Digressions&Impressions

Orwell, Pynchon, Spinoza, and the stability of texts and records (Pt III)

[46] We lack, not only all these things, but also and especially, a phraseology of this language. For time, the devourer, has obliterated from the memory of men almost all the idioms and manners of speaking peculiar to the Hebrew nation. Therefore, we will not always be able, as we desire, to find out, with respect to each utterance, all the meanings it can admit according to linguistic usage. Many utterances will occur whose meaning will be very obscure, indeed, completely incomprehensible, even though they are expressed in well- known terms.
[47] In addition to the fact that we cannot have a complete history of the Hebrew language, there is the very nature and constitution of this language. So many ambiguities arise from this that it is impossible to devise a method which will teach you how to find out with certainty the true meaning of all the utterances of Scripture. For besides the causes of ambiguity common to all languages there are certain others in this language from which a great many ambiguities are born....

[65] These are all the difficulties I had undertaken to recount arising from this method of interpreting Scripture according to the history available to us. I consider them so great that I don’t hesitate to say this: in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty.-- Spinoza, Theological Political, Treatise Chapter VII, translated by E. Curley.

This is the third and final post in a series on Orwell's 1984 inspired by Thomas Pynchon's (2003) "Introduction" to it (here is pt 1; pt 2). After this week's controversy (recall), it might seem cheeky that this piece is mediated via Spinoza. But careful readers of the second in the series will not be surprised (I hope). Okay, with that in place, let me turn to Orwell.

After Winston has been tortured, he comes arrives at three slogans, the third of which is: "GOD IS POWER." Now, on the face of it, this is an odd slogan in the context of 1984. For, first it seems religion and theology are altogether outlawed in Oceania, and this in fact only the second mention of 'God' in the book. What mysticism exists is itself (recall) funneled through the creation of Newspeak. Much earlier, God had been mentioned in the context of the Party's rewriting the poems of Kipling, in which 'God' could not be eliminated as a rhyme (with 'rod'--the subject matter is serious, but the scene is hilarious). Shortly after, writing "GOD IS POWER," Winston insists he is no believer.

The slogan itself echoes one of the claims of his torturer, who says, 'We are the priests of power... God is power.' And, in fact, he goes on to claim in one of the more philosophical passages in the book.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

And in fact, Winston echoes this argument in the context of writing down the "GOD IS POWER" slogan. 

Now, that God is power is a feature of Spinoza's a priori demonstration of God's existence (see, especially, E1P11S). And there is, in fact, more than a kind of superficial similarity between the de-individualized Party and Spinoza's conception of eternality. I don't mean to press the analogy too far because Spinoza's idealism (yes, I know very controversial) is not of the subjective kind.  And while Spinoza's philosophy certainly risks turning the state into a new idol, he would reject many of the Party's techniques and positions. 

This may all be a bit anachronistic, but it is worth recalling that Orwell certainly thought Swift the first great critic of totalitarianism (see his essay Orwell (1946) "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels.") And in a World-War II BBC program, Orwell treats Hobbes "and other 17th century writers" as original predictors of totalitarianisms. So, the connection is not entirely far-fetched.

In particular, in the Appendix to 1984, we are told by a narrator of the distant future that in Oceania, "What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. And, in contrast to Pynchon, I claimed that key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. But this is also a problem.

For, from the first, famous sentence of 1984, we are also reminded that we have entered a universal with a certain kind of instability at its core. That the clocks strike "thirteen" is distinctly odd.* Odder still is that when Winston starts his diary, he quickly writes, ‘To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two." The theme is repeated throughout the novel.** This uncertainty about the date is especially odd because in his work, at the Ministry of Truth, which involves fabricating and retouching news-stories in the Times, he encounters the official date on the newspaper every day.

But, of course, that calendric reform coincides with a major political revolution is no surprise. It's happened before. So, the Party could have changed dates for convenience sake. And the fact that Winston is part of the process of permanent falsification (in the ordinary not Popperian sense) means he knows nothing he reads can be trusted. The "terrible" book by the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein ("The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") turns out to be circulated and written by the Party so Winston's torturer claims. Can he be trusted, who knows?

In fact, and I hate to go meta-textual, but textual instability is even part of the title of Orwell's book, which is often spelled just '1984'; 'nineteen eighty-four' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' And as Pynchon notes, the American edition was almost published without its appendix.

Now, first, Orwell's important political insight, anticipating (recall) Arendt, is that in true totalitarianism the center and near-center is often not just paranoid, but also has no better access to the truth of its own affairs than ordinary citizens or foreigners. In a system like that it cannot develop a true shadow book-keeping. And, as Orwell notes, this also makes collective planning so difficult and self-defeating.

Second, (recall) as Walter Lippmann (building on, as Nick Cowen reminded me, J.S. Mill) emphasized, reliable record-keeping by the state (of birth, death, property deeds, etc.) is one of the bedrocks of many species of modern liberty. Yes, anarchists everywhere and some Foucaultians will see in such legibility an immanent, would-be panopticon. (Pynchon's own writings are worth re-reading for reflection on this.) Even so, reliable record-keeping is the foundation of removing many forms of uncertainty and generating reliable expectations. And when there is little reason for doubt and suspicion about these records, the politics tends to be more temperate. Blessed are the times in which such record keeping can be taken for granted, and is available to all! 

Third, I put the passages of Spinoza at the top of the post because in many ways we readers of 1984 are in the position that Spinoza attributes to the would-be-interpreter of Scriptures. In a way, the Appendix reinforces this point. For, it provides us with an interpretation of the rules of Newspeak that, while compelling, is clearly also post facto and may, in fact, serve it's own political ends. As I noted last week, Pynchon is surprisingly optimist in reading the Appendix as a sign of a restoration of sorts, whereas my two previous posts argue that this need not be so. And because Orwell deliberately does not inform us of the author of the Appendix and his/her intentions, we are pretty much in the same position as Spinoza implies about Scriptures, "we are completely ignorant of the authors (or, if you prefer, Writers) of many of the books, or else we have doubts about them." (TTP VII [58]).

Let me close. I do not mean to suggest that the severe textual and referential instability of and in 1984 reduces it to a kind of meaningless white noise. Spinoza address an objection like this in Chapter X, too:

[42] But perhaps someone will say that in this way I overthrow Scripture completely—for in this way everyone can suspect that it is faulty everywhere. But that would be wrong. 

Something like this seems true of one's reading of 1984. But once one starts pressing on the details, one has to allow major insecurity about one's own judgments of it. Paradoxically, inducing such an experience into the attentive reader may well be one of its aims. 

On Pynchon on 1984 (pt II): On Jews and Religiosity

Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . .." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.--Thomas Pynchon  (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

The other day (recall) I used Pynchon's "Introduction" as a foil to reflect on the the nature of Newspeak in 1984. And since I will be critical of it today, again, I will note, first, that I find his, "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily," a sublime observation. The claim is not just true of Orwell, but of much of the intelligentsia since 1945. Pynchon does not pause to explain why Orwell, who is just about as astute a commentator on his own age as one can imagine, would fall victim to this mistake. A mistake, I hasten to add, that can be easily avoided if one reflects a bit on, say, Lucian and the admiration More, Hume,  and Adam Smith had for him. I suspect that even in magnanimous Orwell the costly mistake is due to an abiding, progressive view of history in which certain stages are overcome and beyond us.

Be that as it may, Pynchon's claims about the absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather strange. He misses entirely, and, as I have noted before, he is not alone in this, that the first thing Winston Smith writes about in his diary is his experience of going to the movies and watching war films which, upon reflection, turn out to be occasions for the audience to cheer on war crimes against (recall) "a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean."* And, included in it, is a gruesome scene involving a "middle-aged woman [who] might have been a Jewess." And so while I agree with Pynchon that there is a reticence in Orwell about describing the camps -- vaporization occurs off-stage in 1984 --, the allusion to the Holocaust is right there in the opening pages of the book. The whole first diary entry supports, in fact, Pynchon's contention that 1984 is misread if one only sees in it anti-communist, cold-war propaganda, and overlooks the book's major focus, which is on the diagnosis of enduring fascism.

I used 'war crimes' in the previous paragraph. Because one of the notable features of Oceania is that it is constantly hanging enemy soldiers for war crimes. And yet its own entertainment depicts war crimes of one's own as mere spectacle, and a further instance of building social cohesion within it. And put this abstractly, 1984 is as timely as ever. 

When I wrote that Pynchon's claims about absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rather strange, I had in mind the fact Pynchon ignores a crucial feature of the Appendix to 1984, despite the fact that Pynchon's own "introduction" is structured on the significance of this "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak" (and so devotes relatively outsized attention to it).  For in it the nameless implied author, who is (as Pynchon notes) writing a considerable time after the events described in 1984, claims the following:

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.*

So, rather than being absent, key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. Now, if I were in a polemical mood (which I am not) I would note there is a flirt with anti-Semitism here; a trope one could imagine existing among disillusioned intellectual Christian Socialists (a "near Communist" in Orwell's terms) who trace the origin of fascism to the fanatical particularism of the Hebrew Bible in the manner, say, in which (in my life-time) Jabotinsky's and Begin's Zionism were depicted as sharing roots with fascism. But I am not interested in polemics today.

That the Hebrew Bible is a source of political craft, even the elements of a political science, is a central feature of Machiavellian republicanism--this is hinted in The Prince, and fully developed in both the Theological-Political Treatise and, perhaps more important for the purposes of reflection on Orwell, Harrington's Oceana. And as it happens Orwell engaged seriously with the most able Machiavellian of his time, James Burnham, in his (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," which discusses critically Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians: defenders of Freedom. I am surely not the first to note that plenty of themes of the former -- especially the power-hungry technocrats and intelligentsia who would develop a new kind of oligarchy -- discussed by Orwell found their way into 1984. In fact, one of Pynchon's key themes, viz. that 1984 is concerned with the international division of the world into three gigantic spheres of influence, is central to Orwell's treatment of Burnham. But while in the latter he has some interest in exploring the roots of fanaticism, Burnham does not, I think, trace some of the roots of fascist technique to the Hebrews.

One peculiarity of the claim about the ancient Hebrew by the implied author of the Appendix is that while it is, indeed, central to the whole spirit of Oceania that "the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible," in virtue of the fact that Oceania lacks written laws. The reader learns this in the opening scene when the thing that Winston "was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)." But this is the exact opposite of the law-saturated life of the ancient Hebrew! And, while the Hebrew Bible is not an instruction manual into a life of service to the false gods, Baal and his priests are mentioned surprisingly frequently in it, and is (for example) central to the narrative about Jezebel in the Book of Kings.

In fact, in Orwell's posthumously published, autobiographical essay, "Such Were the Joys," he writes that "if I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera."** Whatever else they have in common, they are all idolaters in some sense (Cain being a tricky case). So, Orwell presumably knows there is something peculiar about what the implied author of the Appendix says about the "ancient Hebrew." Interestingly enough, Orwell is clear that he finds Christianity "strewn with psychological impossibilities."+  And in context it is clear that the Old Testament does not suffer from these.

Where does this leave us? Pynchon is right within the text of 1984, we are regularly invited to contemplate the religiosity (without religion) of members of the Party and the various forms of social psychological techniques and rituals that facilitate it. But he is wrong to suggest that this is somehow divorced from Judaism. On the contrary, yhe implied author of the Appendix explicitly connects this with the attitude of the "ancient Hebrew." But the text of the Appendix also suggests that its implied author has superficial acquaintance with the book, the Hebrew Bible, that characterizes the life of the ancient Hebrew (something one cannot say about Orwell). And at the risk of overreading, this suggests to me that the vantage point of the Appendix, which is projected much into the future from 1984, and whose implied author is a member of a future intelligentsia -- the official subject matter of the material is the rise and fall of Newspeak -- is one in which the Old Testament is not part of lived experience or knowledge by direct acquaintance, but merely hearsay. As it happens I think (but I would) that this supports my claim (against Pynchon) that the perspective of the Appendix does not hint at (now quoting Pynchon on 1948) "restoration and redemption." But it is, in fact, the state of affairs in much of contemporary life.++

 

 

 

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 Linguistic Narrowness in Philosophy

If you want to read most philosophical classics it is sufficient to master Middle Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic,  Aramaic, French, German, English, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Korean, Japanese,  and maybe a dozen more languages that contain multiple written philosophical classics.* A few such languages are not really living anymore. Because I am ignorant of most philosophical traditions, I am happy to revise that number upwards (for my Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and Italian friends), and to let you, my dear reader, decide what "philosophy'' and "classics" mean. Allowing for partisan voting, I bet we end up with around 50-100 languages, or so. Regular readers know I am a partisan of the claims by those that profess rustic wisdom (and here) so I am not suggesting that being written down is a mark of philosophical distinction or any other sign of moral excellence.

Now consider that "of the currently listed 7,099 living languages, 3,866 have a developed writing system." Let's stipulate that the vast majority of the writings in these writing systems involves accounting and mating/family matters. Even so, that's a lot of living writing systems in which people can muse about, say, reality, the point of it all, the nature of value, or social order, or beauty, etc. I feel extremely confident in saying that these writing systems and the non-living ones pretty much go un-surveyed by the vast majority of most professional philosophers (for some quantitative evidence see this work by Eric Schwitzgebel, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins, and Ivan Gonzales-Cabrera). In addition, there exist many oral philosophical cultures (and many more that are presumably extinct). That is to say, we behave, by and large, as if we are operating in an efficient market in philosophical ideas, insights, and arguments. This state of affairs is, while intelligible and even rational in some sense, just bizarre. 

Before I continue, a qualification: of course, my use of 'we' in the previous paragraph is problematic (it always is). Not everybody is really fooled by the state of affairs least of all, one presumes, those working in or on philosophical traditions not well represented in today's scholarly lingua franca(e).  There are times, when even thinkers in the politically (economically, etc.) dominant cultures are aware that they lack access to crucial texts.  For example, Ibn Rushd, writing in what we would call Islamic Spain, notes the significance of his lack of access to (a translation of) Aristotle's Politics. (It influences his decision, he says, to write on Plato's Republic instead.) Of course, lack of access to a text is not only a linguistic issue: Ibn Rushd's mentor, Ibn Tufayl, who is self-aware that he is writing in the periphery, and who knows that not all texts of his own intellectual tradition -- he mentions Al-Farabi's amongst others -- have circulated to his (Western) part of the Islamic world. Even today, in an age of Google, books and journal articles are expensive and not easy to acquire for those on, say, academic salaries and working in underfunded institutions in many parts of the world. 

When I started drafting the first sentence, I consulted, as the first note below shows, a few experts because it dawned upon me that I had literally no idea in what language some of the Buddhist and Dao (etc.) classics, whose names I was familiar with, were originally written in. It was a moment I allowed myself to recognize my own ignorance about pretty basic facts. And this alerted me that my normal state of affairs is that my own ignorance about my ignorance is my ordinary state of affairs. Now, obviously, -- time is short -- it's okay to be ignorant of lots of non-salient facts. It is clear that the would-be-salience of the very wide linguistic diversity to philosophical thought is not something  I contemplate much, despite the fact that in my scholarly life I bump up against my linguistic limitations all the time. If we allow -- following Samuelson -- that mathematics is a language, then this is, I say this without pride, a near daily occurrence. 

A few days ago I noted that without translator-advocates even superb philosophical texts written in small languages can become, as it were, cul-de-sacs. My use of 'markets' above makes it tempting, if one were to model this, to treat translator-advocates as sources or agents of arbitrage.** The relative lack of translator-advocates, and the relative lack of interest in their significance, suggests that our profession does not incentivize the sometimes onerous efforts of translation and advocacy, and the even more laborious efforts to seek out wisdom and insight in linguistically hard to get to places. This is why one often hears, about translations, that they are a labor of love.  

In earlier times, in the philosophical traditions of European early moderns, the search for occult or hidden knowledge also involved the seeking out of linguistically and temporally distant works. Sometimes (Newton, Locke, etc.) this is relatively narrowly centered on original Hebrew sources that may illuminate the pristine true religion, sometimes (Newton, Locke), this is narrowly focused on esoteric, alchemical wisdom (which involves purpose-made codes), but sometimes -- Leibniz and Bayle come to mind -- one senses an omnivorous hunger that is fueled by an awareness there is always more to learn. (The previous does not mean to suggest that the motives of the omnivore are pure.) This omnivorous hunger is not part of our professional DNA, because for every Leibniz, there is a Descartes or a Carnap, alas, who proudly announces that other traditions are irrelevant and -- this is what I find so remarkable -- the temptation they offer, of willed self-ignorance, is at bottom more seductive and alluring.*** 

 

 

On Working on Problems That Really Interest You; On advice to PhD Students

Work on problems that really interest you. Cross train. Be competent in multiple disciplines and methods. Don't be afraid to start draft/writing before you know all that there is to know. Publish well. Use social media cautiously. Don't think you will be an exception to standard rules because of your race or color. A woman does not get tenure because she been a hard-working institutional citizen rather than research productive. Don't try to please everyone. Make professional friends widely. Go to everything. Develop resilience. Learn to negotiate and to talk about money and goals without embarrassment.--Anita Allen@What Is it Like to Be A Philosopher? [HT Dailynous]

The inspiring and sobering -- so much misconduct in philosophy! -- interview with Anita Allen (whom I have never met, I think) reminded me of an episode at a lovely conference in Edinburgh a few years ago. It was a concluding, closing round-table, and together with the other 'senior' scholars, I was asked if I had any suggestions for the PhD students and early career scholars. I think all of us [apologies to my fellow panelists, if I am mis-remebering!] said something to the effect of, "Follow your passion!" All of us (at different levels of seniority) had done well for ourselves in the discipline, and each of us was busy with and had carved out a distinctive niche/voice for ourselves. I don't recall how much discussion we had about this at the time and to what degree we qualified the point, but for some reason I felt uneasy about the memory. (In other respects the conference was a joy, so it was a strange ambivalence.)

These days, the best advice I can give to PhD students are twofold:

• Get a dog. {If allergic, get a designer poodle}

S/he structures your life (you have to go out regularly; be home on time); you'll end up meeting [interesting] people outside your program, and they will be a more reliable support group if necessary than departmental peers; most important: you'll get to develop your nurturing qualities, and in return you get unconditional love. All of these are goods, but I also think it's the vest antidote for the many ways in which depression hits graduate students. [Obviously, the previous sentence is not advice against getting professional when you show signs of depressive or obsessive symptoms in graduate school.]

• Talk with other PhD students before agreeing to work with a particular supervisor*

I am always amazed by how little research people do before they entrust the most important professional relationship of their career to somebody they barely know. To be sure, each relationship is different and a PhD supervisor who works well with one person, may have more complex relationship with the next. But often the supervisors that create problems, tend to have a string of problems. Obviously due to publicity over sex scandals in philosophy the focus is on inappropriate behavior (of the sort Allen also describes, alas.) But the problems can be very diverse. For example, in grad school, I knew a professor who showed no signs of ever reading not just seminar papers, but also not the chapters of his students' dissertations. I was not alone in noticing this; yet new PhD students kept signing up with him, etc.

The interview says something, I'll copy henceforth:

• "Don't be afraid to start draft/writing before you know all that there is to know."

I love Prof. Allen shares this wisdom! It's not just very important advice for the more obsessive/compulsive types (who will always find reason to keep researching). It's good advice for all of us because drafting/writing is -- when properly structured -- an excellent tool in research. To simplify a great deal, when you have a sense of a thesis and an argument (etc.), writing these down, helps you, on re-reading your own words, point the way toward modifications of your thesis/argument and the need for further evidence. (If you are one of those people, by contrast, who thinks all your written work is fantastic, you can share drafts with others.) By drafting in the context of (say) an outlined chapter, you also can create constraints that will help y ou put yourself in position to make choices about what belongs in the chapter/essay and what should be left for other moments. During my dissertation I would try to cram everything into single, monster chapters. But since then, I have come to see the wisdom of working in more modular fashion. You may also discover, that while writing, you already know quite a bit. [None of this is meant as a discouragement to read the literature and engage  it--there is a strain in professional philosophy that looks down own this, but I am not a member of that party.]

Okay, with that out of the way, what about the following your passion advice ("Work on problems that really interest you")? I am less sure about this. It's worth noting that this can be high risk high reward strategy. (Prof. Allen's case is instructive: she 'left' professional philosophy to go to law school, then left a high status law firm, etc.) But that also means you may not succeed in your ambition (in getting a PhD, a post-doc, a tenure track job, etc). Given that the people who get interviewed in What it is Like and who show up as keynotes, this also creates obvious selection effects; you hear from the 'survivors'. Moreover, there are other, non-trivial costs  along the way; your intellectual community may be small, and so you will feel isolated and lonely.  If you are doing something genuinely distinctive and original, you may also face genuine intellectual hostility ("why is that philosophy?") and opposition. The  peculiar fact of academic philosophy is that there is simultaneous eagerness for novelty and enormous intellectual brutality against people that branch out. (Not to mention the fact, that we continue to glorify the sharp-witted take down of others.) As Prof. Allen suggests (perhaps reflecting on different issues), Don't think you will be an exception to standard rules.

To be sure, nobody really knows what will be thought significant a few years out. And given that it is out of your control, you probably should not worry too much about it (as the sports psychologist echoing Seneca recommend). But a PhD is not just a contribution to original research, but also credentialing and the moment when you acquire a whole range of competencies. In that respect it is significant that Prof. Allen started working on "problems that really interest her" after, if I understand correctly, she had acquired a PhD and a law degree (so credentialed and very competent). (Maybe I am wrong about this--apologies if so.) It's not that I don't agree with her (and others) that soulless academic work is pretty pointless (and God knows the world does not need more publications that lack intellectual necessity). 

One final thought: often when people suggest, follow your passion, there is an implicit suggestion that there is just this one thing that can really interest you. (Prof. Allen does not claim or imply this; just a further thought.) The idea is a bit analogous to the Aristofanesian-Platonic idea of the one true love. Maybe there is truth in the story, but it fails to do justice to the more subtle point that becoming competent is in part the facility of becoming passionate about unexpected things.**

Now, most of us are acquainted with the panic that we may have one idea and so better milk it for all its worth. (I'll spare you my favorite example of the senior professor who is de facto always writing the same paper.) I don't doubt narrow-minded hedgehogs exist and maybe most of us are better off by being such a hedgehog. But I suspect that what the hedgehog focuses on is very context-specific, and that it could have been otherwise, even otherwise for that individual. 

 

On How to Read The Man in the High Castle

The oracle...was sound asleep all through the writing of the book. Sound asleep in the corner of the office. Philip K. Dick (1963) The Man in the High Castle.

of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:12

One branch of political philosophy is a species of comparative institutional analysis; in which the earthly models of the heavenly exemplar are developed in different ways because they are based on different empirical axioms. I have proposed to call this genre, Socratic political theory about ideal theory. In the past I have suggested that More's Utopia and Le Guin's (1974) The Dispossessed are instances of the genre. (To say that does not mean they don't belong in other genres, too.)

I picked up The Man in the High Castle at an airport recently. I am grateful to the TV series for making it so easily and widely available, but I  have not seen the series. The Main the High Castle can be read as imaginative counterfactual history about what would have happened if the Axis powers had won the Second World War and the Axis powers have divided the spoils. It's clever and troubling (it's a world of massive genocide, racial hierarchy, betrayals, censorship, but also uncommon moments of humanity, etc.). Yet within the novel, and arguably the key theme of the story is another book writen by Hawthorne Abendsen [a homage, perhaps, to Asimov's Nightfall or, Wiesel's Night, or, perhaps, Celine's great novel], who has authored The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (itself an allusion, as Wikipedia notes, to Ecclesiastes 12:5). This books is also a counterfactual history, but -- even if you agree that there is no metric for such things -- closer to actual history (the allies win the war, although with plenty of variations from actual history).

We can say, then, that we are explicitly invited to compare two imagined, but institutionally rich worlds to each other. One means for doing so, is by looking at what remains the same in both imagined worlds despite the historical and institutional variation as well as what differs in both worlds despite points of contact. Some other time I want to say more about this, but there is a further complication. For the The Man in the High Castle also goes meta on us (I forget who gave me that phrase recently---apologies!), because the way Abendsen's book is supposed to be interpreted is also a matter of, well, conflicting interpretations throughout the book. And here I want to close with a note on it.

At the end of the The Man in the High Castle by relying on an interpretation of the I Ching (cf here), we are presented with the thought by Juliana (one of the main characters who turns out one of the few heroes of the plot and who is compared to a daemon from the underworld) and Abendsen that the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy has an Inner Truth. (The idea also angers Abendsen.) Remarkably then, we are explicitly invited to consider that books have a surface meaning and an inner truth. A few pages before Juliana had already concluded that the point of Abendsen's book is not about that novel's "make-believe world." She grasps that its inner truth is a commentary on her world (the one in which the Axis won).

We are, thus, invited to treat The Man in the High Castle not just as counterfactual history but also as a commentary on Dick's actual world (ca 1963)--that is on the nature of the civil rights movement and the nature of US imperialism (both issues in the two novels). For example, in Abendsen's imagined world discrimination between 'Whites and Negroes' is ended by the second world war, and US and UK imperialism compete for global victory. How to think about such a commentary in a methodological fashion -- as rigorous as the interpretation of the I Ching -- is for another occasion. 

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.

 

On the Laws of Identity and the Writing Life

Sometimes the better you knew somebody, the more impossible any real talk became.--Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer (124)

Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself. (127)

[W]riting showed his own failings to him. The struggle that was involved was a demeaning and dutiful one, a matter of grinding craft rather than lofty art. Not that he was a fake; his interest had always been real. But he saw in others a hunger, a voracious need to comprehend or capture life by transforming it into a language, which he didn't share. (320)

In “What is a Classic?,” the novelist and critic, J.M. Coetzee insists, while flirting with the idea of the survival of the literary fittest, that classics sustain and survive ongoing scrutiny in the long run from a variety of perspectives, which may include – judging by Coetzee’s practice -- their creative re-writing. Such ongoing scrutiny is certainly a necessary condition on the being of a philosophical classic; one may suspect it is a kind of performative requirement for a classic.

In his essay, Coetzee identifies four features that enable a work to become a classic. While in context, he does not speak of philosophy the features carry over to a considerable degree (and, in general, philosophy is often on Coetzee’s agenda): (1) the work needs to be studied and discussed in small circles, relatively untouched by the general public’s fashion; (2) one can become an advanced student in a discipline based on some kind of competent engagement with canonical works; (3) there needs to be ongoing learned commentary or criticism; (4) the existence of a form of advanced emulation through creative imitation or reworking. In addition, Coetzee implies (5) that a work only counts as a classic if it can, eventually, catch the interest of a wider audience beyond the most advanced professionals.

As an aside, one may doubt that (4) occurs in philosophy. It’s probably not a good strategy to try to get a monograph published, following Kant’s architectonic in the first Critique. Even so, here’s an instance of (4) within recent professional philosophy: an important essay in the recent revival of analytical metaphysics is, O'Leary-Hawthorne & Cortens (1995), “Towards ontological nihilism.”[1] Given its provenance in Syracuse’s philosophy department it is no surprise that it generously mentions the dominant figure of that department, Jonathan Bennett, of the last third of the twentieth century. But as it turns out, the rhetorical and argumentative-methodology is deeply indebted to Bennett's Rationality—a work familiar to Hawthorne and Cortens (recall here and here). This fact could go unnoticed because Bennett’s Rationality is not mentioned in their piece.[2]

A classic instance of (4) is Zadie Smith's homage to Howards End [sic], On Beauty. In fact, while I had seen images of the Merchant Ivory film, I only read Forster's novel after being inspired to do so by reading Smith's novel first. A more complex case of (4) is Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer, which tells the post-Howards End-life of E.M. Forster (primarily the events surrounding the writing of Maurice, published posthumously 1971 and A Passage to India (1924), but also Alexandria:  A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon) as a novel. To complicate matters, Arctic Summer is also the title of an unfinished work by Forster, and another writer, Cavafy, has more than a walk-on presence. One could grow dizzy fast if one tried to map the relationships amongst original and copy in this novel--words and lived experience strain at the law of identity.

It would be misleading to treat Galgut's novel only philosophically, but we should also guard against the other risk -- facilitated by its sensual craft -- of ignoring its philosophical profondity entirely. Under "cover of Plato," (39) -- caves, shadows, homo-erotic love, and all that  -- we can take a second look at the second quote; the nature of identity is at the heart of matter. Self-identity is paradigmatic identity (A=A), of course, but in memory the second A is also not quite the first A because -- to adopt Humean terms -- force and vivacity fade away in echoes. If the second A is epistemically indistinguishable from the first, feel free to generate a Sorites-style series of As, in which the the dividing line between the force and vivacy of the first and last A is insensible at any given moment in the series. To assert A=A even in its shadowy-nth-iteration, is to falsify experience; to embrace fakery, that is, the inability to recognize the significant difference between original and copy. (The previous is not an argument to leave logic behind in one's aesthetics; logic is a necessary pre-condition to aesthetic judgment!)

To capture life by words, when the desire of comprehension is a consequence of need, is doomed to failure. One might object that if lived experience is already linguistic then there is no gap. Undoubtedly some people inhabit a fully linguistic world. But Galgut's novel shows that there is another, more childlike immersion in life, fully sensual and -- miraculously -- intuitive (in Spinoza's sense) that is not opposed to knowledge, but more knowing than the falsifications afforded by language.

One might think, then, that Galgut indicts the writing lives of novelists and philosophers alike; all these can exhibit are the shortcomings of authors (most keenly to the author). For, we try capture by words and in doing so always transform the matter (even if we maintain form). In Arctic Summer there are more than a few hints that knowledge is an obstacle (see first quote above) not a goal.

Even so, the novel is also a defense of the "grinding craft" against the "lofty" visions of genius imposed on us by society and our own endlessly recycled images, popular among false philosophers. It is a rejecton of "smallness of soul, a narrowness of the heart," which undermines even the loftiest "ideals" (295; the context is the British racialized, colonial/imperial project). Such spirited craft may also be a consequence of need, of course, but it is not guided by such hunger, but by the internal demands of craftsmanship. Craft is easily devalued by knowing types (craftiness is not a term of praise), but even Plato defends its nobility and necessity at times.  That philosophy is a daily grind is, of course, one of the core commitments of these near-daily digressions.

In reflecting on the nature of a classic, I was reminded of Prospects & Presumptions, Julia Neugarten's homage to Jane Austen. (Neugarten is a bold young Dutch novelist writing in English.) The slender novella has a preface by the author. She writes, "Writing, I discovered, was one half discipline and one half lack of self-consciousness." Craft and immersion indeed make up the writer's life, but if the laws of arithmetic would allow it, I would add another "half:" the embrace of fate.

 

Mind the Gap! (On the alarming neglect of ordinary language philosophy)

While it has been fashionable for several decades to ignore Sartre's work... .--Alan Schrift in this review.

This 'conceptual cartographical' approach (a description I prefer to 'ordinary language') has all but disappeared in Europe. More alarming, as Laugier points out, it was hardly ever visible in America.--Julia Tanney in this review.

These two NDPR reviews both lament gaps. Schrift's lament criticizes the book under review and a more general philosophical attitude. I am inclined to think that if Sartre's work is really being ignored for several decades now, we should stop calling it a 'fashion' and more a 'firm trend.' That, of course, is a matter of taste on one's preferred time-scale--cf. the famous joke by Zhou Enlai about the French Revolution, which, it turns out, was not a joke but a misunderstanding. Such trends can start as fashionable jokes, of course. The naturalist in me wondered, however, has Sartre really become passé? Judging by google Ngrams, Schrift's lament is premature: Sartre mentions in scholarship are in extremely genteel decline. What has happened, is that he has been overtaken by other luminaries, including parvenus like Derrida and Foucault (see this Ngram) A decline in relative status can feel like a reversal in fashion.

Tanney's review is in agreement with the book reviewed. It is possible that 'ordinary language' was not very popular Stateside; having said that I am pretty sure that Austin's Sense and Sensibilia was taught in my undergraduate epistemology class taught by Jody Azzouni (early 1990s) at the top-ranked MA program, and when I arrived at The University of Chicago (mid 1990s) one could take multiple graduate courses taught by folk sympathetic to Wittgenstein or Austin's American followers (e.g., Cavell). Of course, as regular readers know, I later realized that my education also facilitated a certain ignorance in some of the main trends in recent professional philosophy.  But as it turns out, bookish interest in Wittgenstein is growing (undoubtedly facilitated by the re-presentation by Kripke and the uptake of Wittgenstein in other Humanities disciplines). This even turns out to be true of J.L. Austin (at very low levels) and, shockingly, ordinary language philosophy. Obviously NGrams are coarse instruments and, for all I know, they are lagging indicators tracking -- to use Schrift's technical term -- past fashion.

Leaving aside data, let me know get to to the reason for writing this post which is my attempt to work out why it is thought 'alarming' that a 'conceptual cartographical' approach did not make the American headlines (and, thereby, become 'visible')? This is not quite clear from the review. That there are "neglected insights" lodged in a tradition is not uncommon; time and attention are scarce (even in the land of opportunity), after all. Only if one is a true believer in the efficient markets in ideas will all insights worth having been assimilated. (I hasten to add that at that moment one may as well abolish the history of philosophy as a professional philosophical enterprise!) But perhaps it is a professional deformation (I have been working in the Weberian state for a while now), I tend to see in neglected insights opportunities (to write a paper, a blog post, to propose a grant project, etc.). Of course, it would be alarming if in virtue of a neglected insight humanity were suffering (needlessly). It may even thought -- switching from the world-historical to the parochial -- to be alarming if philosophical culture were debased in virtue of the systematic neglect of certain philosophical options. There is a hint of this latter thought in the sense that ordinary language philosophy somehow has missed out on its "rightful place" in the "current debate." That is, it ought to be fashionable, but it is not.

In reading and re-reading the review I came to discern what may be the cause of "alarm." This, it turns out, is not the deflationary anti-Platonizing account of meaning (one I happen to share) that is the focus of the start of the review, but a particular conception of language (discussed at the end of  the review). I quote Tanney's review:

[Language] derives, as Austin maintains, from 'the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. (Austin, Philosophical Papers; cited in Laugier, 66).'

 

Language should be construed, not as a body of statements or words, but as the [inherited--ES] place of agreement on what we should say when. [Emphasis in original--ES]

This conception of language has a history (in the prudent Scottish Enlightenment) with a certain political resonance.  The conception of language is opposed to seeing language as an immediate gift from the divine as much as it is opposed to the constructivist idea that language can be made (say, by stipulation). It is one of the core ideas behind the political tradition that embraces good judgment ("acumen") of cautious wisdom against mystical insight or revolutionary fervor as much as the technocratic, scientistic expert that merely measures. It's the common law tradition against the Napoleonic code (not to mention people's tribunals). In other words, it's the philosophy of language that is proper to (slow) spontaneous order or natural law, embraced with a hungry ardor by Viennese exiles (not just Wittgenstein, but also Hayek and, I think, Popper).* (Despite Austin's manly talk of 'men' it presumably makes space for women's experience, too.)

Here, language is understood as a set of agreed norms that we submit to because it is inherited.  It turns out, then, that so understood ordinary language philosophy shares with much of twentieth century philosophy an obsession with consensus. But rather than trusting the experts, the consensus is inherited in a way that is taken to be immune from political revolt not the least because it is normative and thus immune to empirical challenge. A dictator or a revolutionary tribunal can try to control language, but it would be self-defeating to aim at abolishing it! (Who would praise the new order if we were condemned to silence?)

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this model of language is true. Is it alarming that it is (relatively) neglected? Do Americans, especially, or their philosophers, need to recover this understanding of language, which, we are told helps us see that language is 'part of experience' and that 'the speaking of a language is part of an activity or a form of life'?

The alarmist language is not in accord with the doctrine proposed. Even if the doctrine were entirely forgotten, if it is true then it is the case that language keeps on being the repository of experience and acumen of many generations, it keeps on providing the norms that constitute activities even forms of life. Thus understood, language will take care of itself, unattended by any philosophy, providing the normative ground of (a part of) lived experience. That is to say, the talk of 'alarm' betrays an anxiety not in accord with the doctrine espoused, but rather, I conjecture, with a despair that a certain form of belonging, a permanent agreement (and the quiet stewardship required of it), is not found among the cacophony exhibited today. 

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.'