Digressions&Impressions

On Hitz's Lost in Thought

For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.

If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings. All intellectual life, no matter how ultimately sophisticated, originates in the human questions arising in and behind ordinary life. Scholarship is exciting in its own right, but it means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life. So, too, scholarship is owed back in return to ordinary people, in forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life.

Anyone seeking a good human life benefits from learning in all of its breadth and depth. Nor need one work in a university or attend one to cultivate the virtue of seriousness. Zeal for the fundamentals in life is fueled by aspiration, by imagining forms of human life that we wish to inhabit or become. Our intellectual culture prizes destruction over edification, a thrill of superiority over deep encouragement, and the reinforcement of factional loyalties over common ground. Yet any thoughtful person, not to speak of a writer, artist, critic, or journalist, can seek out examples, living and dead, historical and fictional, of human beings who have strained every nerve to seek more, better, finer, nobler ways of living.

In this book I have been forced to use mostly examples of high achievers in the realm of the intellect: Einstein, Gramsci, Goethe, Augustine. That is because these are the modes of intellectual life one can easily find in a library—the high achievers are worthy of books. One of the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture is that we forget that the invisible life has all the human splendor of the visible one, and often more. I have had in mind all along, and have appealed to where possible, the humble bookworm, the amateur naturalist, the contemplative taxi driver. If you, like me, are naturally drawn to achievement, collect examples of ordinary thinkers—human beings whose splendor is known only to a few, their family, their neighbors, their coworkers. Settle back in awe from time to time, as I do, in thinking about the vast treasury of thought and experience that will never be available to us.

Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time to think. Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.--Zena Hitz (2020) Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, 202-203

Lost in Thought is that rare book that is manifestly better, more interesting and more compelling, than the essays (recall here; and here) that gave rise to it. It is also a polemical book, polemicizing against the contamination of the intellectual life by the vices of a "spectacle-ridden" culture. As such, it is a book that hopes to restore, even rebirth, a way of life that it is attacked not just from without (which Hitz mostly ignores), but also from within by its ersatz friends. In particular, some of the most bitter, and cogent, polemical attacks are on fellow academics, especially the "elite professors" (200) who, in an imperial context, are seduced by "prestige and status" (10),  who engage in "cruelty," (9) and who justify their wealthy lifestyles in terms of their instrumental value to society (201-202).

This polemic is situated in the interstices of a veritable gallery of intellectual (and sometimes also Catholic) saints, who are the subject of near perfectly executed vignettes. And while the book is very moralistic, the morals are preached lightly and with self-deprecating humor.  Before I engage with her polemic, it is worth noting that part of the fascination of Hitz's argumeny is that it is framed by an autobiographical conversion narrative. It is especially interesting to me because I was a (very) partial witness to a stage of her journey; we overlapped a bit, as PhD students, at The University of Chicago. But that's for another time.

The passage quoted above is from the epilogue of Hitz's book. Her contrast between the false, and fleeting goods of the spectacle-ridden culture, which always are zero-sum and so conflict ridden, and the enduring if not eternal, shareable treasures of inner life re-activates a contrast familiar from the Stoics and Augustine. I mention this not to undermine the diagnosis -- which is wholly on target --, but to caution against the thinly disguised strain of nostalgia that runs through Hitz's argument (this is why she uses the language of 'restoring' (197ff; see also p. 167)). The quest to preserve a site for human dignity and true learning is always with us, part of the human condition.

Because I agree with so much in Hitz's book, it's taken me awhile to figure out my sense of unease with it. This post is an attempt to clarify this unease. And I want to note two features of her account that trouble me. First, Hitz is no friend of scholarship. I quote the relevant passage again: "[scholarship] means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life." 

It is important to be clear on what Hitz is not doing here. She is an eloquent critic of the tendency to subordinate education to moral or political ends; she calls this the "false god" of "opionating," (193)/"opionization" that is, "the holding of a viewpoint" or  the "reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions" (p. 167). She is critical of all political and ethical programs that are tempted by this. This is false education. 

So, Hitz's attitude toward scholarship is not that it must serve some direct political or moral end. In addition, we must distinguish what Hitz calls 'learning' from scholarship. She highly values learning for its own sake because "human beings are essentially knowers, or lovers, or both" (112). But scholarship is a form of learning that somehow (we are never told how) dissociated from the original impulse. It is quite clearly a perverted form of learning.

That is, Hitz wants to resist the idea that scholarship, and excellence in scholarship, is self-justifying. It must, in some non-trivial way, be integrated into the life-world of what she calls "ordinary" human lives. This is why she is attracted to agents and representations of agents (ordinary and extraordinary) whose depth consists in part of a rich and dignified intellectual inner life, but who are engaged in what we may call, humane works (e.g. Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Augustine). And it is to Hitz's credit that what works will count as meaningful can be a wide variety of (possibly conflicting) political and social activities.

It is not entirely clear why Hitz rejects scholarship for its own sake (other than its elitism).  Perhaps her argument is consequentialist-democratic in that she treats it as ultimately selfish ("pointless if...has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people"). Yet, we are not told why the joy of the scholars -- they seem like ordinary people, too, up close -- should not count. 

I believe her more fundamental argument is this: she thinks scholarship for its own sake gives rise to a certain disease of the mind, or a vice, that is characterized by the loss of joy in truth, or what the "ancient monks" call acedia (147). She is right to resist the common translation of 'sloth'; I prefer “a lack of care.” Acedia is distinct from the escapism that, say, Adam Smith thinks is a danger of intellectual life, but it is part of the same species as the 'torpor' which Smith thinks is the effect of the repetitive, work in extensive division of labor.  Notably, the only, authoritative mention of Aquinas in the book is on the nature of acedia (147).

Hitz does not explain why scholarship must give rise to acedia. But she clearly thinks that in so doing it generates the conditions that are conducive to "the pursuit of spectacles." (147) Perhaps, she thinks that the behavior of the elite professors, who are purportedly devoted to a life of scholarship, but glory in cruelty (etc.) is sufficient evidence for her case. But I believe this is a selection effect caused by the incentive structure of the academy, and the way our gaze is oriented toward spectacle and so misses the scholars worth emulating sometimes right in front of us.*

I do not deny that scholars recognize the danger of acedia. Second, our tendency to indulge in esoteric, competitive games and puzzles, are part of our response to it. Let me give a historical example. In the early modern period, the republic of letters had a tradition in which major mathematical and scientific breakthroughs were both announced, and partially hinted at, through anagrams and other puzzles. So, for example, when Galileo saw something unusual nearby Saturn in 1610, he sent out letters with an anagram (here's a fun introduction to the story).

What Hitz ignores is that the otherwise lonely scholarly life is itself organized around competitive emulation in which credit is apportioned in virtue of achievement and excellence. And this competition is practiced and structured in a lot of ways. Hitz mistakenly assimilates this economy to the better known spectacle culture. That is no surprise, because the credit economy of the republic of letters is embedded, perhaps always dangerously so, in a wider institutional economy which is organized along the production and maintenance of prestige hierarchies (which, in turn, are a feature of, and support, our olicharchic culture). This wider institutional economy gives rise to spectacle ridden culture Hitz decries. 

But competitive emulation among equals is the mechanism by which acedia is held at bay. Hitz's distaste for competitive emulation is clear throughout the book not just because she can't find anything to admire in (say) sporting excellence (all the references to sport or negative). But it is exemplified by her analysis of a comment by 'Lenù" (a character in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels--which receive an extended treatment). Lenù, who has just published her own novel and sees it in the bookstore, is quoted as follows:

But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity? (158; emphasis in Hitz.)

The emphasis is in Hitz, but not in Ferrante's original. And I agree with Hitz that what she emphasizes is very important in the passage. But the effect is that Hitz largely effaces the existence and significance of competitive emulation ("which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity") Yes, Hitz acknowledges the significance and existence of competition on the next page (159), but she can't find a good place for it in her analysis. In fact, in general Hitz qualifies competition with negative adjectives ('brutal,' 'grinding,' ''cutthroat,' etc.) and analyzes it in terms of examples in which it degenerates into harm and spectacle.

So, despite her fondness of exemplars, this is why 'emulate/emulation' are near absent in her vocabulary; the exception proves the rule (viz "should we emulate the pure uselessness of Aristophanes’ Socrates, choosing intellectual projects that will be certain to provide no one with any good whatsoever? (p. 188)--the answer is clearly no. This echoes a nuanced analysis of the Clouds earlier in the book worth re-reading.)

There is no denying that competitive emulation risks the dangers of the spectacle. But even then it can be (although need not) also excellence in action. And sometimes it is both at once (poetry competitions/slams and wimbledon finals, etc.). This hybridity, and the danger of degeneration repels a certain kind of extreme purist. Of course, a lot of competitive emulation is incapable of ever becoming a spectacle because it holds no interest to those unwilling to try to understand it. 

That is to say, I admire Hitz's desire to promote "forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life." This is our common ground. But while I am happy to agree with her criticism of universities; I do not share her criticism of scholarship even where it is often too complacent about the conditions that give rise to it. True scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence (including beauty) that constitute it.

 

On Bullying, Conformism, Self-Censorship, and Clinical Depression: The Religiosity of Fahrenheit 451, revisited

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, and mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!  Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.....
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?--From Ray Bradbury (1953) Fahrenheit 451, pp. 75-6

Judging by the results of a Google search, which shows me links to many essay writing companies, the passage quoted is extremely popular among high school and college students. So, for all I know what follows has been worked out countless times before (and, if not, will -- because it's free -- perhaps become a staple of such essays). The narrator here is Beatty, the fire captain and boss of the main protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag -- his name (man Monday) an allusion to Crusoe's man Friday* -- is part of a book burning brigade (firemen). The speech occurs just as Montag's growing doubts about his work and society are crystallizing.

As it turns out, Beatty's own stance toward his own work and society is also ambivalent, but this is shown more indirectly. Be that as it may, he understands legal censorship as originating in self-censorship which arises out of three elements: a do-no-harm principle, mass democracy, and a heterogeneous population. The embrace of a do no harm principle is not a deeply felt normative stance, but rather dictated by prudence--minorities can organize and create unwanted controversy and hurt sales. In a heterogeneous population it will be difficult to avoid giving offense except by embracing a certain blandness and conformity. The idea being that in a homogeneous society free speech is more natural.

One may read in Beatty's speech a prescient prediction about the origin of what is now known as political correctness (something Bradbury encouraged late in life). But his speech is more subtle. His list of possible would-be-aggrieved minorities omits mention of African Americans and Jews. When the book was published, the great civil rights victories were still in the future, and the persecution of Jews (and the burning of their books) too fresh in living memory.  So, the underlying (neo-Humean) idea is that only when one's resentment can be felt by the majority, will the majority embrace bland conformism toward that minority. 

The previous paragraph may be thought speculative. But Beatty himself goes on to call attention to the two key elements, first not everybody is born equal and, second, he exposes the conformist violence at the core of his consumerist, mass-media society when he describes the school bullying of the boy** that stands out. In an age of McCarthyism, Bradbury need not have done it, but the political significance of bullying is made explicit (with a nod to the Constitution)-- bullying makes us equal. That is, rather than being a bug of a democratic polity, conformist violence is a feature of it.+ While African Americans are effaced, the burning of witches at Salem haunts the whole narrative. It is no surprise, then, that such a society, which disguises its own structural violence by, paradoxically presenting it as spectacle, expresses it abroad with a violent foreign policy. 

To what degree Beatty's origin story fits the facts is an open question. (This is a society in which the printer Benjamin Franklin has become the patron saints of book burners. There is a Swiftian fondness for reversals.) Beatty's diagnosis of the conformism and self-censorship of modern mass culture echoes the meritocratic critique of democracy first developed by Mill (recall here and here). Beatty is an interesting character because he clearly is the nerd in disguise (he is well read despite the prohibition) who  goes on to serve a soul-less and cruel regime.++ The regime is grounded in elections, but no less cruel for it. Its bad laws rooted in public opinion.

This last point deserves more emphasis. The underlying horror of the society depicted is that human life in it is trivialized. Something that Guy Montag becomes increasingly sensitive to. This lack of soul is what creates an undercurrent of clinical despair and dangerous thrill-seeking; where fun is everything. It's a bit surprising that Bradbury is not thought of as the prophet of the clinical depression epidemic of a society addicted to communication by (ahh) screens; this is a society in which all feeling is at the surface and in which our desires for goods are made to outstrip our means, but no connection intimate. For such intimacy is only possible -- the point is made explicit right at the start of the novel [Clarisse does not want anything from him]-- if it is not instrumentalized. 

For, while Bradbury himself facilitated the idea that this was a book about the perils of censorship, the truer theme of the book is the pernicious effects of spiritual deprivation on individual and society. At the start of the book, when talking to Clarisse, Montag understands himself (cf. Plato's Cave), by chance, as somebody watching a puppet show. Clarisse is likened to an angel more than once. She is the prophetic light that points the way out of the cave.*** It's no surprise then in the aftermath of rational-man-made cataclysm -- mutually assured destruction is the fruit of the tree of knowledge --, the novel closes with a quote from Revelation (22:2), which not only prophecies such a destruction, but also the promise of a light that follows. Those that have read the novel will understand my conclusion: there is only redemption if you can hold on to a text.

 

When Enlightenment understands its own Violence

Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact -- the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they've no resistance, then (if they've survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour my mining and logging companies -- for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture -- the one that's turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization's perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind's face.--12.10 from Satin Island (2015) by Tom McCarthy (emphasis in original)

One way to understand the revival of the so-called populist, racialized nationalism today is for a keen wish to restore the appearance of "order and harmony of the West" and to keep the noxious by-products of civilization out of sight behind the "perimeter-fence." While the critics of such populism primarily see it as an immoral (because partial) and even violent project, the populist understands himself in moral terms, part of a process of national purification even if (as is sometimes ruefully acknowledged) the agents that facilitate this purification are (rather) imperfect.

Of course, the populist does not allow himself to acknowledge that what it despises and loathes is itself its own filth or the effects of colonial and ongoing political interventions by the West. And often he conflates his own nostalgia with a historical fiction of once steady order and harmony. 

What makes reading Satin Island so interesting is that it allows us to see that populist ideas are, in fact the shadow lives of the purportedly self-critical ideas of the contemporary intelligentsia reflected in a subtly distorted mirror. The novel presents us with a main protagonist, an anthropologist who works for a corporation. The corporation "uses the Future to confer the seal of truth on these scenarios and assertions, making them absolute and objective simply by placing them within this Future: that's how we won contracts." It does so with self-understanding: "Everything, as Peyman [the visionary CEO and networker of the Company] said, may be a fiction--but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all." (8.7) The satirical echoes of Hegel's secularization of Christianity and contemporary theories of reflexivity are undoubtedly intentional here.

What is notable about the quoted passage (12.10), is that it, in turn, reflects a violent delusion of those intellectuals who take themselves to be self-critical heirs of the Enlightenment.+ These intellectuals understand themselves as self-critical, as tracking the all--too-human-costs of civilization, as recognizing that the scientific enterprise itself may be complicit in the very violence of the West; who speak with moral superiority -- because they take pride in frankly acknowledging the violent facts, as if it shows moral fortitude to acknowledge the facts --  and who recognize their own complicity in a system founded on and maintained by violence. In this self-serving fantasy -- but like other fictions it can be made real -- , the modern intelligentsia are the meritocratic elites who understand themselves as cogs in the research and design centers of a hegemonic, world wide civilization characterized by 'complexity.'

Part of the pedantic point of the novel is to show the ever-present desire to perpetrate a gesture of violence against the system by the boys in the Research & Design centers, and simultaneously a kind of obtuseness on their part toward the very real (patriarchal) violence within the hegemonic order against those that merely wish to register their ritualized dissent from the status quo. The obtuseness is not an accident, but a feature.

Above, I suggested that the populist and the self-critical intellectual share an outlook. One commonality is that they both understand the 'West' as 'civilized' and fail to acknowledge the true barbarism within, violence (see 13:12), that makes possible purported 'order and harmony.' They (that is, the populist and the self-critical-intellectual) both treat 'Western' superiority as an unquestionable given. The populist justifies it because she sees the world in zero-sum terms, if 'we' don't project power 'they' will take advantage to us; the would-be self-critical intellectual, takes it as a regrettable given that, while requiring an originary acts of violence,  makes a win-win future possible. What the intellectual does not do is question the very idea of a West. 

Satin Island makes us feel the barbarism within without offering either a scenario or a new language for overcoming it. One may say, then, it disowns the very possibility of researching and designing a better product. This very disowning may be a necessary step on the path of a truer liberation or it may be a quietist gesture characteristic of the reactionary mind unwilling to forego the inherited comforts.

On the Female Gaze (De Grouchy on Demagogues)

When we see a man for the first time, we observe his features, we search them for his soul. If his face has any charm or beauty at all, even if it is only distinguished by some singularity or other, we study it carefully, attempting to grasp the impressions that cross it, and to tease out those that habitually do so. There is no one whose character we cannot guess at least a little from the first sight of a face, enough that we may draw some conclusion, favorable or not, about it. Soon, the impression made by a person’s physiognomy is enhanced, altered or undone by their movements, manners, words, or by whether their words agree or not with their actions. If in the eyes, which betray the soul, or the voice, which modulates it, the physiognomy, which tells of its habits, and the manners which reveal them, we think we find a character, or the signs of some quality that particularly interest us – either because they are like ours, or because they are amongst those we most highly approve of, or because together they strike us as extraordinary and engaging – then a feeling of benevolence rises in us towards the person who seems thus gifted. We feel drawn to him, we enjoy thinking about him, and the interest we feel intensifies our observations, and increases their accuracy. Sometimes, yet, this first impression is so strong as to confuse us, and it takes over our capacity to observe. In lively souls, the effect of such an impression is to give rise to prejudices that blind them, rendering them incapable of right and sometimes even reasonable judgment.--Sophie de Grouchy, Letters on Sympathy, Translated by Sandrine Berges (forthcoming),* Letter 3 (see here for a French version).

In  context of this section of the Letters, De Grouchy is discussing (among other things) the problem of tragedy which exercised many philosophers in the eighteenth century (see Dadlez's very useful introduction). In the quoted passage, De Grouchy adopts the first person plural perspective. It is not entirely clear who is included in this 'we.' As the title of this post suggests, I want to suggest that De Grouchy is articulating something like the (hetero-)female gaze.

In the first sentence of the Letters, De Grouchy speaks in her own authorial-persona voice (first person singular): It seems to me that man [L'homme] has no more interesting object of meditation than himself. If the sentence is read sarcastically (and feministically), (such that L'homme is not 'mankind' but MAN) then she accuses (intellectual type of) men of a species of narcissism. (The sentence has an implied addressee, 'C'--generally thought to be Cabanis, De Grouchy's brother-in-law and a famous physician, and so one wonders how he took it.) If the sentence is read straight up (and a generic claim about mankind) she shows her anti-theistic hand (which shows up throughout the Letters), in which our study is rightfully oriented toward man (not God) and this life (not the afterlife).

The first person plural voice is introduced in the second sentence of the Letters: Is there, indeed, a more fulfilling and pleasant way to pass the time than to turn one’s soul onto itself, study its operations, trace its movements; to employ our faculties to observe and puzzle each other out and to seek out and understand the fleeting and secret laws that guide our intelligence and our sensibility. Here the first person plural seems to be describing a generic experience common to all of us.** Now, this enterprise of self-knowledge, which is about the discovery of hidden laws of (human) nature, includes non trivially  (in an age when women are not assumed to be philosophers) women.

During most of the Letters, the first person plural describes such generic common experience and it is pretty irrelevant if this experience is gendered or not. But, it's not too much of a stretch to say that in the quoted passage articulates a version of what we may call (pretentiously and essentializing -- with all the problems this entails) the female gaze. In fact, she describes what's it like to be infatuated ("this first impression is so strong as to confuse us, and it takes over our capacity to observe.") As she puts it in the next paragraph (from the quoted above): When we see in a man the promise of qualities that please us, we feel drawn to him.

I don't mean to belittle the passage by calling it the female gaze (or to suggest that according to De Grouchy only women have the female gaze.) De Grouchy's text leads the reader to see an analogy between infatuation of a pretty man and being under the sway of a demagogue (a topic that becomes central later in Letter 4, recall here). For, a few pages before she had already had introduced her political interest in the attraction of public spectacles, "which leads the crowds to gather constantly around scaffolds, and to witness there sometimes, in all their horrors, tortures which, nearly always, bring them to tears? The human heart is, in some ways, drawn to what moves and stirs it."

Now, I don't mean to suggest that De Grouchy is the first to articulate the female gaze from within. (I am not an expert on such matters, but I suspect we need to go back to at least Sappho.) But she is notable for articulating the female gaze within a clearly philosophical treatise that itself is not aimed at belittling women's experience.*** (Again, I am not claiming she is the first to do so, but I do welcome learning of other, earlier instances!)

While De Grouchy is clear that there are potential bad consequences of the female gaze, she does not dwell on them. Rather, she goes on to treat the infatuation stage as a path toward moral education into necessary friendship+ and its good political consequences (her main topic):

This is because once alert to the possibility of those qualities, we long for all the rewards we implicitly associate with them. Thus, a necessary effect of the most basic and the least reflective kind of self-love is that we love those whose opinion conforms with ours and who thereby raise in our own eyes the value we attach to our own judgment, and reassure us that we are not mistaken. Similarly those who recommend themselves to us by their virtue, their humanity and their charity interest us either because their memory brings help and support to our plans or projects, or because the very idea of the good they have done or might yet do renews in us the emotion usually produced by the sight or anticipation of public happiness, or the relief of private unhappiness.

This leads her to deviate strongly from Hume and Smith and offer a positive account of enthusiasm+ (about which another time more). Contrary to first appearances, perhaps, De Grouchy does not assume that infatuation will always lead to the moralized and humane friendship. Her larger argument requires the existence of proper institutions that make possible the proper cultivation of our feelings both in us qua excitable individuals as well as in us as qua members of a would be mob (who enjoy the frisson of political action and delusion).

 

 

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

Virginia Woolf's Unmasking of Professional Philosophy

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them.--from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.— from Virginia Woolf (1930) Street Haunting: A London Adventure

I assume most of my regular readers will have registered the allusion to Hume in the title of D&I. In doing so I imitate Virginia Woolf’s example, whose To the Lighthouse is, in part, an extended meditation not just on the connections and gaps among impressions but also on the nature of philosophy worth having. In particular, in reinvigorating the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato Republic), her novel indicts professional philosophy; our ilk is, we might say, too often ‘brave in thought, timid in life.’ The key passage in the novel is Mr. Ramsay’s soliloquy:

It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge--all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase "talking nonsense," because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like--this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.--from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Some readers, possibly distracted by the intellectual challenge, may accept the invitation and construct the lecture advertised about “Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution.” Fictions are quite capable of motivating actions, after all. Perhaps those readers ought to keep in mind, that many of the counterfactual “young men of Cardiff” will die in the trenches in France before long. Would that change the content of their imagined lecture?

But we must now allow ourselves be distracted into ignoring that Mr. Ramsay is a deformed human being. It’s not just his excessive love of praise, his excessive social conformity, and his excessive fondness for his own speech, that are signs of deformation. The central failing is his timidity; he lacks courage to embrace his own feelings and thereby becomes cruel toward others’—he is unreceptive because if he were receptive he would have to make space for the contrary feelings to be found within.

We don’t learn if it is his training that has deformed him or if it is deformed human beings that become professional philosophers. (The novel offers evidence for both views.) The novel strongly suggests, however, that the deformation gets replicated in the next generation of philosophers. (Recall this post inspired by Ruth Chang’s analysis of the deformation of intellectual reflexes in contemporary professional philosophy.) To Ramsay’s modest credit, there are evidently lucid moments when he is not self-deceived about his self-deformation(s), but he is not capable, and unwilling, to change ways.

While the novel leaves no doubt that much professional philosophy is a species of escapism from living, finding "consolation in trifles," the novel as such is not anti-philosophical, however. For it raises a profound philosophical question: must one necessarily “pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings,” or is a more humane academic philosophy possible? In addition, the novel offers impressions, glimpses really, that nod toward a fuller vision of life: the vision, which celebrates chance and felt beauty, is, thus, not entirely Platonic because this “vision must be perpetually remade” by each of us in this possible experiment called 'life.'

Immersed in Play (or Of Philosophy and Playgrounds)

A four-year-old can be immersed in play.

When my son meets school-friends at playgrounds, they often play tag.* As seasoned tag players know, there are many variations. One striking feature of the game is that they sometimes change variants in mid play just in virtue of somebody calling out a new rule. Rather than seeing this as a violation of fair play (my spectatorial reaction), the other kids adjust quickly often seamlessly and with mental agility, but not always--sometimes there is resistance and the game halts. In principle, whole new rules can be introduced in mid play, but if there are more than a few kids this tends to stop the flow of the game. There are, of course, games of tag that have ultimate winners, and that approximate war-games, but the four to five year olds that play with my son favor the indefinite type of game of tag. The point of tag is to stay in that joyful flow. (That's compatible with momentary anguish and fear, of course.) 

As an aside, the moralists and humanitarians are right that there is too much injustice and cruelty in the world. But at the risk of giving offense, the most damning thing that can be said about our political and economic orders is that even among the privileged, we do not cultivate joyful flow, which would be self-justifying, and encourage the substitution of practices that facilitate delusion about this. Among the saddest sights is to see otherwise capable adults embrace escapist activity that they claim generates joy, but that produces loneliness and anxiety. (Fill in your favorite exemplars.) Sometimes it takes a novelist to show us this sight, and then turn it into comedy. 

At the playground, when new rules are introduced in mid-play, the game may halt for 'discussion.' This is a fragile moment--things can as easily devolve into mutual recrimination or into a cascading laughing fit.  It's not to deny that 'discussion' can restore the game, but it never appears to be a foregone conclusion.

Philosophical Escapism

I experienced my first taste of philosophical escapism, Mackie's The Miracle of Theism, in a cramped, rented apartment in Glyfada, a suburb of Athens. Mackie's wonderful book had been recommended by H.M. Kuitert, a Dutch reverend and theologian, in the Saturday Books section, in a page devoted to "unread treasures," of NRC Handelsblad on Dec 24, 1994. The conceit behind the section was, I think, to ask people to read a non-fiction book that they owned (and probably should have read long before).* Mackie's elegant book with its crisp, clear prose and razor-sharp arguments was the perfect companion to distract me from my shame at my failure at being loved. This shame stared me in the face whenever I glanced at my beloved.

To be sure, engaging with philosophy is not so cerebral that one feels nothing. Like David Hume I am inclined to think that most thought is felt; in particular, focused, philosophical thought can be intensely felt. So, in reading Mackie I displaced the possibility of painful shame (held at bay by my numbness) with joy and marvel at the intellectual world that he opened up for me. Such displacement is routine in philosophy. Given the drabness of many feelings and the dreariness of many experiences, such displacement may well improve the lot of our lives.