thus creasing a new guerrilla-publishing method." A decade later Azzouni could have been encouraged to start a YouTube channel.** It's left unsaid in "about the poet" that he is identical to Jody Azzouni the philosopher, or that Jody is a he, or that behind Jody there is a legal identity.  (To say that 'identity is trivial,' is to lack poetic sensibility?+)

Numbered paragraphs violate(s) expectations about what a poem can be. In so doing Jody (the poet, that is) reveals the personality of a poetic outlaw. Logic and Aesthetics have this in common: "merely stipulative constraints" can be "transformed into the normative language of law and proscription." (See: 3.233211) There is a more subtle point here: stipulated constraints are often grasped only after they have been violated by the outlaw.

That is, even stipulated constraints can start out (ahh) tacit?

--I must be losing the plot.

So, the function of the outlaw in poetry is to show us our expectations, and make the violations of  these pleasing aesthetically.  But this turns the outlaw-poet into a kind of literary critic. The difference is the critic is parasitic whereas the outlaw-poet is part of the tradition, retrospectively (leaving aside the exceptions [3.2211]).

Perhaps, "numbered paragraphs" is not a philosophical tract, but an imitation of it (see 3.233543).+

This raises the more challenging question: what would it mean to imitate philosophy? Can a literary critic ask that question?

Here's an answer: in imitative philosophy, let's stipulate, the form and matter is identical to (ahh) a real philosophy, but it (the imitative philosophy) is not original (because a copy). 

That strikes me as off. 

Here's another purported answer: in imitative philosophy, let's stipulate, the form and matter is identical to (ahh) a real philosophy, but it shows...no personality.

'No personality' follows the language of the poem; but I thought you would say 'bad faith.'++

So, we need a clunky distinction between imitative philosophy and philosophy that imitates. A poet could invent the proper vocabulary. (1.23311)

--I warned you (cf. 5.4), this is not some kind of postmodern joke. 

Why not try this answer: in imitative philosophy, let's stipulate, the form and matter is identical to (ahh) a real philosophy, but it (the imitative) becomes a philosophical cul-the-sac; it gives no birth to a series, or tradition.

On Eternity and Chance in Borges on Eid al-Fitr

We inevitably desire eternity; and dreams of eternity can only fail, condemned as we are to temporality.--William Egginton "Borges on Eternity," (in Eternity: A History, 277)

Today, Eternity: A History edited by Y. Melamed arrived in the mail. I don't know why I received the volume (I have edited a volume on Sympathy in the same series, but I have not been sent other gratis copies in the series), but I am pleased with the anonymous gift. Because I sometimes muse about Borges, I was drawn to Egginton's elegant "Reflection" on Borges (quoted above). Oddly, when I looked up Egginton in the list of Contributors, I found his name missing. At first I wondered if Melamed had played a practical, Borgesian joke and invented a fictional character to write the entry on Borges. But from Wikipedia I learn William Egginton was born in Syracuse in 1969.*

In Averroës's Search,-- sadly unmentioned by Egginton --, the great philosopher, Ibn Rushd, is explicitly located in "the land of Spain, where there were not a great many things, yet where each thing seemed to exist materially and eternally." It's important for Borges' politics that this philosopher is also a Spanish philosopher and, thus, somehow in the cultural ancestry of the 'West.' And Spain gets presented as (to adapt a Quine-ean phrase) a desert landscape, where the lack of ''entity' density is compensated, as it were by a cosmic, metaphysical harmony, by eternal, material existence of the relatively rare entities found there. Of course, this only seems so because we assume that no material thing -- we can ignore spirits here -- exists eternally in Spain.

The next time we encounter the eternal in Borges's story of Ibn Rushd, Faraj (an "orthodox" Qur'anist) is reported as saying, "while language and signs and writing are the work of men, the Qur'an itself is irrevocable and eternal.'' (Averroës remains silent in response, although he thinks that Faraj could also have said "that the mother of the Book is similar, in a way, to the Platonic Idea.") Faraj is the host of the dinner-party, and it is impolite and imprudent to draw those unskilled in theology into discussion about it.

As an aside, in his contribution to the Eternity volume (p. 84), Peter Adamson helpfully notes that the idea that the Qu'ran is uncreated becomes an imposed dogma in the mid ninth century by the Abbasid Caliphs, although this remark only gives a hint of what is at stake in Ibn Hanbal's famous defiance on this point.**

It is notable that Borges's Ibn Rushd philosophical translation of Faraj's remark does not contradict it. He is shown capable of an esoteric reading that he does not utter. Here, as is elsewhere, Borges shows that he has grasped Ibn Rushd's political thought because Ibn Rushd is exceptionally clear on the significance to political-theology that the experts that know can keep quiet.

The 'mother of the Book' is itself a Quranic phrase (see 43:2-4) and on the Platonizing reading of Borges's Ibn Rushd it is a kind of eternal template for the Arabic text that Faraj knows how to recite. It is compatible with this idea, but that's unmentioned, that any material Qu'ran could also be produced in a different language (the work of men).***

The idea of a 'mother of the Book' returns under a different name (and with a different content) in The Library of Babel: in the eternally existing and eternally returning library, "There must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books." There Borges's narrator treats the "belief" in what was termed the Book Man," that is, the "librarian" who "must have examined that book" (and "this librarian is analogous to a god") as a "superstition." (Here the narrator sides with the Islamic critique of Christianity.) I note that Borges's narrator goes on to insist -- and I hasten to add on impeccable, modal metaphysical grounds -- that this perfect compendium of all others books itself, must exist.

Eid Mubarak!

 

 

 

On a Memory being a Mirror of Secret Acts of Cowardice; Borges' Symposium with Ibn Rushd

One evening, the Muslim merchants of Sin-i-Kalal conducted me to a house of painted wood in which many persons lived. It is not possible to describe that house, which was more like a single room, with rows of cabinet-like contrivances, or balconies, one atop another. In these niches there were people eating and drinking; there were people sitting on the floor as well, and also on a raised terrace. The people on this terrace were playing the tambour and the lute—all, that is, save some fifteen or twenty who wore crimson masks and prayed and sang and conversed among themselves. These masked ones suffered imprisonment, but no one could see the jail; they rode upon horses, but the horse was not to be seen; they waged battle, but the swords were of bamboo; they died, and then they walked again."
"The acts of madmen," said Faraj, "are beyond that which a sane man can envision."
"They were not madmen," abu-al-Hasan had to explain. "They were, a merchant told me, presenting a story."
No one understood, no one seemed to want to understand.  Borges Averroës's Search 

In La Busca de Averroes -- commonly translated as Averroës's Search but there is something to be said, too, for Averroës's Hunt --, Borges imagines a (presumably) alcohol free, symposium with a lively discussion in twelfth century Córdoba.  While the main focus of Borges's "tale" is on Averroës, the main focus of the discussion at this symposium is, initially, the travel tales of Abu-al-Hasan, a quick-witted traveler (whose "memory was a mirror of secret acts of cowardice").

These tales offer, inter alia, a comparison of two great civilizations: golden age Islam and China. Below I note the significance of this fact. In this paragraph I note that The comparison is shown, instead of told--a distinction that Abu-al-Hasan explicitly relies on when he tries to explain what tragedy is to his uncomprehending audience. It thus, exhibits, both the kind of thing that the purported narrator of Borges's tale says he wanted to show, that is, "the process of failure, the process of defeat" as well as an instance of this kind: "Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy....[that is] Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is." That is, this is an example of the ways in which pre-existing conceptual or cultural 'schemes' prevent us from discerning or grasping 'concepts' or 'content' that fall outside the scheme.

As an aside, the story also instantiates a way -- and it exhibits it without telling us so -- in which one can aim to overcome scheme-induced-failures-of-grasping content. For the story conveys to us what it's like to fail to grasp 'scheme-induced-failure-of-grasping content' through an imaginative. sympathetic identification with Averroës, which in turn involves a kind of, momentary, identification not exactly with Averroës the historical person, but rather the Averroës who is (now quoting the suddenly foregrounded narrator near the very end of the tale) "a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum." (Recall this post.) Here Borges hints, again (recall), at the fragility of identity.

To return to the main point of this post: given the heavy handed articulation by the narrator (the unnamed "I" quoted in the previous paragraph) of 'his' intention, it's easy to overlook that the Chinese performance we are told about by the traveler is about some kind of war or civil war/uprising. These contrast, in fact, with the secret acts of cowardice that crowd the traveler's memory. That is, while the performance may be entertaining, it is, in fact, also political in nature. So, what Borges shows us, is that by lacking comedy and tragedy, the urbane and wealthy, civilized Islamic culture he is describing lacks one of the means to explore the political. It does not lack all means, because it is explicitly noted -- room is made in the taut structure of the tale -- that "Averroës...had written his commentary on [Plato's] the Republic."* But by definition (in Ibn Rushd's philosophy), the commentary on Plato is not really accessible to non-philosophers. 

The political hovers over the symposium which is introduced with praise of the rulers ("the incomparable virtues of the governor to those of his brother the emir"); we are not told if it is flattery -- a word that shows up two sentences down -- or not. Shortly thereafter we are shown the dangers of using the wrong words: the traveler finds himself backed into a corner in which, if he were to answer forthrightly, he "would be judged an infidel." Cleverly enough "He opted to breathe that Allah held the keys that unlock hidden things, and that there was no green or wilted thing on earth that was not recorded in His Book. Those words belong to one of the first suras of the Qur'an." The last quoted sentence shows the subtle hand of the narrator who is aware of his reader's ignorance--the learned participants at the symposium (at the house of a "Quranist!"), would not have needed that bit of editorializing. More amusingly and artfully, the quoted sentence (Surah 6:59) points us to the learned practice in which philosophy is associated with the study of both the hidden bits of nature and the esoteric teachings of the Quran.* That looks to be the end of the political issues discussed at the symposium. But when they turn to poetry,  Averroës is quoted as follows:

Furthermore (and this is perhaps the essential point of my reflections), time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, only enriches poetry. At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr's poetry served to bring together two images—that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead Arab. The figure had two terms; today, it has four. Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men.

The meaning of a poetic text is not stable; in the absence of a firm authority, it multiplies over time and sometimes they support any interpretation. (Some other time, I'll discuss Ibn Rushd's treatment of this very theme in the Decisive Treatise.) It is hard not to see here an allusion to the problems of unstable identity/meaning that beset all religious traditions that rely on a revealed (poetic) text (such as the Quran). Saying the totality of all things is a property not just of the Quran, but also of other poetry: he "spoke of the first poets, those who in the Time of Ignorance, before Islam, had already said all things in the infinite language of the deserts."

All of this semantic instability and polysemy may be thought to undermine the role of revelation. But in the tale, Averroës turns this fact into an argument against poetic and religious innovation. This pleases even flatters his traditionalist audience: "The others listened with pleasure, for he was vindicating that which was old."

 

 

Metaphysics, Identity, and Unity of Virtues in Borges

In Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something to sing about; Mallarmé’s statement, “The world exists to end up in a book,” seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic justification for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely coincide; the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to an era of the written word. One speaks of telling the story and the other of books....

Later, Léon Bloy would write:

“There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light…. History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden.” (L’Ame de Napoleon, 1912)

 

The world, according to Mallarmé, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.--Borges (1951) On the Cult of the Books.

While I was reading Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (about which more soon, because it gave me some ideas about the Principle of Sufficient Reason), I came across a reference to the Book of the Brethren of Purity. Wikipedia sent me to Borges. His essay is, in part, about the problem famously remarked upon, as Borges notes, by Plato that "A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers, who may be wicked or stupid." (The problem is also a trope in Borges--recall.) This presupposes, controversially, that a true teacher is capable of reading souls. And it also presupposes that a genuine teacher is capable of discerning wickedness or stupidity in his pupils before, as it were, it's too late. The life and fate of Socrates does not entirely inspire confidence in this matter; we can, as Abe Stone taught me, understand, say, the Meno as a reflection on this. Even if we grant the two controversial presuppositions, modern professional philosophers do not  have the luxury of picking their own pupils, except, perhaps, at the level of a dissertation (or thesis). Even then, in the modern context it would be a bit odd, say, to blame Rawls for misdeeds of his students (if there were any misdeeds) unless these deeds were somehow traceable to Rawls's teaching(s), doctrines, or meta-philosophy. This latter point reminds us that we can't entirely absolve Wittgenstein for the annoying features of his school because Wittgenstein clearly encouraged a kind of cult of personality around him (as witnesses in his own age already noted).    

 

Yet, Borges's essay is framed by a bit of historicized history of metaphysics. (Above I have quoted the first and last paragraphs of the essay.) And, indeed, in this history he also discusses the contributions of the three great Monotheisms of a Book (including a subtle observation on Al-Ghazali and the Brethren of Purity.) The historicization turns on the switch from oral to written culture.

 

One way to understand substance monism, is to understand us as imperfect 'entities' without genuine identity. To be sure, Sub specie aeternitatis there may well be perfect identity (A=A), but from the vantage point of the 'letters' in the text there is none least of all about our own all-too-human identities. Even relying on baptismal naming ceremonies will not do.

 

It is tempting to treat Borges's essay as a geneaology of error. There are two bits of evidence for this in the piece: first, because he treats the Muslims, Jews, and Christians in increasing order of "extravagance." Second, post-Darwin, he may well reject teleology. But we would be underestimating Borges if he drew an inference from extravagance to falsity.

 

Identity (A=A) is trivial, of course, from the perspective of eternity. But when we mortals rely on that perspective to do our own metaphysics, we tacitly rely, as Borges hints, on a teleology that presupposes, as it were, an intelligible and epistemically stabilized reality (with 'entities') available for an infinite knower (that just happens to be substance). It would be professional foolishness to call relying on such identity a form of extravagance. But again, even if it is extravagance, it would not follow it is false.

 

Garber vs Della Rocca, reviewed (I)

The present issue of the Journal for the History of Philosophy (JHP) has a two-tiered debate between Daniel Garber (Princeton) and Michael Della Rocca (Yale) over (i) the status of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza and (ii) the methodology of the history of philosophy. Both (i-ii) are connected to (iii) a more inchoate debate over what philosophy is. That Spinoza and the PSR would be the occasion of such a debate is no surprise; ever since Russell embraced brute facts (and rejected the PSR) and treated Spinoza as an exemplar of non-philosophy (recall), the place of Spinoza within analytical philosophy is not merely a historical question, but also a means at discerning the contested limits of philosophy and an open path toward renewing philosophy. The previous sentence is to side a bit with Della Rocca, who is very clear that "Spinoza’s philosophy can help us to learn or re-learn how to do philosophy in a more productive vein" (533ff) than the analytical status quo. (It is no surprise that much of the most influential Anglo scholarship on Spinoza (from Curley, Bennett, etc.) has been akin to rehabilitation projects in part by reinterpreting Spinoza into fashionable categories and problematics (and to downplay the mystical and therapeutic elements discerned by Russell)).

As an aside, the very same issue of JHP in which the Garber/Della Rocca exchange appears, also has two papers on Kant, one on Aristotle, one on Descartes--all on topics that reflect ongoing debates in scholarship (with undoubtedly fresh and important angles--I know several of the authors and they are all terrific). By contrast, the book-review section includes topics that are a bit more off-the-beaten-track. Obviously the sample size is small (N=1), and Jasper Reid's piece does not fit my claim, but (a quick glance at the other two issues of the present volume also confirm that) the pages of JHP represent a very conservative orientation toward the relevant subject matters of the history of philosophy. This orientation is a key feature of the PGR ecology in the field (recall this post). 

The core interpretive issue between Garber and Della Rocca is, at the surface, the status and content of the PSR in Spinoza. (I say "surface" because below it, they agree that rationalism vs empiricism has to be discarded as an organizing principle in the history of philosophy--about that deepy some other time more.) In Della Rocca's hands the PSR is both (i) the master-principle (hereafter MP) and (ii) has a very broad metaphysical scope--Garber denies both that there are any such MPs to be found in the text of Spinoza (and, thus ruling out the PSR's role as a MP) and that in so far as Spinoza embraces commitments akin to the PSR his texts support readings that are thinner in scope than Della Rocca allows. It is worth noting three features of their exchange: (A) that even if Della Rocca's view on (i) are wrong -- say because there is an alternative, perhaps even more fundamental MP, in Spinoza [say, that truth = existence (recall), or truth = being] from which the PSR follows, his reading of (ii) could still be defended. (B) That upon closer inspection, the debate between Garber and Della Rocca over (ii) really turns into a debate over the explanatory resources available to Spinoza in being able to account for the relationship between what follows from the essence/nature of Substance/God and particular infinite series of modes (and the concomitant metaphysical ruling out of some alternative series). (C) That both offer their readings in terms of fairly traditional textual hermeneutics (despite some of their self-presentation).*

On (B) in Garber's hands the problem is that the way God's nature is (and, thus, the way things follow from it) becomes a "brute fact" that violates the PSR. Della Rocca is right, I think, that there is a response to this complaint from within Spinoza's philosophy to be found in E1p33d (and also 1p16, which goes unmentioned by our protagonists, even though Garber (p. 515) quotes a passage in which Spinoza flags its significance for the debate). Della Rocca admits in a footnote that Spinoza's response is not very satisfying philosophically, but does not elaborate. As textual exegesis I am inclined to agree with Della Rocca, but see the next paragraph. (It is to my supervisor's credit that his students do not form a doctrinal or magisterial school.)

The judgment of the previous paragraph is the consequence of my study of Samuel Clarke's (1705) response to Spinoza (in his Demonstration); Clarke's philosophical views on the relationship between God's nature and God's existence puts him very close to Spinoza's position in E1p33 (about which another time more [recall]), but Clarke also noted that E1p33 generates  two important tensions with other features of the Ethics. First, Clarke discerned that Spinoza stipulates that the ratio of motion to rest in the universe remains the same, where the universe is taken as an infinite individual that keeps its nature or form (see E2p13L4 and E2p13L7). Keeping this ratio fixed is entirely compatible with variation in the actual motion of the universe. All the same, given that we are dealing with a ratio here, Clarke is right that at any given time there is an intelligible sense in which “there might possibly have been originally more or less motion in the universe than there actually was.” That is, if God's fixed nature is expressed in a fixed ratio, then very same substantial nature is compatible with different motions and this variation violates the PSR. So, Garber has discerned a genuine problem, but misplaces the location.

Second, Clarke (and all the Newtonians) can note that the PSR is too granular (and, again, this echoes the spirit of Garber's objection and, perhaps, explains why Della Rocca has to concede that Spinoza's position isn't so impressive); Spinoza is committed to there being sufficient reason for infinite variety in the modes (E1p16 and E1p28). But Spinoza's metaphysics lacks resources to explain the particular (confused though it may be) characteristics of the variety we observe--here Spinoza inherits some of the problems of Cartesian physics (despite his severe criticisms of Descartes) [for more careful account]; Newtonian physics can help explain observed accelerations and the evolution of (relatively) closed systems of bodies (in terms of abstract quantities) over time. Even if Spinoza is right to express caution about overconfidence here, Newtonian physics did put us on the road to a truer philosophy. 

Clearly, Clarke is a hostile critic, and he is reading Spinoza through his engagement with Toland. I would not claim that Clarke gets us (to quote Garber) "the historical Spinoza who lived and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic." (As a historical aside, Spinoza also lived and worked in a the seventeenth-century Dutch Stadhouderschap!) But the proto-reading I have offered here is in some sense more historically grounded than either the one on offer from Della Rocca or, ironically, Garber! For, Della Rocca notes that his interpretation revives a historically important interpretation (associated with Jacobi and British Idealism). As it happens, I have considerable sympathy with that interpretation as a means toward articulating an important, enduring philosophical position (in the way that Garber allows (521)), but the jury is out if it is compatible with seventeenth century views available to Spinoza. (My quick and dirty judgment: no; Spinoza is closer to Averroes and a variety of neo-Platonism!)

One might think that I am being unfair to Garber here because he is very concerned with avoiding terms that are not actor's categories (511ff). But as Dan Schneider has pointed out, when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (Recall; see also here.) So, even if we are only trying to understand the past in terms of the actor's intentions (certainly not my program), we have every right, and sometimes a duty if we wish to understand the past, to introduce vocabulary unavailable to the historical actors. As Della Rocca notes, if we wish just to avoid (being a Borges's Pierre Menard and) merely replicate the past in the same words as itself, the business of historians of philosophy starts with going beyond the surface text in some way or another.

While we have made some progress on (i-iii), I have also made some promissory notes (about (A) among other things). So, to be continued...