Digressions&Impressions

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

Covid Fellowship and Constrained Living with Invisible Disability

After last week's digression on the effects of my Covid, I was very touched by the many generous well wishes I received. Reading notes of encouragement in my darkened bedroom filled my time for a few days. Thank you.

Two kinds of responses surprised me. First, while commiserating with me, a number of people shared publicly their experiences of living with regular vertigo, tinnitus, and headaches. They did so on this blog, but also in other social media. My piece was a trigger for them to come out, as it were, and share their otherwise invisible disability in our wider professional circle.* These testimonials give a glimpse of stoic perseverance and alert us, perhaps, to quiet suffering. 

Second, a smaller, but not insignificant number of covid 'long haulers,' and their partners, privately reached out to me, to wish me well, to encourage me, and also to tell me that they recognized my symptoms. They have provided me with fellowship and support through the chat functions of social media. 

Because I find speaking quite exhausting, I am, despite my family, rather isolated during the day. But the fellowship -- as I call them to myself --, has made me feel connected to those who have a sense of what it's like. Relative to the people who died or were incubated in hospitals, we don't seem especially stricken. But we struggle in a world designed for activity.

Because I mostly lacked the canonized covid symptoms  -- fever, cough, lack of smell, shortness of breath** --, the fellowship has been reassuring. Knowing that others, too, experience the waxing and waning of dizziness/boat-rocking, fatigue, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and insomnia has given me a sense it's part of the territory. They have given me a window, a sense of familiarity, into how my experiences hang together. 

Last week, I discussed my inability to read and focus; I have withdrawn from all professional activity. In particular, classes start without me next week. Even the fellowship can't remove the dread I may never teach again. 

This week, however, I want to give a sense of the manner in which the inability to concentrate ('brain fog') manifests itself in other ways, too. The most obvious example is that three times since quarantine ended, I nearly burned down our kitchen. Each time I skipped an otherwise obvious step; e.g., pouring water into the espresso machine after adding the beans, removing the paper-towel-role or the plate from the burning stove. Each time I missed that something was burning in front of my eyes until I smelled the problem, and, eventually, registered it as a warning.  

In reflecting on my experiences I receive, I imagine, an oblique glance at the what it's like of Alzheimers and dementia (and, perhaps, other forms of consciousness in animals and AI). And  there is no difference in experience. Compared to my pre-covid self my steam of consciousness does not feel more granular or gappy. I don't have a sense, in the moment, of my blind-spots.

Thanks to Dennett's work I am familiar with the fact that even very healthy conscioussness is full of unacknowledged gappiness. Because I recall my past capacity, I recognize, after the fact, that some of my behavior exhibits less skill-full functioning, an incompetence at tasks I had once been familiar with. Since I am nearly fifty that's not a wholly new experience.

A few years ago, the work of Elizabeth Barnes on disability taught me that the human condition should be conceived as constrained living (here); (here), (and here). The gappiness of my possible blind-spots is not experienced as constraint at all. I don't feel handicapped when I walk into our kitchenette.

By contrast, while I have some recollection issues (with names, especially), I have a pretty vivid sense of my capacities before Covid. And this alerts me to a whole range of new constraints day-to-day. For example, I have learned to walk while dizzy, which involves an inattention to the sense that I might fall any minute; instead I trust in the sturdiness of my legs.

I also can't listen to any music. In fact, the only distraction I tolerate is watching already familiar films, but not musicals, or TV  (or highly episodic series). This is also familiar to the fellowship. One curiosity is that watching explosives or gun-fights on Netflix does not bother me at all, but any other background noise -- the barking of a dog in the yard, even my son singing happily -- evokes the horror of a scratch on a blackboard. 

  

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.

 

 

[Guest Blogger Amy Olberding on] Corpse Display and Anger

[This is an invited guest post by Amy Olberding.--ES]

Eric’s recent post about anger and corpse display left me unsatisfied with how anger is typically and traditionally addressed.  There’s no tidy way to trace out the concatenation of ideas Eric’s post inspired – it starts with Xunzi talking about how to treat a corpse respectfully, turns then toward Plato considering Leontius’ viewing of a desecrated corpse and, more broadly, what looking at a desecrated corpse is meant to inspire, and then ends up at Agnes Callard on anger.  Maybe the simple explanation is this: display of desecrated corpses is an especially vivid case of human anger, and it often does interlock with moral sensibilities in curious ways.  As Eric notes, the display of the corpse summons the eye and then a response to what is seen.  Anger would standardly inform the reasoning to display the corpse in the first place, and some of that anger is likely meant to transmute and become the witness’ own.  So display of the desecrated corpse is clearly a case that invites consideration of anger. 

But maybe it’s also useful as a way to think about the limitations of our philosophical discussions of anger.  That, at least, is what occurs to me. 

Callard’s recent article divides philosophical accounts of anger into two broad types: pro-anger or anti-anger.  Both sides inevitably need more nuance than this.  Recognizing the moral perils of anger unchecked, the pro-anger advocates are left to argue for management and regulation, lest anger run away with us.  Likewise, recognizing anger’s motivating power where moral ills are concerned, the anti-anger advocates are left to argue that we still need (the far more bloodless) indignation to respond to injustices.  The “sides” here, Callard argues, inadvertently converge because both are trying to recognize a morally palatable anger (or anger-ish?) response when injustices demand some moral-emotive response.  They’re both engaging in moral reasoning that aims to tame and domesticate the wild in us – to encourage measured or regulated abhorrence at wrong without licensing the brute unreasoning stuff that inspires revenge and grudges.  Callard’s argument then pivots to considering the simpler, less attractive conclusion that efforts to purify anger overlook that anger’s impulses – revenge and grudges – are rationally justified. We are left then, with the conclusion that “anger implicates all of us in moral corruption.”  The purified forms of anger moral philosophers are ready to endorse are “a philosopher’s fiction” that work to “distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.”

My concern, I suppose, is that it’s all a philosopher’s fiction – that the way philosophy’s methods typically oblige us to speak of anger clarify (if they do) because the phenomenon of anger is severed from other elements with which it may interlock.  This was Eric’s reservation too – if I can put what he said in my own idiom.  He is effectively arguing that we won’t get a satisfying account of anger if we neglect to register its social aspects.  State violence and social norms may have anger embedded in them and, indeed, it may be an important function in some norms that they transmit or summon anger in citizens.  This is why displaying a desecrated corpse to raise the “spirited” in witnesses can be important, in Eric’s example.  So, we might end up with philosophers’ fictions every time we analyze anger as a phenomenon of individual agents.  This was, I take it, Eric’s point.  Mine is similar:  Insofar as our accounts of anger conceptually isolate it from other emotions, they isolate our analyses from the world and from at least some of the people who exhibit anger. 

Because Eric was discussing corpse display, my thoughts turned to the corpse of Emmett Till, a young boy of 14 beaten, mutilated, and shot to death in 1955 by white men who justified their brutality by accusing him of flirting with a white woman.  When Emmett’s corpse was sent home from Mississippi, where he was murdered, to his mother in Chicago, she gave him an open coffin service so that his beaten, distorted, unrecognizable face was visible to all who came to mourn.  Mamie Till-Mobley deliberately displayed what had been done to her boy, displayed his battered dead body and, as Plato’s analysis might suggest, commanded the eyes of all upon him in a way that would summon in them emotional reactions kindred to her own.[1] 

Whatever a philosophical moral account of anger can do, I want it to explain Mamie Till-Mobley.  I am tempted even to say that Till-Mobley is my pre-theoretical constraint for an adequate account of moral anger, such that I take an analysis of anger that I cannot apply to Emmett Till’s mother to be missing something important.  And I don’t think most of our classical accounts or Callard’s can explain her well.  The trouble here, I think, is that we philosophically talk of anger in isolation.

Mamie Till-Mobley is not only angered, she is grieved.  Her action – displaying her son’s corpse – cannot be understood apart from both anger and grief, to an emotive response in which these are profoundly, inseparably joined.  To separate her anger from her grief, to analyze one without the other or lay claim to understanding one without the other would be, to borrow phrasing from Dostoyevsky, false to the fact.  Till-Mobley’s anger and grief are one body and they unite in the display of her son’s body.  Because of this, accounts of anger that seek calibrated, domesticated forms of anger or that would “dark side” our nature in anger just sit ill here.  There is nothing tame in Till-Mobley’s display of her son’s body – it is an action primevally wild and raw – but neither, I think, is there the moral corruption of which Callard speaks.  Contra Callard’s analysis, at least, I think Till-Mobley is exactly “responding rightly to being treated wrongly.”

Some angers are not unmixed but still fully, even emphatically, need to count as forms of anger morally necessary to consider.  Mamie Till-Mobley’s emotive range and reach, evident in the symbolic aching grief and anger in her son’s display, is richer than I think philosophical analysis gets. It is undeniably and potently anger but it’s not only anger, and that seems to me not only what we’re missing in such analyses, but thereby also what we risk missing in our moral-emotional civic cultivation.  To speak of what we ought do with and about anger, we have to speak about the rest with which it often comes – the grief.  What morally angers us can also and often grieve us.  Perhaps, even, what morally angers us ought to grieve us.  But highlighting that alignment changes the kinds of things we ought be saying about anger and, more particularly, anger at injustices.  The thing we call anger is a thing more complicated than “anger” captures.

The methodological claims I suppose are implicit in what I’m stumbling after here are three.  First, I often counterfactually wonder about how different our philosophical work would be were it not lodged too deeply in the traces of its past.  Western philosophical accounts of anger were inaugurated by men who took as their exemplars and standard-bearers for understanding the concept other men, typically men involved in martial contexts.  There is a lot of anger in the world that plainly is not this.  The world is also full of angry, heartbroken mothers.  Were they the original exemplars, I can’t help thinking the philosophical history of anger would look different. 

Second, when we seek to isolate discrete concepts in order to philosophically clarify a phenomenon, we often pre-emptively set aside too much of how the phenomenon operates in the world.  We end up with conceptually cleaner concepts, but lose the moral world we’re trying to track with them.  In short, it’s not obvious that the tidy concepts that make for good, focused, and clarifying philosophy map the messy world.  Anger treated apart from grief will only capture some of anger, and perhaps only the simplest, least experientially vexed kind. 

Finally, where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience.  Presumably, the motivation for talking about anger at all is figuring out what to do about it and with it.  What to do about it, I hazard tentatively, might require talking about the stuff with which it mixes, all the stuff we’ve left aside to focus on anger alone – not just grief, but perhaps also disappointment.  I can’t defend this – here or even in my own head yet – but if it turned out that some moral anger inextricably involves a richer capacity for grief, we are unlikely to see that and thus to say it and make use of it.  I am quite tempted by the thought that were we more attuned to grief, our understandings of anger would be richer, better, and more useful.  But while anger and grief can be inseparably wedded in a person like Mamie Till-Mobley, our philosophical analyses of both anger and grief live in different conceptual worlds.  So we can’t explain her or direct well toward a world where responses like hers are understood, much less cultivated.

Three bodies on a bed.

[This is the last Digression before my annual Summer break. I thank you, loyal reader, for your continued interest. I hope to be back later around the end of August, or early September.--ES]

Gute Nacht, Freunde, es wird Zeit für mich zu gehen.

Was ich noch zu sagen hätte, dauert eine Zigarette und ein letztes Glas im Stehen.--Reinhard Mey

My dad's least breath was a loud snore. I was holding his hand, while stealing a glance at my sister and his face. Before I could grasp it, his hand stopped resisting my grip. Then, we were three bodies on a bed.

Yesterday, I wrote that my post was "prompted by a chance encounter with Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring, which was sold as a cheap paperback, 'modern classic' in a general bookstore." That was factually correct. But it felt untrue; I had omitted that I had seen her book mentioned in Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem (see here) a science fiction novel I read earlier in the Summer.

In Letter 36, Seneca says that fortune has no right over our conduct [in mores fortuna ius non habet]. The underlying point is that we should so cultivate our dispositions that we can react to bad fortune with equanimity, and that when we have the good fortune of riches we can let our good characters shine. 

Seneca, anticipating my objection, recognizes that fortune shapes our conduct.  Our starting points matter, "if you had been born in Parthia [si in Parthia natus esset], you would have begun, when a child, to bend the bow, etc."

In the 1961 version of "Two Dogmas," Quine inserts the claim that "asking which points in Ohio are starting points" is meaningless.* In context, Quine omits to mention he was born in Ohio.** The point is, perhaps, irrelevant in the debate with Carnap over the status of postulates, but once made aware of it, it changes the meaning of the text (if you are a semantic holist). It's an oblique, even existential joke.

Seneca urges to meditate, so we learn to scorn death (Quid ergo huic meditandum est?...mortem contemnere). Seneca is easily misunderstood here, but his point is familiar enough: we should overcome the fear of death. What's less familiar is that Seneca grounds this advice on the claim that nobody doubts that death has some element which inspires terror in everybody [quae quin habeat aliquid in se terribile... nemo dubitat]. (In fact, this has the character of a political postulate.) 

Seneca's postulate consists of a claim about what nobody doubts about the opinions of anybody else. (Does the absence of  such doubt count as knowledge?) I feel a recalcitrance toward Seneca--with what authority is he speaking on behalf of us? But a few lines down, he goes on to qualify the claim; infants, kids+ and the mad are untouched by the property of death that gives rise to terror in everybody else. Strikingly, he urges reason to emulate their folly (stultitia).++ It's too easily overlooked that he also implies that what nobody doubts about others' views is itself constituted by patterns of omitting those whose voices don't count.  

Seneca's version of eternal return, that everything which seems to die merely mutates (omnia quae videntur perire mutari), leaves me indifferent today.  

Before my dad died, he smoked a last cigarette. In German he quoted Mey. I marveled at his performance. Mey's tune had been the theme song of a Dutch late-night radio program which has been going strong for more than forty years.

As I grasped the significance of that snore, I intuited that we must have often listened to the same radio program lying in bed, without realizing it, before sleep.

 

 

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 the 'first' Political Philosopher (Ilimilku of Ugarit)

The Baal Cycle stands out in that it does not use the type-scene to reaffirm the legitimacy of the reigning law and the political positions that the law enshrines. Instead, it turns matters on their head by placing the protagonist in the position of the rebel who disrupts order, thereby rendering questionable the principles according to which that order is defined...

Ugarit's experience as a vassal state subservient to Hatti informed this representation. According to Bronze Age conventions, vassal status was grounded in an international order that reflected the organization of a kin-based household -- with its fathers, sons, brothers, slaves, and masters. The extension of these relations to the international sphere rested upon a legal fiction that aimed to bolster the idea that politics confirmed to a natural hierarchy. Instead of reinforcing this fiction, the Baal Cycle throws it into doubt. As a witness to (and participant in) a world of incessant power struggles and competing assertions of authority, Ugarit produced a poem that encourages its audience to engage with the idea of a universe that lacks the comforts of order. The story of Baal's rise in such a world served as the vehicle for a critical form of political wisdom....

That Ilimilku continues Baal's story beyond the point of enthronement implies an understanding of politics in which struggle is everlasting. There is no telos of peace and joy.  Aaron Tugendhaft Baal and the Politics of Poetry (93, 95-6, 120)+

There are two classical conceptions of myth: first, myth is associated with superstition and something to be overcome by modernity and rationalization. On this view, which takes myth seriously as the necessary stepping stone toward a political or ethical decision that removes us from the state of myth. The only question is if modernity is a permanent achievement or if back-sliding into myth remains a live possibility. As Tugendhaft reminds us in his fascinating book, the post-1933 Cassirer, for example, came to see that his early progressive optimism was a mistake and that back-sliding was always a life possibility in times of crisis: "we are always living on volcanic soul." The other, second, classical conception is that myth just is the stuff of everydayness, an ordinary comportment or way of being in the world.  This Tugendhaft, a classical philologist, associates with Heidegger.*

What the classical conceptions disallow is that myth -- an "ancient poem about the gods" (17) -- itself can be a means toward or expression of rational thinking. That is, because what the poetic form portrays is from the point of view of monotheism or science obviously a fable, then it can't be a source of rational insight. In the Phaedrus (recall), Socrates famously and explicitly has no time for the attempts by fellow intellectuals to "play the sophist" (sophizomenos) (229C)  and naturalize the hidden, kernel in myths, that is, reduce them to what is likely. Now, one can have some sympathy for Socrates's stance if the project is to find the natural event that gave rise to the myth. (For example, a common rationalizing reading of the Baal cycle is to see in it a story of nature's fertility cycle.) But in context (albeit not elsewhere) Socrates refuses to engage with an other alternative, namely that myth is an allegorical representation of reality. That is, while literally a myth cannot be true, that's perfectly compatible with its elements symbolically standing in for intelligible bits of reality.

There is nothing mysterious about an allegorical representation of reality (if you possess the interpretive key that unlocks the allegory). But this conception of myth is disallowed by the classical conception, and so the possibility of a mythic instruction in reality is systematically occluded. One can kind of see that the in the progressive classical view, in which modernity is understood as an overcoming of myth, the idea of myth as a means of rational reflection is almost unthinkable. This need not be the case in the second classical conception, but because it is often a response to the progressive view of myth it tends to inherit this blind-spot.

Tugendhaft's scholarly book -- it is not a popularization, and while written very cleanly can be challenging at times -- is one long argument for the conceptual possibility of myth being a representation of political reality at a certain level of abstraction. And that, in fact, that the Baal Cycle, which was written ca 1220bc in a semitic language (and for a long time primarily studied to provide cultural background to the Hebrew Bible), is in fact, such a representation not as a roman a clef about political local agents, but a more abstract representation about what is taken to be (by the poet) the enduring nature of political reality which is not, simultaneously, a form of propaganda or justification for the existing political order. Rather, the audience of the poem is put in the position to question the forms of justification of authority found in existing political society.

Tugendhaft nicely shows that the poem was written in the periphery of an empire that was crumbling. If I understand him correctly Ugarit was a commercial town which itself was, by Bronze age standards, relatively egalitarian and despite being long lasting, itself never a great empire often a vassal of much larger states (Egypt, Hittites etc.). One member of this society, the poem's likely author, Ilimilku seems to have been an experienced diplomat in late bronze age game of thrones. Perhaps because I am Dutch, but I suspect that it is significant that in virtue of being in the imperial margins in a society where natural hierarchy could not be taken for granted, that Ilimilku could discern the reality behind the dueling imperial orders more starkly and live to tell it.

One striking contextual fact that Tugendhaft points out is that as the Hittite empire was collapsing the ruling kings of that empire started to claim that they themselves were divine in order to shore up their authority and legitimacy (127). It's one thing to believe in the divinity of invisible agents, it's quite another (although since familiar enough) to believe in the divinity of fellow mortals.

Hume points out that not "every Alexander meets with a Lucian, ready to expose and detect his impostures." Even if there is somebody who could expose the imposture, it may often not be prudent to do. If your overlord tells you he is divine you may keep your mouth shut, too. Moreover, even if somebody is secure enough to do so, there is not always an audience that can use the information in an actionable way. Ilimilku must have thought it important to represent the nature of political reality to his king or society.

Tugendhaft's argument will have to be evaluated by his scholarly peers.++ I could close here, but I was surprised that Tugendhaft did not spend more time on the reality represented by his poem. (Tugendhaft's focus is on the way political authority and legitimacy is represented, and here I am not doing justice to his argument.) For, it is significant that Baal's first major opponent is the sea-god Yamm. For, while the sea was a source of commercial riches for Ugarit, it was also a permanent source of political danger. A wealthy town like Ugarit is a permanent target for opportunistic raiders and pirates, especially when its citizen-soldiers/sailors are out of town defending the empire in far-away lands. And, in fact, there is considerable evidence that suggests that within a generation or so Ugarit was attacked, perhaps destroyed, by its traditional enemies from the sea. If that's right then Ilimilku was not merely giving a general analysis of the nature of political reality, but also trying to remind his audience that in the context of collapsing protection of the empire, the city needed (and this is fully compatible with Tugendhaft's analysis) to be on guard against its enemies waiting for an opportunity.** I shall return to the Baal Cycle with the aid of Tugendhaft before long.

PS UPDATE: the initial version of this post did not have  quotes around the 'first political philosopher. Obviously I did not really wish to convey that Ilimilku was the firs political philosopher. For on my reading, political philosophy is a permanent possibility. But Chike Jeffers reminded me that he is published on an earlier (Egyptian) political philosopher in a paper I much admire. So, I changed the title of this post accordingly.

 

 

 

On Fear [FDR& Seneca Letter 24]

Oh," say you, "those stories have been droned to death in all the schools; pretty soon, when you reach the topic 'On Despising Death,' you will be telling me about Cato." But why should I not tell you about Cato, how he read Plato's book on that last glorious night, with a sword laid at his pillow?  [Quidni ego narrem ultima illa nocte Platonis librum legentem posito ad caput gladio?] He had provided these two requisites for his last moments, - the first, that he might have the will to die, and the second, that be might have the means.  So he put his affairs in order, - as well as one could put in order that which was ruined and near its end, - and thought that he ought to see to it that no one should have the power to slay or the good fortune to save Cato.  Drawing the sword, - which he had kept unstained from all bloodshed against the final day, he cried: "Fortune+, you have accomplished nothing by resisting all my endeavours.  I have fought, till now, for my country's freedom, and not for my own, I did not strive so doggedly to be free, but only to live among the free.  Now, since the affairs of mankind are beyond hope, let Cato be withdrawn to safety." So saying, he inflicted a mortal wound upon his body.  After the physicians had bound it up, Cato had less blood and less strength, but no less courage; angered now not only at Caesar but also at himself, he rallied his unarmed hands against his wound, and expelled, rather than dismissed, that noble soul which had been so defiant of all worldly power.--Seneca, Letter 24.

I have been hesitating to write about Letter 24, because I recognize that I am not quite up to task of writing about its surface theme: the fear of death and the way to handle daily fears that are, in some sense, derivative of this master fear. But as Seneca's argument unfolds he points to the fact that the true fear, behind the fears, is fear itself: "you will then know that they contain nothing awful except the actual fear" [scies nihil esse in istis terribile nisi ipsum timorem.] The theme was picked up, perhaps via Montaigne Essays, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Lecture, with its famous phrase that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." [I am not the first to notice this; see Wikipedia.]

In looking, reading and listening at FDR's words, I first noticed that the phrase occurs just as he is also answering (recall) one the great, unsettling questions of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which asks whether a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...can long endure." Lincoln had (recall) offered a new  refounding: "It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work...It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." While maintaining the fiction of continuity ("unfinished work"), the project gets re-launched ("new birth"). Confronting the Great Depressions, FDR, with less eloquence, had started his speech as follows:

I will address [my fellow Americans] with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

Here we have one of the great mysteries of political life. FDR presents himself as a witness being sworn to testify. From the Madisonian, political world of opinion he turns to the juridical world of truth (which he sometimes presents as "ancient  truths"). And as he speaks honestly (setting up 'honest' Abe Lincoln), we find he moves not into truth-telling, but into the register of prophecy: this great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. What's needed for the prophecy to come true in addition to naming one's enemies, we learn, is (again note the Lincolnian trick) a "restoration" by "changes in ethics." (More is needed than these changes.) By this he means primarily a better understanding of the nature of happiness -- the right to pursue of which is so evidently true --, which "lies not in the mere possession of money" (as any Stoic would agree), but, because the value of work needs to be vindicated, "it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."

Second, if you look at the film nobody seems to be paying attention to what FDR is saying. There is no sense he is speaking historic words. The nearby witnesses (family, future cabinet ministers, important politicians, etc.) all seem to be having their own conversation; the crowd may be listening, but, lonely individuals excepted, they do not seem to be responding to the words--they seem to be shifting around on the look-out for something. In the background, a street-car glides along its destined path. Yet, despite the nearby disinterest, there is no doubt that FDR is taking his task seriously.

And this allows me to return to the true theme of Seneca's letter which is on the significance of words. For, the letter aims to vindicate the Stoic school against the "very disgraceful charge often brought against" it "that we deal with the words, and not with the deeds, of philosophy." That Seneca identifies as a member of the school was first announced in Letter 14, not coincidentally a letter in which he had been rather critical of Cato. It's clear from that letter and this one that Seneca recognizes (not wholly happily) that Cato's final day(s) have become legend, and alongside it the ruling image of his school an instrument of propaganda taught to and by others. Here, he embraces Cato for his own ends. 

The striking image of Cato's end is converted into a narrative about the way other people's words [Plato in this case] can control our wishes ,or will [ut vellet mori]. Cato's soul is not autonomous for great deeds; it requires animation by Plato's words. (By contrast, Cato's anger sustains itself.) In one stroke, Seneca brings real world politics and, what I call philosophical politics, together.

In the world of politics, and Seneca does not let us forget that his addressee, Lucilius is leading the political life, you may think you can dismiss words as idle -- a mark of scholarly, sword-less impotence --, but, thereby, fail to note that your actions are governed, almost certainly by the thoughts of others. A true politician understands this.

Inside the MRI With a Splitting Headache

Yesterday, while being pushed inside the MRI, I was looking for signs of the effects of the opiate-painkiller -- I guessed I had swallowed it about thirty minutes before -- to kick in. I had been disappointed to learn that that it was impossible to play music inside the machine. Through the sharp pains behind my eyes and cranium, I was surprised by a clear, albeit dull, beat. It took me a few moments to realize I was sensing my own heartbeat.

It was a good thing that once the procedure started my head was held as tight as Hannibal Lecter's face-mask by some contraption inside the machine. For, despite the two layers of earplugs, the sound of the MRI was deafening and I wondered if one could faint while immobilized flat inside a machine. My next thought amused me: I wonder if FMRI machines [the ones that generate all the hype and beautiful pictures in claims about the brain] also make this kind of deafening noise. All along the shrill noise I could trace the rhythm of my heartbeat, who I noted ruefully, could keep more steady beat than I--I am pretty sure I have some kind of genetic defect that makes it impossible for me to keep beat on the dance-floor or inside symphony-hall. While I was musing on to what degree my steady beat represented my higher, more harmonious self than the day-to-day, agitated and frenetic self, I remembered a performance, once [I couldn't recall if it was in Boston, Chicago, or New York], where I saw Michael Baryshnikov perform a dance duet with his heartbeat projected through the sound speaker system. I couldn't remember if the performance had also projected the sound visually. [See here for a performance of what I am talking about.]

And then, finally, I felt my tension ease and closed my eyes.

One of the very few downsides of being married to a very caring surgeon is that she'll consider all the worst-case scenarios that may lurk behind one's painful symptoms. I knew that the most likely outcome of the scan was that I had some kind of sinusitis, but the neurologist had warned me that it could also be a pinched nerve of some sort. Since my brother-in-law is a brain surgeon who happily and eagerly works heroic 20hours shifts [I consider this a recipe for disaster of the sort that occur when fatigued truck drivers steer off the cliffs], I had decided that the most dangerous thing that could ever happen to me is to be in the hands of a brain surgeon. But I knew my wife had already contemplated rare complications that would end, so imagined, in a slow but inevitable decline accompanied by horrific, experimental treatments that would lengthen my life for a few months. I could tell the painkillers were kicking in, because I caught myself almost giggling that she didn't have time to research all the possibilities awaiting me because she had been in OR treating the needy most of the day rushing in an out to comfort me and to cajole the best possible care for me while teaching nurse-practitioners more efficient and less painful ways of placing intravenous lines.

At the end of the day, the diagnosis is as of yet unclear, but it seems most of the worst has been ruled out.

Even so, the more important discovery is that the stoics had overlooked an important truth: the emendation of the soul starts with giggling.

RIP: José Benardete (1928-2016)

Kris McDaniel informed me that my former colleague and mentor, José Benardete died last week. Before I came to Syracuse for my job talk I only knew of José as the other brother of Seth (the classicist), whom I encountered in person and in his writings, and of Diego (the mathematician), whom I knew, through a mutual friend, by reputation. I was no fan of Seth  -- not because of his Straussianism --, because I found that public conversations with him had the character of a blood sport; undoubtedly, my memory is colored because he got the better of me in public. After my job-talk talk, at the reception José cornered me and while I was ducking his arms that he flailed around in animated gestures, I was introduced to one of the liveliest, analytically acute, erudite, and humorous minds I have ever encountered. His was a peculiar charm: he was just as at ease in thinking through multiple permutations of moves and counter-moves of an argument (I was not surprised to learn he really liked chess), as he was placing that argument in world-historical philosophical context that seemed simultaneously  completely obvious and, upon reflection, utterly original. He would regularly tell me  that qua philosophical historian, I lacked spirited ambition -- my true task qua historian was to change philosophy --, yet do so in a way that made me feel elevated, nearer to the clouds (where we could engage not just with Aristophanes's Socrates, but provide Icarus with directions).

José was one of those characters that generated legendary anecdotes (about him), but whose profundity of thought could not be reduced to them. He would corner you for lunch or in your office (sometimes because had locked himself out of his own), and would start talking. Often you had the feeling you were encountering him in medias res, but he had a keen sense of audience. Once he started telling me about Quine's footnotes (later I learned he had actually written on some of these [recall]), and then, en passant, slyly noted that the footnotes of one of the papers I had sent along as a writing sample (on Adam Smith's obituary of David Hume) the year before contained the heart of the matter and that I should stop hiding the important things from my readers. Once a week, we would meet for lunch and the most memorable ones were the ones in which he gave me master classes on either Wallace Stevens's poetry or recent analytical metaphysics.

José started his philosophical life as a funny mixture of Husserlian, Whitehead-ian metaphysician, and Straussian. His dissertation (at Virginia) was on the philosophy of time and philosophical theology. But his (1964) book on Infinity revived the genre of analytical metaphysics [this baffled the readers in the 1960s {in my lecture below I provide evidence for this claim}] and -- inspired by Wittgenstein -- offered a philosophy of mathematical practice. (The Husserlian and Straussian elements are still visible, but do not predominate.) The book dazzles and continues to dazzle with arguments. It is no surprise that when genuine metaphysics returned to fashion in analytical philosophy, Syracuse (with in addition to Jose, Bennett, Alston, and Van Inwagen) in upstate new york was one of its hotbeds. By the mid 1970s his writings exhibit a deep engagement with the then Quine-ean analytical mainstream. I have argued (see below) that the change of register hides a unity of philosophical vision.

Much to my amazement, while I was at sabbatical at Santa Barbara, I was asked to speak at his retirement party back in Syracuse about his book manuscript on magnanimity. For one divine Fall while overlooking the Pacific, I read all the works of Jose I could get my hands on in order to prepare my lecture alongside Spinoza's Ethics (that I was teaching). I discovered he was not just a great conversationalist; to my horror I noticed that all kinds of ideas I thought I had dreamed up -- in light of his challenge to aim to be a philosophical historian of philosophy [cf. 'Wiggins on Locke'] --, were to be found more cleanly and with more acuity (and poetry) in his writings. Below the fold is the invited lecture I gave at the occasion of his retirement in which I try to characterize Jose's meta-philosophical vision.

Jan Cover closes his moving tribute, May there be a place for him, in the heavens, near Plato. I doubt Plato will get much of a word in.