Wednesday, January 28, 2009
a character
One of the things I do is write stories. Here's an idea for a character in some s/f story. Every day, they compile a scrapbook of their activities - pictures, annotations, diary entries, memorabilia, audio clips, video, etc etc. The thing is, they have a habit of dying. Every time they die, a large machine grows a new body; this new person is fairly similar in character, as it were, but it's not like we're imprinting memories. And then this new person goes and reads all the scrapbooks in order to get a sense of their past. And then they walk out of the facility and pick up their recently deceased predecessor's live exactly where they left it off. It's a sort of immortality, I suppose.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
omission / comission
This is a distinction that some moral philosophers are fond of. This is my take on it: when we are evaluating the actions of others (or our past selves), there is a difference between considering (or having it in one's "horizon of possibilies") an option, and not doing it, and not even considering it (and not doing it). This does not mean that one is excusable, or whatever, and one not; it just means that we should react to the two very differently; fixing each error calls for a different prescription, etc. On the other hand, in my own decision making, about what to do next, this distinction can play no possible role. After all, if I am at the point where I wonder "would this be an error of omisssion or comission," then I am already at the point of considering it, and would perforce be an error of comission.
The upshot of this is that, in cases such as the famous trolley problem, the omission / comission distinction has no bearing. It is a moral failing to hold that it does. I say this because I feel it is a way of avoiding responsibility. Taking responsibility for one's surroundings involves knowing what will happen depending on what you do next, and taking the actions appropriate to your aims.
The upshot of this is that, in cases such as the famous trolley problem, the omission / comission distinction has no bearing. It is a moral failing to hold that it does. I say this because I feel it is a way of avoiding responsibility. Taking responsibility for one's surroundings involves knowing what will happen depending on what you do next, and taking the actions appropriate to your aims.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
r.m. hare
I've read some of Hare's works (the bulk of Freedom and Reason, some of Moral Thinking and The Language of Morals), though I haven't made a thorough study of him. Nevertheless, he's had a big influence on me. His position on morality can be summed up rather quickly: if I assert that X is the right thing to do, I am committed to a) holding that everyone in relevantly similar circumstances should do X (universal) and b) doing X (prescriptivism). There are lots (lots) of details to fill in (e.g. what exactly is the proper connection between my assertion that X is right and my actually doing X? Anscombe anyone?). Nevertheless, there is something very attractive about this position.
For one, it is a very thin notion. There is nothing to my being obligated other than my being obligated. For example, if I fail to do what I should do, all that that implies is that I failed to do it. It does not imply blame, or punishment, or regret, or remorse. I am not particularly fond of moral theories that want to start with notions related to those I just mentioned; I feel it is too easy to import attitudes that are best reformed. Or, in other words, I shouldn't do the right thing because I will be praised for it / will be able to live with myself / will be rewarded for it. You do the right thing because it is the right thing.
Here's an example: what I feel is my worst quality. And that is a propensity towards righteous anger. That is, in certain situations, I will come to think that I have been wronged - or actually that somebody has been wronged - and that it is now available to me to castigate the wrongdoer. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of doing this - of making the sinner feel the weight of their sin. It is for these reasons that I try, very strenuously, to never feel this way. Too often, I could have acted to prevent the unpleasantness in the first place. (Here's a mundane example: I notice that someone has left their soda in a precarious position. Rather than fixing it - after all it's not my responsibility - I wait for it to fall, hopefully on something of mine, and am then in a position to castigate the soda-spiller (this disguises the fact that I am as much to blame for the spilled soda as the soda's owner)). And frankly, yelling (actually I don't yell; I aim for a different style) at people to make them feel bad about the past is unproductive (at least, it is unproductive of what it appears to be intended to produce, i.e. a change in their behavior, though it may be very productive of other things, e.g. pain and satisfaction). The business of our lives is the future: what is to be done next? And so the appropriate course is to figure out, in concert with the other party, how to avoid this in the future.
For one, it is a very thin notion. There is nothing to my being obligated other than my being obligated. For example, if I fail to do what I should do, all that that implies is that I failed to do it. It does not imply blame, or punishment, or regret, or remorse. I am not particularly fond of moral theories that want to start with notions related to those I just mentioned; I feel it is too easy to import attitudes that are best reformed. Or, in other words, I shouldn't do the right thing because I will be praised for it / will be able to live with myself / will be rewarded for it. You do the right thing because it is the right thing.
Here's an example: what I feel is my worst quality. And that is a propensity towards righteous anger. That is, in certain situations, I will come to think that I have been wronged - or actually that somebody has been wronged - and that it is now available to me to castigate the wrongdoer. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of doing this - of making the sinner feel the weight of their sin. It is for these reasons that I try, very strenuously, to never feel this way. Too often, I could have acted to prevent the unpleasantness in the first place. (Here's a mundane example: I notice that someone has left their soda in a precarious position. Rather than fixing it - after all it's not my responsibility - I wait for it to fall, hopefully on something of mine, and am then in a position to castigate the soda-spiller (this disguises the fact that I am as much to blame for the spilled soda as the soda's owner)). And frankly, yelling (actually I don't yell; I aim for a different style) at people to make them feel bad about the past is unproductive (at least, it is unproductive of what it appears to be intended to produce, i.e. a change in their behavior, though it may be very productive of other things, e.g. pain and satisfaction). The business of our lives is the future: what is to be done next? And so the appropriate course is to figure out, in concert with the other party, how to avoid this in the future.
a city of thought
This is an image that I really like, but that I haven't yet figured out how to state eloquently. So here comes the crude version. Basically, it is my image of my own thought processes.
Imagine that you're looking at a structure of some sort through a dense fog. And as the fog clears, you catch a glimpse, an edge, an impression here and there. But it's less like a structure behind the fog being revealed, and more like the fog itself coalescing into the structure, the city. Thinking is the process of refining this image, of working at it until the edges sharpen and it snaps into focus. But the process isn't smooth; for a long time, you may think that everything is set one way, but then suddenly the whole vision snaps into a different arrangement, and you realize that there are things you never understood, floors and walls and trusses you never imagined. And once you've got one element more or less set, one building, one shape, you start to see its vague connections to all these other half-seen half-understood areas, all these lines stretching out into the distance.
In other words, the process of thinking (and I'm talking about doing philosophy here) is the process of constructing a city of thought.
It is one of the funny aspects of philosophy that everyone has to do this for themselves. This is perhaps why we've made so little progress (as opposed to various other disciplines). We are all always starting anew; we are all required to judge for ourselves - else we wouldn't be doing philosophy proper. (I think this is much like the claim that there should never be normal philosophy; we should always be engaged in (or at least have the possibility of near to hand) revolutionary philosophy).
If this is the case, then how is this a thing that we can do together? What are the works of others to me? If I am required to always be starting over, what help can what another has said be to me?
The answer, I take it, is not so much that they provide us with the answers, but with building materials. And sure, these materials may be flawed; we might want to throw them out and make our own. But there's a difference between proving the Incompleteness Theorems the first time (Godel) and proving them once you know the general path (everyone else). (Though they're both proofs, both equally valid, doing one is much harder than doing the other).
This blog, then, is about gathering raw materials.
Imagine that you're looking at a structure of some sort through a dense fog. And as the fog clears, you catch a glimpse, an edge, an impression here and there. But it's less like a structure behind the fog being revealed, and more like the fog itself coalescing into the structure, the city. Thinking is the process of refining this image, of working at it until the edges sharpen and it snaps into focus. But the process isn't smooth; for a long time, you may think that everything is set one way, but then suddenly the whole vision snaps into a different arrangement, and you realize that there are things you never understood, floors and walls and trusses you never imagined. And once you've got one element more or less set, one building, one shape, you start to see its vague connections to all these other half-seen half-understood areas, all these lines stretching out into the distance.
In other words, the process of thinking (and I'm talking about doing philosophy here) is the process of constructing a city of thought.
It is one of the funny aspects of philosophy that everyone has to do this for themselves. This is perhaps why we've made so little progress (as opposed to various other disciplines). We are all always starting anew; we are all required to judge for ourselves - else we wouldn't be doing philosophy proper. (I think this is much like the claim that there should never be normal philosophy; we should always be engaged in (or at least have the possibility of near to hand) revolutionary philosophy).
If this is the case, then how is this a thing that we can do together? What are the works of others to me? If I am required to always be starting over, what help can what another has said be to me?
The answer, I take it, is not so much that they provide us with the answers, but with building materials. And sure, these materials may be flawed; we might want to throw them out and make our own. But there's a difference between proving the Incompleteness Theorems the first time (Godel) and proving them once you know the general path (everyone else). (Though they're both proofs, both equally valid, doing one is much harder than doing the other).
This blog, then, is about gathering raw materials.
punk
Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture
by Lauraine Leblanc
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2008
from p2 (this comes as part of the story of how the author was expelled from high school for dressing as a punk): "Even more distinctly, I remember how I felt: bewildered, frustrated, angry, powerless. It was like a bad anxiety dream, the kind where you talk or scream but no sound comes out. Of course, in reality, I was talking out loud. But still no one heard me."
from p4: "It seemed at the time that everyone had a theory about who I was, what I was doing, and what I was declaring, and people often "shared" these with me, in a most unpleasant and confrontational manner. No one ever asked me, or really listened to what I was saying. I was dying (dyeing?) to tell people what was on my mind. My adoption of the punk style was an attempt at communicating what I thought and felt about nuclear war, sex, religion, language, politics, racism, classism, or any other topic, but no one wanted to hear it. I was a fifteen-year-old girl challenging the entire world on a number of fronts, but no one cared to listen."
from p44: "Given the complexity and ambiguity of the stylistic minutiae of punk style and politics, its meanings varied with each reading; whereas experienced punks could decipher the message, the uninitiated may have received quite an unintended impression."
from pp46-47: "However, the success of early female punk performers' attempts to desexualize the clothes they wore in such a parodic fashion is debatable. Whereas punk women intended to present these garments in such a way as to discredit their effect as fetishistic, sexually titillating items, the overriding cultural view of women as sex objects may have worked at cross-purposes with their intent... While striving to counter stereotypes of women in rock, punk women were repeatedly described as sluts, perverts, whores, and junkies by those outside the subculture."
from p54: "This punk anarchism was not based primarilyupon textual sources, but rather on a grassroots interpretation of antiauthoritarianism and personal responsibility. Punk anarchism stressed not revolution, but education towards liberation, primarily through personal choice and responsibility, leading to an ethic of individualism."
These quotes, taken together, reveal an interesting problem. On the one hand, there is the proseletyzing tendency of punk: they intend to make others see the error of their ways (the error of being bound by socially acceptable horizons of possibility, standards of _____, etc.). They do this through parody of many of these standards. But somehow nobody gets the joke! In other words, this is just another example of how very difficult it is to change people's worldviews, their ways of seeing the world.
Alternatively, one can take punk's aims to be different. It doesn't aim to convert everyone - just those who have ears that listen and eyes that see. And for those people it provides another, more supportive world than the mainstream. It gives them a place where there are others like them.
(You can see many parallels to all this in Revolutionary Road, in which the neighbors, rather than being shocked into seeing their world / worldview differently by the Wheelers' unusual plan, dismiss it as variously crazy, immature, impractical, etc.)
by Lauraine Leblanc
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2008
from p2 (this comes as part of the story of how the author was expelled from high school for dressing as a punk): "Even more distinctly, I remember how I felt: bewildered, frustrated, angry, powerless. It was like a bad anxiety dream, the kind where you talk or scream but no sound comes out. Of course, in reality, I was talking out loud. But still no one heard me."
from p4: "It seemed at the time that everyone had a theory about who I was, what I was doing, and what I was declaring, and people often "shared" these with me, in a most unpleasant and confrontational manner. No one ever asked me, or really listened to what I was saying. I was dying (dyeing?) to tell people what was on my mind. My adoption of the punk style was an attempt at communicating what I thought and felt about nuclear war, sex, religion, language, politics, racism, classism, or any other topic, but no one wanted to hear it. I was a fifteen-year-old girl challenging the entire world on a number of fronts, but no one cared to listen."
from p44: "Given the complexity and ambiguity of the stylistic minutiae of punk style and politics, its meanings varied with each reading; whereas experienced punks could decipher the message, the uninitiated may have received quite an unintended impression."
from pp46-47: "However, the success of early female punk performers' attempts to desexualize the clothes they wore in such a parodic fashion is debatable. Whereas punk women intended to present these garments in such a way as to discredit their effect as fetishistic, sexually titillating items, the overriding cultural view of women as sex objects may have worked at cross-purposes with their intent... While striving to counter stereotypes of women in rock, punk women were repeatedly described as sluts, perverts, whores, and junkies by those outside the subculture."
from p54: "This punk anarchism was not based primarilyupon textual sources, but rather on a grassroots interpretation of antiauthoritarianism and personal responsibility. Punk anarchism stressed not revolution, but education towards liberation, primarily through personal choice and responsibility, leading to an ethic of individualism."
These quotes, taken together, reveal an interesting problem. On the one hand, there is the proseletyzing tendency of punk: they intend to make others see the error of their ways (the error of being bound by socially acceptable horizons of possibility, standards of _____, etc.). They do this through parody of many of these standards. But somehow nobody gets the joke! In other words, this is just another example of how very difficult it is to change people's worldviews, their ways of seeing the world.
Alternatively, one can take punk's aims to be different. It doesn't aim to convert everyone - just those who have ears that listen and eyes that see. And for those people it provides another, more supportive world than the mainstream. It gives them a place where there are others like them.
(You can see many parallels to all this in Revolutionary Road, in which the neighbors, rather than being shocked into seeing their world / worldview differently by the Wheelers' unusual plan, dismiss it as variously crazy, immature, impractical, etc.)
Monday, January 19, 2009
problems with authors
It strikes me that there are potential pitfalls involved in reading books written by people. That is, it can incline us to confront the author, not the book (not the ideas). For example, upon reading, the competitive edge in me out, and I immediately see the book as something to be refuted; I don't even take its ideas under consideration (though I may think about them a great deal). I could go on in this vein for a while, but I won't. The basic point is that it might be better if I read a book as if I had written it myself, as if I were whispering the words into my own ear - as if they appeared in my mind from nowhere.
But this is not quite right either. After all, the point of all this has to do with what we believe, what we value, etc. To paraphrase Aristotle, the point of our inquiry, our reading and writing and discussing, is right action. So - if another person has made a mistake, then I would be well-served to tell them - or to show them - to help them realize their mistake. This is essentially connected with seeing a person (this person) as the author of the work.
But this is not quite right either. After all, the point of all this has to do with what we believe, what we value, etc. To paraphrase Aristotle, the point of our inquiry, our reading and writing and discussing, is right action. So - if another person has made a mistake, then I would be well-served to tell them - or to show them - to help them realize their mistake. This is essentially connected with seeing a person (this person) as the author of the work.
the relevance of philosophy, academia
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
"The Last Professor"
by Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009
The New York Times
In this article, Fish makes the point that academia, properly understood, has no relevance to anything beyond itself (or, perhaps better: that its purpose is nothing beyond itself). Here's a quote:
"This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself."
One of the things that I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. This is not a straightforward task. I have forty-five minutes in which to ask whatever questions I desire. I probably want to talk about classes they've taken, subjects they're interested in, activities they've done or are involved in, their reasons for wanting to come to the university, etc - and other things. How do I break this time down? How much do I allocate to classes, how much to sports, how much to school newspaper, etc? In order to answer these questions, I'm going to need to understand how the interview figures in the overall application process. Is there some deficit it's meant to compensate for? Or is the purpose more vague? Either way, this implies an answer to the question: what are we looking for in applicants? And that's a tough question. What balance of academics vs. "roommate factor" do we want? Should we start doing statistical analyses, looking for correlations between what we know about students when they apply, and their outcomes after four years? Five years? The amount they wind up donating? To answer these questions, we need to start asking ourselves, what is the point of this University?
Another thing I do is Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. One day, we were doing a ground fighting technique that ends in an arm break (before the break it is just very painful). We train fairly slowly, so that we don't accidentally damage our partner. A student asks, "Is this the speed we should do it at on the street?" Our instructor pauses a moment, then admits that they would probably do it very quickly, just snap the arm, because they don't think they could handle pleading and cries of pain. The instructor then goes on, and says that this is a lot like learning certain knife moves - most of which end by slitting your opponent's throat. The instructor says: at this point, you need to start asking yourselves, what do I want to be trained to do? Do I want my instinct to be to snap the arm - to slit their throat? To answer that question, we'll have to ask: what situations do we think we'll be in? Will we be attacked - where? Will we be attacking other people (e.g. getting into bar fights)? If someone attacks us, attempts to mug us - is it okay to kill them? Answers to these questions will dictate how you train - even what you focus on (e.g. defenses against chokes, bear hugs, etc vs. various sparring techniques).
The point of these two examples is to try and show how traditional philosophical / ethical questions play important roles in pretty basic activities that we engage in - e.g. what we do at work. And, I contend, it is the point of ethics, of anything that engages with moral questions (and this is far more than just philosophy) to bear on such questions.
"The Last Professor"
by Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009
The New York Times
In this article, Fish makes the point that academia, properly understood, has no relevance to anything beyond itself (or, perhaps better: that its purpose is nothing beyond itself). Here's a quote:
"This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself."
One of the things that I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. This is not a straightforward task. I have forty-five minutes in which to ask whatever questions I desire. I probably want to talk about classes they've taken, subjects they're interested in, activities they've done or are involved in, their reasons for wanting to come to the university, etc - and other things. How do I break this time down? How much do I allocate to classes, how much to sports, how much to school newspaper, etc? In order to answer these questions, I'm going to need to understand how the interview figures in the overall application process. Is there some deficit it's meant to compensate for? Or is the purpose more vague? Either way, this implies an answer to the question: what are we looking for in applicants? And that's a tough question. What balance of academics vs. "roommate factor" do we want? Should we start doing statistical analyses, looking for correlations between what we know about students when they apply, and their outcomes after four years? Five years? The amount they wind up donating? To answer these questions, we need to start asking ourselves, what is the point of this University?
Another thing I do is Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. One day, we were doing a ground fighting technique that ends in an arm break (before the break it is just very painful). We train fairly slowly, so that we don't accidentally damage our partner. A student asks, "Is this the speed we should do it at on the street?" Our instructor pauses a moment, then admits that they would probably do it very quickly, just snap the arm, because they don't think they could handle pleading and cries of pain. The instructor then goes on, and says that this is a lot like learning certain knife moves - most of which end by slitting your opponent's throat. The instructor says: at this point, you need to start asking yourselves, what do I want to be trained to do? Do I want my instinct to be to snap the arm - to slit their throat? To answer that question, we'll have to ask: what situations do we think we'll be in? Will we be attacked - where? Will we be attacking other people (e.g. getting into bar fights)? If someone attacks us, attempts to mug us - is it okay to kill them? Answers to these questions will dictate how you train - even what you focus on (e.g. defenses against chokes, bear hugs, etc vs. various sparring techniques).
The point of these two examples is to try and show how traditional philosophical / ethical questions play important roles in pretty basic activities that we engage in - e.g. what we do at work. And, I contend, it is the point of ethics, of anything that engages with moral questions (and this is far more than just philosophy) to bear on such questions.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
tragedies
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Lower_Decks_(episode)
[nerd hat]
In this episode of TNG, a junior officer who's had some trouble with the concept of being a Starfleet officer (she feels that the Fleet has been unjust to her in various ways, troubles with authority, etc) is sent on a dangerous mission. Part of this involves being sent back to the Enterprise aboard a tiny life capsule; there's a good chance that she'll be killed. As it happens, she is.
[/nerd hat]
When I saw this episode, I was struck by the question: is her death a tragedy? I guess the answer is: it depends. If, during that long dark journey, she was alone and terrified, quaking in fear of her death - that would be a tragedy. But if she were okay with things - if she really accepted the consequences of her decision (she volunteered for this mission) - and thus the chance of her death - then from that perspective her death is not such a tragedy. (On the other hand, it would perhaps be a great loss to the rest of us if we were to lose such a person - the world perhaps needs more such people. This is a paradox*).
It is these thoughts that led me to think of a myth, of sorts. (I'm into created mythologies). While Sito was taking that long dark trip, maybe she had the chance to talk to someone - someone who helped her accept the possibility of her own death, and be okay with that, so that when she died, she was not afraid. The myth is that everyone, before they die, has that chance - to talk with someone (in the myth, one particular person) until they can accept the contingency and finitude of life. (I think Nietzsche might say: until they learn to love fate).
This myth has a dark version. In this version of the myth, everyone talks to someone - but this conversation is not about acceptance; it's about - let's say the realization of the unalterability of sin. I say "let's say" because this pair of myths have an interesting feature: only one of them can actually make sense. It's meant to be a conversation, one that enables the dying individual to see a truth - not a coercive process meant to bring them to believe something, by any means necessary. And only one of these two opposing visions of the world can be true. The question is: which? (If you want a good fictional exposition of the dark myth, go watch Hard Candy).
* The paradox is, I think, only apparent; but it's important and revealing to figure out how it is resolved - to see how these two perspectives on death interact. Part of this, I think, involves seeing why the fact that deaths are (in some cases) no tragedy does not make it okay to kill people. I think that this involves understanding that the business of human life is action: we do the best we can, but what happens, happens; it is the past, and our actions all concern the future.
[nerd hat]
In this episode of TNG, a junior officer who's had some trouble with the concept of being a Starfleet officer (she feels that the Fleet has been unjust to her in various ways, troubles with authority, etc) is sent on a dangerous mission. Part of this involves being sent back to the Enterprise aboard a tiny life capsule; there's a good chance that she'll be killed. As it happens, she is.
[/nerd hat]
When I saw this episode, I was struck by the question: is her death a tragedy? I guess the answer is: it depends. If, during that long dark journey, she was alone and terrified, quaking in fear of her death - that would be a tragedy. But if she were okay with things - if she really accepted the consequences of her decision (she volunteered for this mission) - and thus the chance of her death - then from that perspective her death is not such a tragedy. (On the other hand, it would perhaps be a great loss to the rest of us if we were to lose such a person - the world perhaps needs more such people. This is a paradox*).
It is these thoughts that led me to think of a myth, of sorts. (I'm into created mythologies). While Sito was taking that long dark trip, maybe she had the chance to talk to someone - someone who helped her accept the possibility of her own death, and be okay with that, so that when she died, she was not afraid. The myth is that everyone, before they die, has that chance - to talk with someone (in the myth, one particular person) until they can accept the contingency and finitude of life. (I think Nietzsche might say: until they learn to love fate).
This myth has a dark version. In this version of the myth, everyone talks to someone - but this conversation is not about acceptance; it's about - let's say the realization of the unalterability of sin. I say "let's say" because this pair of myths have an interesting feature: only one of them can actually make sense. It's meant to be a conversation, one that enables the dying individual to see a truth - not a coercive process meant to bring them to believe something, by any means necessary. And only one of these two opposing visions of the world can be true. The question is: which? (If you want a good fictional exposition of the dark myth, go watch Hard Candy).
* The paradox is, I think, only apparent; but it's important and revealing to figure out how it is resolved - to see how these two perspectives on death interact. Part of this, I think, involves seeing why the fact that deaths are (in some cases) no tragedy does not make it okay to kill people. I think that this involves understanding that the business of human life is action: we do the best we can, but what happens, happens; it is the past, and our actions all concern the future.
kant on lying
on a related note
There is a famous argument in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals which purports to show why the categorical imperative (act only on that maxim you can will as a universal law of nature) dictates that we do not lie. It tries to show that a world in which everyone lies to attain their ends is not a coherent one. That is, if I know you're going to lie to me, you can't lie to me.
But things are trickier than this. After all, the essence of lying does not consist in intentionally making false statements. If that were the case, then the world where we all lie would be straightforwardly pointless. But things are trickier. For example, if I know that you know that I'll lie to you (and you do not know this), then if I make a true statement, you'll believe it to be false and thus believe it's negation - and I will have succeeded in deceiving you.
Of course, if everyone knows that everyone lies, and we recurse this as far as it goes (forever), then things are much trickier. That is, there is no equilibrium. Consider: if I know that you know that I intend to lie to you and I also know that you know that I know that you know, but you don't know that, then telling a false statement will get you to believe the false thing. But if we never hit an item of knowledge that one of us knows and the other doesn't, then there is no straightforward answer as to what to do. It's a lot like playing rock-paper-scissors.
What all this means, actually, is that words would - at least from one perspective - lose their meaning (it is perhaps in this sense that the world is incoherent). After all, in such a situation, sentences would be treated as merely causal objects by everyone - we'd all know that everyone's utterances are responsive not to the truth, but to their causal effects on the world (e.g. us). And if that's the case, then sentences wouldn't mean anything.
This does not mean that such a world is incoherent - at least I don't think so. It just means that we'd all be treating each other as mere means, as merely causal objects. Meaning, normativity, right and wrong - well beyond merely moral matters - would drop out.
(This is as far as I've thought things through).
There is a famous argument in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals which purports to show why the categorical imperative (act only on that maxim you can will as a universal law of nature) dictates that we do not lie. It tries to show that a world in which everyone lies to attain their ends is not a coherent one. That is, if I know you're going to lie to me, you can't lie to me.
But things are trickier than this. After all, the essence of lying does not consist in intentionally making false statements. If that were the case, then the world where we all lie would be straightforwardly pointless. But things are trickier. For example, if I know that you know that I'll lie to you (and you do not know this), then if I make a true statement, you'll believe it to be false and thus believe it's negation - and I will have succeeded in deceiving you.
Of course, if everyone knows that everyone lies, and we recurse this as far as it goes (forever), then things are much trickier. That is, there is no equilibrium. Consider: if I know that you know that I intend to lie to you and I also know that you know that I know that you know, but you don't know that, then telling a false statement will get you to believe the false thing. But if we never hit an item of knowledge that one of us knows and the other doesn't, then there is no straightforward answer as to what to do. It's a lot like playing rock-paper-scissors.
What all this means, actually, is that words would - at least from one perspective - lose their meaning (it is perhaps in this sense that the world is incoherent). After all, in such a situation, sentences would be treated as merely causal objects by everyone - we'd all know that everyone's utterances are responsive not to the truth, but to their causal effects on the world (e.g. us). And if that's the case, then sentences wouldn't mean anything.
This does not mean that such a world is incoherent - at least I don't think so. It just means that we'd all be treating each other as mere means, as merely causal objects. Meaning, normativity, right and wrong - well beyond merely moral matters - would drop out.
(This is as far as I've thought things through).
Thursday, January 15, 2009
living is a risky business, part two
part one
I think that Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is actually a particularly good example of what I talked about in the previous post. In her account of ethical living, Korsgaard places foundational importance on (in other words, she attempts to make into an Archimedean point) this notion of reflectivity: the idea that we can (or must; it's unclear) bring any of our values / impulses to action (again, unclear) into question. But as her account progresses, she systematically obscures the fact that we can question (in a certain sense) the value of being reflective. Or, put another way, she seems to offer a perfectly correct account of how to reflect on one's values.
(I will here skip some technical bits).
The upshot is that while reflection, I believe, is a key component of the good life, there's no way to be sure that you're doing it right. There is one extreme of total unreflectivity, of never wondering about the rightness of one's actions; besides being dangerous, this is a little inhuman, and perhaps even lax. There is the other extreme of spending all one's time on reflection and none on action, of holing up in one's room until you get the answer exactly perfect.* This is equally pathological: reflection that's lost its point: right action.
Unfortunately, striking a balance between reflection on action and action is a tricky business.** They are each demanding occupations, liable to take up a good amount of time. In other words, deciding how much time to allocate to each is yet another decision which we can screw up, or not. We can do our best, of course; there are cases where reflection is pretty clearly the wrong decision (e.g. when we have a drowning baby on our hands), and to do otherwise would be to clearly make a mistake. But in the end, we can't be certain ahead of time that we've done it right: the problem of allocation recurses endlessly. So we might, despite the best of intentions, screw things up rather badly. Living is a risky business.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html
"Shutting Themselves In"
by Maggie Jones
January 15, 2006
The New York Times
"Hiroshi didn't say why working would have been better or why it was too late at age 26 to start a career. He said only that he wouldn't leave the house "until I know exactly what I want to do." It was typical hikikomori thinking: better to stay in your room than risk venturing into the world and failing."
** To get back to Korsgaard, her work solves (avoids) this problem by making it seem as if reflection can be done in an instant, as if it were something that took no time at all. If that's the case, striking a balance between the two is not even a problem. The reason that this is symptomatic of a split between philosophy and the good life is that, if it were clear that the same sort of reflection that Korsgaard thinks is so central to the good life were exactly the sort of reflection her book engages in (or that she engaged in when she wrote the book), it would be fairly obvious that reflection takes time. After all, I could spend my time reading Korsgaard, studying Korsgaard (I personally find her works intelligible at the level of sentences but exceedingly difficult at higher levels), or out canvassing for Obama, etc.
I think that Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is actually a particularly good example of what I talked about in the previous post. In her account of ethical living, Korsgaard places foundational importance on (in other words, she attempts to make into an Archimedean point) this notion of reflectivity: the idea that we can (or must; it's unclear) bring any of our values / impulses to action (again, unclear) into question. But as her account progresses, she systematically obscures the fact that we can question (in a certain sense) the value of being reflective. Or, put another way, she seems to offer a perfectly correct account of how to reflect on one's values.
(I will here skip some technical bits).
The upshot is that while reflection, I believe, is a key component of the good life, there's no way to be sure that you're doing it right. There is one extreme of total unreflectivity, of never wondering about the rightness of one's actions; besides being dangerous, this is a little inhuman, and perhaps even lax. There is the other extreme of spending all one's time on reflection and none on action, of holing up in one's room until you get the answer exactly perfect.* This is equally pathological: reflection that's lost its point: right action.
Unfortunately, striking a balance between reflection on action and action is a tricky business.** They are each demanding occupations, liable to take up a good amount of time. In other words, deciding how much time to allocate to each is yet another decision which we can screw up, or not. We can do our best, of course; there are cases where reflection is pretty clearly the wrong decision (e.g. when we have a drowning baby on our hands), and to do otherwise would be to clearly make a mistake. But in the end, we can't be certain ahead of time that we've done it right: the problem of allocation recurses endlessly. So we might, despite the best of intentions, screw things up rather badly. Living is a risky business.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html
"Shutting Themselves In"
by Maggie Jones
January 15, 2006
The New York Times
"Hiroshi didn't say why working would have been better or why it was too late at age 26 to start a career. He said only that he wouldn't leave the house "until I know exactly what I want to do." It was typical hikikomori thinking: better to stay in your room than risk venturing into the world and failing."
** To get back to Korsgaard, her work solves (avoids) this problem by making it seem as if reflection can be done in an instant, as if it were something that took no time at all. If that's the case, striking a balance between the two is not even a problem. The reason that this is symptomatic of a split between philosophy and the good life is that, if it were clear that the same sort of reflection that Korsgaard thinks is so central to the good life were exactly the sort of reflection her book engages in (or that she engaged in when she wrote the book), it would be fairly obvious that reflection takes time. After all, I could spend my time reading Korsgaard, studying Korsgaard (I personally find her works intelligible at the level of sentences but exceedingly difficult at higher levels), or out canvassing for Obama, etc.
living is a risky business
This is going to be really quick, abstract, and vague, but:
I think that a flaw that corrupts some philosophy, whether it be in ethics or metaphysics, is the desire to give a final, perfect answer. In ethics, this would be a way of living that is, once and for all, morally unimpeachable. If we could just get things right, there would be no danger of acting wrongly (acting wrongly even with the best of intentions). I don't think there is any such answer, any such way of living. Life is a risky business. We can't eliminate the possibility of mistakes, of failures, of one sort or another.
One of the ways that philosophy tries to avoid the point that there is no such answer is by divorcing philosophy and its subject matter. There is the good life, and there is philosophizing about the good life. That is, it would be moronic (or exceedingly arrogant) for a philosopher not to acknowledge that their theories are controversial, doubtful, subject to criticism and revision. But by separating the good life from their philosophizing about it, they can separate it (the good life) off from all that controvesry, doubt, criticism, and revision. This is both wrong and bad.
I think that a flaw that corrupts some philosophy, whether it be in ethics or metaphysics, is the desire to give a final, perfect answer. In ethics, this would be a way of living that is, once and for all, morally unimpeachable. If we could just get things right, there would be no danger of acting wrongly (acting wrongly even with the best of intentions). I don't think there is any such answer, any such way of living. Life is a risky business. We can't eliminate the possibility of mistakes, of failures, of one sort or another.
One of the ways that philosophy tries to avoid the point that there is no such answer is by divorcing philosophy and its subject matter. There is the good life, and there is philosophizing about the good life. That is, it would be moronic (or exceedingly arrogant) for a philosopher not to acknowledge that their theories are controversial, doubtful, subject to criticism and revision. But by separating the good life from their philosophizing about it, they can separate it (the good life) off from all that controvesry, doubt, criticism, and revision. This is both wrong and bad.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
only part of us is sane
"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
--Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Penguin 1994, p. 1102.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp
"On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on children arriving at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego from her house across the street, killing two men and wounding eight students and a police officer. Principal Burton Wragg was attempting to rescue children in the line of fire when he was shot and killed, and custodian Mike Suchar was slain attempting to aid Wragg.
Spencer used a rifle her father had given her as a gift. As to what impelled her into this form of murderous madness, she told a reporter,''I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.''
The "Mondays" comment was not the only eyebrow-raising declaration to issue from Spencer that day. According to a report written by the police negotiators who spoke with her during the six-hour standoff, she made such comments to them as ''There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun''; ''It was just like shooting ducks in a pond''; and ''[the children ] looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings.''"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html
"The Urge to End It"
by Scott Anderson
July 6, 2008
The New York Times
"Prosecutors Say Boy Methodically Shot His Father"
by John Dougherty and Anahad O'Connor
November 10, 2008
The New York Times
"An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday... Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred... An investigation found no evidence that the boy had had disciplinary problems at school or shown signs that he was troubled, Chief Melnick said."
I recall hearing that Sartre once remarked that the fear isn't that you'll be thrown off a bridge; the fear is that you'll throw yourself off the bridge, though I have lost the citation.
***
I don't really know what I have to say about all these examples. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that we (we) can make decisions that don't fit, don't cohere (perhaps can't be fitted into) the rest of one's life, all the things that one has done previously. It happens sometimes that we just do things. Or maybe it is something more like what West had to say: that we (some of us, at least) occasionally feel the urge to do terrible things, just because - and sometimes we do them.
--Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Penguin 1994, p. 1102.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp
"On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on children arriving at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego from her house across the street, killing two men and wounding eight students and a police officer. Principal Burton Wragg was attempting to rescue children in the line of fire when he was shot and killed, and custodian Mike Suchar was slain attempting to aid Wragg.
Spencer used a rifle her father had given her as a gift. As to what impelled her into this form of murderous madness, she told a reporter,''I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.''
The "Mondays" comment was not the only eyebrow-raising declaration to issue from Spencer that day. According to a report written by the police negotiators who spoke with her during the six-hour standoff, she made such comments to them as ''There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun''; ''It was just like shooting ducks in a pond''; and ''[the children ] looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings.''"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html
"The Urge to End It"
by Scott Anderson
July 6, 2008
The New York Times
"As with every other survivor of a near-lethal suicide attempt that I spoke with, Debbie told her story with an almost eerie poise. There was one moment, though, at which she suddenly fell silent, where words failed her.
“You know, I hear myself describing all this,” she said, “but it seems completely surreal. I feel like I’m describing a movie I saw or a book I read. Even sitting here now and looking at that” — she motioned to her cane — “it’s hard to believe this is something I actually did.”
I suspected part of her incredulity stemmed from the recentness of the event; it had been less than three years. But perhaps it was also rooted in something more profound. What united all the survivors I spoke with was a sense of having been so utterly transformed by their experiences that, in essence, they had become different people.
In California, I met with Ken Baldwin, a schoolteacher who, in the grips of a deep depression 22 years ago, leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I’ve had two lives,” Baldwin said. “That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to describe it. Up to the day I jumped, that was one life, and now this is another. I’m not so much a changed man as a completely different one, and that’s why it’s so hard to even recollect what I was like back then, what I was thinking.”
...
“I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/11child.html"Prosecutors Say Boy Methodically Shot His Father"
by John Dougherty and Anahad O'Connor
November 10, 2008
The New York Times
"An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday... Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred... An investigation found no evidence that the boy had had disciplinary problems at school or shown signs that he was troubled, Chief Melnick said."
I recall hearing that Sartre once remarked that the fear isn't that you'll be thrown off a bridge; the fear is that you'll throw yourself off the bridge, though I have lost the citation.
***
I don't really know what I have to say about all these examples. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that we (we) can make decisions that don't fit, don't cohere (perhaps can't be fitted into) the rest of one's life, all the things that one has done previously. It happens sometimes that we just do things. Or maybe it is something more like what West had to say: that we (some of us, at least) occasionally feel the urge to do terrible things, just because - and sometimes we do them.
feel like getting your blood up?
http://www.dirkbenedictcentral.com/home/articles-readarticle.php?nid=5
"Lost in Castration"
by Dirk Benedict
February 7, 2006
It reminds of nothing so much as 88 Minutes, another (man's) fantasy of how the world goes 'round.
[Edit: actually, the article is more laughable than anything. It didn't actually get me that angry. Yes, it is not good that there are such people in the world, but it didn't get me viscerally angry.]
"Lost in Castration"
by Dirk Benedict
February 7, 2006
It reminds of nothing so much as 88 Minutes, another (man's) fantasy of how the world goes 'round.
[Edit: actually, the article is more laughable than anything. It didn't actually get me that angry. Yes, it is not good that there are such people in the world, but it didn't get me viscerally angry.]
the aims of education
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21jolley-t.html
"The Thinker"
by Jonathan Mahler
September 19, 2008
The New York Times
"Being a philosopher requires you to engage in the practice of relentless inquiry about everything, so it’s not surprising that Jolley has spent untold hours puzzling over how to best teach the discipline itself. What he has decided is that philosophy can’t be taught — or learned — like other academic subjects. To begin with, it takes longer. “Plato said that you become a philosopher by spending ‘much time’ in sympathy with other philosophers,” he told me. “Much time. I take that very seriously.” We were sitting in his office, which was dark with academic books and journals; a large paperweight reading “Think” sat amid the clutter on his desk. “Plato,” he went on, “talked about it as a process of ‘sparking forth,’ that as you spend more time with other philosophers, you eventually catch the flame. That’s how I think about teaching philosophy.”
...
Many of Jolley’s colleagues were similarly skeptical of what he was trying to do. Several of them urged him to “tone it down,” he recalls, when they noticed the intimidating syllabus for his first class, the history of ancient philosophy, taped to the door of his office. They advised Jolley against wasting his time trying to start a philosophy club at Auburn — the club now has about 30 members — and called his approach to teaching “aristocratic.” In particular, they objected to the fact that he was grading students not on how well they learned philosophical terminology and definitions but on their ability to think philosophically.
...
While I was in Auburn, I attended a few of Jolley’s logic classes. All students at Auburn are required to take at least one entry-level philosophy course like logic. Traditionally, these “core” classes are designed to ease students into a particular subject. This is not Jolley’s approach. As he argues, core curriculums should aspire to do more than merely give students a taste of something. “Look, if the core is really going to matter for a student’s education, they need genuine exposure to that discipline,” he told me a few minutes before class. “You’re not giving them ‘the core’ if what you’re giving them is some sugarcoated simulacrum of philosophy that you’ve decided they can swallow.”
...
Over pizza and iced tea, I asked him if he ever wondered whether his style of teaching might be inappropriate for a large state school like Auburn — if the cost of his approach is that he’s teaching to the few rather than the many. “My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”
I don't really know what more to say on this subject, except that thinking about the nature of one's discipline, and the point of doing it, is not something you can really get away from. It influences everything one does in that discipline, down to the way one teaches introductory undergraduate classes (or, for that matter, high school classes).
"The Thinker"
by Jonathan Mahler
September 19, 2008
The New York Times
"Being a philosopher requires you to engage in the practice of relentless inquiry about everything, so it’s not surprising that Jolley has spent untold hours puzzling over how to best teach the discipline itself. What he has decided is that philosophy can’t be taught — or learned — like other academic subjects. To begin with, it takes longer. “Plato said that you become a philosopher by spending ‘much time’ in sympathy with other philosophers,” he told me. “Much time. I take that very seriously.” We were sitting in his office, which was dark with academic books and journals; a large paperweight reading “Think” sat amid the clutter on his desk. “Plato,” he went on, “talked about it as a process of ‘sparking forth,’ that as you spend more time with other philosophers, you eventually catch the flame. That’s how I think about teaching philosophy.”
...
Many of Jolley’s colleagues were similarly skeptical of what he was trying to do. Several of them urged him to “tone it down,” he recalls, when they noticed the intimidating syllabus for his first class, the history of ancient philosophy, taped to the door of his office. They advised Jolley against wasting his time trying to start a philosophy club at Auburn — the club now has about 30 members — and called his approach to teaching “aristocratic.” In particular, they objected to the fact that he was grading students not on how well they learned philosophical terminology and definitions but on their ability to think philosophically.
...
While I was in Auburn, I attended a few of Jolley’s logic classes. All students at Auburn are required to take at least one entry-level philosophy course like logic. Traditionally, these “core” classes are designed to ease students into a particular subject. This is not Jolley’s approach. As he argues, core curriculums should aspire to do more than merely give students a taste of something. “Look, if the core is really going to matter for a student’s education, they need genuine exposure to that discipline,” he told me a few minutes before class. “You’re not giving them ‘the core’ if what you’re giving them is some sugarcoated simulacrum of philosophy that you’ve decided they can swallow.”
...
Over pizza and iced tea, I asked him if he ever wondered whether his style of teaching might be inappropriate for a large state school like Auburn — if the cost of his approach is that he’s teaching to the few rather than the many. “My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”
In Jolley’s ideal world, every student would catch the philosophy flame, but he knows this will never happen. He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”
Perhaps the dispute between Jolley and his critics boils down to how you define great teachers. You typically think about them as being devoted, above all, to their students. Jolley says his first priority is to philosophy itself. “I care about the discipline of philosophy more than the academic fate of any individual student — and I think I should,” he said. “Otherwise I’m just a baby sitter who occasionally breaks into syllogism.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html
"At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard"
by Sara Rimer
January 12, 2009
The New York Times
"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.
The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.
“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.
“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”
The problem, say Dr. Dourmashkin and others in the department, is that a lot of students had trouble doing that. The failure rate for those lecture courses, even those taught by the most mesmerizing teachers, was typically 10 percent to 12 percent. Now, it has dropped to 4 percent.
Another big concern was attendance.
John Belcher, a space physicist who arrived at M.I.T. 38 years ago and was instrumental in introducing the new teaching method nine years ago, was considered an outstanding lecturer. He won M.I.T.’s top teaching award and rave reviews from students. And yet, as each semester progressed, attendance in his introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues."
***
I don't really know what more to say on this subject, except that thinking about the nature of one's discipline, and the point of doing it, is not something you can really get away from. It influences everything one does in that discipline, down to the way one teaches introductory undergraduate classes (or, for that matter, high school classes).
bad reasoning
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/08/picture-this-yo.html
"Opposing Sides Weigh in on Flying Fat"
by Dave Demerjian
August 6, 2008
Wired.com
"If there is even the slightest shred of evidence indicating that obesity is genetically determined, forcing fat passengers to pay more is blatant discrimination."
Frankly, this piece of reasoning is ludicrous. And I think it follows the same form of reasoning that a lot of people concerned with gay rights have fallen into: if sexuality is genetically determined, then discriminating against gays is wrong; if it is not, then it is okay. This completely misses the point. It represents the conflation of the possible (socially, technologically, w/e) with the normative. Even if sexuality is entirely a personal choice, gays should have rights. And even if being obese is genetically determined, if you use two seats, you shoudl pay for two seats.
(Allowing people who are fat enough to take up two seats to pay for only one is liking letting people with the munchies eat free at McDonalds)
"Opposing Sides Weigh in on Flying Fat"
by Dave Demerjian
August 6, 2008
Wired.com
"If there is even the slightest shred of evidence indicating that obesity is genetically determined, forcing fat passengers to pay more is blatant discrimination."
Frankly, this piece of reasoning is ludicrous. And I think it follows the same form of reasoning that a lot of people concerned with gay rights have fallen into: if sexuality is genetically determined, then discriminating against gays is wrong; if it is not, then it is okay. This completely misses the point. It represents the conflation of the possible (socially, technologically, w/e) with the normative. Even if sexuality is entirely a personal choice, gays should have rights. And even if being obese is genetically determined, if you use two seats, you shoudl pay for two seats.
(Allowing people who are fat enough to take up two seats to pay for only one is liking letting people with the munchies eat free at McDonalds)
Monday, January 12, 2009
a fantastical and curious place, part two
part one
Just after I interviewed the student discussed in the previous post, I interviewed another student. Football was his most important activity; he felt that he really learned a lot from it - it's made him more of a man, and taught him to persevere through the hardest times, like when you're down five points and you have to pull it together and win the game. He later discussed his interest in business; while he's got no specific interest in it (i.e. not in accounting or marketing or w/e), he always saw himself in that career, just as others dream of being firefighters or police officers. He can just see himself in a corner office with a view of a big city. "You know," he said, "Donald Trump, with the suits, and he works with people at big tables..."
It struck me, right then and there, that this kid had never seen hard times, that he really knew very little about life. So it's strange - while awful things had happened to the previous student, they had really became a better person, a more reflective person, a stronger person, for it. This student had had nothing bad happen to him - had led an idyllic life - and turned out much worse. So who really had good fortune, and who bad?
(this is close to a certain sort of theodicy)
Of course, it is true that other people, with different characters, might have been totally destroyed by watching their father's suicide. It could have been an awful thing. But, it seems that, in the end, it wasn't.
This is why, when people ask me what I think of my past, whether I wish it were different, I always tell them that I would never wish to change the past. Learn from it, yes - change it, no. Too much has happened, has become part of me, and part of other people - and how could I take that from anyone?
Just after I interviewed the student discussed in the previous post, I interviewed another student. Football was his most important activity; he felt that he really learned a lot from it - it's made him more of a man, and taught him to persevere through the hardest times, like when you're down five points and you have to pull it together and win the game. He later discussed his interest in business; while he's got no specific interest in it (i.e. not in accounting or marketing or w/e), he always saw himself in that career, just as others dream of being firefighters or police officers. He can just see himself in a corner office with a view of a big city. "You know," he said, "Donald Trump, with the suits, and he works with people at big tables..."
It struck me, right then and there, that this kid had never seen hard times, that he really knew very little about life. So it's strange - while awful things had happened to the previous student, they had really became a better person, a more reflective person, a stronger person, for it. This student had had nothing bad happen to him - had led an idyllic life - and turned out much worse. So who really had good fortune, and who bad?
(this is close to a certain sort of theodicy)
Of course, it is true that other people, with different characters, might have been totally destroyed by watching their father's suicide. It could have been an awful thing. But, it seems that, in the end, it wasn't.
This is why, when people ask me what I think of my past, whether I wish it were different, I always tell them that I would never wish to change the past. Learn from it, yes - change it, no. Too much has happened, has become part of me, and part of other people - and how could I take that from anyone?
kara 'starbuck' thrace
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/health/06mind.html
"Some Protect the Ego by Working on Their Excuses Early"
by Benedict Carey
January 5, 2009
The New York Times
Basically, the point is that if you set yourself up for failure ahead of time, then you won't feel so bad when you fail. This can be a way of avoiding disappointment; of bringing your life under control.
[nerd hat]
I want to draw on this article to interpret why Kara Thrace marries Samuel Anders. It is a shocking move, given that she has recently declared her love to Lee Adama - and it's pretty fracking clear that they're meant for each other (as Dualla remarks in a deleted scene, they're linked.). The reason, I think, is this: Anders, despite being a resistance fighter, is also more or less a big kid; he's the sort who'd still be playing Halo 3 with his buds when he was thirty. Adama, on the other hand, despite his occasional problems, is more of an adult - someone who really is a mover and a shaker in the world, who is driven to do well (roughly). Kara's problem is that, despite being incredibly talented, she's constantly setting herself up for failure. She can't, in a way, accept that sort of a life. She's too afraid of failing to be willing to step up to the plate 24/7, in a way. Choosing Adama would have been much like embracing that side of her - and it's safer to go with Anders, to maintain her self-conception: a frack-up.
(I almost want to say that she puts all this away while she's in a Viper, though, considering how well she does there).
[/nerd hat]
"Some Protect the Ego by Working on Their Excuses Early"
by Benedict Carey
January 5, 2009
The New York Times
Basically, the point is that if you set yourself up for failure ahead of time, then you won't feel so bad when you fail. This can be a way of avoiding disappointment; of bringing your life under control.
[nerd hat]
I want to draw on this article to interpret why Kara Thrace marries Samuel Anders. It is a shocking move, given that she has recently declared her love to Lee Adama - and it's pretty fracking clear that they're meant for each other (as Dualla remarks in a deleted scene, they're linked.). The reason, I think, is this: Anders, despite being a resistance fighter, is also more or less a big kid; he's the sort who'd still be playing Halo 3 with his buds when he was thirty. Adama, on the other hand, despite his occasional problems, is more of an adult - someone who really is a mover and a shaker in the world, who is driven to do well (roughly). Kara's problem is that, despite being incredibly talented, she's constantly setting herself up for failure. She can't, in a way, accept that sort of a life. She's too afraid of failing to be willing to step up to the plate 24/7, in a way. Choosing Adama would have been much like embracing that side of her - and it's safer to go with Anders, to maintain her self-conception: a frack-up.
(I almost want to say that she puts all this away while she's in a Viper, though, considering how well she does there).
[/nerd hat]
learning things from fictions, part three
part one
part two
One way we can learn things from fictions that I forgot to mention is rather similar to another way I have discussed (having our concepts stretched, or being taught new concepts). And this (roughly) reminding us of something we already knew. That is, everybody knows that there's a genocide going on in Darfur. But nobody really knows it - feels it, sees it the way they see the hand in front of their face. Fictions can help remind us of these things, or of things we've forgotten, or haven't exactly noticed before.
part two
One way we can learn things from fictions that I forgot to mention is rather similar to another way I have discussed (having our concepts stretched, or being taught new concepts). And this (roughly) reminding us of something we already knew. That is, everybody knows that there's a genocide going on in Darfur. But nobody really knows it - feels it, sees it the way they see the hand in front of their face. Fictions can help remind us of these things, or of things we've forgotten, or haven't exactly noticed before.
on falling asleep
The other day I had trouble falling asleep. This was because I kept on having random thoughts on all sorts of topics, and I felt compelled to pick up my pen and notebook, turn on the light, and jot them down (I started doing this years ago when I realized how many thoughts I had lying awake at night, all of which were forgotten come morning). And I just couldn't get to sleep - it was almost frustrating. This is a fairly constant thing (i.e. happens at times other than this), especially when I'm not with other people.
And that, in a way, is what this blog is about: keeping track of all the things I think of. As it happens, a lot of them never make it here. It takes too much time to write these posts - and also, sometimes, too much work to get a thought (esp. a very fragmentary one) into something I feel okay about posting. I should lower my standards - better that than nothing.
It's late. I should go to sleep.
And that, in a way, is what this blog is about: keeping track of all the things I think of. As it happens, a lot of them never make it here. It takes too much time to write these posts - and also, sometimes, too much work to get a thought (esp. a very fragmentary one) into something I feel okay about posting. I should lower my standards - better that than nothing.
It's late. I should go to sleep.
learning things from fictions, part two
part one
I guess I didn't state this clearly, but the reason I thought there was sort of a problem in understanding how we learn things from fictions is because - perhaps - there's nothing particularly interesting to be learned from fictions if all they do is come out and make a claim. Atlas Shrugged is a good example. That novel is littered with lengthy speeches that lay out Rand's philosophy. The problem is that if this is the model of how we're supposed to learn from fictions, it starts to look like the point of the fiction is just to convince us, for non-rational reasons, to buy whatever it's selling. That is, Rand has a lot of devices meant to make John Galt seem like the coolest dude ever, but this hardly means that his ethics is correct. It is this sort of thing that has made people since Plato suspicious of learning things from fictions.
It was therefore for this reason that I discussed how the point of fictions is not to tell us the truth by advancing substantive claims, but instead to open up new ways of seeing the world, but to around with our concepts. If we then come to make judgments (i.e. hold some substantive claim) it is because the world prompts us to (i.e. we see something in the world that prompts us to apply this concept we've just learned or had messed with).
The problem, of course, is that there can be bad concepts and bad ways of looking at the world. Consider an adjective like "bosche,"* which is defined as follows: If you're French, then you're bosche. And if you're bosche, then you're cowardly. This sort of concept, like perhaps many, would have the implication that all French are cowardly (we need only admit the concept into our language for this to follow).
* I'm stealing this example from a philosopher, but I can't remember who. GAH.
I guess I didn't state this clearly, but the reason I thought there was sort of a problem in understanding how we learn things from fictions is because - perhaps - there's nothing particularly interesting to be learned from fictions if all they do is come out and make a claim. Atlas Shrugged is a good example. That novel is littered with lengthy speeches that lay out Rand's philosophy. The problem is that if this is the model of how we're supposed to learn from fictions, it starts to look like the point of the fiction is just to convince us, for non-rational reasons, to buy whatever it's selling. That is, Rand has a lot of devices meant to make John Galt seem like the coolest dude ever, but this hardly means that his ethics is correct. It is this sort of thing that has made people since Plato suspicious of learning things from fictions.
It was therefore for this reason that I discussed how the point of fictions is not to tell us the truth by advancing substantive claims, but instead to open up new ways of seeing the world, but to around with our concepts. If we then come to make judgments (i.e. hold some substantive claim) it is because the world prompts us to (i.e. we see something in the world that prompts us to apply this concept we've just learned or had messed with).
The problem, of course, is that there can be bad concepts and bad ways of looking at the world. Consider an adjective like "bosche,"* which is defined as follows: If you're French, then you're bosche. And if you're bosche, then you're cowardly. This sort of concept, like perhaps many, would have the implication that all French are cowardly (we need only admit the concept into our language for this to follow).
* I'm stealing this example from a philosopher, but I can't remember who. GAH.
a puzzzle in nietzsche
From the preface to the second edition,* Section 2: "Just like a traveller who resolves to wake up at a certain hour and then calmly givers himself up to sleep, so too we philosophers, should we become ill, temporarily surrender ourselves with body and soul to the illness -- we shit our eyes to ourselves, as it were. And as the traveller knows that something is not asleep, something that will count the hours and wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will find us awake, that something will then leap forward and catch the mind in the act..."
from Book One, Section 54, "The consciousness of appearance": "...I suddenly awoke in the middle of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish... To me, appearance is the active and living itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that here there is appearance and a will-o'-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing else -- that among all these dreamers, even I, the 'knower', am dancing my dance..."
from Book Two, Section 107, "Our ultimate gratitude to art": "And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool's cap: we need it against ourselves -- we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us. It would be a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get completely caught up in morality and, for the sake of the overly severe demands that we make on ourselves, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We have also to be able to stand above morality -- and not just to stand with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float and play above it!"
from Book Four ("St. Januarius"), Section 279, "Star Friendship": "We were friends and have become estranged. But that was right, and we do not want to hide and obscure it from ourselves as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each of which has its own goal and course; we may cross and have a feast together, as we did -- and then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbour and in one sun that it may have seemed as if they had already completed their course and had the same goal. But then the almighty force of our projects drove us apart once again, into different seas and sunny zones, and maybe we will never meet again -- or maybe we will, but will not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we had to become estranged is the law above us; through it we should come to have more respect for each other -- and the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our different ways and goals may be included as small stretches -- let us rise to this thought! But our life is too short and our vision too meagre for us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. -- Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we must be earth enemies."
I interviewed a student recently; at the end of the interview, I asked them: "If you were a storm, what kind of storm would you be?" They responded that they would be a hurricane. At first, when a hurricane hits, it's tremendously stormy and active etc. But then you reach the eye, and everything is calm. The student saw something of themself in this: for a while, they just want to talk about everything to everyone, and ideas are just pouring out of their head and mouth etc etc etc. And then they switch, and all they want to do is listen and hear what other people think, and not really develop their own conclusions at all. And then, some time later, they'll got back. Etc.
Anyways, all of these passages cited, and to some extent the student's answer, exemplify an idea I've been trying to figure out for a while now: how I can do something in all seriousness, and yet not. (Part of the problem is that I can't even get a good statement of the problem). Basically - what is it to act on my ideals even admitting that they are very subject to revision - and what distinguishes this from just acting on my ideals? From acting on them and holding that they are not subject to revision? Do these things 'look' exactly the same, or are there substantive consequences (i.e. Kantian ethics?) from being able to take a step back from oneself? How exactly does all this work?
* citation here
(This is just a side-note, but I've discussed how I have a really hard time reading some philosophers, and find them nearly unintelligible. I actually, for reasons that are unclear to me, find (feel that) Nietzsche is very clear - which is odd, considering that it is usually Continentals that I find unintelligible.)
from Book One, Section 54, "The consciousness of appearance": "...I suddenly awoke in the middle of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish... To me, appearance is the active and living itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that here there is appearance and a will-o'-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing else -- that among all these dreamers, even I, the 'knower', am dancing my dance..."
from Book Two, Section 107, "Our ultimate gratitude to art": "And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool's cap: we need it against ourselves -- we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us. It would be a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get completely caught up in morality and, for the sake of the overly severe demands that we make on ourselves, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We have also to be able to stand above morality -- and not just to stand with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float and play above it!"
from Book Four ("St. Januarius"), Section 279, "Star Friendship": "We were friends and have become estranged. But that was right, and we do not want to hide and obscure it from ourselves as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each of which has its own goal and course; we may cross and have a feast together, as we did -- and then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbour and in one sun that it may have seemed as if they had already completed their course and had the same goal. But then the almighty force of our projects drove us apart once again, into different seas and sunny zones, and maybe we will never meet again -- or maybe we will, but will not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we had to become estranged is the law above us; through it we should come to have more respect for each other -- and the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our different ways and goals may be included as small stretches -- let us rise to this thought! But our life is too short and our vision too meagre for us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. -- Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we must be earth enemies."
I interviewed a student recently; at the end of the interview, I asked them: "If you were a storm, what kind of storm would you be?" They responded that they would be a hurricane. At first, when a hurricane hits, it's tremendously stormy and active etc. But then you reach the eye, and everything is calm. The student saw something of themself in this: for a while, they just want to talk about everything to everyone, and ideas are just pouring out of their head and mouth etc etc etc. And then they switch, and all they want to do is listen and hear what other people think, and not really develop their own conclusions at all. And then, some time later, they'll got back. Etc.
Anyways, all of these passages cited, and to some extent the student's answer, exemplify an idea I've been trying to figure out for a while now: how I can do something in all seriousness, and yet not. (Part of the problem is that I can't even get a good statement of the problem). Basically - what is it to act on my ideals even admitting that they are very subject to revision - and what distinguishes this from just acting on my ideals? From acting on them and holding that they are not subject to revision? Do these things 'look' exactly the same, or are there substantive consequences (i.e. Kantian ethics?) from being able to take a step back from oneself? How exactly does all this work?
* citation here
(This is just a side-note, but I've discussed how I have a really hard time reading some philosophers, and find them nearly unintelligible. I actually, for reasons that are unclear to me, find (feel that) Nietzsche is very clear - which is odd, considering that it is usually Continentals that I find unintelligible.)
revolutionary road, part two
part one
In many ways, it is also a feminist movie. There is one scene in particular that makes this point. In it, April goes to Frank with a) the news that she's pregnant and b) a plan to get an abortion (consider that this was well before Roe v. Wade). She feels that this is the best way to continue with their plan to move to Paris. He is furious, and tells her that no sane, normal woman / mother would even consider such a thing (he later asks if she really loves her kids). And you can see on her face the pressure of living with a society that tells you that it is freakish, abnormal, insane (and this carries with it the various sanctions that society can impose on those who are insane), etc to think what you're thinking. And it can be very hard indeed to fight the system.
It is also interesting to realize that, by the end of the movie, Frank is happy with suburbia - with his well-paying job, his nice house and swell kids, his beautiful wife. It's April who can't stand it, who's being driven mad by suburbia. And consider that while she initially casts the plan to move to Paris as a chance for Frank to stop working and do what he wants, it would involve her getting a job. And maybe that's not exactly a downside, as far as she's concerned. (Indeed I think it is something she really desires). In other words, it is a feminist movie also insofar as it shows what being forced into one life path, a way of living that one may detest, can be really harmful - can drive you to desperation.
The wrong lesson to learn, of course, is that suburbia is awful. Like I said, Frank is happy (with his side of it, at least). So maybe there are some who really do like being suburban mothers. But that shouldn't be the only life available.
In many ways, it is also a feminist movie. There is one scene in particular that makes this point. In it, April goes to Frank with a) the news that she's pregnant and b) a plan to get an abortion (consider that this was well before Roe v. Wade). She feels that this is the best way to continue with their plan to move to Paris. He is furious, and tells her that no sane, normal woman / mother would even consider such a thing (he later asks if she really loves her kids). And you can see on her face the pressure of living with a society that tells you that it is freakish, abnormal, insane (and this carries with it the various sanctions that society can impose on those who are insane), etc to think what you're thinking. And it can be very hard indeed to fight the system.
It is also interesting to realize that, by the end of the movie, Frank is happy with suburbia - with his well-paying job, his nice house and swell kids, his beautiful wife. It's April who can't stand it, who's being driven mad by suburbia. And consider that while she initially casts the plan to move to Paris as a chance for Frank to stop working and do what he wants, it would involve her getting a job. And maybe that's not exactly a downside, as far as she's concerned. (Indeed I think it is something she really desires). In other words, it is a feminist movie also insofar as it shows what being forced into one life path, a way of living that one may detest, can be really harmful - can drive you to desperation.
The wrong lesson to learn, of course, is that suburbia is awful. Like I said, Frank is happy (with his side of it, at least). So maybe there are some who really do like being suburban mothers. But that shouldn't be the only life available.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
emotions
I have at various times been told that I am, in one sense or another, an unemotional person, or that I am disconnected from my emotions. This may be true
Earlier this fall, I was very, very unhappy. This was a persistent bad mood that lasted for at least a few months. Basically I was distressed about possible future events, and this set my baseline mood to "unhappy." It was not a lot of fun.
One day, after work, I walked outside, and it was snowing. And I suddenly became really, really happy - winter is my favorite season, after all. It was simply beautiful walking home in the snow. And I haven't been unhappy since. This is rather odd. Nothing changed about the future, after all - and yet I am happy.
This suggests to me that my moods (shall we call them) are not entirely responsive to reasons, or at least good reasons. A snowfall should not, rationalistically speaking, be the sort of thing to clear up anxiety.
Or maybe it should. Maybe it is a good reminder, for me at least, that the world is a beautiful place. And maybe I had forgotten about that - and maybe forgetting that is what my depression was all about. It's odd.
in other news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14bipolar-t.html
"The Bipolar Puzzle"
by Jennifer Egan
September 12, 2008
The New York Times
"“My feelings weren’t really going that well,” Phia [a nine year old with bipolar disorder] told me when I asked her about the previous weekend. “It was like all of a sudden, horribleish. Unexplainable mad, sad horrible feelings inside.” She blamed the several days of standardized tests she recently took at school, saying they made her anxious."
It's interesting that when she is young, Phia can see that her feelings aren't really prompted by the events around her, in a way - that they're not caused by what they purport to be about. For my part, realizing that a snowfall was enough to make me happy makes me wonder whether I was ever really upset by the future, or whether that's just what my bad mood fixated on after the fact.
Earlier this fall, I was very, very unhappy. This was a persistent bad mood that lasted for at least a few months. Basically I was distressed about possible future events, and this set my baseline mood to "unhappy." It was not a lot of fun.
One day, after work, I walked outside, and it was snowing. And I suddenly became really, really happy - winter is my favorite season, after all. It was simply beautiful walking home in the snow. And I haven't been unhappy since. This is rather odd. Nothing changed about the future, after all - and yet I am happy.
This suggests to me that my moods (shall we call them) are not entirely responsive to reasons, or at least good reasons. A snowfall should not, rationalistically speaking, be the sort of thing to clear up anxiety.
Or maybe it should. Maybe it is a good reminder, for me at least, that the world is a beautiful place. And maybe I had forgotten about that - and maybe forgetting that is what my depression was all about. It's odd.
in other news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14bipolar-t.html
"The Bipolar Puzzle"
by Jennifer Egan
September 12, 2008
The New York Times
"“My feelings weren’t really going that well,” Phia [a nine year old with bipolar disorder] told me when I asked her about the previous weekend. “It was like all of a sudden, horribleish. Unexplainable mad, sad horrible feelings inside.” She blamed the several days of standardized tests she recently took at school, saying they made her anxious."
It's interesting that when she is young, Phia can see that her feelings aren't really prompted by the events around her, in a way - that they're not caused by what they purport to be about. For my part, realizing that a snowfall was enough to make me happy makes me wonder whether I was ever really upset by the future, or whether that's just what my bad mood fixated on after the fact.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
the canon, part two
part one
also relevant
Earlier, I mentioned that I tend not to read authors that I find unintelligible. But there can be more than merely pragmatic considerations that go into such decisions, especially when it comes to deciding what (who) is worth talking about, and what not. The mess surrounding Alan Sokal's conflicts with postmodernism is a good place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
Basically, Alan Sokal saw a lot of academics we can vaguely term "postmodernists" abusing science in various ways, whether that meant attacking its legitimacy or co-opting its legitimacy through nearly indecipherable and probably incorrect / meaningless references to scientific and mathematical concepts (e.g. Lacan likening a variety of insanity to a torus). Here's an example:
"It is clear that, as far as meaning is concerned, this `takes hold of it' of the sub-sentence -- pseudo-modal -- reverberates from the object itself which it wraps, as verb, in its grammatical subject, and that there is a false effect of meaning, a resonance of the imaginary induced by the topology, according to whether the effect of the subject makes a whirlwind of asphere (sic) or the subjective of this effect `reflects' itself from it." [I hereby refuse to attribute this citation!]
Now, I find this fragment pretty much unintelligible at the sentence level. I just have no idea what the man is saying.
Now -- what does all this have to do with the canon? The question is: how ought one to write philosophy (or other academic material)? One thought is that one ought to strive for clarity and ease of understanding. The point of publishing is communication, and I want to make myself as easily understood as possible. This is partly because I ought to be appropriately humble; I ought to expose myself to criticism. It is also because I have respect for my colleagues - I see them as fellow-investigators.
There might, however, be reasons for avoiding straightforward clarity. Maybe the point of the academic activity isn't to accumulate (or spread) knowledge, but to effect a change in my readers. Kierkegaard offers the following metaphor: suppose a man is such a glutton that his mouth is so stuffed with food he can no longer swallow or eat. In this case, feeding the man involves taking food out of his mouth. The (inexact) analogy is that when a person is so convinced they already know the answers, telling them the answers involves not just telling them, but convincing them that they know much less than they think they do.*
On this second view, it might be very important that a work be difficult to interpret. It is the process of interpreting it that is the point of the work, not any substantial doctrines contained therein (see also the resolute reaidng of the Tractatus). On this view, it is the activity that we are engaged in, rather than its products (i.e. bodies of knowledge) that is the point (although we may very well produce bodies of knowledge).
Unfortunately, things are not as clear as all this. That is, I might think that the point of philosophy is activity, and still think that it is in the nature of that activity that I should write clearly (perhaps because of respect my co-investigators enough to let them judge for themselves, as it were). Alternatively, I might think that real knowledge is really hard to communicate clearly - it takes a lot of working-through messy interpretation to arrive at it.
To get back to the canon: what we allow into the canon, what is worth talking about, depends a lot about where we come down as far as clarity vs. difficulty goes, and also whether we think we are accumulating knowledge, or something else Let's discuss:
If we're accumulating knowledge, then we want to encourage people to write as clearly as possible (maybe). It is one of the norms of the activity we're engaging in that one writes clearly, and we don't want people getting the wrong idea by declaring that dudes like Lacan are really worth reading. But on the other hand -- if it's knowledge we're after, such knowledge may very well be buried in Lacan. And it's worth finding it - since it's the end result, not the process, that is of moral worth.
If we're engaged in an activity, then maybe we also want to encourage people to do it a certain way - and thus we want to exclude certain people from the canon (just who depends on our view of the activity), and we shouldn't worry too much about losing whatever knowledge may be buried in there. On the other hand, maybe doing the activity well (or learning to do it well) involves wading through layers of interpretation. And so obscurity is in fact necessitated by the moral point of the activity.
These are complicated issues.
* http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+1.pdf
http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+2.pdf
"Putting Two and Two Together"
by James Conant
in The Grammar of Religious Belief
ed. D.Z. Phillips
St. Martin's Press, NY: 1996
also relevant
Earlier, I mentioned that I tend not to read authors that I find unintelligible. But there can be more than merely pragmatic considerations that go into such decisions, especially when it comes to deciding what (who) is worth talking about, and what not. The mess surrounding Alan Sokal's conflicts with postmodernism is a good place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
Basically, Alan Sokal saw a lot of academics we can vaguely term "postmodernists" abusing science in various ways, whether that meant attacking its legitimacy or co-opting its legitimacy through nearly indecipherable and probably incorrect / meaningless references to scientific and mathematical concepts (e.g. Lacan likening a variety of insanity to a torus). Here's an example:
"It is clear that, as far as meaning is concerned, this `takes hold of it' of the sub-sentence -- pseudo-modal -- reverberates from the object itself which it wraps, as verb, in its grammatical subject, and that there is a false effect of meaning, a resonance of the imaginary induced by the topology, according to whether the effect of the subject makes a whirlwind of asphere (sic) or the subjective of this effect `reflects' itself from it." [I hereby refuse to attribute this citation!]
Now, I find this fragment pretty much unintelligible at the sentence level. I just have no idea what the man is saying.
Now -- what does all this have to do with the canon? The question is: how ought one to write philosophy (or other academic material)? One thought is that one ought to strive for clarity and ease of understanding. The point of publishing is communication, and I want to make myself as easily understood as possible. This is partly because I ought to be appropriately humble; I ought to expose myself to criticism. It is also because I have respect for my colleagues - I see them as fellow-investigators.
There might, however, be reasons for avoiding straightforward clarity. Maybe the point of the academic activity isn't to accumulate (or spread) knowledge, but to effect a change in my readers. Kierkegaard offers the following metaphor: suppose a man is such a glutton that his mouth is so stuffed with food he can no longer swallow or eat. In this case, feeding the man involves taking food out of his mouth. The (inexact) analogy is that when a person is so convinced they already know the answers, telling them the answers involves not just telling them, but convincing them that they know much less than they think they do.*
On this second view, it might be very important that a work be difficult to interpret. It is the process of interpreting it that is the point of the work, not any substantial doctrines contained therein (see also the resolute reaidng of the Tractatus). On this view, it is the activity that we are engaged in, rather than its products (i.e. bodies of knowledge) that is the point (although we may very well produce bodies of knowledge).
Unfortunately, things are not as clear as all this. That is, I might think that the point of philosophy is activity, and still think that it is in the nature of that activity that I should write clearly (perhaps because of respect my co-investigators enough to let them judge for themselves, as it were). Alternatively, I might think that real knowledge is really hard to communicate clearly - it takes a lot of working-through messy interpretation to arrive at it.
To get back to the canon: what we allow into the canon, what is worth talking about, depends a lot about where we come down as far as clarity vs. difficulty goes, and also whether we think we are accumulating knowledge, or something else Let's discuss:
If we're accumulating knowledge, then we want to encourage people to write as clearly as possible (maybe). It is one of the norms of the activity we're engaging in that one writes clearly, and we don't want people getting the wrong idea by declaring that dudes like Lacan are really worth reading. But on the other hand -- if it's knowledge we're after, such knowledge may very well be buried in Lacan. And it's worth finding it - since it's the end result, not the process, that is of moral worth.
If we're engaged in an activity, then maybe we also want to encourage people to do it a certain way - and thus we want to exclude certain people from the canon (just who depends on our view of the activity), and we shouldn't worry too much about losing whatever knowledge may be buried in there. On the other hand, maybe doing the activity well (or learning to do it well) involves wading through layers of interpretation. And so obscurity is in fact necessitated by the moral point of the activity.
These are complicated issues.
* http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+1.pdf
http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+2.pdf
"Putting Two and Two Together"
by James Conant
in The Grammar of Religious Belief
ed. D.Z. Phillips
St. Martin's Press, NY: 1996
Thursday, January 8, 2009
1984
I once asked a student what they thought of 1984. They responded that they preferred Brave New World, because the latter was more relevant. After all, all the things Orwell described did not come to pass, the Soviet Empire fell, etc etc. I was very surprised by this remark, because I've always found 1984 to be a tremendously relevant book. But maybe they just weren't paying attention. Let me discuss one of the book's central themes, and its relevance: language.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
"Politics and the English Language"
by George Orwell
first published 1946
Orwell writes, "But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble [of constructing one's sentences carefully and thoughtfully]. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear... A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity."
In general, it's a great essay, and well-worth reading, especially if you spend time writing (or reading (or listening)). But I think this passage gives the gist of what I want. The point is the way in which unthinking, uncritical use of language leads one to fall into the easiest ways of expressing oneself. This leads to vague, inexact sentences that don't actually say anything, but yet give the impression of meaning. Consider the following article:
http://www.tnr.com/currentissue/story.html?id=3e721912-21ef-40ff-90b2-f70236b4f81e&p=1
"Scared Yet?"
by Jonathan Chait
December 31, 2008
The New Republic
This article discusses the use of scare quotes by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Chait writes, "Yet another--siding with Hank Greenberg against Eliot Spitzer--sputtered, "Mr. Spitzer's Starr 'report' claimed that Mr. Greenberg had benefitted from 'self-dealing.'"" The scare quotes around 'report' are rather odd - is the Journal suggesting that Spitzer didn't actually issue a report, but something else - and if so, what? But the use of scare quotes in this manner leaves such questions to the side. It is just a quick way of expressing disapproval (a certain sort of dismissive disapproval, a rejection of the reality of the opposition).
Or consider this article:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/sorry_to_hear_obama_talking_th.php
"Sorry to Hear Obama Talking This Way"
by James Fallows
January 8, 2009
The Atlantic
This is a short discussion of the evolution of divine references in American political speech. Fallows starts with Lincoln, who quoted scripture and in general made substantive points with his divine references (for example, in his Second Inaugural, where he suggests that the scourge of the Civil War is a divine punishment for the sin of slavery). Eventually, he comes to Reagan: "But then Ronald Reagan began using the phrase to mean "The speech is over now," and ever since then politicians have seemed afraid not to tack it on, perhaps out of fear that we'll have the aural equivalent of phantom-limb pain if we don't hear the familiar words."
This is a good example of the debasement of words. Fallows suggests, perhaps rightly, that these words no longer mean "let our Lord bless these United States," or the equivalent. Rather, they are used to express - patriotism? - and let people know it's time to clap. But we place a lot of importance in these words - if politicians didn't use them, we'd think there was something about them.
All of these points are about the misuse of language. I previously discussed the notion of being humble in a bad way - refusing to stand behind one's words. This is a similar, at times identical, sin: refusing to assign a definite meaning to one's words. There is quite literally nothing to stand behind. These words are being put to a use that does not involve meaning anything by them - they are more like (in many of these cases) shibboleths, ways of telling who the good and bad guys are, of identifying oneself as a member of a particular group. And we get to find out without even thinking about it.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
"Politics and the English Language"
by George Orwell
first published 1946
Orwell writes, "But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble [of constructing one's sentences carefully and thoughtfully]. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear... A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity."
In general, it's a great essay, and well-worth reading, especially if you spend time writing (or reading (or listening)). But I think this passage gives the gist of what I want. The point is the way in which unthinking, uncritical use of language leads one to fall into the easiest ways of expressing oneself. This leads to vague, inexact sentences that don't actually say anything, but yet give the impression of meaning. Consider the following article:
http://www.tnr.com/currentissue/story.html?id=3e721912-21ef-40ff-90b2-f70236b4f81e&p=1
"Scared Yet?"
by Jonathan Chait
December 31, 2008
The New Republic
This article discusses the use of scare quotes by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Chait writes, "Yet another--siding with Hank Greenberg against Eliot Spitzer--sputtered, "Mr. Spitzer's Starr 'report' claimed that Mr. Greenberg had benefitted from 'self-dealing.'"" The scare quotes around 'report' are rather odd - is the Journal suggesting that Spitzer didn't actually issue a report, but something else - and if so, what? But the use of scare quotes in this manner leaves such questions to the side. It is just a quick way of expressing disapproval (a certain sort of dismissive disapproval, a rejection of the reality of the opposition).
Or consider this article:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/sorry_to_hear_obama_talking_th.php
"Sorry to Hear Obama Talking This Way"
by James Fallows
January 8, 2009
The Atlantic
This is a short discussion of the evolution of divine references in American political speech. Fallows starts with Lincoln, who quoted scripture and in general made substantive points with his divine references (for example, in his Second Inaugural, where he suggests that the scourge of the Civil War is a divine punishment for the sin of slavery). Eventually, he comes to Reagan: "But then Ronald Reagan began using the phrase to mean "The speech is over now," and ever since then politicians have seemed afraid not to tack it on, perhaps out of fear that we'll have the aural equivalent of phantom-limb pain if we don't hear the familiar words."
This is a good example of the debasement of words. Fallows suggests, perhaps rightly, that these words no longer mean "let our Lord bless these United States," or the equivalent. Rather, they are used to express - patriotism? - and let people know it's time to clap. But we place a lot of importance in these words - if politicians didn't use them, we'd think there was something about them.
All of these points are about the misuse of language. I previously discussed the notion of being humble in a bad way - refusing to stand behind one's words. This is a similar, at times identical, sin: refusing to assign a definite meaning to one's words. There is quite literally nothing to stand behind. These words are being put to a use that does not involve meaning anything by them - they are more like (in many of these cases) shibboleths, ways of telling who the good and bad guys are, of identifying oneself as a member of a particular group. And we get to find out without even thinking about it.
a fantastical and curious place
I once interviewed a student. I asked them, "What would you change about the world, were I to give you a magic wand?" They thought a moment, then said that they would make everyone stronger - and not physically stronger. That is, if awful, terrible things happen to you, and they're all you can see and you just focus on the negative, then that's a real tragedy. But if, when terrible things happen, you can think 'How can I learn and grow and become stronger from this,' if you can keep in mind that the world is a fantastical and curious place, then that can be a really good thing. So in that sense, they wanted to make everyone stronger.
I then asked the student what they would change about themselves, given a magic wand. They responded that they would make themselves less nervous. They then thought for a moment, and said, "Ok, my father killed himself when I was twelve [I later found out that they witnessed the event]. And that was really hard at the time. But I've grown and become stronger and I'm okay now. But I'm still a little too careful with other people's emotions - you know - sometimes it would be better, better for them, better for me, better for the world, if I would just tell them the truth about certain things. So in that sense I'd like to be less nervous."
This is one of the students that I have interviewed that I really admire, who really impresses me, who inspires me. The world is a fantastical and curious place, and everything - everything - that happens can be an occasion for joy, of a sort, or at least for learning and growth (I include the second part of the story to demonstrate that this student actually did know what hard times are, unlike many of the kids I interview). In this mood, one might be tempted to affirm a theodicy of sorts. I don't think, however, that this thought absolves us of action - or at least, properly understood it does not. That is, a different version of the above point is that the business of human life is action. The question always is, "Where do we go from here?" And that involves learning from the past, not dwelling on it.
But I almost prefer the version that says that the world is a fantastical, a curious, a beautiful (perhaps even a dangerous) place. It is a joy to be alive, every moment - if we can just see it.
*Some months later I told this story to another student (the first wish). They responded by saying that maybe this would make things worse - because bad people as well would be better able to deal with life's troubles, and would therefore be better equipped to do bad things. I think this student really missed the point.
I then asked the student what they would change about themselves, given a magic wand. They responded that they would make themselves less nervous. They then thought for a moment, and said, "Ok, my father killed himself when I was twelve [I later found out that they witnessed the event]. And that was really hard at the time. But I've grown and become stronger and I'm okay now. But I'm still a little too careful with other people's emotions - you know - sometimes it would be better, better for them, better for me, better for the world, if I would just tell them the truth about certain things. So in that sense I'd like to be less nervous."
This is one of the students that I have interviewed that I really admire, who really impresses me, who inspires me. The world is a fantastical and curious place, and everything - everything - that happens can be an occasion for joy, of a sort, or at least for learning and growth (I include the second part of the story to demonstrate that this student actually did know what hard times are, unlike many of the kids I interview). In this mood, one might be tempted to affirm a theodicy of sorts. I don't think, however, that this thought absolves us of action - or at least, properly understood it does not. That is, a different version of the above point is that the business of human life is action. The question always is, "Where do we go from here?" And that involves learning from the past, not dwelling on it.
But I almost prefer the version that says that the world is a fantastical, a curious, a beautiful (perhaps even a dangerous) place. It is a joy to be alive, every moment - if we can just see it.
*Some months later I told this story to another student (the first wish). They responded by saying that maybe this would make things worse - because bad people as well would be better able to deal with life's troubles, and would therefore be better equipped to do bad things. I think this student really missed the point.
revolutionary road
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0959337/
Revolutionary Road
directed by Sam Mendes
2008
There's a lot to be said about this very depressing movie. I'll stick to two: first, it is very much like a Greek tragedy in some ways. There is a chorus, acted by pretty much all the minor characters. There are our tragic heroes, undone (in at least one case) by the will of the gods. And there is even a mad prophet! He is quite literally mad, but has a better grip on the truth than anyone around - not that anyone is listening (and when they are, they ain't happy to hear it).
That said, the movie also says a bit about the notion of "horizons of possibility." One way to put this is: when I get up in the morning, I choose between eggs and cereal (for example). I don't choose between eggs, cereal, and running into the lake, or breaking into my next door neighbor's house, or pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, etc etc etc. It would be very difficult to make those kinds of choices on a regular basis.
Anyways, early in the movie, April (the wife) conceives of a plan to save their marriage: move to Paris. At first, Frank tells her it's ridiculous - at which point she asks him to point out what's stopping them. And he can't. As they tell the rest of the people they know, the plan is variously derided as immature, impractical, a fantasy, etc. These are all ways of essentially excluding the very idea from consideration. The movie tries to make the point that these people are doing this because if they ever took the idea seriously, they'd see just how awful their lives are - how empty and hopeless.
In other words, the movie argues that we work ourselves into routines designed to keep us ignorant of how little of true value there is to those routines. We have a sense of a normal world, but this sense is constructed, in a way artificial. If we'd just open our eyes, we'd realize that there's far more out there than we ever dreamed - that the world is a crazy place, a fantastical and curious place - and perhaps also a dangerous place.
(This is perhaps the reason that I am more sympathetic to Singer et al than Diamond is in "Eating Meat and Eating People." They seem to have the will to look at the world, to consider every possibility, and decide what is to be done. I worry that her kind of ethics is too close to putting blinders on oneself. But this is just to neither Diamond nor Singer; it's neither of their positions I am discussing here, but versions of them.)
Revolutionary Road
directed by Sam Mendes
2008
There's a lot to be said about this very depressing movie. I'll stick to two: first, it is very much like a Greek tragedy in some ways. There is a chorus, acted by pretty much all the minor characters. There are our tragic heroes, undone (in at least one case) by the will of the gods. And there is even a mad prophet! He is quite literally mad, but has a better grip on the truth than anyone around - not that anyone is listening (and when they are, they ain't happy to hear it).
That said, the movie also says a bit about the notion of "horizons of possibility." One way to put this is: when I get up in the morning, I choose between eggs and cereal (for example). I don't choose between eggs, cereal, and running into the lake, or breaking into my next door neighbor's house, or pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, etc etc etc. It would be very difficult to make those kinds of choices on a regular basis.
Anyways, early in the movie, April (the wife) conceives of a plan to save their marriage: move to Paris. At first, Frank tells her it's ridiculous - at which point she asks him to point out what's stopping them. And he can't. As they tell the rest of the people they know, the plan is variously derided as immature, impractical, a fantasy, etc. These are all ways of essentially excluding the very idea from consideration. The movie tries to make the point that these people are doing this because if they ever took the idea seriously, they'd see just how awful their lives are - how empty and hopeless.
In other words, the movie argues that we work ourselves into routines designed to keep us ignorant of how little of true value there is to those routines. We have a sense of a normal world, but this sense is constructed, in a way artificial. If we'd just open our eyes, we'd realize that there's far more out there than we ever dreamed - that the world is a crazy place, a fantastical and curious place - and perhaps also a dangerous place.
(This is perhaps the reason that I am more sympathetic to Singer et al than Diamond is in "Eating Meat and Eating People." They seem to have the will to look at the world, to consider every possibility, and decide what is to be done. I worry that her kind of ethics is too close to putting blinders on oneself. But this is just to neither Diamond nor Singer; it's neither of their positions I am discussing here, but versions of them.)
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
learning things from fictions
"Introduction"
in The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula LeGuin
New York: Penguin Group
1976
LeGuin, in the introduction, treats the question "How and what can we learn from science fictions?" (or at least her fictions). There's a puzzle: she writes, "I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth." As she puts it elsewhere, given that fictions are packs of lies, it is very strange to think that we could learn anything from them. How can we get closer to the truth by reading falsehoods? I think that LeGuin provides some part of an answer when she first references thought-experiments in science, and then writes, "I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information [information about the future]... All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen." And later, "Yes, indeed the people in it [The Left Hand of Darkness] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing."
There's a lot to be gained from these comments; I'll do my best with it. One thing to be learned is, in a way, that the purpose of novels is to teach us new concepts, or to show us our old concepts (or, equivalently, our old world) in a new light. LeGuin, for example, states that she wants to show us that we're androgynous already. She doesn't do this by telling us anything substantive new about ourselves - rather, she provides the concepts (the facility and flexibility with concepts) that enables us to come to substantive judgments about ourselves, here and now.*
This, interestingly, means that, in a way, there's little difference between those fictions that have been written, and those that are merely possible or speculated upon. That is, we can (in a sense, for the details are often lacking in speculated-upon fictions, and all the important bits are in the details) learn as much from what LeGuin hasn't written, the ending she didn't write, as the ending she did. It is their possibility, not their actuality, that concerns us.**
Of course, there are reasons that we have for taking the actual version as more worthy of discussion than the possible one. One reason is discussed elsewhere here - we don't have time to consider every possible fiction, every possible world, so we stick to the ones that the authors seem to have had in mind, for they probably knew a thing or two.
Much of this is echoed in Cora Diamond's "Missing the Adventure," in her Realism and the Realistic Spirit.
Anyways, perhaps of this explains why it is one of my ambitions, albeit one I don't pursue as continuously as others, to write a novel. There are some ways I'd like to get people to see the world, and I think a novel might be a good way to do that.
* There can be other sorts of fictions, which take substantive truths that we might not have thought to combine, and bring them together in new ways to show us new substantive truths. Many of Eintein's thought experiments function like this.
** This commits me to the claim, I think, that fictions are descriptions of possible worlds. Books like House of Leaves play hell with that notion. I don't yet know what to do with such books.
in The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula LeGuin
New York: Penguin Group
1976
LeGuin, in the introduction, treats the question "How and what can we learn from science fictions?" (or at least her fictions). There's a puzzle: she writes, "I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth." As she puts it elsewhere, given that fictions are packs of lies, it is very strange to think that we could learn anything from them. How can we get closer to the truth by reading falsehoods? I think that LeGuin provides some part of an answer when she first references thought-experiments in science, and then writes, "I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information [information about the future]... All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen." And later, "Yes, indeed the people in it [The Left Hand of Darkness] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing."
There's a lot to be gained from these comments; I'll do my best with it. One thing to be learned is, in a way, that the purpose of novels is to teach us new concepts, or to show us our old concepts (or, equivalently, our old world) in a new light. LeGuin, for example, states that she wants to show us that we're androgynous already. She doesn't do this by telling us anything substantive new about ourselves - rather, she provides the concepts (the facility and flexibility with concepts) that enables us to come to substantive judgments about ourselves, here and now.*
This, interestingly, means that, in a way, there's little difference between those fictions that have been written, and those that are merely possible or speculated upon. That is, we can (in a sense, for the details are often lacking in speculated-upon fictions, and all the important bits are in the details) learn as much from what LeGuin hasn't written, the ending she didn't write, as the ending she did. It is their possibility, not their actuality, that concerns us.**
Of course, there are reasons that we have for taking the actual version as more worthy of discussion than the possible one. One reason is discussed elsewhere here - we don't have time to consider every possible fiction, every possible world, so we stick to the ones that the authors seem to have had in mind, for they probably knew a thing or two.
Much of this is echoed in Cora Diamond's "Missing the Adventure," in her Realism and the Realistic Spirit.
Anyways, perhaps of this explains why it is one of my ambitions, albeit one I don't pursue as continuously as others, to write a novel. There are some ways I'd like to get people to see the world, and I think a novel might be a good way to do that.
* There can be other sorts of fictions, which take substantive truths that we might not have thought to combine, and bring them together in new ways to show us new substantive truths. Many of Eintein's thought experiments function like this.
** This commits me to the claim, I think, that fictions are descriptions of possible worlds. Books like House of Leaves play hell with that notion. I don't yet know what to do with such books.
dinner parties are artworks
That is, one of the things that I do is throw dinner parties. They are the sort of art that I engage in; it's an art form that has many elements. First, of course, there is the preparation of food - an art in itself. Beyond the cookery, though, you need to put together a menu - a set of dishes that complement one another (and which will satisfy the needs of the guests). There is also the presentation - the way the food is served, the room it is served in, and so forth. This is fairly important, but I don't do a very good job at this part. But dinner parties are not just installations of food on plates in rooms. They are also collaborative performance art. The artwork is the whole experience, and this involves devising an appropriate guest list - people who will mix well together, and provide interesting conversation (or other things, depending on the aim of your dinner party). Beyond selecting guests, and providing an appropriate setting (for example, the sort and volume of music that is present will have tremendous effect), however, there is not much the host can do once the party is going. Sure, they have certain abilities, but the party - the artwork - is well beyond their control once the guest arrives (in a way that the food, generally, is not). What is particularly nice is that dinner parties are such transient works. The artwork is a collection of experiences (the experiences of all the guests), and each one of these is gone as soon as it happens, receding into memory. You can't experience a dinner party, at least not fully, without actually being a guest there - in other words, the art is self-contained; it appreciates itself, and can't really be transmitted beyond that. And once it's done, it's done, over.
A dinner party is a thing of transient beauty - it epitomizes (or at least exemplifies) the point that we really can't hang on to everything, that this is a fleeting world, often beyond our control, and that we have to make the best of each moment as it is, and then move on.
A dinner party is a thing of transient beauty - it epitomizes (or at least exemplifies) the point that we really can't hang on to everything, that this is a fleeting world, often beyond our control, and that we have to make the best of each moment as it is, and then move on.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
male/female?
One of the things I do is interview applicants to a prestigious university. The other day, I had a very odd experience: I interviewed a student who gave off very conflicting gender signals. On the one hand, they had long hair, a female name, certain feminine secondary sexual characteristics, and referred to themselves as a girl. On the other hand, there was something about their voice that, every time I heard it, made me think "this is a prepubescent boy in front of me." It was a very odd experience. I kept on wondering if I would have categorized the student and their attitude differently if I had been sure of their gender, one way or the other; if I would have seen their cheerful, happy attitude differently if I were sure they were a boy, or a girl. It was pretty distracting, actually.
knowing others' minds
One of the things I do is interview applicants to a college. It's an interesting experience. I do a very thorough, very structured interview; I discuss any exceptional features of their high school, classes they've enjoyed and academic subjects that interest them, books they've read, extracurriculars and sports, bad experiences they've had. I then ask a few more oddball questions: "What would you change about yourself, given a magic wand?" "What's something you don't know now that you'd like to know?" Depending on the student, I'll ask what they would change about the world with a magic wand, this riddle, and what their college application would be if it were to be restricted to just ten words. I then ask them about their interest in the University, their thoughts on college, etc. This is followed by a segment where they can ask me questions. I close the interview by asking if there's anything else they'd like to talk about, any question they wished I had asked them. During the entire process, I follow up on any interesting leads, and ask very vague and generic follow-up questions (sometimes just "Hemmingway?" and a quizzical look). The whole process takes thirty minutes at the minumum. Typically, interviews run forty-five minutes; occasionally an hour or more.
I then write a report which is read later during the admissions process. In my discussions with readers, I have been assured of this fact: my reports are always very accurate. That is, the impression I have of students usually lines up very closely with the impression garnered from transcripts, teacher recommendations, test scores, essays, other essays, resumes, and all the rest of the college application.
On the one hand, this is somewhat reassuring: I seem to be able to get an accurate sense of a student in about forty-five minutes.* On the other hand, there have been some interviews that just underscore how incredibly difficult it is to get to know another person. That is, when asked about bad experiences, or what they would change with magic wands, some students have revealed intensely (believe me) experiences and facts. Other ones go with bland, generic answers, safe ones that are thoughtful, and perhaps even true. But I am struck by the thought that so many of the students who I interview have enormous aspects of their lives that they never reveal.
Or even if they do - what is "I really enjoyed cow tipping" compared to the experience this student had going out and tipping cows? I don't want to say that words always fail to represent their objects, but in many cases, given the limits of human finitude, they leave us with a terribly incomplete picture of what has happened.
* In Doubt, when Father Flynn asks Sister Aloysius how she knew what he was, she recalls a single moment: when he grabbed one boy's arm, and the boy pulled away. In that single moment she saw (perhaps) his character.
I then write a report which is read later during the admissions process. In my discussions with readers, I have been assured of this fact: my reports are always very accurate. That is, the impression I have of students usually lines up very closely with the impression garnered from transcripts, teacher recommendations, test scores, essays, other essays, resumes, and all the rest of the college application.
On the one hand, this is somewhat reassuring: I seem to be able to get an accurate sense of a student in about forty-five minutes.* On the other hand, there have been some interviews that just underscore how incredibly difficult it is to get to know another person. That is, when asked about bad experiences, or what they would change with magic wands, some students have revealed intensely (believe me) experiences and facts. Other ones go with bland, generic answers, safe ones that are thoughtful, and perhaps even true. But I am struck by the thought that so many of the students who I interview have enormous aspects of their lives that they never reveal.
Or even if they do - what is "I really enjoyed cow tipping" compared to the experience this student had going out and tipping cows? I don't want to say that words always fail to represent their objects, but in many cases, given the limits of human finitude, they leave us with a terribly incomplete picture of what has happened.
* In Doubt, when Father Flynn asks Sister Aloysius how she knew what he was, she recalls a single moment: when he grabbed one boy's arm, and the boy pulled away. In that single moment she saw (perhaps) his character.
advice for liars
One of the things that I do is interview applicants to the college from which I graduated. It's an interesting experience. One thing I have noticed is that, as far as I can tell, most liars (at this age at least) are not very good at it. And I'm not exactly talking about someone telling me that they put in thirty hours instead of twenty at a volunteer job; that sort of lie I could never catch. No, in this context, students are asked to demonstrate certain aspects of character and certain interests. Some of them manage it, some of them don't. The ones that don't haven't thought enough about what they're saying; they haven't thought it through.
Consider the individual who states repeatedly that they're interested in learning for learning's sake (an interest that is said to be characteristic of this university). Later, I ask them what the value of a college education is. They respond that it gives you the ability to read between the lines - for example, if someone's trying to sell you a car, an education will enable you to see through their sales pitch and see what the real deal is.
In other words, if you want to lie about something, lie about it thoroughly and resolutely. Think through the implications of the falsehood you mean to propound. What else would it commit you to?
Consider the individual who states repeatedly that they're interested in learning for learning's sake (an interest that is said to be characteristic of this university). Later, I ask them what the value of a college education is. They respond that it gives you the ability to read between the lines - for example, if someone's trying to sell you a car, an education will enable you to see through their sales pitch and see what the real deal is.
In other words, if you want to lie about something, lie about it thoroughly and resolutely. Think through the implications of the falsehood you mean to propound. What else would it commit you to?
arrogance and humility
I sent these quotes out while thinking about arrogance and humility. I would argue that there are, in fact, both good and bad forms of arrogance and humility, and that the good forms of each are in fact compatible with each other. I specifically want to talk about arrogance and humility in the context of inquiry.
There is a certain degree of arrogance that is required when conducting inquiry. That is, when I assert something, one of the things that I am committed to is thinking that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong. And there is a real sort of arrogance involved in this - "who am I to say such things?"
Of course, this can shade into a dangerous kind of arrogance. That is, it is arrogant to not only assert that I am right, but that I must be right, that I am sure that I am right. When on is arrogant in this way, one starts to simply deny (on face) the contrary assertions of others. I don't even begin to think about what they say (I don't begin to imaginatively enter into their position); I don't try and meet their objection - because, after all, they're wrong.
Avoiding this arrogance, however, can lead us to a dangerous kind of humility. This is the humility of (to steal Conant's phrase) not even "sticking one's neck out." I do this when I start to qualify everything I say - "Well, it seems to me" / "I think that" / "This is just my opinion, and I might be wrong." What one is doing is refusing to stand behind one's words. That is, you might manage to disprove what I've said, but you can't touch me. The problem is that you get further and further away from asserting anything.
But there is a closely related, and good, kind of humility. This is just the humility involved in realizing that I might, in fact, be wrong. I need to be meet objections; they can't exactly be ignored. Humility in the search for truth is a difficult undertaking.
What I mean to say is this: good arrogance and humility are both compatible and constitutive virtues of inquiry. Part of what it is to seek after truth is to have both. Dangerously, both are closely related - both shade into - pernicious arrogance and humility (which are not compatible). When one starts displaying either of these traits, then one is no longer (exactly) engaged in inquiry. I've started doing something else entirely. (This is the Platonist in me talking).
In short: inquiry requires enough arrogance to assert that I am, in fact, correct (and perhaps even justified), and enough humility to admit that I might, in fact, be wrong.
There is a certain degree of arrogance that is required when conducting inquiry. That is, when I assert something, one of the things that I am committed to is thinking that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong. And there is a real sort of arrogance involved in this - "who am I to say such things?"
Of course, this can shade into a dangerous kind of arrogance. That is, it is arrogant to not only assert that I am right, but that I must be right, that I am sure that I am right. When on is arrogant in this way, one starts to simply deny (on face) the contrary assertions of others. I don't even begin to think about what they say (I don't begin to imaginatively enter into their position); I don't try and meet their objection - because, after all, they're wrong.
Avoiding this arrogance, however, can lead us to a dangerous kind of humility. This is the humility of (to steal Conant's phrase) not even "sticking one's neck out." I do this when I start to qualify everything I say - "Well, it seems to me" / "I think that" / "This is just my opinion, and I might be wrong." What one is doing is refusing to stand behind one's words. That is, you might manage to disprove what I've said, but you can't touch me. The problem is that you get further and further away from asserting anything.
But there is a closely related, and good, kind of humility. This is just the humility involved in realizing that I might, in fact, be wrong. I need to be meet objections; they can't exactly be ignored. Humility in the search for truth is a difficult undertaking.
What I mean to say is this: good arrogance and humility are both compatible and constitutive virtues of inquiry. Part of what it is to seek after truth is to have both. Dangerously, both are closely related - both shade into - pernicious arrogance and humility (which are not compatible). When one starts displaying either of these traits, then one is no longer (exactly) engaged in inquiry. I've started doing something else entirely. (This is the Platonist in me talking).
In short: inquiry requires enough arrogance to assert that I am, in fact, correct (and perhaps even justified), and enough humility to admit that I might, in fact, be wrong.
Monday, January 5, 2009
the canon
People bitch about the canon of philosophy from time to time. But there's a reason it's there, and it has to do with the fact that we are finite, mortal creatures. Consider the amount of philosophy (or anything else, for that matter) that's been written. It is more than you or I could read in a hundred lifetimes - and as soon as we were finished, another volume two times larger would have been produced by the modern academy (ok, maybe I exaggerate). The point is that we need a way to figure out what's worth reading, and it needs to be really quick - in order for our criteria to distill eight million items down to twelve (or w/e), they need to operate very quickly. The canon serves this function, as do other things.
For my part, one of the criteria I employ involves whether or not I speak the same language - and I'm not exactly talking about English vs. German here. Even in English, I find Heidegger almost unintelligible. So I don't read him further. My main worry is that this is just an excuse for being lazy, or inflexible, since I have other reasons (other criteria indicate) that MH is worth reading.
For my part, one of the criteria I employ involves whether or not I speak the same language - and I'm not exactly talking about English vs. German here. Even in English, I find Heidegger almost unintelligible. So I don't read him further. My main worry is that this is just an excuse for being lazy, or inflexible, since I have other reasons (other criteria indicate) that MH is worth reading.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
the adversarial conception
I might have talked about this before; I'm not sure. I'll start with an example, drawn very closely from my life: say a friend of mine comes to me in class one day and asks me a logic problem (this is a good one). Now, I can take this problem as a challenge, as it were: if I win, I'll have beaten the person who asked me the problem. Or I can take it as a gift: there's a joy and a beauty to mathematics, and this is my friend trying to share a piece of that with me.
The idea of the adversarial conception of other people is that we treat others primarily as engaged in competition with us for various resources (prestige being one of them). The aim of the game is to pull others' levers in order to ensure the most advantageous outcome. (A lot of game theory examples demonstrate this way of living). I treat others as adversaries.
Basically what this is is one way of putting the Kantian distinction between treating others as mere means, and treating them as ends-in-themselves. As it happens, while a lot of Kantian ethicists will talk about this contrast, I don't think they spend enough time on it. It's a really worthwhile way of getting at the Kantian critique of non-Kantian ethics, especially things like utilitarianism. That is, treating others as mere means can involve being very nice to them. For example, working hard to satisfy another's desires can in fact involve treating them merely as a means.
Of course, understanding the ("the"?) alternative is the tricky part (and without an alternative, it's hard to see what's wrong with utilitarianism). Kantians talk about "respect," or "treating others as ends-in-themselves." I'm actually not a fan of the latter phrase. In general, too many Kantian ethicists seem to talk as if it is the unreformed desires of others to which we must respond. I'd rather say that the whole point of Kantian ethics, an ethics of freedom, is to understand that everyone else is, more or less, in the same boat we are: wondering what is true and what is worth doing. We work together insofar as we work together on figuring out what that is.
* I can't take credit for the phrase "the adversarial conception;" that is due to someone else.
The idea of the adversarial conception of other people is that we treat others primarily as engaged in competition with us for various resources (prestige being one of them). The aim of the game is to pull others' levers in order to ensure the most advantageous outcome. (A lot of game theory examples demonstrate this way of living). I treat others as adversaries.
Basically what this is is one way of putting the Kantian distinction between treating others as mere means, and treating them as ends-in-themselves. As it happens, while a lot of Kantian ethicists will talk about this contrast, I don't think they spend enough time on it. It's a really worthwhile way of getting at the Kantian critique of non-Kantian ethics, especially things like utilitarianism. That is, treating others as mere means can involve being very nice to them. For example, working hard to satisfy another's desires can in fact involve treating them merely as a means.
Of course, understanding the ("the"?) alternative is the tricky part (and without an alternative, it's hard to see what's wrong with utilitarianism). Kantians talk about "respect," or "treating others as ends-in-themselves." I'm actually not a fan of the latter phrase. In general, too many Kantian ethicists seem to talk as if it is the unreformed desires of others to which we must respond. I'd rather say that the whole point of Kantian ethics, an ethics of freedom, is to understand that everyone else is, more or less, in the same boat we are: wondering what is true and what is worth doing. We work together insofar as we work together on figuring out what that is.
* I can't take credit for the phrase "the adversarial conception;" that is due to someone else.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
my interest in ethics
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01kristof.html
"The Evil Behind the Smiles"
by Nicholas Kristof
December 31, 2008
The New York Times
In the article, Kristof describes the practice of child / sex slavery in Cambodia.
Consider also:
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality"
by Peter Singer
1972
Philosophy and Public Affairs
Consider also:
http://endlessrecombination.blogspot.com/2008/12/kingdom-of-night.html
For most of the time I've spent discussing ethics, I've maintained a sense that the answers, in many case, are blindingly obvious. It's almost perverse that we have to argue about whether or not to save those who are suffering from starvation, torture, and rape. And I get the impulse to just grab and shake those who disagree.
Part of my interest in ethics involves realizing that this is not a productive impulse. Part of my interest in ethics involves trying to figure out how to get a grip on people who can't see their obligations - how to help them see what's going on. (As Korsgaard says, it is not the strength of our convictions (the volume of our voices) that will convince others).
The other part involves the thought that while saving the drowning baby is a pretty clear-cut case, it represents a certain subset of moral matters, what we might call "material threats to agency." I'm of the opinion (though I think it is important to figure out how to justify this, for reasons I discuss above) that we are all pretty thoroughly obligated to do something about such threats, such as starvation, torture, and rape.
But beyond that, it's really hard to figure out how to lead good lives. And that's something I'd like to do.
"The Evil Behind the Smiles"
by Nicholas Kristof
December 31, 2008
The New York Times
In the article, Kristof describes the practice of child / sex slavery in Cambodia.
Consider also:
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality"
by Peter Singer
1972
Philosophy and Public Affairs
Consider also:
http://endlessrecombination.blogspot.com/2008/12/kingdom-of-night.html
For most of the time I've spent discussing ethics, I've maintained a sense that the answers, in many case, are blindingly obvious. It's almost perverse that we have to argue about whether or not to save those who are suffering from starvation, torture, and rape. And I get the impulse to just grab and shake those who disagree.
Part of my interest in ethics involves realizing that this is not a productive impulse. Part of my interest in ethics involves trying to figure out how to get a grip on people who can't see their obligations - how to help them see what's going on. (As Korsgaard says, it is not the strength of our convictions (the volume of our voices) that will convince others).
The other part involves the thought that while saving the drowning baby is a pretty clear-cut case, it represents a certain subset of moral matters, what we might call "material threats to agency." I'm of the opinion (though I think it is important to figure out how to justify this, for reasons I discuss above) that we are all pretty thoroughly obligated to do something about such threats, such as starvation, torture, and rape.
But beyond that, it's really hard to figure out how to lead good lives. And that's something I'd like to do.
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